I’ve always been the kind of person who can get a lot of things done in a single day. But for the past 6 months or so, I’ve been operating under a near-constant state of hyper-productivity, largely enabled by my prolific usage of AI tools that allow me to shave hours or minutes off of every single task.
I can write an event brief in minutes, and publish a website in under an hour. There have been multiple instances where, due to the instant design abilities of gamma.app, while on a conference call where my human counterparts are debating something, I quietly use AI in the background to immediately move the task forward, or to solicit the opinion of a trained custom GPT that has just enough context to offer that objective, middle-of-the-road take.
Once, on a call with an external funder, when another participant presented a set of slides (which we hadn’t been asked to prepare), I turned our detailed project plan into a set of our own slides on the spot, in seconds. I screen shared those net new slides less than 30 seconds after creating them. No one seemed the wiser.
In other words, the speed to accomplish the task is nearly 10x faster than the speed to debate the task. This is crazy exciting for a productivity junkie like me, but also dangerous without limits or boundaries. Just yesterday, while others debated whether we needed to invest in a third-party designer for a basic splash page, I simply threw up an AI-assisted version of a page in seconds.
“Did you just make this while we were talking right now?” they asked.
“Yes,” I admitted.
It’s a fun party trick. And over the past six months, I’ve used AI to move dozens of projects forward across a half-dozen organizations—projects that would not have happened without me using these tools. The daydream-to-actualization loop is tantalizingly closer than ever.
For someone like me, who wanders around the streets of New York on a daily basis asking the question, “What if…?” I now have a near-infinite set of tools at my disposal to accomplish more, better, faster, across every aspect of my personal and professional life.
But to what end? If social media’s undoing has been the addictive nature of external validation, the underbelly of overusing AI seems might have a similar hazy effect of addiction: Cruel efficiency.
The Risks of Over-Reliance
That AI can empower us to move more quickly is exciting and intoxicating. But, left unchecked, you can imagine the balance tipping precariously in the other direction, where we humans become so obsessed with the good vibes from task completion that we accidentally optimize our allegiance to our AI counterparts and agents that we trust blindly to give us directives, next tasks, or the latest optimization hacks.
When productivity becomes the only goal, we might inadvertently hand over too much trust to our AI counterparts, allowing them to dictate directives, next tasks, or the latest optimization hack without questioning why. We lose the benefit of human processing and debate, and we might also lose our ability to effectively prioritize what we need. In a world of AI, it’s not, this or that? I’m asking, why not both?
Today, when I meet someone for the first time, I can tell within a few minutes how deeply they rely on AI. And I ask this question of people around me a lot. I’ve noticed that most people are still skeptics or casual users. A minority of my friends (mostly those in tech) recognize and learn into AI’s magical performance-enhancing possibilities, but even a smaller percent–a sliver, if that–are living in a state of “addict mode” with AI, almost entirely reliant on this odd, third-party entity.
It makes me wonder: Where does this leave us as humans?
In a fictitious book on a sentient AI doll that I read this summer, Klara and the Sun, it is commonplace for children to receive genetic modifications to help them learn more, better, and faster. These “lifted” children have higher social status, more job opportunities, and quirks that set them apart. The more I think about Klara and the Sun and its “lifted” children, the more I wonder: Is AI-assisted hyper-productivity lifting us up too, or is it quietly tethering us to an addiction disguised as efficiency?
If we become too “lifted,” will the productivity gains outweigh the losses of messy human collaboration? Will productivity and instant gratification eclipse the human need for creativity, connection, and the slow, steady processing that often brings our best ideas to life?
After all, sometimes, the best ideas are the least efficient ones.
