The nightmare of a frictionless world

Big tech businesses like Google and Meta are trying to build a world where their AI products 'assist' everyone to do everything. They are eliminating friction from life, letting us all do things by ourselves that would once have required the help of other people, and the time needed to cultivate human relationships. I don't want to live in that world.

A couple of weeks ago Google released a video hyping their latest research prototype of 'Project Astra', their ongoing attempt to turn their best large multi-modal model, Gemini, into a 'universal assistant'.

A hype fest for an AI assistant that will alow you to do everything in your life without ever having to interact with another person.

The announcement about Project Astra, rather than being exciting, made me feel a little queasy. Damien Power and Dan Rath put their finger on this horrible feeling in a recent episode of their hilariously dry and self-effacing podcast, Neurotic News.

Inventions aren't exciting anymore. They just fill you with dread. Every time I hear something new is invented, you hear of a new strand of AI and you're just like "oh no".

What is this video promising? The universal assistant will help you fix your bike. Great. It will help you be more capable and more productive, more successful in achieving your goals.

But that's not really it. The universal assistant will tell you what you need to know to fix the bike. Don't worry about going to a bike shop or asking a friend who is good with bikes. Ask the universal assistant. Don't search for information yourself, and decide what you see and encounter, and how you respond to it. Don't create opportunities for serendipitous encounters with new and interesting things (or, god forbid, new and interesting people). The universal assistant will find the right video for you. On Youtube, Google's platform. You don't need to ever leave Google's ecosystem. Stay there. Stay at home. By yourself. With your new companion and assistant. Your universe will be circumscribed by the boundaries of the universal assistant.

Need a new part for the bike? Don't worry, you can find a store that stocks it. But not by calling up and talking to someone. You are far too busy for a 2 minute conversation with a person. The assistant will assist you to find a person. The assistant will assist you in getting what you need from that person. In fact, it will have the conversation with the person for you. It will chooose the right part, and buy the right part. It will have the conversation and it will make the purchase for you. It will arrange the delivery for you.

Frictionless.

In this world that Google is trying to build, there is no friction because there is no contact. Because that is what friction is, isn't it? It's the resistance that arises when contact happens; a resistance that creates warmth. The world of Project Astra is frictionless and cold

Project Astra imagines a world where Google, via the universal assistant, insinuates itself into every (human) interaction, and turns it into a transaction. Google intermediates, it commodifies, and, it 'enshitifies'. Corey Doctorow explained that enshitification is the business model of digital platformisation. My take on Doctorow is that the platform (Google, TikTok, Amazon, whatever) draws consumers into its ecosystem by removing 'friction': say, by recommending 'content' or a product that meets your needs, so that you don't need to put so much effort into finding it. It creates a two sided market, making suppliers pay to put their product in front of you. And then it stops giving you what you want, and starts giving you what suppliers pay it to give you. In Doctorow's words:

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Why should AI assistance platforms like Project Astra be any different?

Another feature (not a bug) of the platform business model is that it creates dependency, and atomisation. By 'intermediating' or 'assisting', the platform disconnects people from other people with whom they could build relationships that make them collectively stronger. And it therefore removes the prospect of effective resistance against universal intermediation.

The underlying assumption in the Project Astra hype video is that every instant that we spend with other people without transacting is an instant of unnecessary friction: a transaction cost getting in the way of efficient market exchange. Developing trust is a transaction cost. The universal assistant will authenticate and verify for you. Relationship building is a transaction cost. Learning about each other is a transaction cost. It's friction to be removed.

But that is not how life works. The friction is where all the good stuff happens. The friction that stands in the way of a purely transactional life is interaction, experience, human closeness. Friction is meeting people and getting to know them, and being delighted by them. Friction is the conversation where we find out about where the bike shop owner came from, how she ended up in our town, where her kids go to school, what she loves about bikes, where she thinks the best coffee is, when the next big swell is going to hit the coast (Oh! You're a surfer, maybe I'll see you out the back some time!).

Friction is life. I hope we can hold onto friction in the age of AI.