The time dividend: a new essay by director Roland Wenzlhuemer in Merkur - global dis:connect

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The time dividend: a new essay by director Roland Wenzlhuemer in Merkur

Our director Roland Wenzlhuemer has published a new essay, Die Zeitdividende. Künstliche Intelligenz und Wissenschaft, in the September 2026 issue of Merkur (Heft 928).

Prompted by a panel discussion at the BMFTR‘s launch for its new humanities funding framework, the essay argues that debates about AI in academia are stuck between blanket rejection and hollow optimisation. Both are preoccupied with the targets of faster and cheaper, but neither asks what happens to the time these tools free up. Drawing on Keynes’s 1930 prediction of a 15-hour work week, Jevons’s paradox and the history of the telegraph, railway and telephone, Roland shows that such the time dividend is never paid out automatically. Rather, history shows that it has had to be fought for, as in the 20th-century labour movement’s struggle for the 8-hour day, or it simply gets reinvested into more of the same.

Applied to today’s AI use in the ivory tower, he coins the term academic AI slop: a growing volume of publications, made cheap and fast by AI, that meets formal standards while adding little to the actual stock of ideas. Such slop is a rational response, he argues, to incentive structures that reward output over insight and that weigh unevenly on tenured and untenured researchers. The essay closes with a case for redirecting the time AI saves toward thinking, teaching, public communication and life itself, and points to existing reform proposals, among them DORA, the CoARA coalition and narrative CVs, as ways to make that redistribution possible.

Read the full essay at Merkur (The teaser is free, but the full German-language text is behind the paywall).