Great, insightful read, Kyla! Thank you. "But friction isn’t the enemy!!!! It’s information. It tells us where things are straining and where care is needed and where attention should go." ... Exactly! The question is ... who is giving (not paying!) attention? How can we grow that group of people?
I think it starts from within. Besides going around and blaming people with thier obvious wrong doings we can start putting efforts where its actually needed. I as an AI enginner dont need to go around making automations in the factory to make operators life easier because honestly making life easier is much less preferred than making systems reliable to the core. We can never fully convince people with the effect of overly friction controlled physical world cos the origin of change is not of much real effects at the highest of points in life where wealth is not an issue. Having said that it doesn’t also means to blatantly shut the voice for other people.
Kyla wants to villainize tech, but it's tech billionaires like Patrick Collison who are funding initiatives like Progress Studies to figure out what's up with the economy and how to fix it.
Patrick Collison is in the business of making money and editing genes. His side project on "progress studies" hasn't added up to anything other than "progress has slowed down and we have no idea why".
Regarding the pushing of costs down the road - “The American economy has been running a decades-long experiment in removing friction, both through technological advancement and through financial engineering that pushes costs into the future.” - Something I have been thinking about lately is how mass production has removed friction of consuming things, but at the expense of the environment. IE we can mass produce milk, but in order to distribute it we need all of these systems in place (distribution, cartons) to facilitate getting the milk to consumer. This translates to excess energy spent, not experienced by the consumer (who bought the milk and had it delivered rather than owned a cow and milled it and maybe sold it to some immediate neighbors) but by the larger natural ecosystem (which endured the carbon output of transit, carton production, and ultimately the biodegradation, or not, of the carton).
Mass production makes things more efficient. I'd expect that if we shifted away from mass production, the externalities would increase dramatically. For example: Alright, so I have my own cow. That means I have to build my own barn. Which means CO2 to move the lumber to build it, and to construct it. I have to feed the cow. I have to dispose of its waste. That's also going to release CO2, and the feeding and waste disposal no longer benefits from economies of scale. Per capita emissions are going way up. Don't forget about poor land use: Now that everyone has their own cow in a barn, everything is way more spread out. You need to drive in order to get anywhere. That releases more CO2. Etc.
I thought this was supposed to be a blog about economics. Y'all are like a bunch of teenage hippies. "Yeah but like mass production man... it's so bad for the ecosystem."
Thanks for the discourse Ebenezer - no need to be patronizing. There might be models of localized production that are more efficient and ultimately healthier than mass production as I think we all understand it. You’re right, it depends on the density of markets served.
A thought on students using AI for school work. If AI can do it so well, maybe we are measuring the wrong capabilities? Just because the skills and knowledge needed to write an essay or take a test were valuable 50-100 years ago doesn't mean they will be valuable in the future.
Is anyone working on a curriculum to prepare students for the future, where machines will be even more integrated into how we think and communicate?
+1, I feel like this is a deeper continuation on why higher level math is relevant in curriculums to begin with. The argument of “why do I need to learn this when I have a calculator” now can stretch across pretty much any subject. With math, the deeper step was to “show your work” to prove understanding of systems, but what does this look like in the context of writing or other systems of thought?
It’s a word calculator — but not a thought calculator. Words work primarily as a means of externalization and collaboration of thoughts, and so using them hollowly has little utility.
Totally agree! To keep it simple; you need to know and understand what you are asking Chatgpt, and secondly if you don't internalize the answer, which is what is meant by 'kicking the can down the street', then you are still at zero. Knowledge is everything! AI could not have written what Kyla Scanlon wrote. Creativity, a never before thought remains a difficult point for AI. By the way, I like the struggle to master a new piece of music ..... (even if it doesn't work out...)
Almost gets to a sort of Buddhist place if you want to think about it that way. Life is suffering, or rather life is friction. It's not something to be avoided or minimized, but to be accepted and managed.
To the contrary, friction can absolutely be minimized.
Just to challenge *one* of what I suspect is *many* false or dubious claims in Kyla's essay:
"Amazon's one-click ordering creates a seamless customer experience by offloading friction onto warehouse workers and delivery drivers."
Consider the difference between buying on Amazon vs going to the store.
* If I buy from the store, I drive there in my ICE vehicle, releasing all the CO2 to move both me and the vehicle perhaps a mile away. Maybe the store doesn't have what I need, and I need to drive somewhere else. Then I drive back with my purchase.
* If I buy on Amazon, it's far more efficient. The Amazon worker picks up what I need from the warehouse and puts it in an electric van which drives around my neighborhood every day delivering parcels. The marginal CO2 emitted is far lower: it's the difference between hauling around an entire vehicle and person just to make one purchase, vs adding one additional package to an electric van that's amortizing transportation costs and labor across a much larger number of purchases.
Yes, tech is absolutely all about minimizing friction. I think you are proving Kyla's point though tbh. The offloaded friction isn't about C02 emissions or efficiency its about the effort put in to receive the item. Ordering through amazon means you take out all the effort you laid out if you buy from the store. It doesn't mean that it is more efficient to buy items yourself it just moves the extra time, effort etc from you to the workers packaging, loading and delivering the item.
It moves it, and also greatly reduces it due to economies of scale. For example, if an average Amazon van carries 100 packages, that's 99 fewer drivers on the road, relative to the case where everyone drives themselves to the store individually to buy their thing.
Friction isn't a conserved quantity. It's possible to reduce it, sometimes by orders of magnitude.
Thanks so much for this piece! As a service designer it resonates so deeply. In my field, we often talk about how friction, like energy, doesn't just appear or disappear, it moves. When we remove it from one part of a system it'll pop-up somewhere else (often as an unintended cost in under-invested and over-worked infrastructure) for somebody else to deal with. When incorporated into an overall experience, designed for, looked at holistically, however, understanding frictions can make an experience better.
Your point about curated spaces is well put, we often call then controlled environments, or walled gardens, and there are always considerations made around how those are formulated and maintained (chronicled using customer journeys or experience maps). In my experience, to be successful they generally need to be bound by time or space, require some level of access control, like a neighborhood, application, theme park, hospital, or school, have a defined before, during and after and require a degree of fluency to navigate. Our lives are often increasingly awkward movements between these artificial and curated spaces, and in many ways our phones have become the necessary translation layer through and between them (which is classist in its own way).
Friction is a wonderful thing. As you say, it's information and forces intentionality. A lot like encountering a roundabout while driving, it forces us to think and interact with the world around us in a more material way. It also makes our lives more interesting. Thanks again for putting this piece out there!
Oof, another doozy. Taken together with your piece from a few weeks ago on compliance, this really does shed light on the current crisis in the classroom. I've been a teacher for 12 years, since around the intersection point of physical world and digital world on your graph, and the front lines are bleak. Others have commented that perhaps the curriculum needs to adapt to the changing world, but the curriculum, in my opinion, is somewhat irrelevant when filtered through an increasingly frictionless world. I have witnessed/caught students using ChatGPT to write unmarked, personal journal entries, summarize reading materials, choose courses for them, etc. etc. etc. The real world rears its ugly head when they are asked to hand write exams and essays (analog ftw!), but this sometimes leads to full-on breakdowns, parental intervention, tears, or what the TikTok kids refer to as "crashing out". I used to start my courses with this favourite Tom Robbins quote about failing with grace, which was an inspiring call to work through the friction, but today it would be met with eyerolls.
I am truly hopeful that parents of the next generation will understand and revisit the value of friction. Time will tell.
On the question if we are measuring the wrong things in education: Yes and traditionally so. Even a degree in engineering or science does not necessarily say a lot about the students abilities. It is worse in school. ChatGPT only shows how bad it always was, it does not make anything worse. School, by tradition, produces mass employable people, lessons and the bell being relicts from factory shifts. School teaches statistics for large numbers, because companies are often environments of high replication. If school would teach for life, it would teach communication and learning theory, so we understand on a fundamental level how to communicate better and how humans learn. Except that's not what the economy is interested in and in an oligarchy, the economy determines politics. Not the society.
Respectfully, this seems like a bit of school strawman, arguing against the worst of schools. There are certainly schools and school systems that rely heavily on standardized testing and teaching to those tests, but more progressive curricula, like the IB program, focus heavily on communication, collaboration, metacognition, and inquiry, skills that, while perhaps not oligarchy-approved, are likely valuable in the working world of tomorrow. Unfortunately, students in these programs, often the best and brightest, are not immune to the draws of ChatGPT as a de-frictioning agent. As a teacher, I aknowledge my inherent bias, but what we are witnessing is not students turning to ChatGPT only for assignments that are outdated or misaligned with the realities of the world around them, but rather, for any and all calls to think, toil, and/or feel the discomfort of friction. Classroom discussions, where communication and active listening skills used to be honed, have been reduced to students simply reading their ChatGPT generated answers one by one. It's a startling trend that is a bit less Socratic, a little more Black Mirror.
Mr. Buffet is uniquely accomplished. But his accomplishment has been allocating capital effectively and efficiently for personal gain I don't think he has ever put his talent to work for the public other than to scold us once a year. Just an observation, it's not that I am any better
This is excellent stuff and I feel it maps to the the UK quite well too. You've managed to put into words something I have only vaguely had a sense of. I'm in the middle of an MSc in Systems Thinking and the concept of friction has really got me thinking! Thank you!
How Buffet compared American capitalism to there being two buildings, a casino and a cathedral (when there’s a conclave going on right now) is definitely something to meditate about.
So great. Another leading indicator is the recent story circulating about how Rockstar Games poured more money into making Grand Theft Auto 6 than it took to build the Burj Khalifa.
Getting Atlas Shrugged vibes from this essay. Tech is the one part of the economy that's working well, isn't stifled by overregulation, still celebrates individual achievement. Yet somehow, all the dysfunctional parts of the economy are tech's responsibility.
There's too many sweeping claims and too much narrativium in this essay. Try making just a single claim and actually fact-checking it in depth. The world is rarely as simple as it appears. There's no conservation law for friction no matter how much you pretend there is. (Otherwise economic growth would be impossible.) The US just has some systems that are working relatively well, and others that are working relatively poorly.
For example, this piece dives into the quality of bridges in America: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-worst-us-bridges-are-getting and argues with data that things are actually getting better--the worst bridges get substantially better even while great bridges become slightly worse.
In a complex system of systems like a country you'll always have components that are breaking down (air traffic control) and ones that are improving (bridges) so to focus on the former while ignoring the latter is just a means to paint a picture of the the vibes you want. Ironic for an essay that also points out having llms do the thinking for people.
To be fair, the essay makes good points, but I don't think they're composed to prop up the larger point. Would love to see less area covered and more focus on detail because it's the details that are interesting.
Great, insightful read, Kyla! Thank you. "But friction isn’t the enemy!!!! It’s information. It tells us where things are straining and where care is needed and where attention should go." ... Exactly! The question is ... who is giving (not paying!) attention? How can we grow that group of people?
this is the question! there has to be avenues for them to find each other.
I think it starts from within. Besides going around and blaming people with thier obvious wrong doings we can start putting efforts where its actually needed. I as an AI enginner dont need to go around making automations in the factory to make operators life easier because honestly making life easier is much less preferred than making systems reliable to the core. We can never fully convince people with the effect of overly friction controlled physical world cos the origin of change is not of much real effects at the highest of points in life where wealth is not an issue. Having said that it doesn’t also means to blatantly shut the voice for other people.
Trying to find these avenues and looking to build/expand them … if anyone knows any …?
Maybe it’s an offshoot of the progress studies community— progress doers. Probably less analysis and more management + people skills?
"Attention must be paid" is a key line in the play, Death of a Salesman.
Kyla wants to villainize tech, but it's tech billionaires like Patrick Collison who are funding initiatives like Progress Studies to figure out what's up with the economy and how to fix it.
Patrick Collison is in the business of making money and editing genes. His side project on "progress studies" hasn't added up to anything other than "progress has slowed down and we have no idea why".
Editing genes could help address issues like a shortage of talent to fix air traffic systems.
For progress studies, here's a link where you can read more: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-studies-conference
Maybe you should volunteer then to be a test subject for the mRNA vaccines they're developing.
Regarding the pushing of costs down the road - “The American economy has been running a decades-long experiment in removing friction, both through technological advancement and through financial engineering that pushes costs into the future.” - Something I have been thinking about lately is how mass production has removed friction of consuming things, but at the expense of the environment. IE we can mass produce milk, but in order to distribute it we need all of these systems in place (distribution, cartons) to facilitate getting the milk to consumer. This translates to excess energy spent, not experienced by the consumer (who bought the milk and had it delivered rather than owned a cow and milled it and maybe sold it to some immediate neighbors) but by the larger natural ecosystem (which endured the carbon output of transit, carton production, and ultimately the biodegradation, or not, of the carton).
oh yes - many, many externalities
Mass production makes things more efficient. I'd expect that if we shifted away from mass production, the externalities would increase dramatically. For example: Alright, so I have my own cow. That means I have to build my own barn. Which means CO2 to move the lumber to build it, and to construct it. I have to feed the cow. I have to dispose of its waste. That's also going to release CO2, and the feeding and waste disposal no longer benefits from economies of scale. Per capita emissions are going way up. Don't forget about poor land use: Now that everyone has their own cow in a barn, everything is way more spread out. You need to drive in order to get anywhere. That releases more CO2. Etc.
I thought this was supposed to be a blog about economics. Y'all are like a bunch of teenage hippies. "Yeah but like mass production man... it's so bad for the ecosystem."
Thanks for the discourse Ebenezer - no need to be patronizing. There might be models of localized production that are more efficient and ultimately healthier than mass production as I think we all understand it. You’re right, it depends on the density of markets served.
A thought on students using AI for school work. If AI can do it so well, maybe we are measuring the wrong capabilities? Just because the skills and knowledge needed to write an essay or take a test were valuable 50-100 years ago doesn't mean they will be valuable in the future.
Is anyone working on a curriculum to prepare students for the future, where machines will be even more integrated into how we think and communicate?
+1, I feel like this is a deeper continuation on why higher level math is relevant in curriculums to begin with. The argument of “why do I need to learn this when I have a calculator” now can stretch across pretty much any subject. With math, the deeper step was to “show your work” to prove understanding of systems, but what does this look like in the context of writing or other systems of thought?
Chatbots are the new calculators I guess 😃
It’s a word calculator — but not a thought calculator. Words work primarily as a means of externalization and collaboration of thoughts, and so using them hollowly has little utility.
Totally agree! To keep it simple; you need to know and understand what you are asking Chatgpt, and secondly if you don't internalize the answer, which is what is meant by 'kicking the can down the street', then you are still at zero. Knowledge is everything! AI could not have written what Kyla Scanlon wrote. Creativity, a never before thought remains a difficult point for AI. By the way, I like the struggle to master a new piece of music ..... (even if it doesn't work out...)
Almost gets to a sort of Buddhist place if you want to think about it that way. Life is suffering, or rather life is friction. It's not something to be avoided or minimized, but to be accepted and managed.
To the contrary, friction can absolutely be minimized.
Just to challenge *one* of what I suspect is *many* false or dubious claims in Kyla's essay:
"Amazon's one-click ordering creates a seamless customer experience by offloading friction onto warehouse workers and delivery drivers."
Consider the difference between buying on Amazon vs going to the store.
* If I buy from the store, I drive there in my ICE vehicle, releasing all the CO2 to move both me and the vehicle perhaps a mile away. Maybe the store doesn't have what I need, and I need to drive somewhere else. Then I drive back with my purchase.
* If I buy on Amazon, it's far more efficient. The Amazon worker picks up what I need from the warehouse and puts it in an electric van which drives around my neighborhood every day delivering parcels. The marginal CO2 emitted is far lower: it's the difference between hauling around an entire vehicle and person just to make one purchase, vs adding one additional package to an electric van that's amortizing transportation costs and labor across a much larger number of purchases.
Yes, tech is absolutely all about minimizing friction. I think you are proving Kyla's point though tbh. The offloaded friction isn't about C02 emissions or efficiency its about the effort put in to receive the item. Ordering through amazon means you take out all the effort you laid out if you buy from the store. It doesn't mean that it is more efficient to buy items yourself it just moves the extra time, effort etc from you to the workers packaging, loading and delivering the item.
It moves it, and also greatly reduces it due to economies of scale. For example, if an average Amazon van carries 100 packages, that's 99 fewer drivers on the road, relative to the case where everyone drives themselves to the store individually to buy their thing.
Friction isn't a conserved quantity. It's possible to reduce it, sometimes by orders of magnitude.
The most valuable commodity in the world is time.
friction is relative to time! definitely.
Thanks so much for this piece! As a service designer it resonates so deeply. In my field, we often talk about how friction, like energy, doesn't just appear or disappear, it moves. When we remove it from one part of a system it'll pop-up somewhere else (often as an unintended cost in under-invested and over-worked infrastructure) for somebody else to deal with. When incorporated into an overall experience, designed for, looked at holistically, however, understanding frictions can make an experience better.
Your point about curated spaces is well put, we often call then controlled environments, or walled gardens, and there are always considerations made around how those are formulated and maintained (chronicled using customer journeys or experience maps). In my experience, to be successful they generally need to be bound by time or space, require some level of access control, like a neighborhood, application, theme park, hospital, or school, have a defined before, during and after and require a degree of fluency to navigate. Our lives are often increasingly awkward movements between these artificial and curated spaces, and in many ways our phones have become the necessary translation layer through and between them (which is classist in its own way).
Friction is a wonderful thing. As you say, it's information and forces intentionality. A lot like encountering a roundabout while driving, it forces us to think and interact with the world around us in a more material way. It also makes our lives more interesting. Thanks again for putting this piece out there!
Oof, another doozy. Taken together with your piece from a few weeks ago on compliance, this really does shed light on the current crisis in the classroom. I've been a teacher for 12 years, since around the intersection point of physical world and digital world on your graph, and the front lines are bleak. Others have commented that perhaps the curriculum needs to adapt to the changing world, but the curriculum, in my opinion, is somewhat irrelevant when filtered through an increasingly frictionless world. I have witnessed/caught students using ChatGPT to write unmarked, personal journal entries, summarize reading materials, choose courses for them, etc. etc. etc. The real world rears its ugly head when they are asked to hand write exams and essays (analog ftw!), but this sometimes leads to full-on breakdowns, parental intervention, tears, or what the TikTok kids refer to as "crashing out". I used to start my courses with this favourite Tom Robbins quote about failing with grace, which was an inspiring call to work through the friction, but today it would be met with eyerolls.
I am truly hopeful that parents of the next generation will understand and revisit the value of friction. Time will tell.
On the question if we are measuring the wrong things in education: Yes and traditionally so. Even a degree in engineering or science does not necessarily say a lot about the students abilities. It is worse in school. ChatGPT only shows how bad it always was, it does not make anything worse. School, by tradition, produces mass employable people, lessons and the bell being relicts from factory shifts. School teaches statistics for large numbers, because companies are often environments of high replication. If school would teach for life, it would teach communication and learning theory, so we understand on a fundamental level how to communicate better and how humans learn. Except that's not what the economy is interested in and in an oligarchy, the economy determines politics. Not the society.
Respectfully, this seems like a bit of school strawman, arguing against the worst of schools. There are certainly schools and school systems that rely heavily on standardized testing and teaching to those tests, but more progressive curricula, like the IB program, focus heavily on communication, collaboration, metacognition, and inquiry, skills that, while perhaps not oligarchy-approved, are likely valuable in the working world of tomorrow. Unfortunately, students in these programs, often the best and brightest, are not immune to the draws of ChatGPT as a de-frictioning agent. As a teacher, I aknowledge my inherent bias, but what we are witnessing is not students turning to ChatGPT only for assignments that are outdated or misaligned with the realities of the world around them, but rather, for any and all calls to think, toil, and/or feel the discomfort of friction. Classroom discussions, where communication and active listening skills used to be honed, have been reduced to students simply reading their ChatGPT generated answers one by one. It's a startling trend that is a bit less Socratic, a little more Black Mirror.
Yes good point learning theory!
Mr. Buffet is uniquely accomplished. But his accomplishment has been allocating capital effectively and efficiently for personal gain I don't think he has ever put his talent to work for the public other than to scold us once a year. Just an observation, it's not that I am any better
Great read. You can’t start a fire without a spark, and you can’t have a spark without a bit of friction.
Bruce Springsteen! 😎
This is excellent stuff and I feel it maps to the the UK quite well too. You've managed to put into words something I have only vaguely had a sense of. I'm in the middle of an MSc in Systems Thinking and the concept of friction has really got me thinking! Thank you!
definitely in terms of the decay of the infrastructure! NHS, transport, all full of friction and too much inertia to change
The greater the friction, the more we should believe in a higher-for-longer baseline inflation rate.
Abundance in the frictionless digital world chasing shortages in the physical world.
How Buffet compared American capitalism to there being two buildings, a casino and a cathedral (when there’s a conclave going on right now) is definitely something to meditate about.
that whole speech he gave with the Q&A is truly a lifetime on things to think on
So great. Another leading indicator is the recent story circulating about how Rockstar Games poured more money into making Grand Theft Auto 6 than it took to build the Burj Khalifa.
Getting Atlas Shrugged vibes from this essay. Tech is the one part of the economy that's working well, isn't stifled by overregulation, still celebrates individual achievement. Yet somehow, all the dysfunctional parts of the economy are tech's responsibility.
There's too many sweeping claims and too much narrativium in this essay. Try making just a single claim and actually fact-checking it in depth. The world is rarely as simple as it appears. There's no conservation law for friction no matter how much you pretend there is. (Otherwise economic growth would be impossible.) The US just has some systems that are working relatively well, and others that are working relatively poorly.
This reflects my thoughts as well.
For example, this piece dives into the quality of bridges in America: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-worst-us-bridges-are-getting and argues with data that things are actually getting better--the worst bridges get substantially better even while great bridges become slightly worse.
In a complex system of systems like a country you'll always have components that are breaking down (air traffic control) and ones that are improving (bridges) so to focus on the former while ignoring the latter is just a means to paint a picture of the the vibes you want. Ironic for an essay that also points out having llms do the thinking for people.
To be fair, the essay makes good points, but I don't think they're composed to prop up the larger point. Would love to see less area covered and more focus on detail because it's the details that are interesting.
My life is frictionless and I sleep in my car.