So I suppose this is a good place to actually seriously consider my idea of technology that hates you, since its in a similar vein. Right now, all the technology you own seeks to make your life a little bit better (even if it doesn't always succeed). Your computer can entertain you, make work easier, find you the weather, schedule you for the next six months, buy your food, pay your bills, do everything you used to have to do by hand or even on a computer with much more effort, and you can basically do all of it at the click of a mouse. Okay, cool, awesome. Except that that's boring. Sure my computer works fine, it makes my life better. But I don't always want it to make my life better or easier. I want it to make my life worse. I want technology that hates, because you need hate just as much as you need love. There's not a great deal of adversity that I need to overcome in my every day life, and I'm not really the better person day in and day out. Why not do something like that? Something simple, doesn't have to be hard, but put it in. At random intervals in the day, your computer locks up, and you have to do something to unlock it. Doesn't matter when. Nothing too inconvenient, nothing like "go write me a paper" but simple things like "solve this math problem" or "repair this part." It locks up until you do 10 jumping jacks. Technology is a great escape from responsibility, so what if we redesign it all to punish us?
What is friction in computing? From what I gather, it has something to do with making a task easier, and/or take less time. If that's the case, then Zuckerberg is saying easier sharing or faster sharing. Easier sharing sounds ok, but faster sharing sounds a bit suspect, and yet that's what we are getting. The important point that Vardi is elucidating here is that removing friction from a task fundamentally changes the nature of the task. Removing friction from physical mail means that you no longer have physical mail. What if instead of frictionless sharing, Zuckerberg proposed that the goal was, frictionless relationships? I agree with JTHipster that humans need adversity. It's worth considering that everytime we remove a known adversity, we might be creating a vacuum that will be filled by an unknown adversity. But it's not just computing. The pharmaceutical industry has been working for the past two decades on the frictionless psyche. What kind of vacuum has that been creating?
I've thought about this several times before. The problem is that as long as a certain technology exists, people will gravitate to it, even if it means losing their humanity/culture in the process. If inventing AI means that all our jobs will be taken care of, obviously that means that no one would have to work because we'd have robotic slaves. But do we really want that? Does it matter? It'll happen eventually, whether we like it or not, is what I'm saying.