CONCEPT
Task Seepage (Wajcman's Extension)
Wajcman's temporal extension of the Berkeley researchers' finding — AI-assisted work does not merely colonize <em>workplace pauses</em>, it seeps into the domains of <em>care, rest, and relational presence</em> with consequences the workplace-bounded framing cannot capture.
The Berkeley researchers coined the term task seepage to describe how AI-assisted work filled previously protected gaps in the workday — lunch breaks, elevator rides, transitional minutes between meetings. Wajcman's framework accepts the term and extends its scope dramatically. Seepage, by its nature, does not respect containers. Water that finds the crack in a workplace pause also finds the crack in a soccer game, the waiting room, the evening walk with a child, the hour before bed. AI tools make the seeping work not merely responsive but generative — they convert previously unreachable temporal margins into sites of production that are far more engaging, rewarding, and difficult to resist than the passive consumption earlier phones enabled.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The image is hydrological by design. Seepage does not flood — it finds small openings with the patience of a force that has no intention but also no resistance. The Berkeley study documented this pattern inside a
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