In late April of this year, a Portuguese start-up, Sensei, raised $6.5 million to enable it to scale a technology that can help retail to compete with Amazon Go – autonomous stores whereby you can pick up grocery items and just walk out of the store, no checkout necessary.

Michael Stothard, editor of the FT-backed publication on European start-ups Sifted.eu, tweeted that this technology will save each of us two years of our lives that we spend queueing in shops. Two years. This number and this tweet really stuck with me. And clearly, it still does, since I’m writing about it nearly a month later. Two years seems like a lot of time. By the time I’m 80, I’ll supposedly have spent 2.5 per cent of my time in supermarket queues. The number seems really high, but let’s assume it’s right – Michael is great and I trust his research. Let’s go even further and say 3 per cent or 4 per cent of my life is spent waiting to pay for food. My next reaction? Who cares.

Most of technological innovation is predicated on the idea of efficiency, yet we never discuss the nature of this concept in and of itself. Trillions of dollars’ worth of technology is aimed at buying individuals or corporations more time or money. Efficiency, at its core, is the ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time in doing something or in producing a desired result.

There are two things I want to discuss: the first is that we engage laboriously in this efficiency-production system without defining the “desired result” that we are optimizing for, and secondly that we never buy more time, we simply redistribute it.

Increased efficiency?

Let’s think about increased efficiency. Two weeks ago, I was teaching an undergraduate class in macroeconomics. I explained that the formal study of economics began when Adam Smith published his famous book The Wealth of Nations in 1776, through which he introduces the concept of the division of labour: the assignment of different parts of a process or task to different people in order to improve efficiency.

That evening, I ordered sushi from an online food delivery app. Five years ago, I would have called the restaurant, ordered sushi, and I would have paid their delivery person for the food when it was brought to me. That evening, however, I thought about the division of labour: I ordered from a digital food ordering platform (GrubHub), who placed the order with the restaurant, which ordered a delivery driver from another digital platform (Uber), who delivered it to my door, all paid for via the initial digital platform which outsources its payment system (to Stripe). 

Each of the business functions initially provided by the restaurant five years ago were further divided and optimized to create efficiency and economies of scale. But where does this efficiency go? From the consumer perspective, I pressed a couple of buttons and food magically appeared. I got my food slightly faster and without the need for human interaction, but with so many intermediaries, my $40 food order accumulated $20 of fees on top. Tips, charges and taxes for each intermediary.

The fact that I would be happy to go back to 2015 and pay $20 less to call the restaurant myself doesn’t matter – Uber and GrubHub’s market share now means that restaurants have no option but to go to through this intermediary-driven process. As a side note in this case, efficiency has been bad for restaurants and consumers, but great for venture capital and private equity.

The general outsourcing of our lives, division of labour-style, is not just with food ordering.

Several friends of mine use digital platform services in the home maintenance sector whereby, for $150+ a week, a gig worker will do your grocery shopping, laundry and cleaning. $600 a month seems like an insanely high price for somebody picking up groceries and folding some clothes, but the people who use these services love it because they press a few buttons and stuff gets magically done while they are at work. Indeed, most have never met, seen or even know the name of the people selecting their food or rearranging their bathroom cabinets.

It’s efficient if you’re beyond a certain salary threshold – somebody else’s time simply becomes cheaper than your own. As the app tells you, you can now buy back your own time.

Dating apps and social efficiency

The last example I’ll give is that of dating apps, the ultimate creator of social efficiency. Let’s assume that a night out “costs” four hours. If you’re single, let’s assume you have to go out to a bar three times to meet one suitable partner (this 3:1 ratio is my assumption in Dublin, whereas in Boston this ratio is absurdly wrong and after much research is probably closer to 11:1).

The hours-to-partner ratio then becomes 12:1. Why waste the time? Dating apps allow you to reverse that ratio, and meet 10 potentially suitable partners in an hour (there’s a lot here I could add about the speed at which people swipe right and metrics of suitability vs availability). So, the created efficiency is simple and measurable – dating apps moves you from 12:1 to 1:10 in terms of hours-to-partners.

If efficiency is the ability to avoid wasting resources in producing a desired result, what is the desired result that we are always optimizing for? We are continually sold the idea that it is time. Time is what we are trying to buy, gain, achieve, reproduce. But that’s incorrect, since we know that time is a zero-sum game (more on this in a minute).

The core concept that I teach in macroeconomics is that of tradeoffs. Absolutely everything has a tradeoff, and that includes efficiency. Efficiency has huge individual and societal costs, but unlike efficiency it is difficult (if not impossible) to measure these costs. Therefore, they nearly always go unacknowledged.

As we further outsource the tasks in our lives in the name of efficiency, we have to wonder at what stage we have just outsourced living. What if these seemingly boring tasks, which now belong to nameless, faceless people, apps or automated systems, actually are our lives? If we are able to get rid of standing in a supermarket line, seeing the person who made our food, thanking our delivery driver, talking to the person who cleans our homes, meeting friends and creating memories on a night out, what else are we going to get rid of? Is caring for our family or our friends going to become simply inefficient?

Infinite things in a finite space

And this brings me to our second point – time. It sounds extraordinarily counterintuitive, but it is mathematically possible to contain infinite things in a finite space. In complexity science, there’s a very simple way to make this happen – by making a fractal, which is a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern at every scale to infinity.

This diagram shows that by breaking down this line into increasingly smaller components, the length of the line increases but the area that contains it stays the same. This line could, hypothetically, reach infinite length within its finite area. And this diagram is representative of how most of technology corporations, venture capital and private equity model the human relationship with time. Although Adam Smith did not have the mathematics available to him in 1776, his division of labor concept, as he defined it without limits, is indeed hypothetically fractal. A good analogy for some readers may be to consider the last time you were billed by a lawyer, in which case you will feel like you are interacting with the bottom iteration in this diagram (n=4). And as a society, technology is trying to push us far beyond this diagram.

However, there is a caveat: humans are biologically and societally constrained. Our lives are merely a set of randomised iteration of events, from birth to death. Nothing more, nothing less. We are not fractal, as the diagram shows, but in fact evolutionary; it is impossible to create infinite time without our finite life. We do not divide the time in our lives to infinity, but instead we move through it. We are often sold the concept of being able to buy or create time, but in our fixed-dimensional reality, we can merely distribute it. As Annie Dillard wisely wrote:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”

Since we cannot buy time, the entire meaning of our life is created by the ways in which we distribute it. The randomized iteration of events that makes up our life only becomes meaningful when we choose to attribute meaning to it. As Michael Stothard tweeted, Sensei may make my life 2.5 per cent more efficient, but that is only true when we measure the associated tradeoff as zero. Standing in a grocery store line is what makes us human; it levels our experiences within our community, it provides a commonality with those around us. Surely this must count for something.

The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that technology-driven efficiency would enable everybody to switch to a 15-hour work week, freeing up much more time for leisure and restoration. In fact today, we are twice as efficient as Keynes predicted, but we work on average three times as much. What will we do with the two years that we save by avoiding supermarket queues? We will work more. And if given the choice of spending two years working more or spontaneously interacting within my community, I’ll choose the more meaningful – the latter.

Efficiency, which is an eternal race to the bottom, reduces our lives to metrics of productivity, output and measurable value creation and abandons creativity, ideation and – most importantly – the forging of human connections within our world. Our private equity-backed world has created a modern two-class system: those who interact with the real world, and those who do not, with the latter being seen, strangely, as a privilege.

Like everything, this is not absolute: efficiency isn’t evil and is often very necessary. However, I believe that there can be a healthy interaction of efficiency with society. The first step in achieving this balance is in the acknowledgement of trade-offs and of our losses, as individuals and as communities, that we experience at the merciless hands of efficiency. We should all be in favour of supermarket queues.