AI Gave Us Superpowers. Now We’re Just Scrolling Faster.
A friend of mine, Ross, told me something last week that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
He’s been using AI at work for a few months. On Tuesday he finished a client report in forty minutes, something that normally eats most of his afternoon. He leaned back feeling pretty smug, opened Instagram “for a second,” and looked up to find it was dinnertime. Two and a half hours, gone, and he couldn’t tell me where.
What got me wasn’t the lost time. It was that he’d been so focused on getting the hours back that he never decided what they were for. No walk, no book, not the side project he’s been “getting to” since 2022. Whatever was already eating his evenings just ate these too.
I laughed when he told me. Then I stopped, because I don’t think this is a Ross problem. I’d probably have done the same thing.
Now picture it at scale. Say every knowledge worker on the planet is suddenly working two, three, maybe five times faster than before. Reports that took days take hours, and plenty of decisions that used to need a meeting now need a prompt. That’s real saved time, adding up across millions of people every day. So where does it go? Nearly all the conversation about AI is about the saving: which tool, which prompt, whatever shaves off another twenty minutes. I almost never hear anyone ask what the time is for, and I’m not sure anyone has a good answer. It feels like we built a faster engine before anyone decided where the road goes.
We did this with smartphones, too. Some of what they gave us is great and I’d fight to keep it: maps that actually work, paying a bill without driving to the bank, video calls with family overseas. But look at your screen time and ask how much of it you’d defend. For most people it’s a fraction. The rest is Candy Crush, infinite reels, TikTok at 3am. And we never really voted on any of it. Banks, restaurants and schools just started assuming everyone had a phone, and now opting out costs you something. The time it saved us mostly went to noise.
I think AI is heading the same way, only quicker. Clear your inbox by 2pm and then what? More Netflix queue, more reels, more stuff we didn’t ask for, filling the space we just made. The tech is fine, honestly. What worries me is that “faster” has quietly become the goal, and the gains might be the biggest thing we don’t know how to capitalize on.
Ross has started writing down what the saved time is for before he begins a task. “If this finishes early, I’m going for a run.” He says it works about two days out of three. It doesn’t answer the bigger question, but it does make it harder to ignore.
If you’ve got a better answer, I’d like to hear it.