The keyword of this year seems to be “friction.” We need to learn through “productive friction,” educators say. Technology makes everything too easy, too convenient, removing all “friction” from our lives until we are complacent, docile, stupid. AI is, then, the ultimate barrier to this friction–even moreso than the smartphone, streaming media, internet shopping or food delivery apps. It strips away the friction of thinking, of learning skills, of working through the drudgery of failure after failure until you get it right.
If friction is what we need to learn and grow, AI is its opposite. AI is lube, and we are all smooth-brains now, gliding through life on a slip-n-slide of automation.
This seems right to me, and it draws attention to all of those other kinds of digital lubrication that make doing hard things feel scary or boring, turning all of lifes struggles into tl;dr: Making an awkward phone call instead of filling out a form on line or sending an email, finding a store in your home town that sells what you need instead of just ordering it from Amazon, sitting without distraction for a full hour to just think about something.
When things become too easy, what do we lose? Who wins? Who’s benefitting from the slippery, lubed-up existence of never really having to work for our small, daily wins? When we get things without really working for them, the gain starts to feel meaningless. Empty.
No wonder we’re in such an anxiety and depression criss. We need to strip away some of the automated reward systems and sit in the crunchy, sandpapery, frictiony world again.
