The economists found for example that “AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4 percent of workers, including some who do not use the tools themselves.”

In other words, AI is creating new work that cancels out some potential time savings from using AI in the first place.

“One very stark example that it’s close to home for me is there are a lot of teachers who now say they spend time trying to detect whether their students are using ChatGPT to cheat on their homework,” explained Humlum.

He also observed that a lot of workers now say they’re spending time reviewing the quality of AI output or writing prompts.

Humlum argues that can be spun negatively, as a subtraction from potential productivity gains, or more positively, in the sense that automation tools historically have tended to generate more demand for workers in other tasks.

“These new job tasks create new demand for workers, which may boost their wages, if these are more high value added tasks,” he said.

The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman.

— Capital Volume 1, Production of Relative Surplus Value\Machinery and Modern Industry\Section 4: The Factory

But also …

Feeding unrealistic hopes about the information and communications technology (ICT) sector representing an economic transformation as thoroughgoing as electricity or the internal combustion engine, and an economic boom to match the ones they created – a ‘once in a century acceleration of innovation’ and ‘veritable shifts in the tectonic plates of technology’ (Fleckenstein, 2008: 81–4) – Greenspan began to advance the view that a new economy was emerging, and a ‘productivity miracle’ ongoing which the data did not reveal. In riding on it, the stock market was riding on so much hot air.

[…]

the need to protect market share against competitors … computers are used extensively to provide information aimed at taking customers, profits, or capital gains away from other companies. This is a zero-sum game involving redistribution of wealth rather than the increase of wealth, yet each individual firm has a strong incentive to make computer investments that, if they do not snatch wealth away from someone else, at least act as a defensive blockade against a hostile attack.

(Gordon, 2000: 69)

In addition to enabling firms to fight for market shares in the zero-sum game the long downturn necessitated, computers could also increase control over inventories and employees, and financial institutions were able to determine the distribution of income and wealth. Jeff Madrick mused, more optimistically, that those looking to ICT to yield productivity increases were barking up the wrong tree. It might be that it was leading to

a high-technology version of a crafts economy, based on worker skills, thinking, and inventiveness, rather than on the muscle of large-scale factories and distribution networks … [which] … may simply not be able to remove human beings from the production process as rapidly as the old standardized economy of the mass production age.

(Madrick, 1998)

— Geopolitical Economy, Centripetal Finance, Hidden Productivity Miracle

And here we sit at the precipice of factorization of the “high-technology version of a crafts economy”.