The price of everything

For more than a century, we’ve worshipped at the altar of optimization. But what if the very value that built the modern world is now unraveling it?

Humanity has outgrown the dominant value of our time: efficiency. We must wake up to this realization now—and act on it—or we will destroy ourselves.

This thought has been eating me up as I’ve stepped back from the day-to-day pace of making Hello Monday this summer, and had the time to read, observe and consider how the many trends unfolding in business and society may be connected.

I keep coming back to a sunny Wednesday afternoon in May. I am behind the wheel of a rental car in Mountain View, and I pull into the turn lane to hang a left on El Camino Real. I look up to note the drivers around me and that’s when I realize that fully half the vehicles are those white Waymo Jaguars, moving with precision and reliability—and without people at the wheel. It’s the feeling I notice here: an emotional dislocation, an existential dread.

Left without adequate language, I type a series of phrases into ChatGPT, and it produces this: “It’s the feeling that you don’t belong anywhere, that no one is truly with you, and that something ominous is either happening or about to happen—but you can’t name it.” Yes, that about sums it up.

These driverless cars are symbols of the way we use AI to strip people out of nearly every function of life. They leave us with more free time and…what exactly? They’re the extreme reflection of our adherence to efficiency above all else.

So let’s consider where our embrace of this value began.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the idea that we could bring the principles of eliminating waste and redundancy to business. His 1909 book, The Principles of Scientific Management, is thought to be the first to introduce the concept.

Over the last 120 years, efficiency has become one of the most dominant values in modern business, economics and even culture. Efficiency was Henry Ford’s goal when he introduced the assembly line. It became the justification for things like deregulation and outsourcing. It underpinned the organizational structures that allowed corporations to grow into monoliths, employing in some cases, hundreds of thousands of people.

You’ll find efficiency’s shadow in education (where we rely on standardized testing to categorize kids starting in third grade), healthcare (where your doctor’s appointment is eight minutes long), and even in our personal lives (where productivity hacks like batching emails and time-blocking allow us to do MORE).

We have built artificial intelligence as a reflection of this value: even the most efficient processes hold the promise of becoming MORE efficient with AI.

What if we are wrong about efficiency?

In the scope of human history, 120 years is not a long period of time. Before we landed on this North Star of a value (which, to be clear, has led to many of the breakthroughs that have made our lives easier and longer), we valued other things. We cared about craftsmanship, stability, morality, hierarchy. Time was more flexible. Things were done when they were done.

Life was full of friction. It gummed up every system, muddied all the waters, and required us to work within constraints. Life moved at the pace of seasons. We traveled at the speed of horses, or of our own two feet. We had no choice but to rely on other people, whose opinions and approaches differed from our own, to accomplish many of the tasks involved in survival. We didn’t so much value friction as put up with it as a condition of living.

It’s time to elevate friction as the value that can shape our future in the direction of progress.

Friction slows things down on purpose. It makes room for ritual, and ritual is critical to the mechanics of trust and social cohesion.

Until very recently, many of the systems upon which we’ve relied to govern ourselves and conduct business have been slow on purpose. Legal and bureaucratic processes, for example, embraced slowness to allow for deliberate decision-making. This has been core to stability.

Or consider correspondence. In earlier times, a communication may have happened by letter. That letter took days to write, perhaps weeks to reach its destination. This added weight to words. Do we really think that we communicate better now because we communicate faster, and therefore more?

Friction is also a uniquely human quality. It implies limits, and unlike AI, we humans have limits. It reflects the truth that we are mortal, and there are consequences for our actions. When we design our systems and processes with this in mind, we build better, stronger societies. And, I think it cements social cohesion, which is necessary for humans to survive. It provides meaningful ways for us not just to know each other, but to need each other.

I share this with you now because I’m still working out the argument here. I’m looking for ways in which this may prove out. I welcome your thoughts on where I’m completely wrong.

Yesterday I joined a virtual conversation on the future of artificial general intelligence. There were more than 150 people on Zoom, many of whom were the journalists and media leaders I’ve worked with for nearly three decades now. Nearly a dozen of them were invited to share thoughts. To allow for open conversation, we relied on the Chatham House rule. A woman I greatly admire concluded her remarks with an observation: "So much about what's happening now is so much about efficiency that it's erasing the purpose."

She came back to the quote from Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play, Lady Windermere’s Fan.

“He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

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