CONCEPT
Efficient Inefficiency
Mills and Spencer's term for AI performing bullshit tasks faster — the deployment of automation that increases the speed of pointless activity without eliminating the activity itself, producing bullshit at scale.
Efficient inefficiency names the central paradox of AI deployment within institutions that produce bullshit work. The technology that could eliminate pointless activity is instead applied to perform pointless activity more rapidly. The AI that automates compliance documentation does not eliminate the documentation requirement; it generates more documentation, faster, in more formats, with better grammar. Stuart Mills and David Spencer coined the term in their 2024 Journal of Business Research essay applying Graeber's framework to AI. The concept captures something that productivity metrics systematically miss: that doing pointless work efficiently is not progress. One study they examined found that programmers using AI co-pilots wrote more code but also increased code churn — broken code requiring editing and fixing. Writing more bad code, faster.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanism is institutional rather than technological. AI is deployed within organizational structures that generate bullshit. The structures persist; the technology amplifies their output. The compliance department receiving AI tools generates more compliance reports. The