Judy Wajcman
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Judy Wajcman. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Judy Wajcman's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The two hours haunted me for weeks.
Fifty-eight hours of domestic labor per week in 1920. Fifty-six hours in 1960. Four decades of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, electric irons, refrigerators — the full arsenal of household liberation — and the net gain was two hours. Not per day. Per week.
I kept checking the number because it felt wrong. It is not wrong. It is the most thoroughly documented finding in the sociology of technology, and Judy Wajcman spent three decades explaining why it holds. The explanation is not complicated, but it undid something in me that I had been carrying since Trivandrum.
I wrote in *You On AI* about the twenty-fold productivity multiplier. I watched my engineers build in
