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Efficiency is good, right? Who doesn’t want to do more with less, reuse and recycle, end food waste and food miles, minimise their impact on the earth and make the most of their time on it?
What helps us do these things is efficiency: the one thing of which we can never have too much. But what if our constant striving to streamline is actually having a negative effect?
That’s the argument advanced by Edward Tenner in his new book, The Efficiency Paradox. Efficiency is “something self-evidently desirable,” he says, “until it isn’t”.
His beef is with big data (in which large collections of information are analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends and associations), which is great at helping us to do more with less, or even to do less with much less. It’s not so good at helping us do something new and hitherto unimagined –those things that extend our capabilities.
Things like flight. It wasn’t big data that invented the aeroplane, but risk-taking humans who took a chance on heavier-than-air flight being possible, in many cases throwing themselves from high places in pursuit of their dream. Once you have aeroplanes, efficiency – through the use of big data – can do wonderful things, such as minimise unwanted environmental effects, reduce prices to put flight within reach of ordinary people, and let us choose the seat we want online.
This is what Tenner, quoting Clayton Christensen, Derek van Bever and Bryan Mezue, calls “efficiency innovation”, typical of the platform-based disrupters such as Uber and Amazon, that “makes existing goods and services available to more people at lower prices”. But “market-creating innovation” that generates the new products or services, such as photocopiers or aeroplanes, takes longer to bear fruit.
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