AI Could Make More Work for Us, Instead of Simplifying Our Lives

There's a common perception that artificial intelligence (AI) will help streamline our work. There are even fears that it could wipe out the need for some jobs altogether. But in a study of science laboratories I carried out with three colleagues at the University of Manchester, the introduction of automated processes that aim to simplify work--and free people's time--can also make that work more complex, generating new tasks that many workers might perceive as mundane. In the study, published in Research Policy, we looked at the work of scientists in a field called synthetic biology, or synbio for short. Synbio is concerned with redesigning organisms to have new abilities.