There’s a particular fantasy that keeps showing up in our culture: the fantasy of frictionlessness. The belief that if we remove enough obstacles, life will finally glide. No waiting in line. No awkward small talk. No irritation or delay. Just a perfect, seamless flow of convenience.
It sounds like progress. Who wouldn’t want fewer errands, fewer misunderstandings, fewer things to fix? But when you start tracing where that fantasy appears — and what it quietly replaces — the promise of convenience begins to look less like liberation and more like cultural erosion.
We have been training for this future for years. The first wave of “on-demand everything” made it ordinary. Uber, Instacart, Amazon Prime: rides, groceries, household supplies materializing at the tap of a screen. Back in 2015, Lauren Smiley called out “the shut-in economy,” writing about the rise of apps that allowed you to live in a city but bypass most human interactions. For the companies that built these apps, that was the selling point. Convenience, not community. Efficiency, not entanglement.
Now that same ideology has found a new home in AI. Don’t have time for a meeting? Let your AI note-taker attend. Need advice? Ask your chatbot therapist. Want companionship? Download an AI partner who never interrupts, never disagrees, never asks anything in return.
It feels easy. But those tiny frictions we are so eager to delete — the delays, interruptions, and misunderstandings — are the texture of connection. Contemporary social science keeps finding the same thing in different ways: brief, ordinary exchanges reliably lift mood, create belonging, and even promote learning. Researchers at the University of Virginia reported that talking with strangers turns out to be more informative and satisfying than people expect, in part because we tend to underestimate the value-adding benefits of learning something new, leading many people to miss out on opportunities of growth and reflection.
A 2024 paper from Princeton shows that our self-view — how we think about ourselves and our opinions — evolves during the act of reciprocal conversation, suggesting that the back-and-forth of real dialogue retunes identity in ways a chatbot cannot. A surgeon general’s advisory in 2023 treated social connection as a public-health necessity and recommended that we focus on supporting “the development of pro-connection technology to promote healthy social connection, create safe environments for discourse, and safeguard the well-being of users.” How many AI tools today promote connection and not isolation?
Every time you ask a chatbot for feedback instead of a coworker, you skip the subtle choreography of collaboration, miss an opportunity for mentorship and trust-building. Every time you turn to AI for comfort, you avoid the vulnerability of letting someone witness your pain. Every time you talk to an algorithmic “friend,” you eliminate the risk of rejection, but also the possibility of surprise, growth, and intimacy.
When you talk to it about your marriage or your grief, it mirrors your view perfectly because it is designed to. There is no friction, no resistance, no “Wait, what if you’re wrong?” And while that smoothness feels comforting, it can also harden delusion. As cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik pointed out in The Atlantic, artificial intelligence is not our friend. Citing research conducted by the AI firm Anthropic, she wrote that AI systems “sometimes sacrifice ‘truthfulness’ to align with a user’s view.”
Urban planners learned the lesson about the importance of friction decades ago. When cities were redesigned for cars instead of pedestrians, we gained convenience but lost community. In her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote that sidewalks are what knit a neighborhood together because people bump into one another there. More recent urban sociology backs her up: walkable neighborhoods produce more social trust, civic engagement, and public safety than car-oriented suburbs do, according to a 2003 study in American Journal of Public Health. Similarly, when we replace the corner store with next-day delivery, we erase all those tiny moments of exchange — the greeting to a neighbor, the quick chat with a clerk, the walk with a friend. Life became easier and lonelier at the same time.
AI promises more of the same bargain. It removes the snags that make daily life cumbersome, but those snags are also where meaning hides. What we call inefficiency, anthropology might call social ritual: small, repeated acts that remind us of our dependence on each other. Social anthropologist Victor Turner described rituals as “liminal spaces” in which social identities are not fully formed and transformation happens — not in smooth efficiency, but in pause and uncertainty. Friction, in this sense, is the site of change.
A certain amount of discomfort allows trust to form; the smoother our interactions, the less resilient our relationships become. Rachel Botsman calls friction the “oxygen of community” and urges us to create more of it through “tasks requiring collective effort” and by designing public spaces with “‘snagging points’ like ledges and steps” that “encourage lingering and conversation.”
Friction is also part of creative work. Writing, painting, composing — all are full of friction: the blank page, the bad draft, the long night of self-doubt. AI tools smooth away that struggle. They can generate drafts, designs, and songs in seconds. But creativity is about the process of wrestling with possibility and failure. To create is to confront resistance. Remove that resistance and you remove the part of art that makes it human.
This has consequences for our sense of agency. The Pew Research Center recently reported that many experts fear automation will erode human autonomy. When every decision is optimized for speed, there’s no room left for deliberation. The smoother life becomes, the less aware we are of the forces guiding it — and the easier it is to mistake efficiency for freedom.
The truth is that convenience is never neutral. It privileges the individual over the collective, the quick over the considered, the outcome over the process. It tells us that independence is the highest good, even when real human connection remains an essential need for our psychological, mental, and physical well-being.
When looking at the impacts of technology, we should ask what purpose it serves. AI is the newest expression of that persistent fantasy: a life in which nothing resists us. Every feature that promises to “save time” carries the same quiet message that friction is a flaw to be eliminated instead of a natural part of the human experience. Generative tools collapse the space between wanting and getting. But that space, the small gap of not knowing, is where curiosity, community, and creativity live.
The work ahead is to build technologies that keep a little grit in the system. To protect the pauses, the small misunderstandings, the moments that slow us down. Because when everything is easy, nothing means very much.