Friction is a four-letter word (part i)
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
Marshall McLuhan, philosopher
Stop me if this sounds familiar. We know that technology works if it removes the friction from our life. Technological innovation is all about speed and convenience.
No longer do we need to labor over paper maps when your phone has GPS. (Though I do still remember printing out directions from MapQuest. RIP.) We have automation now so you don’t need to keep wasting time on repetitive tasks. Think of how much better your life would be if you didn’t have to write a single email ever again, because ChatGPT will do that for you. It’s nice that you don’t have to keep re-entering your credit card information when you shop online, because you can just save it the first time around.
We tend to judge technological advances on the one basis of how much work (and time) the tech saved us. Is there ever a time where we consider, though—was any work that was removed also doing something for us?
Friction is an ugly four-letter word in this field. Technology’s main objective is to remove the steps between intention and outcome. Which is exactly what all of us want. Whatever makes the boring stuff easier, the annoying stuff easier, the mundane easier, life easier. And it has!—Google Maps is the sole thing standing between this current reality where I frantically clutch my smartphone everywhere I scurry… and the dreamy utopia where I chuck it into the dizzying depths of the ocean and brandish my hot pink Motorola RAZR V3 in front of other jealous millennials. Google Maps is also the reason why I bid thee Mapquest farewell; I like that I don’t have to manually print out directions every time I walk more than five blocks from my apartment. And really, typing up a paper on Microsoft Word via keyboard sure beats the painstaking labor of typewriters of yore. (I won’t pretend that I was around for that.)
But are we able to consider that friction may not always be waste? Some friction—a lot of friction—is simply inconvenience. But some does force us to engage with discomfort, with a problem. Human capabilities aren’t developed in isolation through study. They are developed through repeated use. So yes… manual navigation forces you to develop spatial awareness. Writing out every single line of all your emails (god, the horror) does, in fact, force you to organize and articulate your thoughts. Researching instead of letting Google AI spoon-feed you (sometimes false) information does force you to evaluate competing information and maybe even gain and practice media literacy. When you have to problem-solve, you work through uncertainty. When you have to make decisions, you have to weigh alternatives.
The point isn’t that technology destroys these capabilities. (Well, I mean… no, that’s a topic for another time.) It's that when a system repeatedly performs a task for us, we end up practicing that underlying capacity in a different way. Technology changes both what humans do and what humans practice. When we move from individual tasks to systems, we forget that we do lose familiarity with the process itself. A system can make us more capable at the level of outcomes, all the while making us less practiced at producing those outcomes independently.
This isn’t really supposed to be a typical piece on the dangers of deskilling in the age of AI. (Well, I mean… no, that’s a topic for yet another time.) I think what that conversation may be missing is the nuance: cognitive work may not completely disappear, but in fact “move”. When ChatGPT spits out a muted email that you intend to send to your boss (maybe because your first draft contained one too many expletives?), you still have to evaluate it. When the search engine retrieves information, you still have to determine whether it’s credible. So the cognitive work didn’t exactly completely disappear; some tasks moved from production to evaluation, others from execution to oversight. Does that mean our capacities need to change, too? Does that also mean that convenience changes our expectations?
Once technology makes something easy, the previous level of friction suddenly feels unacceptable. We expect more and more things to be effortless, nearly instantaneous, always available all the time. Convenience creeps from a faraway dream to a thrilling possibility to a firm expectation to an invisible infrastructure. Convenience lastly becomes infrastructure when the friction we once accepted begins to feel like an intolerable error.