Written on July 12, 2024

Once a tax is increased, it will never decrease again. Once a price has become more expensive, it will never become cheaper again. And once work that used to be done by eight people can now be done by three people, a company will never employ more than three people again.

When computers appeared in workplaces it was marketed as every employee's dream. The computer would take over tasks from humans, meaning that less monotonous work would have to be done — because this would be taken over by the computers — which would provide work relief to the employees.

Is it starting to sound familiar yet?

Naturally, the opposite happened. Computers have caused workloads to increase at a tremendous pace since their introduction into the workplace.

Work that once took longer could now be done faster, so companies started phasing out employees en masse. As soon as someone left or retired, a replacement was no longer sought for this person, the work could of course be taken over by the rest of the colleagues, who now had more time left thanks to the computer.

And what has this brought? Departments that used to employ eight people now only employ three. And the work relief? That also turned out to be a lie. Work that you could normally do at your leisure, task by task, was suddenly increasingly interrupted by direct contact via email or telephone.

Colleagues, customers or employers who are constantly clamoring for your attention and distracting you from the tasks at hand. But by constantly repeating the lie that it would all become easier, it was pushed through.

Of course, more work can be done than before, but the work has become much more stressful due to the interruptions and many tasks have been added, all of which now have to be done with a smaller and more stressed team.

As previously hinted, we are once again on the threshold of an increase in workload. This is due to the introduction of «AI». Access to large databases with fast algorithms linked to them could further automate work and take over more tasks from humans.

What happened before will happen again, history repeats itself. Just as the computer increased the workload, this «AI» will do the same. And again it is brought as work relief. Don't believe the lies.