Will AI Make Us Happier?
No, because it burns us out faster and deprives us of the means of happiness.
ChatGPT and Claude will make us all more efficient. That much seems clear. But will it make us happier?
I want to outline two reasons why AI may not make us happier.
First, because AI does not relieve the pressure of work but intensifies it.
Byung-Chul Han has described how we have become entrepreneurs of ourselves in our modern economy. To get a promotion or a raise, we advertise our success and the value we provide to the company. To get a job or simply to raise one’s profile, we document our lives on social media, thus creating our own brand. While such decisions feel free, they are in fact the result of structural pressures placed upon us to produce more and more.
The psychological pressure to be productive spans all spheres of life. We cannot ask someone about their weekend without saying something like, “Did you have a productive weekend?” If not, we almost feel embarrassed. “No, it was a lazy weekend, but that’s because I had a long week of hard work!” Rest, non-productive activity, is not something we are usually proud of. Sure, some communities may lead the resistance to efficiency culture, but the pressures of work and society do not easily allow it.
So we become, in the language of Han, both predator and prey, oppressor and oppressed. We burn ourselves out by aiming to eke out the most productive labour, meanwhile becoming more and more exhausted. “Why am I so tired all the time?” we wonder.
Recent data confirms that AI ostensibly will accelerate this exhaustion. Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye studied 200 tech workers in the USA to trace how AI transformed their work habits. What they found is that AI did not make work easier, but accelerated its intensity. They write:
“In an eight-month study of how generative AI changed work habits at a U.S.-based technology company with about 200 employees, we found that employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. Importantly, the company did not mandate AI use (though it did offer enterprise subscriptions to commercially available AI tools). On their own initiative workers did more because AI made ‘doing more’ feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.”
The key here is “On their own initiative.” AI frees us up to do more, faster, better. We seize the opportunity for more efficient and productive labour.
As one worker noted, “You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”
Additionally, in their report, Ranganathan and Ye isolated three kinds of intensification: task expansion, blurred boundaries between work and non-work, and more multitasking. These forms of intensification corroborate the argument that AI-ification of work means we exploit our psyche. We exhaust ourselves because when nothing seems impossible, we believe all things are possible. So we do more and more. AI enables that feeling, and the human psyche cannot handle it apart from burnout, fatigue, and related disorders.
We will work more intensely, therefore, but will that make us happy? Probably not. If burnout syndrome has been on the rise for the last few decades (it has), then likely it will increase alongside AI-ification of work.
Second, because AI deprives us of the very means by which we can attain happiness.
Annie Crawford recently wrote, “If Aristotle is right and happiness is the state of the soul in an activity of excellence, then offloading all our creative and intellectual work to AI will make us supremely miserable.” I think she is right, but her point may not be obvious to everyone. So let me walk through it before I infer a similar conclusion.
First, human beings naturally seek to achieve what they can achieve. We build culture (agriculture, horticulture, etc.), and we not only enjoy what we make, we use it for food and other ends. We naturally love others, and want to be loved back. So we end up marrying, having children, and supporting our families. We could add a mountain of things that we naturally can achieve.
But the limits of “can achieve” are vast. I cannot fly without an airplane. I may find that extreme isolation (say, in an isolated prison cell) is its own form of torture, since I am made for community. So what we can do is not everything, but we potentially can do a great many things, provided we act on our potential.
Second, we find deep satisfaction in the things that we can do. A hard day’s work satisfies us, and the rest following our labour seems sweet. The same might be true of a number of excellences we pursue in life, whether skill, craft, or otherwise. But if AI machines increasingly replace our labour, our excellences, then we will outsource the very things that satisfy us, those potentialities within us.
If that is the case, AI may remove the very mechanism for human happiness; the way in which our souls exist in the act of achieving excellence, the satisfying experience of doing what you were made for.
If this seems too abstract, consider the retired person in your life who has lost the will to live; the light has dimmed in their eyes. What makes one retired person dim and another bright? We know the answer upon reflection. The retired person who gives his life to non-economic ends (as a grandparent, artist, volunteer, etc.) thrives; those who stop acting and become reclusive dim slowly.
What I am saying is this: human beings are happy when they excel in the activities they are made for. If those activities are outsourced to AI, then human beings will lack that excellence. For Aristotle, achieving excellence defined happiness; it was not an emotion. I agree there is truth in his view. We are happiest when we do what we were made for.