I keep reading about another part of academic work that AI can do.
In our research, Alex Cooper, Lisa Flower and I have explored using AI chatbots for qualitative interviewing. Students are increasingly using AI to generate their assessments and teachers are using AI to generate feedback. Now a new study reports that AI-generated peer reviews outperform human reviewers.
Where are we going?
We have three possible futures.
In one, we deliberately reduce working time. We share work, maintain decent livelihoods and slow down.
In another, universities cut jobs. Some (most?) people become unemployed while those remaining manage larger workloads, overseeing AI-agents.
In the third we produce more. More grant applications. More data collection. More papers. More reviews. More publications. I can imagine finishing this technological revolution still answering emails at ten o’clock, except now I supervise several machines answering emails too.
How much is enough?
Jeff Sparrow argues that AI is entering a university system already troubled by competition and expanding workloads. If success means producing more things, making each thing faster offers a straightforward instruction: keep growing.
But would twice as many publications mean twice as much understanding? How much feedback can students use? How many applications should we write to distribute the same research funding?
We need to decide what is enough, then taking productivity gains as time.
I enjoy research. I like asking questions and discovering unexpected things. I’m less convinced that the reward for a pie eating competition should be…. more pie.
Putting the beach in the plan
Reducing working time and cutting jobs might look similar in a spreadsheet, but they would produce very different lives—and shape the quality of our thinking and the knowledge we create.
We could share the work and all have shorter working weeks. Or we could end up with unemployment for most and exhaustion for others.
That is a choice we need to make collectively. Politicians should be taking this seriously. How do we turn efficiency gains into better lives?
When I get work done more efficiently I want to be able to go to the beach. With my family.