In 1984, journalist Steven Levy wrote a great article About spreadsheets, a new invention that saves people a lot of time. He tells the story of an accountant who “had an urgent assignment, sat down with his microcomputer and spreadsheets, finished it in an hour or two, and left it on his desk for two days. Then he Fed Ex it to customers and get all kinds of credit for working overtime.”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve met with lawyers, accountants, and consultants who are beginning to use generative artificial intelligence in their daily work. They all talk about the time saved by having AI do the technical research or the first draft of a document or clause for them.
I’m curious what they do with the time they save. come home early? Lunch time longer? stupid question. They are using their time to do more work.
White-collar workers are showing the same trend amid the pandemic. A global survey Researchers in 27 countries published this year found that working from home saved each employee about two hours of commuting time per week in 2021 and 2022. What do people do with it? According to the survey, they spend the lion’s share of it — about 40 percent — doing more work and spending less on leisure and childcare.
Meanwhile, online calendaring and teleconferencing software seem to be encouraging people to spend more time with each other.
“Right now, people usually look at a diary, and the first thing they do is look for a 15-minute gap, and it’s recorded,” a consultant told me. “My biggest challenge is finding time for lunch.”
I’m starting to think of this as the “suitcase principle” of white-collar work: Just like whether you’re out for the weekend or the week, you always have your suitcase full, white-collar work always seems to expand to fill the time available.
What happened after the invention of the spreadsheet is an instructive example of how time-saving technology can create more work. The days of peace of mind for accountants did not last long. By the time Levy was writing, new technologies were already reshaping demand.
People come to expect work to be done faster because they know it Can Get it done faster. What’s more, spreadsheets greatly expand the possibilities of analysis.
Suddenly, businesses can track things that were previously unmonitored because they would take too much time to calculate, such as the daily performance ranking of sales employees. With the push of a few buttons, it is now possible to model a variety of different scenarios: What happens to the bottom line if we cut the pension plan, sell that factory, or buy this company in a hostile takeover?
These new capabilities have shaped the course of company history and created more work for people to do. Thousands of accounting clerk jobs have disappeared, as will jobs that today consist largely of tasks that AI can do more cheaply, such as copywriters. But that doesn’t mean there will be fewer white-collar jobs overall. As different products and services become possible, needs and expectations may expand.
It turns out that my “suitcase principle” isn’t a particularly novel idea.in a prose In The Economist in 1955, C Northcote Parkinson described the same phenomenon in the civil service. According to “Parkinson’s Law”, officials like to multiply subordinates, and they all tend to work for each other.
He describes the arrival of a received document: “Official E decides that it belongs to F’s province, F submits a draft to C, and C substantially revises it before consulting D, who asks G to deal with it. But at this time G is on vacation, hands the paper to H, H drafts a minutes of the meeting, D signs it and returns it to C, C revises his draft accordingly and puts the new version ahead of A.”
A rewrote it and went home in the dim light, “shoulders slumped, wry smile, late night, like gray hair, one of the punishments of success”.
Is working life really so different in most large corporations and bureaucracies today, despite tools like email, spreadsheets, Slack, and Zoom? Would a mix of generative AI really be so different?
I’m not sure whether to admire or be disappointed by the ability of humans to create work for themselves. But even in the age of AI, I think you’d be brave enough to be short.
sarah.oconnor@ft.com