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We’d just finished an early afternoon jazz gig at the Stellenbosch Hotel and Henry and I (he’s the double-bass player and I’m the singer and guitarist) had spontaneously decided to stroll around the town centre for fun. We came across a poster advertising a play celebrating the Afrikaans language. Reading the blurb, I asked, ‘what does uiteenlopende mean?’Henry, whose Afrikaans is a lot better than mine, didn’t know either.
For some inexplicable reason, neither of us thought to google it. Thank God.
Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt famously said that getting multiple answers for your search query was actually a bug in the system. “We should be able to give you the right answer just once,” he said. “We should know what you meant. You should look for information. We should get it exactly right.”
Frankly, I find that idea creepy. That AI should presume to know me so well, it would know exactly what I wanted.
You may have heard the term cognitive friction. It’s a UX term which refers to not making a user work too hard to figure out how to navigate a screen, thereby causing cognitive friction. In other words, cognitive friction is not wanted. You want the process of moving from one screen to another to be seamless and smooth. I hadn’t heard of it until the brilliant Joshua Styleman introduced me to the concept. He wrote of it a lot less benignly, “when AI systems can predict your needs before you feel them and shape your choices before you make them, you're not using technology—you're being optimized by it.” That’s pretty creepy too.
Bear with me – I promise this is all coming together.
So as Henry and I continued to wander, we puzzled over this word uiteenlopende. Stopping at a restaurant to inspect the menu, Henry asked the maitre d’ and waitresses – all speaking lively Afrikaans to each other – if they knew what it meant. There were baffled frowns, shaking heads, tentative murmurings… maybe something to do with taking a different path? Cheerful shrugs, laughter. We went on our way. We stopped a lone walker, he was startled, then affable when he heard our strange quest. But couldn’t help us. Nor could the third person we asked. For a short while, it became a little game. Anyway, we never found out that day but it was enjoyable trying.
The thing is, we were encountering cognitive friction. We wanted to get a result and we didn’t get it immediately. In the perplexity of trying to find out, we engaged with other people, we got them mulling over the meaning of this unlikely word, our brains were lit up, we connected and had friendly conversations.
We lose something intangibly valuable when we don’t have to experience the friction of not getting what we want instantly, a space to feel longing, desire. To have one’s every wish answered before we barely know what that wish may be, feels like being secretly looted by a charming and velvet-gloved thief. Yet that is exactly what we’ve designed AI to do; to study us so well, it’ll know us better than we know ourselves and so give us exactly what we want before we even have to ask.
In the glut of never-ending fulfilment, how will we ever know the restlessness of our own disquiet, a nagging feeling of resistance to something that doesn’t feel quite right, the hunger for a different version of living, outside of that which we are ceaselessly fed?
I’m not anti-AI. In fact, I’m working with some fine minds who have created incredibly smart automated systems using AI. I also want to stay alert to how we get hypnotised by convenience into giving away what makes us human.
Oh, turns out uiteenlopende means diverse, varied, divergent. I’d call that a prompt worth following.