CONCEPT
Task Seepage and the Always-On Machine
The colonization of non-productive time by AI tools whose availability converts possibility into compulsion—Schumacher's tendency of powerful technology to consume every available space, documented empirically by the Berkeley study.
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.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The colonization is invisible to the productivity metric because the metric measures what happens during work and ignores what happens when work should stop.