Friction is where skill lives (Aeon)

Every tool that removes effort also removes the practice the effort provided, and while that trade is often worth making, we rarely make it deliberately.

Melanie Challenger's new Aeon essay draws the line precisely. Some technologies strengthen a capacity, while others repeatedly substitute for the actions through which that capacity forms. Following GPS is the second kind: one longitudinal study she cites followed 13 GPS users over three years and found a steeper decline in spatial memory than in non-users. So is asking AI to write the draft rather than revise it, where another study she cites found that people who passively copied AI-generated writing were less confident performing the task unaided afterwards, a measure of confidence rather than proof of lost skill.

The third study she cites is a 28-day trial run with OpenAI. Its 981 participants had a short daily conversation with ChatGPT, and those assigned personal topics ended the month less likely to choose a human for personal support, down from 82.6% to 72.3%, while non-personal daily chat barely moved it. That is a stated preference, not behaviour, and across the whole trial the average shift was small (d = 0.12). The authors' own word for the pattern is path-dependent: each interaction made a repeat of the same kind more likely.

None of this argues for refusing the tools. GPS genuinely makes navigation easier, much of what knowledge work calls effort is pure waste that nobody should mourn, and Challenger's own distinction gives the test: what matters is whether the effort being removed is the training.

Inside an organisation the same test is harder to run. Picture the graduate who never drafts the first version of the memo, the analyst who never builds the model from a blank sheet and the lawyer who never reads the whole file: the output can look the same in year one, while the judgement gap would only surface years later, when those people are supposed to be the reviewers.

Friction is not always waste. Some of it is the training programme. The design question for any AI rollout is which effort you are happy to remove and which is quietly building your next generation of experts. If you cannot answer that, you are spending capability to buy speed.

#AI #Capability #FutureOfWork

Source: Melanie Challenger, Aeon, "The more we rely on tech, the more we deskill our bodies" https://lnkd.in/gKGvUhmp