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Mike Randolph's avatar

Rohit, your friction analysis connects to patterns I've been exploring around system persistence and constraint satisfaction. What strikes me is how each technological "solution" displaces constraints rather than eliminating them.

Your AI coding example perfectly illustrates this - and I see it in my own work. AI has removed the friction of generating text, but now I spend enormous time reviewing LLM output for accuracy, coherence, and alignment with my actual thinking. The constraint moved from "time to write" to "capacity to validate and refine AI-generated content."

This pattern repeats across history. When the printing press removed friction from copying texts in the 1500s, scholars complained about "the confusing abundance of books" - suddenly they could access more information than they could meaningfully evaluate. Same displacement: easier creation, harder curation.

What's remarkable is how quickly this is changing. I retired 25 years ago and had basically forgotten how to type. But only in the last month have AI models become sophisticated enough to understand my cognitive load limitations and adapt accordingly. When I push back, these newest systems don't just generate faster - they actually recognize when I'm getting overwhelmed and adjust their communication style.

This suggests we might be moving beyond the historical pattern where new technologies create problems humans must solve through adaptation. Instead, we're developing systems that can adapt to individual human needs rather than forcing uniform interaction styles.

The critical questions remain: Are we confusing efficiency with effectiveness?

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Michael Garfield's avatar

Gotta disagree with you about "you can't opt out" — there are a million dimensions of opting out; "opting out" is the very essence of executive function; and if as kyla says friction is information then it's worth more to the automated economy when you exert yourself for a no then when you slide choicelessly into a yes.

I look forward to speaking with you about all of this on the show, when we get there...I have this idea of a future that rewards distinctive persistent embeddings produced by self-directed learning that I just discussed with Alex Komoroske for his episode today, we mentioned this piece, and we didn't fully digest the ramifications of what happens when the system favors the "hipster" (or "Irish") move of "thinking otherwise" for maximal coverage of latent space and the cultivation of an adaptive reservoir. There's a phase transition underway and on the other side of it is a paradox I'd love to explore with you — when the frictionless convergence is toward everyone using *different* bespoke software, inhabiting *different* conceptual frameworks, increasingly reliant on an illegibly complex layer of mediation that makes mass customization under surveillance capitalism look like child's play and ups both the ease of translation between strangers and our total embeddedness in a shared but prismatic hyperlanguage. Surely this is an upper bound we never quite reach, but it's directly opposite the lower bound most people are kvetching about, so it seems like a fun provocation to explore together.

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