(This is taken from the newsletter I sent in March 2025)
Hi everyone,
I had to get this one out even though the idea isn't fully formed. So forgive me if it sounds incomplete.
This non-stop talk of AI is doing my head in. I'm tired, bored, and maybe wrong.
It feels like everywhere I look, I am, we are, being sold a New Frictionless World.
Before, where effort was required, we now have Artificial Intelligence.
Those annoying hours spent doing something are about to be given back to you by a very powerful AI.
Rejoice!
What will you do with all your new free time, human?
By now, you have probably seen the clip of the AI Music Production CEO explaining in a podcast interview, how hard music production was. And now, with his software, you just...get songs!
This radicalised me. I hate what this man thinks he stands for. I hate that he thinks he understands how things like music are made.
I don't even know how music is made, but I know (I think) that it is a deeply human experience.
Nowadays I DJ. I play music for friends. I make mixes. I know that the songs I've searched for and discovered myself in record stores and online, occupy a difference place in my my brain than the ones I've just been given by friends. The ones I did no work to acquire.
There is meaning and value in the work.
But now, Spotify are doing 'Smart' shuffle. Where they choose songs for me. My relationship to those songs is so different to songs I have discovered myself.
So I am trying to make an argument here that Friction in achieving something makes an important difference to the outcome.
I find it hard to explain why, but I do feel this deeply.
I saw an add the other day on Twitter that said, "Need a logo, click here for a perfect logo in 10 seconds."And I ask, is that the kind of world anyone wants to live in?
The answer is that for some people, it is.
And it always has been. But the tools weren't available to enable it. Now we're starting to get them.
The ad below was also from Twitter, not the same but you get the idea.
If you've ever set type by hand, you probably understand how much of a step change the word processor was for that industry. Is placing letters individually a good kind of friction? Is there art in that. Or is that more like a mechanical task?
Last week, Open AI CEO Sam Altman shared what he thought was an incredible piece of fiction.
Some people had other ideas.
...
The thing I've been thinking a lot about is 'where do we want friction?'
New pandemic? Need a vaccine? Have the choice between 10 years and 1? You want 1 right? And AI helped us do that.
The line is blurry, but it does exist.
There seems to be places where we want AI to help remove friction and places where we don't.
Figuring out which is which is probably both an art and a science problem. And that probably requires both kinds of people.
And right now, it feels like there is only one of them in the room.
What do you think?
(Thanks for Yass, Alex, Whitney and Gin who have been generous sounding boards.)