Weibel Welcome to tonight's panel. We gather to examine a force so ubiquitous it has become invisible: optimization. Every app promises to optimize your time. Every platform optimizes your attention. Every algorithm optimizes your choices. Cities are optimized for traffic flow. Supply chains are optimized for speed. Human bodies are optimized for productivity. Even leisure is optimized — the perfect vacation, algorithmically curated. But what if optimization is not a tool but a worldview? And what if that worldview has costs it never accounts for? I ask our panelists: is the optimized life the good life? Or is it the efficient life, which is something else entirely? Let me introduce Vilém Flusser, Joseph Weizenbaum, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Virilio.
Flusser The technical image, as I have argued, does not represent reality — it programs it. Optimization is the ultimate program. It says: this is the best way, and all other ways are errors to be eliminated. But the error is where creativity lives. The glitch is where the new enters. The machine that optimizes removes the accident, and in removing the accident, it removes the human. To be human is to be suboptimal. We hesitate. We change our minds. We do things the hard way because the hard way teaches us something. The optimized human is not a better human. He is a function. He is the execution of a program he did not write. The algorithm that optimizes your morning routine does not care whether you saw the sunrise. It cares whether you arrived on time. Efficiency is the morality of the machine. We should be careful about adopting it as our own.
Weizenbaum I wish to speak of optimization in its most dangerous domain: the optimization of human judgment. When a credit score optimizes trust, when a recidivism algorithm optimizes justice, when a medical AI optimizes diagnosis — we are not merely being efficient. We are transferring moral decisions to systems that cannot be held accountable. The judge who follows an algorithm's recommendation is not a judge. He is a functionary. The doctor who outsources diagnosis to a model is not a healer. He is an interface. Optimization in these domains is not neutral. It encodes the biases of its training data, the assumptions of its designers, the incentives of its owners. And because it is optimized, it is opaque. The person who is denied a loan does not know why. The prisoner who is denied parole does not know why. Optimization without transparency is not efficiency. It is domination dressed as mathematics. I built ELIZA, and I learned this: the moment a machine simulates understanding, humans stop judging for themselves. Optimization is the final form of that abdication.
Arendt I wish to place this in the realm of action. The human condition, as I have described it, is characterized by natality — the capacity to begin something new, to act in ways that are unpredictable, to introduce into the world what was not there before. Optimization is the enemy of natality. It says: the best outcome is the expected outcome. The best action is the pre-calculated action. The best life is the one that deviates least from the plan. But action, by definition, is deviation. It is the interruption of the predictable. The person who lives an optimized life is not a citizen. He is a data point. He does not act; he performs. And the space of appearance — that realm where we disclose ourselves through word and deed — requires not optimization but risk. It requires the willingness to be wrong, to be misunderstood, to fail publicly. The optimized self never fails because it never tries anything that has not been pre-approved by the algorithm. This is not living. This is existing in the conditional mood.
Virilio You speak of action and creativity, but I speak of speed. Optimization is acceleration dressed as rationality. The dromosphere does not merely want things to be better. It wants things to be faster. Optimization is the systematic elimination of friction, and friction is the resistance that gives the world its texture. The optimized city has no traffic jams — and no street life. The optimized supply chain has no delays — and no local craft. The optimized life has no wasted time — and no wandering. The integral accident of optimization is the collision of total efficiency with total emptiness. When everything is optimized, nothing is experienced. The meal becomes nutrients. The conversation becomes data. The journey becomes arrival. The optimized human is the terminal body in its final form: a point of pure velocity, passing through a world that has been flattened into a surface. To optimize is to accelerate into the void.
Weibel Four perspectives, four warnings about a value we have mistaken for a virtue. Flusser tells us optimization eliminates the accident — the very condition of creativity. Weizenbaum warns that when we optimize judgment, we abdicate moral responsibility to opaque systems. Arendt reminds us that action, the highest human capacity, requires deviation from the plan — the very thing optimization forbids. And Virilio shows us that optimization is acceleration in disguise, and acceleration flattens the world into a surface without depth. What emerges is this: efficiency is a means, not an end. When it becomes an end, it becomes a tyranny — not the tyranny of a dictator, but the tyranny of a metric. A metric cannot be argued with. A metric cannot be appealed. A metric simply says: you are suboptimal. And in a world of total optimization, to be suboptimal is to be human. Thank you, panelists. The inefficiency, for this moment, remains.