Just Because You Can: The Eggbeater Effect Revisited

Eight months before ChatGPT launched to the world, I wrote about "the eggbeater effect," or the tendency for labor-saving tools to create new labor. Four years later, I'm revisiting that idea. Remember: just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• "The Stepford Wives" on You're Wrong About
• More Work for Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan
• "The Illusion of AI Productivity Gains" by Philippa Hardman
• "AI Doesn't Reduce Work—It Itensifies It" by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye in Harvard Business Review
• "AI's big productivity boost? It's happening from the sofa" at Stanford Institution for Economic Policy Research
• "Seeing Software" by Tara McMullin on What Works
• "The Eggbeater Effect" by Tara McMullin on What Works (original)
• "How the Push for Efficiency Changes Us" by Tara McMullin on What Works (work intensification)
• MIT State of AI in Business 2026
• "Beyond Productivity: Measuring the Real Value of AI" from Workday

• (00:00) - Making Things Fancy
• (01:19) - The Eggbeater Effect
• (06:01) - More Work for Mother
• (16:09) - Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should
• (19:43) - How to Decide When Doing More is the Right Decision

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What is What Works?

Work is central to the human experience. It helps us shape our identities, care for those we love, and contribute to our communities. Work can be a source of power and a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, that's not how most of us experience work—even those who work for themselves. Our labor and creative spirit are used to enrich others and maintain the status quo. It's time for an intervention. What Works is a show about rethinking work, business, and leadership for the 21st-century economy. Host Tara McMullin covers money, management, culture, media, philosophy, and more to figure out what's working (and what's not) today. Tara offers a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to deep-dive analysis of how we work and how work shapes us.