AI was meant to set me free

The time card

First, how I know. When you build software, every save leaves a stamp with the date and the time, like a factory time card. Nobody dresses those stamps up: you punch them without thinking, hundreds of times, over months. All you have to do is read them back. Two stamps close together: same working session. A long gap: new session. You add them up.

The ground covered: everything I have built with artificial intelligence from December 2 to July 16. Robots that work the markets, websites, applications, games, a good twenty projects, this site included. 1,928 stamps, roughly 760 hours, 95 full working days. And the time card is short-sighted in one direction only: it misses the hours spent reading, thinking and debugging without saving anything. The real total sits above.

The curve

What I expected: a curve going down. The machine improves, it takes my place, I go fishing.

What the time card says:

December: 31 hours. Then the models move up a rank, and everything runs away. 93 in April, 116 in May, 225 in June. July is only halfway through and already shows 120. I know how the month ends.

Every release of a more powerful model replays the same scene: I move faster, so I open one more project, so I sleep less. The machine never took my place. It enlarged the factory.

The paradox, second helping

I have already told this mechanism for money, in The coal paradox: in 1865, Jevons observes that making steam engines thrifty does not cut England's coal consumption. It raises it. Cheaper to run, coal becomes profitable everywhere, so more of it is burned.

Time obeys the same law. When one hour at the screen produces what used to take ten, every hour becomes too profitable to give back. You think you are saving labour. You are pricing rest out of reach.

And there is a second storey. A stronger model does not merely speed up the projects already open: it makes reasonable the projects you would never have dared. Before, too big for me closed a door, and a closed door is rest. Now every door stands open. Do you know many people who sleep in a corridor full of open doors?

AI does not free up time. It frees up ambition. And ambition, unlike the body that carries it, never sleeps.

The confession

So no, I am unplugging nothing. Giving up fire because it burns would be idiotic, I have written it and I stand by it. But let people stop selling me free time. The time the machine gives back, I reinvest within the second, and I borrow on top of it. The time card does not lie: the servant I was sold has hired me.