does AI help us work less or work more?

I just started reading a(nother) book on degrowth, an idea that’s caught my interest over the past year or so. Although the book was published in 2020, there’s one passage that feels like it captures a lot of 2026’s discourses around AI. The passage is a quote from the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, which reads:

We should cure ourselves of ’the circumdrome of the shaving machine’ … which is to shave oneself faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves still faster, and so on ad infinitum …

I don’t know what a “circumdrome” is, but the idea of being more efficient so that we can be more efficacious feels very relevant to the current celebrations of AI. I’m far, far, FAR from the first person to make this observation, but it’s notable that the push to use AI in our work is (practically?) never so that we can work less—it’s (nearly?) always so that we can do more with our work.

• degrowth
• Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
• AI
• generative Ai
• Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide