We're Going to Accept This as the Cost of Efficiency

More than 15 years ago, when I was still early in my tech reporting career at Fortune, an executive at Time Inc (Fran Hauser) told me she had someone I needed to meet: the futurist Amy Webb.

I spent my time reporting on the rise of various technologies. Youthful founders promised me their well-funded inventions would change the way we lived.

As a futurist, Amy had an informed perspective on what would actually stick.

Ever since, I’ve looked to Amy as a guide for how our current inventions collide with emerging trends to inform the future. This past weekend, she gave her annual SXSW talk, an event that routinely sells out despite its early Saturday morning time slot. Shortly before that, I invited her into the studio to help me discern what this chaotic moment means for our immediate future.

We’ve living through creative destruction

Amy’s framework for this moment is called creative destruction. It’s a term she borrowed from the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote about it in the aftermath of World War II. The idea is this: there are moments in history when external forces — technological, geopolitical, social — compound and collide in ways that make the old ways of doing things obsolete.

We are in one of those moments now.

What makes this one different from previous cycles like the Industrial Revolution, the post-war boom, or even the early commercial internet is the sheer number of convergences happening simultaneously. This is not just another AI conversation. Amy is talking about how AI and robotics and biotechnology and energy infrastructure and geopolitical competition all smash into each other at once, creating structural changes that most organizations will recognize too late.

As she put it at this year’s SXSW talk, a convergence tells you what’s going to become inevitable.

Here’s what happens to work when our jobs start to go away

Amy says that the white collar jobs being eliminated right now are probably not coming back. This is where years of experience advising executives in leadership positions comes into play. She says what we all kind of know, that it’s not like the tech is so much better than the people its replacing. But adding headcount back would require leaders to admit they made a mistake, and they’re not going to do that.

It’s actually going to make a lot of things shittier for awhile. The quality of our cognitive output is going to decline. And we are going accept that as the cost of efficiency.

I found this both clarifying and devastating. Clarifying because it names something I’ve been feeling but couldn’t articulate. Take my original profession; does anyone think that the quality of journalism can be maintained if we’re not training people to do excellent work? How did we think this was going to end up?

Devastating because it suggests that the bargain we’re making isn’t just economic. Collectively, we’re willing to let go of this excellence across every domain in the name of a balance sheet.

Which brings me back to efficiency, the wrong value for our time

You know I’m obsessed with efficiency and how thoroughly it has colonized our understanding of what work is for. In an earlier piece I wrote for this newsletter, I traced that value back to Frederick Winslow Taylor and his 1909 principles of scientific management, and argued that we’ve built artificial intelligence as its apotheosis: the most efficient processes, made more efficient still.

Amy’s framework supports this idea. She suggests that creative destruction cycles have a shape. They begin with convergence, move through disruption and fear, and arrive somewhere new. Our radical focus on the values of the last era (industrialization) will lead it through the disruption, and will force the destruction more quickly. It often feels like the future is happening at us. But by paying attention to the way these trends are converging, we have the opportunity to engineer our own future.

Amy pulls up the driving-on-ice analogy here, and it feels apt after the winter we’ve had in Brooklyn. When you hit a patch of ice, the instinct is to slam on the brakes. That’s the reaction. The correct response is counterintuitive, and it will save your life every time. You steer into the slide. You keep your eyes on where you want to go, and take your foot off the gas. You have to let the car find its footing.

The future isn’t foretold. It gets created by the decisions we make in the present. Every decision we make influences a future that hasn’t arrived yet. The question is whether we are making those decisions deliberately, with information, or whether we are reacting out of fear and FOMO while the ice carries us somewhere we didn’t choose to go.

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I’ve spent 20+ years covering tech from the inside for BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Wired. My mission is to close the gap between the people building the future—and those of us living it.