Efficiency Isn’t the Point: Work, Time, and Reverence in the AI Wave

“I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.”

“That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.”

Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt” (1950)

AI frenzy abounds. Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman faced attempted murder, and Anthropic’s Project Glasswing launched. In March, Science labelled artificial intelligence “sycophantic,” claiming large language models’ (LLMs’) flattery “decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence.” Citing cognitive surrender and the loss of something essentially human, critics mourn creative and critical thinking capacities, as well as the heightened electricity and water consumption, traumatized content moderators, and military use of autonomous weapons indirectly implicated by the average user’s encounter with ChatGPT.

But I don’t want to talk about all of that – we’re sufficiently swirling in chatbot praise, critique, and bothesidesism. Instead, I’d like to unpack what I encounter to be its most common justification: “It just saves so much time.” From what, exactly, are we saving ourselves? For what ought we preserve our time, energy, and attention?

In other words, if AI’s perceived upshot is efficiency, then we must first ask if efficiency is good.

To be efficient is to minimize input while maximizing output. At first, it’s hard to see this as anything but a win. Suppose you have a series of to-dos requiring four hours of your time and 70% of your energy. If granted an offer to expend just two hours or 35% effort to accomplish the same tasks, then accepting it seems like a no-brainer.

Familiar bearers of these magic offers include sinks and stoves, washers and dryers, and dishwashers. Weekly hours devoted to hygiene and maintenance vanish, replaced with a utility bill and push of a button, producing near-instant heat, water, and clean clothes. With oodles of bonus time, you may do anything you like, from extra work to extra rest. For many, any conceivable use of time seems more valuable than those sunk into soapy water.

If behind-the-scenes essentials are handled, then human attention can be delegated toward what really matters. But what counts as washing dishes, and what counts as the thing we ought to do instead?

To answer, imagine you’re a researcher compiling a literature review. You’re up to your elbows in reading, none of which may make it into your end product. You scour papers, hunt through footnotes, and chase citations. Once the gathering is over, you endlessly rework paragraphs, contextualize your contribution within a broader narrative, and scroll through a few more PDFs, just in case you missed something. It takes weeks.

Barring its citation fabrication habit, AI could do this before you finish brushing your teeth.

Is this good?

If you spend less time doing your work and have less of your work to do, then you spend less time with it. This poses two risks.

First, you disassociate from the chance encounters that come along with work. There’s no more surprise confrontations with that random secondary author’s name over and again and puzzling over terminology of centuries-old subfield debates, the moments that enable our stumbling upon new projects to explore and ignite curiosities. There is a sea of untapped value floating in extra hours of devotion before we reach the point of unconstructive rumination or moral masochism.

Second, less time with work means less knowledge of it. For instance, if I ask AI to pour over my students’ handwriting and stylistic quirks, then I decline opportunities to encounter who these thirteen-year-olds are. Such circumstances leave me with more time but less understanding of who or what I’m tasked with learning, nurturing, or preserving.

When the researcher, grader, or student speeds through or delegates their job, something connective and uniquely human dies, just a little. Floundering in how to reply to a colleague, brainstorm an essay, or outline a painting are not mere precursors to an output. Thoughtful expression is the task itself. 

I think I mean something like this: we need to be hyperaware of the aim of our efficiency and the tools we use to achieve it. That is, “It just saves so much time,” is an incomplete celebration. We ought to hold our applause until affirming that a given stroke of efficiency promotes something that really matters. In other words, efficiency isn’t an inherent good. It’s good when it preserves what is good, not good when it doesn’t.

One thing that probably is good is that which, in both process and result, enables human flourishing. And if our flourishing is the aim, then some of our work shouldn’t (or can’t) be efficient. Kurt Vonnegut’s 2006 letter of advice to high schoolers articulates it best:

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.”

The thought of quickly, efficiently executing this task, or even striving to do so, is nonsensical, and not because someone will mourn their favorite writer’s flick of the wrist. Some value doesn’t rest in it being for anyone. The process is the point.

Further, even if you disagree that some work shouldn’t (or can’t) be efficient, it’s hard not to accept another notion: efficiency rivals reverence, and reverence is essentially human.

Reverence is a name for the attitude that begins with deep looking and awe and sprouts truth-entrenched, thoughtful responses. It is necessarily slow and methodical, even repetitive or nutty. It lives not only in open-mouthed wonder in response to sunlight but also in the evenings of rereading a sentence five times, of staring at a semicolon and wondering if it belongs there.

There’s something reverent in talking to someone about an idea in person for no other reason than curiosity. It’s what we take on when staring at the sheen of an apple, tracing handwritten sentences, or reflecting on the care and vulnerability embedded in the act of a peer reading your paper and how, in response, you might embrace the disgustingness and epiphany in rewriting.

A chatbot could tell you exactly what shade of red the apple is quicker than you can describe it, offer an analysis of your collection of letters, and shoot you feedback with entirely less effort than your friend will expend. While I am sure someone has arguments (perhaps compelling ones) for its place, I cannot help but mourn that something – wonderfully vibrant and real – we’ll lose, even if just a bit. We owe it to humanity to cement our lives in a handful of bumbling, blisteringly human habits, if given up, would make you feel less yourself.

Maybe we are supposed to hand wash the dishes. And be bored. And look over each word each of our kids wrote in their essays. Or help each other think of synonyms and solutions and jokes and pick up apples and stare at them because they’re there, and they’re red, and we can see them. What else, really, are we supposed to be doing?

Our aims do not live and die in efficiency. It’s hard to call something a tool when its use is to “alleviate” us from the hours needed to meaningfully persist alongside each other. How can we expect to engage our own humanness by mechanizing it? And even if we were able to pull it off, wouldn’t the irony cheapen it so severely that something, surely, has already been lost?

Amidst panicked invitations to question the fate of humanity, let us not, in the meantime, forget to revel in its essence.