Hello, hello!
The topic today is AI and efficiency. When I wrote Predictably Irrational, which was quite a while ago, I did the final round of editing by printing it on paper and editing it at Burning Man. Burning Man, as you probably know, is a festival in the desert. In the middle, there’s a tent. It was the only place you could use money and only for coffee. And I would take my wooden clipboard, the pages, and a pen to the tent. And my hand is not so good, so I can’t use a pen for long. But I would sit there and I would read what I’d written very slowly. I would make notes, I would propose changes, I would listen to the music playing, I would stop and look at the people. The process was very slow and very deliberate. Also, because my hand gets very painful very quickly, I would take breaks. And it was a very inefficient process. It took me six days, I think, to edit. I would write very slowly. It was very inefficient and very wonderful to edit this way.
This was almost twenty years ago and I remember it. I remember some of the music. There were also some people who gave little lectures and so on and it was a beautiful, beautiful way to edit a book. I went to Burning Man with one other book. But with other books, I do similar things. I take things to edit on vacation or when I go abroad. I sit in different places. I do all kinds of things like that. It always makes the editing process slow, inefficient, but wonderful and memorable.
As I’m writing now and AI is a possibility, it’s a very different story. Imagine I edited with AI. I would not print anything. I wouldn’t waste that. And I would sit with, let’s say, Claude, and I would ping questions and get answers. The process would be very efficient. And if I wanted to change something, I would say, “Hey, Claude, please change X across all the document and show me all the places you’re changing it to double check.” And it could be very efficient. Would I enjoy it? Ten years from now would I remember the day I edited the book? The answer is of course not. And I worry about this. I worry about efficiency versus deep enjoyment and memory and satisfaction.
Imagine I could just produce another book that would just be there. Printed. Would it feel like mine in the same way? Would I be connected to it in the same way? My answer is no. So, if you think about this axis of efficiency versus meaning, investment in human capital, and our memory. I worry that we’re going to be tempted to be more efficient but not do things that are good for us in the long term. Like imagine that I could have written each of my books with AI in a more efficient way. And therefore, I might have produced three times as many books. You can ask whether the world would have been a better place. I think the answer is no. And if you ask, would I have been in a better place? I think the answer is also no.
Here’s my thought: We should seriously think about which cases efficiency is undermining some of our most important elements like feelings of connection, mastery, improvement, learning by trial and error, all of those things. And then be very careful not to use AI for efficiency when efficiency eats at the core of what we really want. Now the temptation is going to be tough because efficiency is very tempting. But I think we will all need to learn how to fight that urge for efficiency at our own expense.
Good luck to all of us.
