Blog - If AI Is So Wonderful, Why Do I Still Need to Work So Hard?

AI is everywhere. It writes, summarizes, translates, codes, debugs, formats, explains, and occasionally even inspires. I use AI tools constantly—daily, hourly—both as a researcher in academia and as someone who works closely with industry. And yet, despite all this technological magic, my days are still packed. My to-do list still spills into the evening. My brain is still tired at the end of the day.

If AI is supposed to make us more productive, faster, freer—why does it feel like I’m still working just as hard?

At first glance, the answer seems obvious: maybe expectations have simply increased. But that’s only part of the story.

The Nature of My Work Hasn’t Disappeared—It Has Shifted

My days are filled with a mix of short and long tasks. Emails, reviews, meetings, feedback loops, and administrative chores are interleaved with deep, cognitively demanding work: writing papers, designing exams, crafting research proposals, mentoring students, shaping ideas.

AI has absolutely transformed how some of these tasks are executed.

Drafting text is faster.

Summarizing literature is easier.

Generating examples, explanations, or alternative phrasings takes seconds instead of hours.

And yet, the work itself hasn’t gone away.

Writing a paper is still a long and challenging process. Not because typing is slow—but because thinking is hard. Because deciding what matters, what is novel, what is correct, and what is worth saying is still deeply human labor. AI can help me phrase an argument, but it cannot decide which argument is worth making. It can smooth prose, but it cannot resolve conceptual confusion. It accelerates execution, not judgment.

AI Helps With the “How,” Not the “Why”

Consider preparing exams. AI can generate questions, suggest variations, even estimate difficulty levels. But ensuring that an exam is fair, aligned with learning objectives, resistant to shortcuts, and appropriate for this specific cohort of students? That still requires care, responsibility, and context. If anything, AI raises the bar: I now have more options, more versions, more things to evaluate and refine.

The same is true for writing research proposals. AI can help structure, rephrase, compress, or expand. But proposals are not written for machines—they are written for people. People with limited attention, strong opinions, hidden biases, and competing priorities. Crafting something that will be read, understood, and evaluated favorably is still a deeply social and strategic task. AI assists, but it does not replace the act of persuasion.

Productivity Gains Don’t Always Feel Like Relief

There’s a subtle paradox here: when execution becomes easier, ambition expands.

Because I can do more, I often do more.

Papers become more polished. Proposals become more ambitious. Teaching materials become richer. Expectations—my own and others’—quietly adjust upward. The saved time doesn’t automatically turn into rest; it often gets reinvested into quality, scope, or parallel tasks.

AI didn’t give me empty days. It gave me denser ones.

The Bottleneck Was Never Typing

For knowledge work, the real bottlenecks were never mechanical. They were—and still are—cognitive:

• Deciding what question is worth asking

• Choosing between imperfect alternatives

• Taking responsibility for correctness

• Making trade-offs under uncertainty

• Owning the final result

AI reduces friction, but it doesn’t remove responsibility. In some ways, it increases it. When generating content is easy, discernment becomes more important. When many options are available, choosing wisely becomes harder.

Why It Still Feels Hard—and Why That’s Not a Failure

So if AI is so wonderful, why do I still need to work so hard?

Because my job is not to produce text—it’s to produce meaning.

Because my value is not speed—it’s judgment.

Because my work is evaluated not by whether it exists, but by whether it matters.

AI has changed the texture of my work, but not its essence.

And maybe that’s the quiet truth we’re still adjusting to: AI doesn’t eliminate effort—it reallocates it. Away from mechanics and toward thinking. Away from drafting and toward deciding. Away from “can I do this?” and toward “is this the right thing to do?”

That kind of work was never going to be easy.

And perhaps, if we’re honest, we wouldn’t want it to be.