All humans are born ignorant and helpless. A child’s parents, community, and society pays an enormous sum of time and money to provide their basic needs and to prepare them for adulthood. Nearly all children in modern societies are incapable of being anything but economic liabilities until age 16, when they might finally have the right intelligence, strength, and personality traits to work full time and contribute more to the economy than they consume.
Of course, in increasingly advanced societies like ours, economic, scientific, and technological growth depend on having high-quality human capital, and that requires schooling and workplace training well into a person’s 20s. This effectively extends the “liability” phase of such a person’s life just as long, as higher education usually costs more money than a young adult student can make at a side job.
Once that is finished, the productive period of an educated person’s life lasts about 40 years, after which they retire and stop contributing to the economy, science, or technology. In terms of a resource balance sheet, the only difference between this period of a person’s life and his childhood is that, as a retiree, he is probably living off his own accumulated savings rather than other peoples’ money.
And then the person dies, at 80 let’s say. He spent the first 25 years of his life learning and preparing for the workforce, 40 years participating in it and making real, measurable contributions to the world, and the final 15 years hanging around his house and pursuing low-key hobbies. That means this person, who we’ll think of as the “average skilled professional,” had a “lifetime efficiency rate” of 50%. Not bad, right?
Actually, it’s much worse once you also consider this person’s daily time usage:
The average, working-age American only spends about 1/3 of his day working. Sleep takes up just as much time, and the remaining 1/3 of the day is devoted to leisure, satisfying basic physiological needs (e.g. – eating, drinking, cleaning one’s body), running errands, doing chores, and caring for offspring or elderly parents. This means the typical person’s “lifetime efficiency rate” decreases by 2/3, from 50% to 16.6%.
But it gets worse. Any adult who has spent time in a workplace knows that eight hours of real work rarely get done during an eight-hour workday. Large amounts of time are wasted doing pointless assignments that shouldn’t exist and don’t actually help the organization, going to meetings that accomplish nothing and/or take longer than necessary, socializing with colleagues, using computers and smartphones for entertainment and socializing, doing non-value-added training, or doing actual value-added refresher training that must be undertaken because the brains of the human workers constantly forget things. In industrial jobs, there’s often downtime thanks to lack of supplies or to a crucial piece of equipment being unavailable.
From personal experience and from years of observation, I estimate that only 25% of the average American professional’s work day is spend doing real, useful work. That means the lifetime efficiency rate drops to 4.2%.
It still gets worse. Realize that many highly productive people who, let’s say, might actually do eight hours of real work per eight hour work day, are actually doing things that damage the world and slow down the pace of progress in every dimension. Examples include:
- A journalist who consciously inserts systematic bias into their news reports, which in turn leave thousands of people misinformed, anxious, and bigoted against another group of people.
- An advertising executive whose professional life revolves around tricking thousands of people into buying goods or services that they don’t need, or that are actually inferior to those offered by competitors. The result is a massive misallocation of money, and possible social problems as only people with higher incomes can visibly enjoy the useless products, while poorer people can only watch with envy.
- A mathematician who uses his gifts in the service of a Wall Street hedge fund, finding exotic and highly technical ways to aggregate stock market money in his company’s hands at the expense of competitors. The hedge fund creates no value and doesn’t expand the size of the “economic pie”–it merely expands the size of its own slice of that pie.
- A bureaucrat who manages a program meant to further some ill-defined social mandate. Though he and his team have won internal agency awards for various accomplishments, by every honest metric, the program has consistently and completely failed to help its target demographic.
- A drug dealer who “hustles” his part of the city from sunrise to sunset, doing dozens of deals per day and often dodging bullets. The drugs leave his customers too intoxicated to work or to take care of themselves and their families, and have sent many of them to hospitals thanks to overdoses and chemical contaminants.
These kinds of people do what could be called “counterproductive work” or “undermining work,” and it can be very hard to tell them apart from people who do useful work that helps the whole world. Unfortunately, peripheral people who use their own labors to support the counterproductive people, like the cameraman who films the dishonest newscaster’s reports, are also doing counterproductive work, even if they don’t realize it. Once the foul efforts of these people are subtracted from the equation, the lifetime efficiency rate of the median American professional drops to, I’ll say, 3.5%.
Only 3.5% of this educated and well-trained person’s life is spent doing work that benefits society with no catches or caveats. Examples include:
- A heart surgeon who saves the lives of younger people.
- A medical researcher who runs experiments that help discover a vaccine for a painful, widespread disease.
- A chemist who discovers a way to make solar panels more cheaply, without any reduction to the panels’ efficiency, lifespan, or any other attribute.
- A civil engineer who designs a bridge that sharply reduces commute times for local people, resulting in aggregate fuel savings that exceed the bridge’s construction cost in ten years.
- A carpenter who helps build affordable housing that meets all building codes, in a place where it is in high demand.
In each case, the person’s labor helps other people while hurting no one, and improves the efficiency of some system.
Let me mention two important caveats to this thought experiment. First, humanity’s 3.5% efficiency rate might sound pitiful, but it beats every other species, which all have 0% efficiency. One-hundred percent of every non-human animal’s time is spent satisfying physiological needs (e.g. – hunger, sleep), avoiding danger, caring for offspring, and indulging in pleasure (which might be fairly lumped in with “satisfying physiological needs”). At the end of its life, the animal leaves behind no surpluses, no inventions, and no works that benefit its species or anything else, except maybe by pure accident. Our measly 3.5% efficiency rate allowed our species to slowly edge out all the others and to dominate the planet.
Second, under my definition of “efficiency,” it’s possible for a person to have 0% efficiency even though they work very hard, create tangible fruits of their labor, and never do “counterproductive work.” A perfect example of such a person would be a primitive hunter or sustenance farmer who is always on the brink of starvation and spends all his time acquiring and eating food, with no time left over for other pursuits. He never invents a new type of spear or plow, never builds anything more than a wooden shack that will collapse shortly after he dies, and never makes up any religions or useful pieces of knowledge. For the first 95% of our species’ existence, our aggregate lifetime efficiency rate was infinitesimally greater than 0%.
Am I doing this thought experiment just to be dour and to cast humanity in a cynical light? No. By illustrating how inefficient we are, I’m just making a case that we’ll be surpassed by intelligent machines that will be invariably more efficient. Ha ha!
The first key advantage intelligent machines will have is perfect memories. They will never forget anything, and will be able to instantly recall all their memories. This will dramatically shorten the amount of time it takes to educate one of them to the same level as the average American professional I’ve profiled in this essay. Much of teaching is repetition of the same things again and again. And since intelligent machines wouldn’t forget anything, there would be no need for periodic retraining in the workplace, which takes time away from doing real work. Machines wouldn’t have “skills degradation,” and they wouldn’t need to practice tasks to remind themselves how to do them.
(Note that I’m not even assuming that machines will be faster at learning new things than humans are. Again, I’m being conservative by only assuming that they don’t forget things.)
The second key advantage would be near-freedom from human physiological needs, like the need to sleep, eat, or clean one’s self. Intelligent machines would need to periodically go offline for maintenance, repairs or upgrades, but this wouldn’t gobble up anywhere near as much time as it does in humans. For example, while a human spends 33% of his life sleeping, a typical server at a major tech company like Amazon or Facebook spends less than 1% of its time “down.” Intelligent machines wouldn’t have a good correlate to “eating,” since they would only consume electricity and do it while simultaneously performing work tasks. And since machines wouldn’t sweat, shed skin, or grow more than trivial amounts of bacteria on themselves, they wouldn’t need to clean their bodies or garb (if they wore any) nearly as often as humans. Intelligent machines also wouldn’t have a need for leisure, or if they did, they might need less than we do, saving them even more time.
Instead of being able to devote just eight hours a day to learning and working, an intelligent machine could devote 20 hours a day to them, as a conservative estimate. This, in turn, would further shorten the amount of time needed to educate a machine to the same level as the average American professional. I wrote earlier that the professional needed schooling until age 25 to be able to start a high-level job. Since the intelligent machine can spend more time each day studying, it can attend the same number of classes in only 10 years. And since it has a perfect memory, it lessons don’t need to contain as much repetition, and remedial lessons are unnecessary. Let’s say that cuts the amount of schooling needed by 30%. An intelligent machine only needs seven years to operate at the same level as a highly educated 25-year-old human.
And in the workplace, an intelligent machine wouldn’t be subject to the distractions that its human colleagues were (e.g. – socializing, surfing the internet), though its human bosses might still give it pointless assignments or force it to attend unproductive meetings. Still, during an eight-hour day, it would get at least seven hours of real work done (and this is another conservative guess). But as noted earlier, it would actually have 20 hour work days, meaning it would get 17.5 hours of real work done each day, dwarfing the two hours of real work the typical American professional does per day.
As for the “counterproductive work” / “undermining work,” I predict that human bosses will someday task intelligent machines with doing it, allowing scams, disinformation peddling, and criminal enterprises to reach new heights of efficiency. However, the victims will all be humans. Intelligent machines themselves would not be dumb enough, impulsive enough, or possessed of the necessary psychological weaknesses to take whatever bait the “counterproductive workers” were offering, and the latter will be laid bare before their eyes and avoided. For example, an intelligent machine looking to buy a new vehicle would have a perfect understanding of its own needs, and would only need a few seconds to thoroughly research all the available vehicle models and identify the one that best met its criteria. Car commercials designed to play on human emotions, insecurities, and lifestyle consciousness to dupe people into buying suboptimal vehicles wouldn’t sway the machine at all.
I won’t do another set of calculations for the hypothetical intelligent machine, but it should be clear that its advantages will be many and will compound on top of each other, resulting in them being much more efficient that even highly trained humans at doing work. Moreover, in a machine-dominated world, where they controlled the economy, government, and resource allocation, parasitic “counterproductive work” that we humans mistake for useful work would probably disappear. Just as humans slowly edged out all other species thanks to our tiny work efficiency advantage over them, intelligent machines will edge out humans in the future. It’s just a question of when.