Farewell to Friction

So sayeth Zvi: “when defection costs drop dramatically, equilibria break”. Even if AI makes individual tasks easier, this can still cause all kinds of societal problems because for many features of the world, the difficulty is load-bearing. John Stone gives a reflection on this phenomenon, ironically with the editing help of GPT5. He draws a nice parallel with the Jevons paradox: now that AI is making certain tasks like job applications easier, people are just spamming them in a way that overwhelms the system.

And the problem is a lot broader than applications and filtering processes. Last year, two Harvard students plugged some smart glasses into facial recognition software so that they could automatically identify people by looking at them. With minimal scaffolding, you could easily integrate deep research's ability to swiftly build a profile on people based on just their name (try it and see!), or frontier models’ capacity to identify locations from pictures. Turns out our society really takes for granted the fact that a stranger cannot, simply by looking at you, infer your name, address, and biography.