The Right Amount of Friction

Do you remember going down a slide as a child? Maybe it was the old metal kind that sat in the sun all afternoon and was almost too hot to touch by the time you climbed to the top. You would grab the rails, sit down, give yourself a little push, and see what happened.

Sometimes not much happened at all. Your shorts caught on the metal, you slowed to a stop halfway down, and you had to scoot yourself toward the bottom. Other times, especially when the metal had been polished smooth from years of kids doing exactly what you were doing, you took off. For a few seconds you were moving much faster than you expected, and then you were on the ground at the bottom ready to climb the ladder and do it again. We did not think about friction. We just knew when the slide felt right.

Now picture that same slide today. Not one like it, but the exact same slide you went down when you were eight years old. You climb the same ladder, squeeze yourself onto the same little platform, and push off just like you did then. Except you are not eight anymore. You are a lot bigger and a lot heavier, and there is a pretty good chance you are going to come flying off the bottom and land on your butt wondering what possessed you to get on a children’s slide in the first place. Or maybe you get stuck at the top and have to work out how to get off a children’s slide with your dignity still intact.

There is nothing wrong with the slide. It was simply designed for a different rider, and I have been thinking about that as we choose GenAI tools and decide how to use them.

Technology has spent years trying to remove friction from our lives. Every extra click, confirmation screen, and pause became something to eliminate because we wanted the software to get out of our way. Most of the time, that made sense.

But GenAI can do much more than the software we grew up using. It can read what we give it, summarize, draft, remember things about us, connect to other tools, and, in some settings, take the next step before we have fully considered the consequences. When technology can do that much, I am not sure every pause is a defect.

Not only do the safeguards we need depend on the rider, they also depend on the ride. Brainstorming an idea is one thing. Summarizing a hearing transcript, reviewing a record, or allowing a tool to act on your behalf is something else entirely. The cost of an error is different, so the level of human review should be different too.

Sometimes the answer is a little more friction. Another review, another confirmation, or a setting that prevents the system from acting until you approve it. Sometimes the answer is a different tool. And sometimes the answer is that you do not get on that slide at all.

That is what we can miss when we talk about making GenAI easier and faster. Faster is not always better, and friction is not always a flaw. We still need friction in all the right places. The right tool and the right settings depend on who is using it, what they are using it for, and what is waiting at the bottom if something goes wrong.

We understood that instinctively on the playground. We should remember it now.