AI Has Sped Up Work, but You Still Feel Behind

Today, artificial intelligence lets you do in ten minutes what used to take hours. Yet even as people get more done, the feeling “I didn’t get enough done” doesn’t go away. So what is actually changing in our lives?

In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I look at what we even mean by efficiency. If the number of tasks and the amount of knowledge have grown, do we have more free time? Has your state changed, your relationships with people, your understanding of why things happen? And where is it truly important to direct your attention?

How society feeds the feeling of “not getting enough done”

– We live at a time when artificial intelligence helps people become more efficient. What used to take two hours can now be done in ten minutes. Before AI and after it, people seem to be doing more, but the inner sense of insufficiency remains: “I didn’t make it,” “I didn’t do enough,” “I’m not productive enough.” Is this simply about time management, or is it a state you need to work with and look at — this constant feeling of “I haven’t done enough, I need to do even more”?

– This is a very important topic for being aware of and understanding your goals, your life, your state. People ask themselves this question endlessly, every day, because we live in a society that increasingly promotes the idea that you need to know more, be able to do more, study more. That the most important skill is learning how to learn. And to pile ever more information of every kind into yourself. Know every school subject, go to eighteen after-school clubs.

Children didn’t use to spend so much time in clubs, and young heads didn’t take in that much information and content. Whatever we may think, it wasn’t like that. Even someone who read a great deal didn’t consume such a huge amount of varied information.

Look at an interesting aspect: if you talk with five people but watch two hundred people in Instagram stories, you start living with those two hundred people — you might as well be talking with them all the time. That is a huge volume of interaction with other people.

If you look at the development of technology and science over thirty years, you will see an incredible leap — but you will not see a basic effect for the human being.

Do people truly live better? Do they truly feel better? Do people truly earn more money? Have conflicts, wars, problems and quarrels at home disappeared? We now have endless access to psychotherapy — has that meant fewer family problems or more?

In Soviet times, or even in the nineties, access to therapists was critically limited compared with today. But if you look at the actual number of marriages that broke up, at the number of conflicts in families — has it really gone down or really gone up? What do you think, Olya?

– I think it has gone up.

– You see, you even think it has gone up, although you weren’t born in Soviet times but at the end of the nineties or in the two-thousands. And that is a serious question. My daughter is sixteen; she is in school and she is vice-president of the psychology club — they study psychology at school. On the one hand, that’s great: they are supposed to think broadly and understand certain topics more widely. On the other hand, you start looking deeper and wonder: is this child really smarter? Does she really understand life better? Or are these just additional indicators that a person has taken more courses or got better grades?

There is an incredibly powerful example in my own life. I could never memorize a poem at school or learn anything by heart at all. Then, in my second year at university, my memory opened up, and I began to remember everything incredibly well. A second example: I could never write essays, and now I can talk for hours on any topic, from different angles. I can speak very clearly, point by point and constructively. Or I can lead a discussion so that the other person thinks for themselves. I can speak fast, I can speak briefly — adapting to a particular audience, carrying the meanings I have put in at that moment, or moving toward a goal I have set.

But I didn’t learn this as a child, I didn’t read enough books for it, and I didn’t take any special public-speaking programs. I never took them at all.

Information overload and the fear of missing out

So when we talk about the development of the technological world and about how people are endlessly chasing something, it is very important to start understanding for yourself why particular consequences happen. Is it really true that if you did well at school and got into a good university, you will have a good salary or a steady job? Is it really true that if you behave a certain way with your bosses, you’ll get a promotion? Or are shares in a company given for something else?

Some people achieve things and others don’t — and not because of how they did at school. I am in no way dismissing school; it is very important. I believe a good education, a good upbringing and sound values are all necessary. But what comes first? And do you see the cause-and-effect connections in what is happening?

Over these three years, an interesting feature has become visible with artificial intelligence. I talk with many people who speak about AI with incredible enthusiasm. Have you personally earned more money with it? Have you personally freed up more of your time? Do you know more? But people also started knowing more with Instagram and with Facebook. Or have you started to feel better?

FOMO — how to relate to it

A friend of mine, a very good doctor, once said: “People are taught to memorize fast and read fast. But no one teaches them how to get information out of their brain so that it is no longer there.” There are many things I would rather not know. There are many things I would like to take out of my head and delete.

In the world we constantly see this pattern: some people say you need to sit, study, be in silence, especially once you have achieved something. Supposedly those who have achieved something don’t live in silence — for some reason people say that, which is absolutely absurd. And on the other hand — constantly stuffing yourself with information and rushing somewhere. And everyone talks about FOMO: that there is supposedly FOMO in Silicon Valley, FOMO in the tech world. But there is FOMO in every part of life.

I often give the example of my wife, Polina. She has used artificial intelligence almost from the very beginning, and uses it well. But what has truly changed in her life? Has her state changed? Yes, she can ask a question, it’s easier for her to fill in a form, she can do some extra things. But has it really affected her life?

I am talking about a person’s own state, their ability to interact with the world around them, their ability to love other people, their ability to truly understand causes and effects.

Why things in the world happen this way and not another — has the person figured that out or not? People use artificial intelligence, you talk with them and see how wrong they are, how constantly they deceive themselves.

Just yesterday my wife and I had an interesting discussion about this. Sometimes it’s paradoxical. There are many situations around us where people argue, discuss things, voice opinions. And you think: there’s ChatGPT — go in, double-check this information, and it will immediately become clear whether it’s true or not. On the one hand, people have started doing that. They take one of my videos, for example, upload it to an AI and write: “Does Alexander Volchek have the right to talk about this?” On the other hand, they don’t double-check simple things, they don’t study themselves. Who are you? What kind of person are you, really?

I had a video on an AI channel that got a hundred thousand views, and there was a person who wrote a lot of negativity. I clicked on his photo and saw that he had left thirty comments under one video. I wrote: “Oh, thank you so much for thirty comments.” I think he disappeared after that. But what’s the point? All his comments were incredibly negative. If he had uploaded not my video but his own comments to an AI and asked whether it is normal to leave thirty such comments — what would the AI have told him about himself?

Recently there was a discussion about the existence of the spirit and the soul, and someone wrote: “Prove it exists. It’s all hormones. Prove it.” When you encounter someone who demands proof, even though the scientific world has not proven or explained an enormous number of things — what is this soul supposed to do? What is a person to do who endlessly wants something proven, and who needs proof that fits their own system?

You can do 56 tasks. But where is the real result?

On the one hand, we have a person who doesn’t understand sound cause-and-effect structures. And when a person, Olya, doesn’t understand causes and effects — and this is a very important topic — then no matter how much information they consume, no matter how much content they generate, even if they do not two tasks a day but fifty-six, how will that lead them to a result?

If artificial intelligence truly gave people efficiency, then right now, at this very moment, five billion people on Earth would already be happy.

When someone claims that with artificial intelligence it will be easier for anyone in the world to start a business, I personally say very clearly: wait a second. If there are a hundred thousand businesses in some field and there will be ten million — do you think that will help? It will become much worse, because everyone will stop making money. The system of distributing money will break down. The state will stop printing it, someone will stop doing their side projects. The world order will be disrupted — and then there will be a new flood or a new earthquake that stirs everything up again and introduces some imbalance.

Last year in California there was a terrible tragedy: huge fires, and a vast area of Los Angeles burned down. If you drive around Malibu, everything looks catastrophic. But if you look at how people here live, how they talk to each other, what they say — nothing in them has changed. Even though tens of thousands of people were affected and lost huge amounts of money: the average property price there was three, five, seven, ten million dollars, and tens of thousands of homes were wiped out. And in fact nothing has changed. For anyone. Something just happened.

What technology changes in our lives

Of course, with the arrival of the technological world, a huge number of people get the opportunity to change their lives. That really is happening. It used to be that if someone made a serious change — changed profession, moved to another country, took up five or seven extra hobbies — it was a very serious result. Just as getting into a newspaper, onto television or giving an interview used to be a serious result. But can you imagine, Olya, how many interviews there are today compared with thirty years ago? The numbers can’t even be compared.

It’s like a real Porsche next to a car drawn with a finger in the sand — not even a toy, it doesn’t even exist in plastic. That’s roughly the comparison. Have people started to feel better because there are interviews, because there is accessibility? What has actually happened?

Or, for example, medicine has become more accessible. But if you do the math, there are now far more poor, destitute and unhealthy people on Earth than four hundred years ago. I am sure that if you pulled the numbers and counted properly, there would be many more — because that many people simply never lived. Fine, medicine is accessible. But does anyone actually understand why there are more people? Who is managing this? Who is managing the process?

By the way, this is a huge, incredible task for people. On the one hand, the world thinks about ecology, about a green world, about protecting everything from data centers, electricity, gasoline, oil, about saving animals. On the other hand, a small group of people in different countries can blow something up — in space or not in space — with absolutely no understanding of the consequences.

Who today understands the consequences of launching ChatGPT or Claude? Imagine it were switched off tomorrow. How many people in the world would get not just FOMO but real suffering in their lives?

Olya, can you even imagine what kind of virus this is — if you switched it off tomorrow and took it away from people? This isn’t taking away cars or airplanes. ChatGPT, Anthropic and Gemini have hundreds of millions of unique regular users; ChatGPT has one to two billion weekly users. I mean the people who depend on it. What would happen? What would happen if you took YouTube away from people? What would they do? Would it be a positive or a negative thing? This is an unexplored question.

We know that many countries have switched off social networks — for children or for adults; somewhere things were blocked because of sanctions, somewhere countries switched things off themselves. And I personally know many people who stopped using a lot of social networks. Nothing happened to them. Seemingly. Or did it? How do you measure that? Who is even capable of measuring the influence of all these chats, systems and everything that is happening on a person?

When you move to live, say, from Moscow to Silicon Valley, you think: why aren’t there such good restaurants here? Why are the plates in the restaurants not good? And this is a very interesting story: if restaurants don’t have good tableware, people still go to restaurants. They have a settled idea of why they go there. If you give people good tableware, they will get used to it and, of course, will say: “Give me good tableware.” But if you don’t give it to them, they won’t even know it exists. They won’t turn the plate over.

I was in France with two friends — one from Minsk, the other from Rome — and both turned the plates over in a restaurant. You can tell the people who are curious about what kind of tableware it is. I also like to turn a plate over in a restaurant, look at it, discuss it with my wife. I have a trained eye, and it came over the years — not over one, two or three years, but over decades. My parents taught me to live this way from the nineties: the fork matters, the plate matters, its size, how many plates there should be, where they should lie, how many forks and spoons there should be, what kinds of items exist.

That’s simply how I was raised. And there are people for whom it makes no difference at all: when the fork says Amazon on it, they don’t feel any worse while eating. But I feel a bit off when the fork says Amazon. That added aesthetic matters to me.

How to respond to the speed of change in the world

The most important thing a person needs today, with such a volume of everything happening, is to keep watch. Once again: not much has really changed. If we look at the volume of change between 1990 and 1995, 1995 and 2000, 2000 and 2005, we will see leaps everywhere.

I am by no means comparing artificial intelligence with cryptocurrency or with the internet. Although, taken as a whole, you could say it is more serious than the internet. It is something very serious. But the process of change itself, in terms of speed, has simply accelerated.

My sister, my wife and I were discussing how collections are released in the fashion market now, how the market renews itself: almost every week, every two weeks, every month you need a new collection, new shop windows. Zara sets a very good example: look at it closely and the volume of change inside is simply enormous. That is the turnover people need.

People will live in a state of constant shortage of content, simplification, acceleration. But at the core we will see an incredible number of people going to the same restaurant and drinking the same coffee as fifty years ago.

To people who saw a huge amount of change in their own lives — for example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, from 1990 to 2005 — it will seem that many countries have frozen and their technological progress has stopped. For example, when you come to America. We watched a 1991 film with Tom Cruise: the characters’ New York apartment has two big built-in ovens. 1991! What two big ovens in the Soviet Union in 1991? Or in Europe?

And at some point you get the feeling that they have stayed where they were, because the ovens are the same. I walk into my kitchen — I have the same two huge ovens. Obviously, that takes an apartment or a house of a certain level, but generally it’s the same two big ovens. Or the same boot hanging on the fireplace. When we didn’t have two big ovens and then got them, it seems that everything there is outdated, because it has stayed the same.

And here it is very important for a person to look carefully at the world, at different countries: what is really happening there?

A huge number of people have the impression that China produces low-quality goods. That is gradually fading now, but five, and certainly ten years ago, everyone said China only made junk. That’s obviously absurd. And does anyone understand where this will lead in the long run?

To open reality to a person, I always use a very simple line of reasoning about countries. Look at all the empires and great countries that have ever existed. What has become of them now? Take a short span of time — four thousand years — and see what happened in the end. We will see the same thing everywhere. Did they feel like leaders? We say the Roman Empire developed incredibly: they invented the first houses, plumbing, a whole lot of things. In Egypt people did incredible, simply cosmic things, and it’s still unclear how they did them. Now look at what is happening in those countries today in terms of development.

In America you often hear stories about someone buying a glass for ten dollars in some house or shop, and then it turns out it was made by some great artist or sculptor and is now worth a hundred thousand dollars. There was a case just recently. An American artist in the fifties tried to sell her paintings, priced them at a hundred dollars, and no one bought them. Now one of them was found in a dark corner of some house — people came to buy things, as usually happens. Our family likes to do that too, by the way. They bought the painting for thirty dollars and then sold it for 1.3 million.

That is the reality of the world. Back then the painting cost a hundred dollars, and now it costs 1.3 million. Did the artist change? No. Did her state change? No. She has died and doesn’t even know this happened. Some person simply bought the painting and then sold it. He made money because he was smart: he knew which house to go to.

There are millions, tens of millions of people who go around trying to find and buy something. This person bought it. Did anyone forecast it, plan it, understand it would happen? The fact that this painting has now sold for 1.3 million dollars doesn’t mean at all that it will be worth that in ten years. It might be worth a hundred million, it might be worth nothing, it might burn, it might be thrown away. We don’t know what will happen.

No one in the world forecast this properly. Look at all the analytical centers, all the investment and licensed companies: who, twenty years ago, predicted that Elon Musk would have a trillion dollars? Him personally — even if in shares. People said the overall market would grow, but they were afraid even to voice such figures.

On the other hand, people voice extremes that were unattainable and have remained unattainable. Settling on Mars, for example. To me it is a very strange idea — to fly to Mars, as they show in the movies, and spend forty years of your life on the question of Mars. What is that? And from the point of view of energy — I talk about this a lot, including on our meditation channel — where do these energies come from at all? What is this construct of perception? How well does a person even understand what it is?

It’s the same as with the Moon: people supposedly landed on it in the middle of the twentieth century, and then nothing happened there. Why?

What it is truly important to direct your attention to

That is why, Olya, the coming decades are an endless process: giving people an endless carrot to pump up their own ego, to pump up fear, to pump up harm to other people. An endless pulling of people away from the real, important, necessary things worth studying every day.

What do I actually need to study every day? What do I, as a person, need to look at every day? What do I truly, genuinely need to invest myself in every day?

And when it comes to artificial intelligence, the world will still have to explain how to evaluate it. After all, life is evaluated somehow: by the number of children, by how long your marriage has lasted, how long you have lived, what your health tests show, how you passed your university exams, what your salary is, how much money is in your account, what marathon you ran or swam. This will have to be evaluated somehow too. And how will you evaluate the benefit of using this system for one or two billion people?

Today one of my partners reminded me of the film “Don’t Look Up.” I can’t say I liked it at the time, but it conveys an absolutely simple idea. Everything is unbelievably obvious, yet a person simply doesn’t want to look up. They personally don’t look up, they personally aren’t ready to look at the real truth happening around them — and to accept it.

🎥 Video for this article