The obsession with removing friction is often wrong. When users have low intent or understanding, the goal isn't to speed them up but to build their comprehension of your product's value. If software asks you to make a decision you don't understand, it makes you feel stupid, which is the ultimate failure.

Like chess players who still compete despite AI's dominance, humans will continue practicing skills like writing or design even when AI is better. The fear that AI will make human skill obsolete misses the point. The intrinsic motivation comes from the journey of improvement and the act of creation itself.

The drive for hyper-efficiency, seen in targeted ads or ghost kitchens, eliminates the valuable "slosh" that funds culture and journalism. This friction and inefficiency are essential for creating vibrant cities and healthy economic ecosystems, as they provide the space for creativity and community to flourish.

True creative mastery emerges from an unpredictable human process. AI can generate options quickly but bypasses this journey, losing the potential for inexplicable, last-minute genius that defines truly great work. It optimizes for speed at the cost of brilliance.

The process of struggling with and solving hard problems is what builds engineering skill. Constantly available AI assistants act like a "slot machine for answers," removing this productive struggle. This encourages "vibe coding" and may prevent engineers from developing deep problem-solving expertise.

While AI can accelerate tasks like writing, the real learning happens during the creative process itself. By outsourcing the 'doing' to AI, we risk losing the ability to think critically and synthesize information. Research shows our brains are physically remapping, reducing our ability to think on our feet.

The narrative that AI-driven free time will spur creativity is flawed. Evidence suggests more free time leads to increased digital addiction, anxiety, and poor health. The correct response to AI's rise is not deeper integration, but deliberate disconnection to preserve well-being and genuine creativity.

The real danger of new technology is not the tool itself, but our willingness to let it make us lazy. By outsourcing thinking and accepting "good enough" from AI, we risk atrophying our own creative muscles and problem-solving skills.

The worship of founders like Mark Zuckerberg leads to a lack of internal pushback on massive, ill-conceived bets. Swisher points to the billions spent on the metaverse as a mistake made on an "awesome scale" because no one around the founder was empowered to challenge the idea.