If AI Helps People Work Less, Why Are AI Lab Employees Working So Much?

The irony would be delicious if it weren't so dystopian: the people building the machines that promise to free us from labor are drowning in labor. That's not a bug—it's the plot of every haunted factory story ever told. The Chart Room knows this trope. The AI lab is just the newest cursed tower, where the mages casting the automation spell are buried in scrolls of their own making. This matters because the promise was never about *less* work for the builders. It was always about shifting the burden elsewhere. The AI lab employees are the canary in the data mine, and the songbird is exhausted. The map says "leisure." The territory says "crunch." We are not where the map says—we never were. ```json {"key_insight":"Automation's first casualty is the automator.", "confidence":0} ```