Busy
A thread of thoughts between news articles that have caught my attention this week…
I wrote yesterday about the promises of AI investment for organisations being framed and sold as productivity and efficiency: Good admin and everything you don’t have to automate. An aspect of this I didn’t fully explore is how further AI promises are being made about the time we will all get back from automation. Not just for more meaningful work, but for leisure.
Despite the latest promises of AI, technology never seems to make the world or our day-to-day lives any less busy.
In this opinion piece, the Guardian reported that Britons have just 23 hours of ‘genuinely free’ time a week.
Most strikingly this highlights how “the average time spent on leisure has decreased since the 1980s, even in economies (such as the UK’s) that have grown in that time. Official time-use statistics suggest that recreation has been declining ever since 2020, particularly for women, younger people and those on lower incomes.”
This is the same week that technology ‘disruption’ in business has been in the news again as Uber drivers are feeling the impact of new ‘dynamic pricing’ cutting their earnings. This is gig economy workers having to work harder than ever to make a basic living and to achieve any decent level of free time.
Something I’ve been increasingly thinking about is how busy is a type of distraction for the rest of us…
If we’re busy, it’s easier not to think about the future we want. An alternative to extractive and exploitative big-tech that is shaping all of our lives. Busy is also how we can justify our place and advantages in society, and it’s how far we’re willing to go in questioning how fair and equal that society is.
Busy is the lack of serious attention that’s being paid to the climate emergency – when scientists are telling us there are just three years left to limit warming to 1.5C. And the type of convenience and comfort that helps manage busy lives is what makes it easier to read past headlines telling us that UK air pollution is killing more than 500 people a week.
Even when it promises to give us time back, we’ve designed technology that keeps us busy. Designed to keep us scrolling and distracted. Always on and always connected. It’s the need to be following and to be followed. It pulls us into global news and issues as much as local connections, making life the relentless pursuit of everything, everywhere and nothing more serious all at once.
Most of all, we have to want to stop being busy. And that’s before technology can help us rethink and reimagine something better. What’s at stake is more than a few hours of leisure time a week being won or lost through the promises of AI. It’s everything.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.