The False Promise of AI Efficiency

“This AI tool will save you hours of time on boring assignments!” “Use these five websites to be more productive!” “Think about how much time you’re wasting!”

If you’ve ever scrolled on social media, odds are you have heard these snappy, clickbait, AI-endorsing promises being made through the screen. You, the viewer, are being advertised something priceless: more freedom and time that you can use on things you actually enjoy. But who decided every moment of our lives needed to be optimized in the first place?

Today, our society — and college students in particular — seems to be addicted to efficiency. Inventions like artificial intelligence offer us the promise of saving time and getting more tasks done. However, in optimizing everything, we lose the beauty of the struggle that makes our lives valuable.

We tend to assume that efficiency is inherently good. After all, shouldn’t finishing tasks faster mean more time for ourselves — more time to spend with family, to pursue passions, and to simply exist without pressure? In theory, yes. In reality, it’s not that simple. According to a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, instead of reclaiming our time, we often fill it right back up with more work. The hours “saved” by technology turn into more tasks, higher expectations, and an ever-moving bar for what counts as “enough.”

This tendency is part of a broader economic pattern in the United States. Over the past several decades, productivity has steadily increased, but wages and personal well-being have not kept up with this progress. In other words, more output does not necessarily translate into more value or leisure for the people doing the work.

Artificial intelligence further accelerates this dynamic. We’re constantly sold the idea that AI will bring a better, brighter future, but the reality is far darker than its creators would like to admit. When things like emails or spreadsheets become easier and faster to produce, expectations shift, and you are supposed to produce more of them. A task that previously took hours of hard work to complete is now demanded in mere minutes. Suddenly, what used to be exceptional becomes baseline. Efficiency is not freeing us. It is raising the standard we are measured against.

And in this process, we risk losing something uniquely human. Not everything meaningful in our lives is efficient, nor should it be. Growth is supposed to be slow. Creativity and effort should be messy. Learning and producing something excellent requires failure, revision, and time that cannot be optimized away with a large language model or an algorithm.

The tasks our society is so obsessed with streamlining — like when you struggle with a difficult problem set or revise an essay again and again — are the very experiences that shape who we are. When we remove the friction from our lives, we are not getting rid of inconveniences. We are removing the sense of accomplishment, resilience, and meaning that comes from working through obstacles. Why would we ever want to do that?

At Harvard, this conversation is especially important. Harvard students exist in a culture that prioritizes achievement, efficiency, and constant motion. We optimize our schedules and stack our commitments. Soon, many of us will enter careers where we will have the power to shape workplaces, technologies, and institutions — including the very AI systems changing productivity — that define how others live and work. The question is not whether we can make things more efficient. We can, and we will. The question is whether we know when to stop.

What would it look like to resist the instinct to optimize everything? To question what we’re outsourcing to AI in the first place? To leave room for inefficiency, not as a failure of our efforts, but intentionally?

If everything becomes quicker and simpler with AI, we may eventually optimize away the very things that make our lives worth living.

Tara G. Malhotra ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.