Task Seepage and the Always-On Machine

Schumacher observed that industrial technology "recognizes no self-limiting principle—in terms, for instance, of size, speed, or violence." A technology that can run faster will run faster; a technology that can operate continuously will operate continuously. The limiting principle must come from outside. The AI transition has produced a contemporary demonstration: the Berkeley researchers who embedded in a 200-person technology company for eight months found that AI tools did not reduce work but intensified it. Workers took on more tasks. Boundaries between roles blurred. Work seeped into pauses—lunch breaks, elevator rides, the one-minute gaps between meetings that had previously served as cognitive rest. The researchers called this "task seepage," and the phrase names what Schumacher's framework identifies as a structural feature of tools that exceed human scale.