The Efficiency Trap

AI isn’t destroying the workforce – decades of short-termism and the financialization of human labor are.

What I read: “It was never about AI (we are not our tools)” by Eric Markowitz. Published March 19, 2026.

Something has been gnawing at me recently. Despite reading and writing a lot about AI and its implications on society and the workforce, percolating in my brain is lingering doubt that the most extreme uses of AI will manifest anytime soon.

Don’t get me wrong. AI is groundbreaking technology. It’s going to change a lot about us and our world. Some bad. Some good. Some terrible. Some remarkable. It’s here to stay in some form even if some of the big AI companies end up collapsing under the weight of massive investments not countered with enough growing revenues.

AI is simply too useful a technology, even with all its imperfections, for the corporate world to not utilize it.

But underlying that issue is one that’s been a longstanding truism of corporate America. US corporations don’t care about long-term planning or the execution of such plans. They manage to the quarter. They are bullied by Wall Street analysts sitting with spreadsheets at desks and deciding for whatever reason a company is only going to do well in the market if they drastically cut expenses (people). It doesn’t matter if those cuts will hurt the company over the long haul. The entire system is messed up and makes zero sense if the goal is to produce and manage stable companies doing good work while maintaining some decency in how they treat their workforce.

The philosophy of business underlying managing to the quarter is that human beings (workers) are always expendable. Corporations can give lip service to valuing people, but actions speak much louder than words. When a corporation’s profits are soaring and they’re laying people off, that disconnect from values is so glaring that to attempt to explain it away with corporate speak would be humorous if it wasn’t so disheartening and dishonest.

As Eric Markowitz’s superb article explains, when it comes to the technology sector, Wall Street and Silicon Valley “have formed a feedback loop of short-termism so tight, so self-reinforcing, that they’ve confused efficiency with purpose, growth with meaning, and the elimination of people with progress. They have built a religion out of optimization. And they are coming for your job with the enthusiasm of true believers.”

At the core of Markowitz’s argument is that companies built slowly and methodically are the ones that survive and thrive. AI is accelerating the speed with which companies function and pivot and it’s contributing to yet more speeding up of lack of corporate management foresight.

Efficiency and optimization have become gods in the corporate world. This has led to a toxic relationship between corporations and workers, between good corporate management and kowtowing to the quarterly report by utilizing drastic “efficiencies” to eliminate employees.

Here is what the gospel of efficiency tells us: If a process can be made faster, it must be made faster.

If a human can be replaced, the human must be replaced.

There is an almost zealous religiosity to this idea, and its one that few of us would ever question. The immediate beneficiaries of AI will no doubt capture the headlines — companies laying off workers, streamlining operations, extracting capital at breathtaking speed. Rational actors, all of them. Except these are all fictions.

They are stories we tell ourselves about the purpose of a company, stories written by people whose time horizon ends at the next earnings call and whose moral imagination, if it exists, resides somewhere in the P&L statement.

Although AI is an obvious factor in where work and employment go in the future, Markowitz doesn’t think AI is the core problem.

This is not about AI. I need to say that clearly, and I need you to hear it. This was never about AI.

Every generation has faced a version of this moment.

The printing press, locomotive, electricity, assembly line, and internet were all deemed poised to destroy some important aspect of human society. Markowitz contends that at the center of those panics was a question often left unsaid, “Are we our tools, or are we something more?”

But why does it seem like right now things are much worse than before. Markowitz offers this that rings true to me.

The reason this moment feels so acute, so existential, is not because AI is uniquely powerful — although it is. It’s because AI has arrived at precisely the moment when we have already hollowed out so much of what makes work meaningful.

We have already financialized everything. We have already reduced human beings to line items and disposed of them like inventory. We have already built an economy that treats people as costs to be minimized rather than as the very source of the value being created.

AI didn’t cause this. AI is just holding up a mirror, and we don’t like what we see.

I’ll let you read Markowitz’s entire article. It’s not long and well worth your time. Pass this article on to coworkers and anyone within corporate management who might hear its message. As a society, we don’t have much choice but to alter our perspective on how AI and other technologies serve us as tools or replace us altogether. I know it seems like all companies are run be evil overlords, but I refuse to believe that’s true. Markowitz doesn’t either.

I’ve seen it in the owner who refuses to lay off her team even though the math says she should. I’ve seen it in the small manufacturer who keeps his factory in the town where he grew up because the town needs the jobs more than he needs the savings. I’ve seen it in the founder who looks at AI and says: This is a tool, and I will decide how it serves us — not the other way around. These people exist.

Even while AI, automation, and robotics continue to be developed and deployed unabated, which I expect will happen at exponentially increasing speeds, if we can instill in workers, management, and investors that the long view is preferable, a view that values humans over money and efficiency, maybe we can avoid the worst of what’s on the horizon as AI becomes a ubiquitous part of our lives.

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