Author: Merrel Briona

The world’s capitalists have been waiting with bated breath for the day AI finally delivers on the tech industry’s longstanding promise to create a tool more efficient than human workers.

In the four years since AI first became broadly available as a commercial product, these productivity returns have mostly failed to materialize. Now, there’re signs that the push to automate labor is actually backfiring in ironic fashion, as workers who’ve been forced to adopt AI tools are becoming less efficient as time goes on.

A new analysis published by the workplace surveillance company ActivTrak, first covered by Gizmodo, found that white collar workers who use AI put in up to 90 minutes more work each day compared to non-users.

To arrive at that blistering number, company analysts looked at anonymized work activity from over 9,100 employees at over 450 companies from the period between April and September. For non-AI users observed over that time, the average active workday was 7.6 hours — compared to between 8.4 and 9.1 hours for heavy AI users.

For workers, the findings may add to the body of evidence suggesting that sorting through AI-generated slop takes more time than it would to just do workplace tasks by hand. It could also point to the fact that employers aren’t necessarily using AI to replace jobs wholesale, but as an excuse to demand even more labor per worker regardless of any true efficiency gains.

From a management point of view, the findings suggest that heavy AI users are having to spend extra billable time working after hours, while experiencing a higher frequency of interrupted work than light- or non-AI users.

As head of ActivTrak’s productivity research division Gabriela Mauch wrote in the company’s press report, AI “may help employees complete tasks faster, but our research shows it contributes to longer workdays, more application switching and shorter focus sessions.”

More on AI: There Are Now Growing Signs That AI Is Hurting Employment in the Job Market

Text by Iris Long. 

“Time is paradoxical; it folds or twists; it is as various as the dance of flames in a brazier—here interrupted, there vertical, mobile, and unexpected.” —Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour

Across many mythological traditions, the River Lethe is imagined as a river of oblivion, whose waters erase all memory. Even the word lethargy derives from the same root. Lethe can also be understood as the hidden current beneath linear time: a subterranean river into which all things dissolve back into indistinction, before they are permitted to return as singular beings.

Lightning on the Upper Reaches of the Lethe seeks to seize those fleeting instants when the chaos of history is briefly illuminated—when seemingly unrelated things suddenly become connected, and obscure constellations of relation momentarily conduct once more. Cao Shu’s works trace a series of unsettling synchronisms across modern history: nineteenth-century colonial surveys attempting to prove that two differently named rivers shared a single origin; the ghostly overlap between the flash that erased bodies in Nagasaki and the photographic flash that fixes a subject upon film; science-fiction film narratives propelled by absent protagonists; and images from the visual cortex of deceased mice, drawn onward by invisible memories.

These seemingly disparate episodes converge upon a single question: might there be such a thing as an irrational history of technology? Colonial triangulation, polygonal meshes in digital modelling, datasets for training artificial intelligence, and the meticulous archives of cortical activity all translate the heterogeneous sea of lived phenomena into a lucid, linear cognitive universe.[1] Yet beneath this technological surface—so clear, so rectilinear—the meandering river of Lethe continually returns, folding fear and memory back into the landscape.

Mark Hansen has proposed the notion of a worldly sensibility[2], directing attention to the conditions under which experience takes shape before we can ever say I feel. Bodily processes, environmental forces, and technical operations unfold beneath the threshold of consciousness, feeding forward into perception and action, while consciousness itself arrives only afterwards. Cao Shu’s practice is remarkably attuned to these opaque moments of feed-forward—to the upstream of Lethe, where anima and animus have yet to be separated by conscious interpretation, and where the non-human mysticism of climate and geology[3] remains at work.

In this sense, Lightning on the Upper Reaches is not merely a collection of stories woven from coincidence and omen. It proposes a more permeable mode of historical perception, one capable of gently unsettling the linear narrative of progress constructed through invention, institutions, and media. Each flash of lightning briefly illuminates the darkness before the world falls back into shadow. Yet the lightning returns, again and again, upstream of Lethe.

[1] Grimm, Jon Auring (2025) “The Movement of the Whole and the Stationary Earth: Ecological and Planetary Thinking in Georges Bataille’. Journal for Cultural Research 29(1–2): 4–21.

[2] Hansen, Mark BN (2015a) Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[3] Thacker, Eugene (2011) In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 1. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.