Atomic effort

We live in a world where effort is beaten out of everything, like pulp from orange juice.

Effort is often seen as the bad guy.

Companies spend billions of dollars a year figuring out how to remove effort from experiences, and we individually expend billions of synapse connections on how to create a shortcut from where we are to where we want to be, physically or metaphorically.

Whilst I largely agree that making products, services and actions easier is often a good thing, and I have spent many years trying to achieve that as a user experience designer, I don’t believe that should always the case.

Like in design, there are times when friction should in fact be applied to an experience, not taken away. Is it good to allow someone to delete their account at the click of one button? No. There should be several steps in the way of that action, to ensure it’s not accidental. Should an email be sent straight away? Or should we allow someone a few seconds to undo that action? We should of course, allow someone to undo that.

The point is, friction (effort) is sometimes the optimal experience.

Today, it’s exceptionally easy to outsource friction, and the need to expend effort on thought.

That might seem like a true marvel, and it definitely is. We are now in a position to work on problems and calculations humans would never be able to rise to the occasion of because of the sheer computational power required. That’s amazing.

We all now have this power at our fingertips. Sure it hallucinates, sure it gets things wrong. But for the most part it’s exponentially improving, and its place in the world is inevitable. The thing I therefore want to be really mindful of is, where does it make sense to outsource effort, and where do I consciously not want to do that. Where do I want to experience friction in my life? I’d really encourage you think about that too.

I think it’s amazing that we can now choose more wisely where we want to expend atomic effort. Rather than “everywhere” having to be the answer. I don’t want to have to manually delete my spam mail. I just want it to be gone. I don’t want to sift through websites looking for the answer to a technical problem, I just want to know the answer.

But I refuse with every possible atom of my being to replace my brain in places that make me uniquely me. Regardless of the effort involved.

I will never use AI to write my mum a message. I won’t use it to speed up my personal creative process (in a commercial setting I think about this differently, more on that in another blog!), I won’t use it to win a chess game against a friend, and I won’t use it as a substitute for a real world connection. Because the journey to get to that outcome is my fingerprint on that music, that design, or that idea.

In other words, I won’t use it to numb my experience of being a human being.

If you look at most industries and technologies across time, they tend to trend to a place of making something as little effort as possible. Essentially, the poor UX of new technology eventually becomes great, and so the effort involved in using that tech goes down and you end up with something low effort. This is generally a good thing.

Take the mobile. Originally you carried this around in a suitcase. Then it could fit in your pocket with tactile buttons you had to click through multiple times to get the correct character, then individual buttons for each character, then autocomplete, then you could send voice notes and now, your phone could write a message for you and send it without you ever seeing it if you want.

Hopefully you recognize a tipping point in that evolution where you frown a little reading that and consider if we’re going too far. Maybe there should be effort in communication because it’s so fundamental to our lived experience?

So if there is a physiological reaction you feel when you consider that communication between friends can now be outsourced, then we should get coffee haha, because that feels like the wrong direction to go with all the avenues we could possibly pursue with this new found power.

I hope most humans feel this way. It’s scary to me that during a pandemic of loneliness (the last 20 years to the present) we’re accelerating the building of products away from communicating with each other directly, for the sake of effort. It seems we’re accelerating towards a world where a digital representation of ourselves will interact with a digital representation of other people.

If that is true, then real communication is an ever shrinking pocket of our experience, for the sake of effort.

However, there is an alternative outcome to all of this.

The menial tasks that encompass out lives become absorbed by AI, allowing us to focus more on being human. More coffees with friends, more no-phone experiences, more time to spend with family, more adventures with partners. More effort.

I’ve come to believe that in many cases effort = value.

I’d like to propose a question. Which of these scenarios would mean more to you?

You receive two birthday cards. One has a printed message inside which was pre-selected by a third party company, printed and all your friend had to do was click order on a website and it was sent straight to you. The other is hand-written, it has a personal message and the address is hand-written on the front. You know your friend had to go and find a card they thought you would like, buy a stamp and mail it.

You might argue the first still shows your friend cares, and it does. But there is something far more emotional about receiving something hand-written in today’s world. It says, I spent some of my effort on you, I added friction to my life, for you. We understand that, and we appreciate that.

That’s why we admire olympians, or artists or carpenters. Because we appreciate that, that the outcome took tremendous effort. The achievement of the effort involved is perhaps equal, to the outcome itself. That’s certainly the case as a parent you receive a painting your child has drawn. The outcome doesn’t matter, it’s the effort that went into it that matters.

So if effort = value, then does it matter if AI can replicate a work of art to the exact paint stroke, if process of creating that art didn’t include one very important, and one very uniquely human ingredient, atomic effort? I would argue it doesn’t.

If anything, I think that in a world dominated by AI, pursuing things that require effort on a personal level could become even more valuable over time. The effort to achieve an outcome tells a story. We’ve been telling stories for the past 100,000 years, and I’m placing my bet on the side of that not stopping anytime soon.

Your friend,
Oliver