What leads to progress: Inefficiency, randomness and messiness
Being efficient only makes us similar to the machines. We should embrace what makes us inefficient.
It is our ability to embrace randomness, luck and flexibility that often leads to breakthroughs — Eric Markowitz
Erin McKeen talks about the best thing about paper being serendipity: “finding things you aren’t looking for because finding what you are looking for is so difficult”. https://www.ted.com/talks/erin_mckean_the_joy_of_lexicography?subtitle=en
In his book Messy, Tim Harford discusses how messiness leads to unexpected significant breakthroughs while trying to tame the mess or artificially create it leads to nothing. https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/you-2-0-embrace-the-chaos/
Kevin Kelly argues that “efficiency is for robots” and what humans are really good at are things that are inefficient, like: science, innovation, art, exploration, human relationships etc.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjbTiRbeNpM
Eric Markowitz argues that [inefficiency] is what leads to progress, makes us human, makes us happy: “[An AI doesn’t know] what it feels like to tour the vast halls of the Louvre? Has AI ever experienced a homemade meal? Can it possibly know the joy and wonder of seeing a musician on stage perform a rock ballad before thousands of screaming fans?”. https://www.fastcompany.com/91119990/where-the-human-brain-still-has-an-edge-over-ai
Or to quote Robin Williams in the movie Good Will Hunting: “You’re an orphan right? Do you think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist?”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo
Large Language Models are clever. They’re good at solving efficiency problems. They are good at helping us do what we are already doing only cheaper (the essence of efficiency). And making things cheaper makes it available to more people and for more things (this is the Premium Puzzle where what was once only available to rich people becomes available to all people opening up enormous new markets (Shoshana Zuboff, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/creating-value-in-the-age-of-distributed-capitalism ).
To quote Jon Hamm in Mad Men: “technology is a glittering lure”. AI’s and LLM’s are impressive, but why are we so impressed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1_H7k0tXlM
I remember attending an agile workshop back in 2019 where the goal was to produce the most efficient human machine (passing a ball). The team completely over performed crushing the numbers, but while at it produced the most torturous contraption leaving them in agony for the duration of the process.
Efficiency is good as it makes good things available to more people. But it’s not all good. To paraphrase Clayton Christensen: we tend to forget about the customer and we start focusing only on our own products. https://youtu.be/IkBp1ntD3Zc?feature=shared
The glorified search engines are amazing. But humans are to. We might not be that efficient, but maybe that shouldn’t always be the unit of analysis.