When Efficiency Becomes the Only Value

Efficiency as a metric in business often feels inevitable. How else to determine value?

Yet, I presume that many people instinctively feel pessimistic when they think of a concept like: efficiency at all cost. Doesn't it sound a bit like companies exhausting their employees, not taking their physical and mental health in account, while proclaiming a healthy growth for their business?

Is, faster=more=better? Can a company achieve long term sustainability, can it uphold quality, can it give its employees the feeling of being more than adequate, if its only goal is efficiency?

Have metrics replaced meaning already? As long as companies sell a lot within a short amount of time, they are "good"?

Surely, numbers can give us comfort. Abstraction makes the world seemingly understandable. Complexity can frighten, the objectivity of numbers might make it seem easy to decide on deep issues. Eventually, once the abstraction becomes absolute, all nuance is lost. People turn into numbers controlling more numbers.

In many cases, optimization leads to compression. Values, ideas, ideals, if it doesn't fit, if you can't make it coherent, it gets chucked. Complexity is getting treated as a defect which has to be flattened out. Isn't life all about complexity if you look closely?

Human variation = noise; Emotional labor = unproductive; Exploration = excess; Friction = needs smoothing. Yet, these are precisely the qualities from which meaning, resilience, and innovation emerge.

Is this what endless optimization will lead to? Will the increased use of AI in business accelerate that process?

Within this new optimized world, many creatives feel hollowed instead of liberated. Their output increased, efficiency numbers went up. They experienced fewer struggles during the creative process. Once a job is finished, a feeling of emptiness might linger; not because the work was bad, but because authorship became diffuse. A loss of ownership, a loss of the feeling of success might be experienced once all processes function optimally.
Did they outsource their success to the AI? Can they even take pride in their work or only experience satisfaction because of the increased throughput? Does that bring more happiness or less?

It seems as if one metric has taken over and now dominates all others. Ethical, cultural, and emotional factors are increasingly made irrelevant. Aren't these factors which make us human? If we take the humane more and more out of business, will this gradual erosion eventually lead to collapse?


Efficiency can only answer: "how fast" but never: "why". If we lose that metric, we literally lose meaning. If we continue to increase the speed we might be incapable of switching from "can we?" to "should we?" in time.

When needed, will we still be able to find the brakes?