The Friction We Need
Most discussion about AI's impact on human capability focuses on jobs: which roles will be automated, which augmented, which created. A paper published in Communications Psychology by psychologists from the University of Toronto takes a different and more unsettling angle. The authors — Emily Zohar, Paul Bloom, and Michael Inzlicht — argue that the most significant long-term cost of AI systems making tasks too easy may not be economic but psychological: the erosion of the effort, struggle, and friction that make learning deep, creativity genuine, and relationships meaningful.
The paper, titled "Against Frictionless AI," does not argue that AI tools are useless or that convenience is harmful. It argues for a distinction between productive friction — manageable difficulty that drives growth — and unproductive friction — obstacles that add burden without benefit. Its concern is that AI systems, in their current design trajectory, are removing the former along with the latter.
Desirable Difficulties
The psychological research underlying the paper's core argument is well-established. Cognitive scientists have documented for decades that effortful learning — working through problems, encountering obstacles, generating explanations — produces better long-term retention and more flexible understanding than passive absorption of presented information. This principle, known as "desirable difficulties," runs directly counter to the design philosophy of AI systems that aim to deliver answers as quickly and completely as possible.
"We define friction as any difficulty encountered during goal pursuit," Zohar explained in an interview. "In the context of work, it involves mental effort — rumination and persistence, staying on a problem for some time, and this helps solidify the idea and the creative process." AI systems that complete the whole task from a single prompt — bypassing the intermediate steps where learning and consolidation happen — produce better immediate work products at the potential cost of the cognitive development that struggling would have generated.
