The Free Press is out today with an article arguing that friction in life is necessary—and in many cases should be sought out rather than avoided—especially in light of the world AI is rapidly bringing into being. As an example of deliberately embracing friction, it cites a 1995 interview with Kurt Vonnegut, in which he explains that he intentionally doesn’t buy envelopes in bulk, forcing himself to go out and get what he needs rather than having everything waiting at his fingertips.
Perhaps AI will make humans even less likely to truly engage with the world, but it seems to me that we passed that post many miles back. Self-driving vehicles will be far safer, and I view this as a manifest good—even though I’m not going to give up control of the wheel anytime soon. I like driving, and I like doing other things that require my time and attention.
What AI is promising to bring is still mostly speculation: the insertion of “intelligence” into cars, robots, and other devices so they can perform work with little or even no active human input. This is a difference in degree, not in kind—and I noticed it nearly a decade ago. This is me, from 2017:
Chief among the “listicles” that pass through my social media feed are those offering bold, bullet-pointed predictions about the Great Utopian Future. These lists are heavy on “sweeping change” rhetoric and seem to delight in forecasting the decline and fall of entire industries. Rarely cataloged in these lists are predictions about the number of people who will be swept out of a job by that future.
Dystopian visions—in which man is first displaced and later dominated by machines—are not difficult to find, however. The drivers of the tech revolution often seem to subscribe to both futures: a utopia for the smart and socially connected, and, to offset the dystopian outcomes and inevitable job losses, free money for everyone else. The premise of Universal Basic Income is that everyone should be paid something, even if they can no longer contribute to the economy once machines begin doing more and more of the work.
I was reading yet another set of bold predictions when I was reminded of a book by Kurt Vonnegut, the great science-fiction writer and contrarian. I read it long ago, during a teenage “Vonnegut phase,” when I plowed through his catalog. One of his classics, Player Piano, imagined a similar dystopian utopia.
Player Piano was released in 1954 under the title Utopia 14 and was considered science fiction—so, you know, not real literature. Vonnegut was writing in relative obscurity, and the book was not widely read. It took decades before he was recognized as a major literary figure and his novels properly appreciated.
The story centers on an engineer in a future world where machines do most of the work and society has been divided into three broad camps: the useful people who design and service the machines, the bohemian artists who exist on the fringes, and the useless people who merely act busy.
The useless people do have jobs, mainly puttering around for the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, but they are known to all as the “Reeks and Wrecks.” One of the more adept engineers, Dr. Proteus, suffers an existential crisis over what machines are doing to people and organizes a rebellion, leading to his eventual arrest. After helping the Reeks and Wrecks throw off their machine-dominated lives, he watches in horror as the very people who were displaced begin putting the machines back together so they can resume doing the work for them.
It seems people don’t really want to work—even if work gives their lives purpose and meaning. Humans are caught between the desire to conserve energy and the need to be useful. Evolution is far from perfect.
I take the long view that utopias and dystopias mostly exist in the mind. Predictions of the future are notoriously wrong, so only the broadest themes are useful as guides. Broadly speaking, people adjust to and absorb new technologies according to their tastes and needs, and those who want to work—and who find meaning in the tasks that make up their working lives—will find ways to keep adding value. Those who find the workplace a bore or regard effort as something for suckers aren’t contributing much now, and they won’t in the future either. Work is like exercise and eating right: some do it and reap the rewards; others don’t and pay the penalty.
In any future, character is destiny. Habits and values matter. Meaning is subjective, and cultures vary widely in what they consider a purposeful life. Human nature is both unchanging and highly adaptive. Technology empowers people to be more fully what they already are, for good or ill.
In most ways, we choose our future. We always have—and always will.
Hey, Free Press—if you want someone who actually sees the future, hit me up. This writer misses a vital point about friction and human flourishing. Friction helps the body, but it adds far less value in the mind. I find that a smoother mental journey takes me farther into my thinking and AI is a huge value add. Allow me to explain.
I’m an avid user of AI in the form of ChatGPT, and I make no excuses: it’s awesome. I’ve had long philosophical conversations with it. I’ve asked it questions about gardening, cooking, relationships, how to write emails that deliver bad news while making it sound like good news, and a host of other things. It’s genuinely incredible.
On the long list of things I learned in college that are no longer useful is how to normalize a database. To get a computer to extract meaningful information from a database, you had to “normalize” it—meaning you put the data into meaningful rows and columns, with “keys” to show how one set of rows and columns related to another. This was called, quite literally, a relational database. Once a human built a database full of relationships, the computer could take over, populate it with billions of items, and extract information using a language called SQL—Structured Query Language.
The problem, of course, is that most data in the world is not structured.
AI systems have learned to extract meaning and words out of unstructured data—which, in any other context, I would call thinking. Making sense of unstructured data is what I do in my own head, and now AI can do it too. So the obvious question is: is this reducing friction in my thinking, making my intellectual life easier, and therefore ruining me?
Unlike technologies that glue me to the couch, I think this technology is a manifest gain. It’s not an extension of my body; it’s an extension of my thinking. It’s bringing technology-speed cognition to my brain—the locus of my thinking and decision-making life.
If I think better, decide better, and act more effectively in the world because of improved thinking, have I reduced friction and made myself poorer? Maybe—because making mistakes is also how we grow. Doing things wrong is often how we learn to do them right. But with AI, I will make different mistakes. I will learn at a higher, more capable level.
So while I appreciate the point the writers at The Free Press are making, I think they’re late to the game—both in their Vonnegut references and in their worries about what technology will do to us. The enfeeblement they fear is already here. That’s why I work every day on my body—at home, in the kitchen, and in the gym—to harden my physical self against the softening effects of modern technology.
But the mind is different. Technological applications that engage cognition are not the same as those that promote passivity. The printing press was a manifest good for the human mind, and AI is more like gaining access to the world’s best, quickest, and most comprehensive library. If people use it to let machines drive their cars while they stare at their phones even more, that’s on them.
At its best, technology makes humans more expansive: we can see better into the past, act more effectively in the present, and set a better course for the future. Friction is for the body, but better technology is a massive step forward for the mind.
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