PERSON
Judy Wajcman
The sociologist who proved that time-saving technologies do not return hours to their users—they raise expectations to match every saved minute—and whose three decades of research on gender, care, and the social shaping of technology make her the essential guide to what AI is really doing to the structure of human time.
In 1920, the average American household spent fifty-eight hours per week on domestic labor. By 1960, with the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, and the refrigerator in widespread use, the figure had fallen to fifty-six hours. Four decades of mechanical revolution had saved two hours. This number, so counterintuitive it sounds wrong, is the foundation of Judy Wajcman’s career: a three-decade empirical investigation into why time-saving technologies systematically fail to save time, and why the people they most promise to liberate—the
knowledge workers, the caregivers, the people whose lives run at the intersection of paid work and unpaid obligation—are often the people who gain the least from them. Her central thesis is the
temporal paradox of efficiency: a technology reduces the time required to perform a task, but cultural expectations rise to match the new capability, and the time saved at the