CONCEPT
Health-Ease/Dis-Ease Continuum
Antonovsky's replacement for the binary of health-versus-disease: a continuum along which individuals move constantly, and on which AI-mediated work simultaneously pulls workers in both directions.
The health-ease/dis-ease continuum is Antonovsky's reformulation of what it means to be healthy. Rather than treating health and disease as discrete categories — a person is either sick or well — the continuum frames them as poles of a single axis along which individuals move constantly. The salutogenic question is not whether someone has crossed a threshold into illness but in which direction they are currently moving and what is determining the direction. Applied to the AI transition, the continuum dissolves the dichotomy between the triumphalist and pessimist narratives. The same workplace, the same tool, the same week of work can move different individuals in opposite directions, and even the same individual can move in both directions simultaneously across different dimensions of her work.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The dichotomous framing of AI's effects — is it good or bad, helpful or harmful — fails for the same reason the dichotomous framing of health fails. Reality is graded, situated, and dynamic. The Berkeley research documented in