one of my favorite rory sutherland anecdotes is about how people complained that an elevator took too long to arrive. it would cost ~ a million dollars to make the elevators 5% faster. they solved the problem for ~$100 by adding mirrors so people groomed themselves while waiting

In Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?, advertising executive Rory Sutherland challenges our knee-jerk assumption that faster is always better. He asks us to consider what might happen if we approached problem-solving and decision-making with a more open-ended, human-centered perspective.

He offers a thought experiment: what if the brief to des... See more

So I’ll end with a very weird question: What does slow AI look like? We’ve automatically assumed that the way we interact with it is instantaneous. Are we sure that’s right? Would it be interesting to be able to say to an AI, Look, over the next three or four months, can you give me some ideas about holidays in Greece? Do we want to make that decis... See more

There are brilliant examples all over the place of people tweaking time subjectively. One of my favorites is the Uber map. It doesn’t change how long you wait for the taxi. It changes the quality of the waiting time by reducing uncertainty. If you look at human emotions, although humans might say, “I don’t like waiting for a taxi,” what makes them ... See more

What does slow AI look like?

I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest. And I don’t think we’re going to differentiate between those things. Because ... See more

The general assumption driven by these optimization models is always that faster is better. I think there are things we need to deliberately and consciously slow down for our own sanity and for our own productivity. If we don’t ask that question about what those things are, I think we’ll get things terribly, terribly wrong.

Quite a lot of people enjoy their commute time. And there’s good behavioral evidence for this because economists have noticed that people live a bit further from work than they optimally should in order to create a chronological buffer between where they work and where they live. We like that decompression time.