Choose Friction: Use AI Intentionally to Foster Growth

The author contends that overcoming friction drives growth, while too much convenience—especially via AI—can dull creativity and learning. Examples like memorizing phone numbers and writing illustrate how convenience shifts us from skill-building to dependency. The solution is not avoidance but intentional, balanced use of AI with added friction to preserve and develop core skills.

Key Points

Growth comes from overcoming friction; excessive convenience leads to stagnation and reduced creativity.
Technology and capitalism push toward extreme convenience, shifting us from learning to mere lookup.
Personal example: memorizing phone numbers declined once phones stored contacts, illustrating how tools can atrophy skills.
In writing, easy access to AI can discourage practice, vulnerability, and the mistakes necessary for mastery while raising expectations.
Total abstinence from AI isn’t the answer; intentionally introduce friction and use AI judiciously to aid, not hinder, long-term growth.

Sentiment

The Hacker News discussion exhibits a nuanced and mixed sentiment. While there is broad agreement with the article's fundamental premise that productive friction is crucial for growth, many commenters introduce important distinctions between wasteful 'friction' and beneficial 'effort'. There's significant debate on AI's role, with some echoing concerns about its potential to stifle creativity and skill development, while others strongly advocate for its utility as a powerful tool to enhance creativity and efficiency by offloading mundane tasks. The discussion explores both the potential benefits and pitfalls of AI, highlighting a community grappling with how to leverage new technologies without undermining essential human capabilities.

In Agreement

Growth stems from overcoming friction, mirroring biological principles like Wolff's Law for bones, progressive overload for muscles, and Hebbian learning for brains, where continuous stimulus is needed for adaptation and strength.
Excessive convenience, particularly from AI, can lead to stagnation and a decline in cognitive skills by removing the necessary effort for learning and creation, as illustrated by the shift from remembering to retrieving information.
The tendency for humans to choose the path of least resistance necessitates deliberately reintroducing productive friction into processes to ensure continued growth.
Some forms of 'wasted' effort, such as struggling to learn code or music by ear, are not truly wasted but lead to deeper, more holistic understanding and broader skill development.
Meaningful friction, where users are actively involved and have agency (e.g., checking AI's assumptions), can lead to better outcomes and user preference compared to faster, less controlled automation.

Opposed

There's a critical distinction between 'friction' (wasted, inefficient effort) and 'effort' (productive, growth-oriented work); friction should be minimized so that effort can be maximized for genuine growth.
AI can serve as a 'creativity cultivator' or 'thought partner,' by handling tedious or low-level tasks, thus freeing up mental cycles for higher-level creative thinking, prototyping, and synthesis.
The example of memorizing phone numbers is flawed; it represents the removal of an unnecessary technological complexity rather than the loss of a valuable cognitive capacity, as simply remembering strings of numbers doesn't inherently foster significant intellectual 'growth'.
The long-term viability and 'masterability' of LLMs like ChatGPT are questionable, with concerns about their unsustainable business models, potential for new forms of friction, and comparison to tools without genuine skill elements.
The goal of innovation should be to build more efficient and better solutions regardless of the friction involved, and defining 'growth' solely by overcoming friction can be unhelpful or circular.
Higher-level programming languages remove friction, allowing developers to focus on more complex problems; AI could similarly elevate the focus of creative and intellectual work.
The 'law of conservation of intelligence' (smarter tech = dumber humans) is a simplification, as freeing up mental capacity from mundane tasks could allow brains to be applied to different, potentially more complex, challenges.