Brave Smooth World.

Everywhere in the news lately is constant panic about AI/LLMs. But we’ve seen this all before. We see it everyday in fact, this is simply the natural evolution of American Culture. A capitalist society is best served by a world of frictionless consumption, where money leaves our hands at a steady cadence. It preys upon the fact that the general population has a proclivity to follow the path of least resistance. With AI in the world now I can’t help but worry about the acceleration it will have on our frictionless consumption. We are all turning smoothed brained and this will allow us to follow the path of least resistance in every aspect of life and consumption in ways we could never do before. Are we doomed to settle?

Everything these days feels this way. This visual language alluding to this frictionless world is everywhere. Look at your app icons on your phone and every container on every modern website. You’ll see smooth rounded corners on damn near every single one. Zero visual friction. Our entire modern world has been built on this conveyed frictionless convenience. That whatever it allows us to do, we can do something immediately afterward. Drive-Thru. 1 Tap to Apply. Click to Buy Now. Swipe Right to Fuck. This is all delivered into our eyeballs and into our brains via our fingers scrolling infinitely on LED screens. Perpetuated by primitive brain chemistry we can’t ourselves control, though big tech has been aware of and exploiting it on a massive worldwide scale for decades in ways we will only comprehend once it has been written about in future history books.

Look at the items we’re being sold—every product says it’s for our benefit, but is in reality against us and our well-being. Most items in a grocery store these days is brightly-colored-plastic-wrapped-hyper-palatable-ultra-processed-food stacked neatly on shelves like demented fruits inside a abundant capitalist forest. All fighting each other trying to catch our consumer eye. The saturation on these colors in the supermarket has gotten out of control, and why do we think that is? Everything, everywhere, is trying to capture the attention of all of our senses.

And I cant tell why the most prevalent is food. Yummy sugar filled coffees for breakfast. Doordash fast food for lunch. Craft cocktails in a can at happy hour. Frictionless consumption. Sure it makes our life easier and might be enjoyable in the moment but we will become unhealthy and downright miserable in the process. We will then pay for it even more when we’re old and can barely walk. Riddled with heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Chomping on prescription medications, spending our life’s retirement savings on overpriced healthcare filling the pockets of health insurance executives as they relax healthy and wealthy on yachts until we succumb to our own miserable lonely painful deaths. Just like they want. It’s hard not to feel like this is the real conspiracy.

We need a bit of good friction in our lives. The kind of friction that enriches us. And we all need to welcome it. Generative AI, as much as I use it and do and still and will advocate for its use as the tool it is, and not the global panacea that tech billionaires are trying to make us think it is, is making this so much worse. I know because I keep letting it remove friction for me, and I am terrified to see what it will do on a massive scale to humanity if all of us outsource our creativity and engineering to even competent AI models. Code this for me. Brainstorm that. Build me a website. Fix this issue. Explain this documentation. Write a command with these flags. etc. And this is just what I do. What kind of prompts are you making? All of this is just so we don’t have to waste our mental capacity on learning or doing something simple? But what do you do if you also need to stay competitive in the job market or simply your creative/technical occupational field? Say there are basic we should maybe do ourselves, we always created tools to automate and make things easier for us. At what point is any of it real though? Its all very conflicting. These are cutting edge tools being advanced daily that have utility, though it comes with serious ethical concerns. Most of which are where the wealth goes. It is trained on nearly all of humanities content generated thus far. The lines have never been this blurred.

I’m getting more scared for when it turns solid. I worry this could cause a massive cultural divide in the general population. And it is beginning to feel bad using it sometimes. I’ve gone back to using books and reputable websites to work on projects and learn the fundamentals. I’m still making things I know I could never code myself and I don’t know how I should feel about it. For instance, because of generative AI, I feel like I don’t actually know how to say build a website, but when I put my mind to it and embraced the friction, I spun up a basic website with CSS and content available on a domain the World Wide Web without any generative AI in like 20 minutes or so the other evening, just to prove it to myself that I can do something. I will of course still use it though, I still think it’s the craziest tool I’ve ever used and making things sort of come to life is very fun. I’ve updated my system prompt on Claude so when I hit a wall and since I have no other peers to brainstorm or talk Linux with, that it is more pedagogical rather than servant-like, guiding me towards the answer or the thought process to the answer rather than giving me everything I asked for (and didn’t) on a copy-and-pasteable silver platter.

But this applies to so many other things in our modern American culture. We’ve been doing this for years, we just weren’t ready for the scale of this. I think an apt, although still very flawed comparison to how we’ve been heading down this path for awhile is how using AI is like eating fast food instead of making yourself a home cooked dinner. Hear me out—by ordering from the drive-thru you’re offloading the act of creation; in this case a meal, to someone else in a process that also generates unnecessary waste and uses resources. All to enjoy a mediocre unhealthy meal that isn’t even filling, because it’s been engineered to keep you eating more and more, relying on it. Sounds like ‘slop’ to me.

The same way I’m trying not to keep eating the slop and for example—write my own bash scripts is the same way someone else could cook at home and learn how to make a bechamel or something, instead of letting Claude code or McDonald’s cook it for us. Or when we do have to use it (or go out to eat) we make an educational use of the tool (or we go somewhere a touch classier to eat…like Chipotle). Yes, it’ll take longer, and you have to go inside. Claude or McDonald’s could have made it quicker. The food comparison is simply a flawed metaphor, but perhaps this is the sort of friction we need to nourish both the body and mind. I can’t imagine letting the friction nourish us and being more thoughtful about how we interact with and learn about the world around us will lead to a more negative outcome than the one we are currently heading towards.