Efficiency Without Judgment

Everyone talks about redefining efficiency. I thought about what that means for a while. And I think it means nothing. Efficiency is efficiency. More output per unit of time. That’s not new. That’s the same definition since the industrial revolution. What’s new is the speed. And that’s exactly where the problem lies.

When everything gets faster, the slowest part becomes the bottleneck. What’s the slowest part? The human. Not as labor, that’s replaceable. But as someone who has to judge whether what was produced is actually good.

A colleague showed me a report last week that he’d created with AI. Ten pages, cleanly formatted, with charts and recommended actions. It took him twenty minutes. What used to take a day. I asked him if he’d read the report. He looked at me as if the question were odd. Of course, he said. Skimmed it.

Skimmed it. Ten pages of action items on which decisions will be made, skimmed. Not because he’s lazy. Because the speed of production has changed the expectation. When something is created in twenty minutes, you treat it like a draft, not a result. But it gets passed along as a result.

This is what happens when efficiency increases without judgment keeping up. You produce more. You check less. And the ratio shifts further with every acceleration.

AI can accomplish in minutes what takes teams weeks. That’s true. For some tasks. But the teams didn’t spend weeks just producing. They spent them thinking. Discussing. Discarding. The time wasn’t waste. It was the space in which judgment formed.

Judgment takes time. Not because humans are slow, but because a good assessment requires you to sit with something. To see a draft differently in the morning than in the evening. To talk to someone about it and notice the gaps. This process can’t be sped up. It’s human. And it’s the only thing that remains when everything else is automated.

I know companies that have quintupled their content output since introducing AI. Newsletters, blog posts, social media, reports. All five times what it was before. Quality control has stayed the same. One person who now has to skim five times as much. The result is predictable: Mistakes happen. Shallow content happens. Statements nobody checked happen. But the output numbers are right.

Efficiency without judgment is faster noise. That’s not progress. That’s volume.

In companies, they call this “productivity gain.” And in the spreadsheets, it checks out. The numbers go up. More produced, less time invested, costs down. But spreadsheets don’t measure whether what was produced is worth anything. They measure quantity. And quantity is not value.

I’m waiting for someone to describe slowness as a competence. For someone to say: Yes, AI can create a report in twenty minutes. But the real question is who sits down for two hours afterward and checks whether the report is right. And whether what it recommends should actually be done.

That would be the new definition of efficiency. Not producing faster. Judging better.