Efficiency Is a Choice

Tenner defines efficiency as “producing goods, providing services or information, or processing transactions with a minimum of waste.” It is a term that he applies to “all technology intended to reduce to human time needed for a task, whether buying a product, learning a subject, planning a trip, or making a medical decision.” Essential to Tenner’s approach is the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, a mechanical plow using an internal combustion engine is far more effective at plowing a field than a horse is, but it uses about 13 times as much energy—which is not very efficient.

Tenner argues that our current technocratic elite focus on efficiency—a focus that has been increasingly obsessive for more than a century—leads to a series of “wasted efforts and missed opportunities.” Tenner names seven forms of this misapplication of efficiency takes, including “counterserendipity” (the narrowing and focusing of data retrieval in a way that makes the discovery of unexpected information almost impossible), “data deluge” (no explanation needed), and “skill erosion.”

“Skill erosion” is a primary focus of Nicholas Carr’s 2014 book The Glass Cage, which concerns the ways that automation atrophies human capacities, but Tenner takes pains to distinguish himself from Carr. Carr, he says, is a pessimist; by contrast he himself believes that “technological optimism is, on balance, a blessing.” And “balance” is what Tenner strives for: He sees himself as occupying the “great middle range [of] authors skeptical of technological utopianism but not necessarily alarmed by the likelihood of meltdown.” Still, the overall tone of the book is far closer to that of Carr than of techno-utopians like Kevin Kelly (from whom Tenner also makes a point of distinguishing himself).

The specific ways in which Tenner occupies this “great middle range” can be difficult to discern, because his writing tends toward the abstract, and there are some passages that I struggle to parse. This abstractness manifests itself organizationally and also stylistically. For instance, he describes his first chapter as devoted to “the contrast between continuous process efficiency (which fascinated painters as well as photographers and filmmakers in its monumentality and awesome concreteness) and platform efficiency, which is far more profitable but concealed and evanescent and that takes a leap of artistic imagination to dramatize.” By the end of that chapter I think I have a grasp of the general contrast—but I still don’t understand that sentence.

Or take this (fairly typical) paragraph, from the first chapter:

Why does a paragraph that begins in the Middle Ages suddenly leap back to the ancient world? Do any of technological practices listed here relate to the opening sentence’s statement about the lack of “an underlying theory”—a theory of efficiency, I suppose? Beats me.

I found Tenner’s chapter called “The Mirage of the Teaching Machine” the most helpful at summarizing and synthesizing both the excitement about algorithmic, screen-based, massive-scale education and the (in retrospect inevitable) deflating of that excitement. But that may be because I knew this material better than I know anything else Tenner writes about and so can intuit his meaning even when he doesn’t write lucidly. In any case, Tenner shrewdly notes that there may be intractable problems with technological approaches to education that are created by “entrepreneurs, foundation executives, professional administrators, and politicians rather than classroom teachers.” While acknowledging the possibility “that algorithms may yet learn effective tutoring techniques,” Tenner believes that technological solutions are “likely to remain inefficient at teaching critical judgment or creativity.” And ineffective too, one might add.

By the concluding chapter the argument starts to come together. Tenner outlines a series of strategies for “balancing algorithm and intuition,” most of which involve a correction of algorithm-worship and therefore echo Nicholas Carr’s project more than Tenner wants to admit. His emphases on “physical presence,” “creative waste,” “analog serendipity,” and “desirable difficulty” certainly rhyme with many of the more thoughtful recent critics of our technological elite, including not just Carr but also Sherry Turkle (Reclaiming Conversation) and David Sax (The Revenge of Analog).

This is not a bad thing. While in his conclusion Tenner makes the “obvious point” that “new and old technologies alike can be right for some uses and wrong for others,” this is not the most stirring of perorations and the point seems rather too obvious. The value of Tenner’s book, at least when the writing is sufficiently clear, is its outlining of a rich historical context for the efficiency-obsessed algorithmic culture of “big data” and its suggestion of constructive responses to the ingrained intellectual habits of Silicon Valley and its many outposts. It may be hard to parse at times, but The Efficiency Paradox provides a useful compendium of ways to address our increasingly technocratic ways of doing intellectual business.