When people around the world are asked what benefit AI will bring, most give the same answer: it will save us time.

This belief isn’t new. Every wave of technological innovation promised time savings — the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner. Each arrived with the hope that we would finally have more room to rest, to sit down, to be bored.

But the plot twist: instead of doing less, we began doing more, in less time. Sociologist Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983, More Work for Mother) showed that while household technologies reduced the physical intensity of labour, they did not reduce the total time spent on housework. Rather than enjoying leisure, middle-class women found themselves striving to meet rising standards of cleanliness.

Efficiency reshapes expectations. Think of how messaging apps like WhatsApp have altered how quickly we expect a reply.

Sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls this “acceleration totalitarianism”: we appear freer and faster, yet remain under constant pressure to keep up. There is little room to slow down, as work, technology and even leisure demand speed.

A new study published in Harvard Business Review suggests AI does not reduce workloads; it intensifies them. Employees work faster, take on broader responsibilities and extend work into more hours.

Will AI give us back time and actually allow us some respite to slow down, or trick us into doing more? Only time will tell.