Writing about the burst of new communications systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nikil Saval notes that:

The invention of telecommunications allowed offices to be separated from factories and warehouses and in turn expanded the range of jobs available to office workers. Consider a mail-order company and its warehouse. Bosses and errand boys no longer had to conduct transactions in person; aside from the occasional messenger, it was now possible to send and receive information from your warehouse, or factory, or printing house, using Morse code or by picking up the phone. Within the office itself, the use of pneumatic tubes made it possible to run material between levels of a company, while Dictaphones, which could carry a smoke- and bourbon-ragged voice from a snug top-floor executive suite down to a harried typist marooned in the steno pool, made transcription rational and smoothly impersonal.

Paradoxically, this new capacity to communicate speedily and efficiently resulted in more and more work for workers to push through—more physical products, but also more paperwork (invoices, receipts, contracts, memos, profit-and-loss statements), which meant more typewriters, which meant more typists, which in turn meant more messages and therefore more messengers.

Things that were heralded as “laborsaving” devices gave rise to a whole new industry, and to more labor. As the great theorist of technology Marshal McLuhan put it in Understanding Media, “It was the telephone, paradoxically, that sped the commercial adoption of the typewriter. The phrase ‘Send me a memo on that,’ repeated into millions of phones daily, helped to create the huge expansion of the typist function. In Sinclair Lewis’ office novel The Job (1917), his protagonist, Uma Golden, suffers a kind of sublime dread when she confronts the expanse of supposedly laborsaving machines: “machines for opening letters and sealing them, automatic typewriters, dictation phonographs, pneumatic chutes.” But she’s surprised that “the girls worked just as hard and long and hopelessly after their introduction as before; and she suspected that there was something wrong with a social system in which time-saving devices didn’t save time for anybody but the owners.”

Saval, Cubed, page 40

(Emphasis mine.) Sound familiar? That same siren song of laborsaving technology echoed throughout the twentieth century, with vacuums and dishwashers and personal computers and 5G networks and on and on and on. Yet the average number of hours worked (both waged work and housework) hasn’t budged. The present-day fiction of so-called AI is the same story, second verse. The people urging AI on us won’t save labor; they will try to degrade that labor, to further alienate us from it, to demand that we work as long and hard and hopelessly as ever. Unless we refuse.