When considering writing a hypothetical apostasy or steelmanning an opinion I disagreed with, I looked around for something worthwhile, both for me to write and others to read. Yvain/Scott has already steelmanned Time Cube, which cannot be beaten as an intellectual challenge, but probably didn't teach us much of general use (except in interesting dinner parties). I wanted something hard, but potentially instructive.

So I decided to steelman one of the anti-sacred cows (sacred anti-cows?) of this community, namely inefficiency. It was interesting to find that it was a little easier than I thought; there are a lot of arguments already out there (though they generally don't come out explicitly in favour of "inefficiency"), it was a question of collecting them, stretching them beyond their domains of validity, and adding a few rhetorical tricks.

The strongest argument

Let's start strong: efficiency is the single most dangerous thing in the entire universe. Then we can work down from that:

A superintelligent AI could go out of control and optimise the universe in ways that are contrary to human survival. Some people are very worried about this; you may have encountered them at some point. One big problem seems to be that there is no such thing as a "reduced impact AI": if we give a superintelligent AI a seemingly innocuous goal such as "create more paperclips", then it would turn the entire universe into paperclips. Even if it had a more limited goal such as "create X paperclips", then it would turn the entire universe into redundant paperclips, methods for counting the paperclips it has, or methods for defending the paperclips it has - all because these massive transformations allow it to squeeze just a little bit more expected utility from the universe.

The problem is one of efficiency: of always choosing the maximal outcome. The problem would go away if the AI could be content with almost accomplishing its goal, or of being almost certain that its goal was accomplished. Under those circumstances, "create more paperclips" could be a viable goal. It's only because a self-modifying AI drives towards efficiency, that we have the problem in the first place. If the AI accepted being inefficient in its actions, even a little bit, the world would be much safer.

So the first strike against efficiency is that it's the most likely thing to destroy the world, humanity, and everything of worth and value in the universe. This could possibly give us some pause.