A.I. and the growth of the chore economy

Carl Benedikt Frey, This Is Why You’re Drowning in Busywork, NYTimes, May 11, 2026.

We have been told that A.I. will take people’s jobs. What no one mentions is that many of those jobs are landing on us. The A.I. revolution involves a massive transfer of labor — not from worker to machine, but from worker to consumer. The ability to do everything ourselves may be satisfying, but it can gradually overload us with busywork without our noticing. Tasks that we used to delegate will still be done. They will simply move out of the work force and into the household as new forms of invisible, unpaid labor.

The movement toward self-service is one of the most powerful and least appreciated forces in the history of work. Consider the washing machine. In many 19th-century cities, laundering was a major urban service occupation, and one of the hardest. [...] The washing machine, together with the infrastructure that made it possible — running water, electricity, synthetic detergents — gradually ended this world. But it did not end the work. Customers bought machines and did the laundering themselves. The laundress was displaced by her former clients.

And so it goes:

That pattern has been repeating ever since. Self-checkout makes scanning and bagging the shopper’s job. The internet gives travelers direct access to the flight schedules and hotel reviews that agents once controlled. Online brokerages put a trading terminal in every pocket. And the smartphone replaced the bank teller with you.

We’re used to being our own checkout assistants, travel agents and tellers. Handling these tasks ourselves often makes our lives more efficient. But A.I. is now extending the chore economy into territory that once required years of training, such as law and medicine. As of January, more than 40 million people worldwide were using ChatGPT daily for health questions — from symptoms to decoding bills and fighting insurers.

Trade-offs:

However, self-service does not automatically reproduce a professional’s judgment. The billing specialist notices the code the patient didn’t think to question. The accountant points out the deduction the taxpayer didn’t know existed. The tool answers what you ask, whereas the expert tells you what to ask. That is the A.I. trade-off: greater access, but thinner expertise.

Second, no single act of self-service feels like a major burden. We notice the accountant’s fee we didn’t pay. We rarely notice the evening we spent doing her job. There is a name for this: opportunity cost neglect — the well-documented tendency to overlook the value of what we give up when the cost is time rather than money.

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