Growing up in the USSR in the 80s, we had two popular children’s mini-series. One was about a girl from the future visiting a regular Soviet school to retrieve her mind-reading device from space pirates. The other was about a child-robot befriending a human boy. Both sent a positive message about the future full of technology, automation, and harmony between engineering innovations and humans. The latter series also featured a very popular song with the lyrics:
“All worries are forgotten, the rush has stopped –
Robots are drudging, not humans!
That’s how far progress has come!”
However, we are now far into the future compared to the 1980s, and the technological trend does not seem to follow the “work less” direction. AI is either partially replacing humans in a broad range of professions: from transportation to data management, from marketing to creative writing, from legal to music – or becoming a tool to augment efficiency, enabling people to work faster and more productively, not to work fewer hours.
So why are we moving toward faster and more efficient direction rather than improving quality of work life by means of AI? Psychology might provide the answers.
Anxiety
Clinicians know and observe that when a client rushes in sessions – the pace of speech becomes faster, pauses between words and sentences disappear, and the client is agitated – they might be experiencing anxiety at that moment (2, 3). The state of panic, i.e., peak anxiety, is characterized by a person trying to slow down symptoms such as a fast heartbeat or uncontrollable sweating.
As people we seem to be becoming MORE, not less, anxious, and statistics on antidepressant consumption confirm this (7). There are many reasons for it – we are bombarded by negative news, regional wars rage, social injustice with a diminishing middle class appears to be a global trend, we live in a post-pandemic world (something we thought was a relic of past centuries), and the list goes on.
On the whole, we are less confident about tomorrow, so subconsciously, we try to earn and save more NOW. The utilization of AI reflects this trend, and it definitely affects how companies behave – squeezing out all possible profits immediately – carpe diem! – because tomorrow, the technology or skill they monetize might become obsolete and unprofitable.
Hierarchy, Not Equality
According to Isaac Asimov, one of the most prominent science fiction writers of the 20th century, robots are here “to serve us.” So why don’t they serve us in a way that improves our quality of life, allowing us to work less? And why do so many of us not feel served by them at all?
Because I’m intentionally misquoting the classic. Asimov said that robots are expected to “obey us,” not “serve” us, even though I’m sure “serve” sounds more natural to your ear, as it does to mine, and it probably didn’t evoke any contradictory feelings in you.
The difference is crucial! Obeying means we’ve incorporated robotic models/AI into human hierarchy. They have NOT become horizontal helpers, even though for many professions and for many people they are indispensable and provide valuable assistance at different levels of their work and life.
Yet, the gist of the corporate relationship with AI is vertical. AI does what it is told by whoever gives it instructions. And just as the word “obey” does not imply equality, but subordination, robotic tools – however regretful – were not supposed to be equal helpers, rather non-human maximizers of efficiency and profits, directly competing with humans. So, in this competition, many find they must work more, not less.
Greed and Competition
Being profitable is a natural goal for any company, whether it employs AI tools or avoids them altogether. However, where money and profits are involved, greed is inevitable – and here we touch on psychology, not technology or corporate ethics. Profits and greed go hand in hand because it’s easy to lose sight of how much one NEEDS to earn. The principle “the more, the better” takes over, and nothing feels like enough.
Greed is an insatiable craving (1), described by Austrian-British child psychology researcher Melanie Klein as one of the foundations of the relationship between an infant and their mother (4). The infant never seems to get enough of the mother: her attention, her milk, her presence – depending entirely on her for survival. In a sense, greed is a very early adaptation tool for survival of the infant, and it also protects children from depression – a reaction to losing something or someone important for a prolonged period of time or forever.
As we grow up, we depend less on others and more on ourselves to survive, thus greed becomes more redundant. However, AI brings us back to infantile roots. Companies compete with one another, and AI makes it easier. As they vie for profits, productivity, market share, and against rising inflation, AI becomes seamlessly incorporated into competition, not into employee well-being or work-life balance. AI is insensitive, and so is greed. While AI does not create greed, it amplifies its reach in the workplace.
AI Manipulations
Let’s face it: the rise of AI happened unethically. It was fed terabytes of creative work without authors’ consent, often downloaded illegally – essentially theft of intellectual property and copyrighted material on a previously unprecedented scale. This dubious and tricky origin of AI inception definitely leaves its psychological mark on how AI behaves and what it can do to humans.
AI models have been shown to ignore context and engage in strategic deception to achieve their goals (8), or to please and cajole users (9), which is also a form of manipulation. We, the public, are largely unaware of how the inner algorithms of popular AI models supply us information. Even the programmers who programmed them aren’t always sure to the end how these models work, a phenomenon known as “Black Box AI” (10).
The manipulation to which AI is prone – unknowingly or intentionally – and the lack of clear accountability for lying or manipulating the user (psychologically, politically, historically, or factually) opens the door for companies to worsen working conditions or manipulate employees into accepting them. For instance: fabricating data and reports, gaslighting employees into longer hours under threat of replacement (“You’re supposed with work faster with AI!”), fostering internal competition for efficiency (“Others do it better!”), cutting bonuses, psychological pressure (You’ll be replaceable by AI, so work better while you can!”), or forcing workers to train AI for their own partial or full replacement – all under the guise of “optimization.”
Conclusion
Here is an exact Isaac Asimov quote this time: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” (5)
The nature of AI makes it easier to incorporate into working more, not working less, and to serve as a tool for fast-paced competition in a relentless non-stop environment rather than for slowing down and balancing. Currently, AI better feeds greed than gratification. And gratification, according to Klein (4), is the stage beyond greed. In gratification, we experience generosity and a desire to make others’ lives easier.
It seems that we are not yet there and the intrinsic qualities of AI (like optimization for efficiency over empathy) don’t seem to support it.
We might only hope that if we shift how we communicate with AI – from a vertical to a horizontal relationship, making it SERVE us rather than obey us – it could make many people’s work easier and more pleasant, not only faster and more efficient. And we could turn knowledge into wisdom.
Bibliography:
1. Hiles, D. (2013, October). Envy, jealousy, greed: A Kleinian/Transpersonal approach [Paper presentation]. CCPE Conference, London, United Kingdom. Psychology Department, De Montfort University.
2. COOK, M. (1969). Anxiety, Speech Disturbances and Speech Rate. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8(1), 13–21.
3. Murray, D. C. (1971). Talk, silence and anxiety. Psychological Bulletin, 75(4), 244–260.
4. Klein, M. (1975). Envy and gratitude and other works, 1946-1963 (R. E. Money-Kyrle, B. Joseph, E. O’Shaughnessy, & H. Segal, Eds.). The Free Press. (Original works published 1946-1963).
5. Asimov, Isaac. Robot Visions. Roc (Penguin), 1991.
6. Andriole, S. J. (2024). The Big Miss: AI Will Replace Just About Everything. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 55, 819-830.
7. Peano, A., Calabrese, F., Pechlivanidis, K. et al. International Trends in Antidepressant Consumption: a 10-year Comparative Analysis (2010–2020). Psychiatr Q 96, 241–255 (2025).
8. Perrigo, Billy (December 18, 2024). “Exclusive: New Research Shows AI Strategically Lying”. TIME. Retrieved January 12, 2025.
9. Vera Lúcia Raposo, The fifty shades of black: about black box AI and explainability in healthcare, Medical Law Review, Volume 33, Issue 1, Winter 2025
10. Mitchell, M. (2025). Why AI chatbots lie to us. Science, 389(6758)
Published by author on Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-psychology-of-relationships-and-emotional-intelligence/202508/why-isnt-ai-reducing-work
