The title is inspired by the novel “The Wonders of the Two Thousand,” not exactly one of Emilio Salgari’s best-known works, which describes the adventures of two friends who sleep for one hundred years and wake up in a future world (in 2003) where electricity is omnipresent, has made communications instantaneous, and automated many work activities. For them, coming from the early twentieth century, it is a beautiful and pleasant experience. But then… if you keep reading, you will understand for yourself why I chose it as inspiration.
One of the promises linked to the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is that by automating the most repetitive and low value-added tasks, it would allow workers to have more time for more creative and meaningful activities. A research conducted over eight months, from April to December 2025, at an American tech company of about 200 employees, also through in-depth interviews, partially contradicts this expectation: GenAI tools do not reduce workload but intensify it. Workers operate at a faster pace, perform a wider range of tasks, and extend their activities into time slots previously reserved for rest, often without anyone explicitly asking them to.
Three main forms of intensification have been identified.
The first is task expansion: since with GenAI it is easy to access professional skills one does not possess, workers have started to take on tasks previously performed by others. Product managers and designers began writing code, researchers engaged in product development activities, and generally employees attempted jobs they would previously have delegated or avoided. GenAI tools made these tasks suddenly accessible, enabling what many experienced as a cognitive enhancement: less dependence on others, immediate feedback, a sense of autonomy. The concrete result was a progressive broadening of each role’s perimeter, with cascading effects: engineers, for example, found themselves having to review and correct GenAI-assisted work produced by colleagues, further increasing their own workload.
The second form of intensification described in the research was the progressive blurring of the boundary between work and non-work. Since starting a task with GenAI has become almost frictionless — no more “writer’s block” — workers began inserting small work activities into moments that were previously waiting times: during lunch, in meetings, while waiting for a file to load. The conversational style of prompts contributed to normalizing this behavior, making it difficult to perceive the activity as “real work.” Over time, breaks lost their recovery function and work assumed an increasingly widespread and continuous presence throughout the day.
The third form is intensified multitasking: GenAI introduced a new mode of work in which a person performs multiple activities simultaneously — writing code manually while GenAI generates an alternative version, running multiple agents in parallel, resuming long-postponed tasks because GenAI can “take care of them” in the background. Although this creates a feeling of productive momentum, it also causes constant shifting of attention, frequent checking of what GenAI is doing, and a growing number of open tasks to follow up on.
These three mechanisms feed each other in a self-reinforcing cycle: GenAI accelerates certain tasks, speed expectations increase, dependence on GenAI grows, and the scope of work expands further.
The authors warn that what appears to be a productivity gain risks masking a silent and unsustainable expansion of workload, with consequences on cognitive fatigue, decision quality, turnover, and burnout. Since the additional effort is voluntary and often experienced as stimulating experimentation, managers struggle to realize it until the damage is already done.
At this point, I return to Salgari’s novel: what happens to the two young men is that the frantic pace and continuous stimuli caused by the acceleration of human activities induced by electricity lead to irritability, insomnia, mental fatigue, culminating in a full nervous breakdown. What seemed like an unstoppable possibility of progress reveals itself as a physiological and psychological threat. The moral, extraordinarily topical, is that technological progress, if not accompanied by balancing actions that take into account our human nature, can become destructive.
We must be well aware of this aspect as generative artificial intelligence tools (useful but to be used with constant caution) become increasingly widespread. Surely psychologists working on digital transformation can contribute to deepening these aspects.
The solution proposed by the study’s authors I cited is not to ask individuals to self-regulate, but to develop a true “corporate practice of GenAI”: a set of intentional norms and routines structuring the use of these tools. The authors suggest three concrete levers: intentional breaks to slow the pace and prevent silent overload accumulation; work sequencing, i.e., rules regulating when and how activities progress, protecting concentration windows and reducing context switching which is cognitively costly; finally, human grounding, i.e., safeguarding spaces and moments of social connection that interrupt solitary work mediated by GenAI, broaden perspective, and foster creativity through the exchange of diverse human viewpoints.
These practices become increasingly important as information technology becomes more widespread. Although techno-stress began to be discussed in the mid-1980s and some countermeasures have been taken, e.g., at least in some organizations email is not accessible outside working hours, we are — thanks to smartphones and social networks — constantly connected.
Let us be careful that the further acceleration due to generative artificial intelligence does not derail our mental health. What do you think?
(Interested readers can engage with the author, starting from the third day after publication, on this interdisciplinary blog.)
