“You know that actress. The one with the curly blonde hair.”
You’ve said this at a dinner table. Everyone has. You’re fishing around in your memory, dropping clues, watching your companions’ expressions shift from interested to politely concerned.
“You know the one. She was in that movie. With the guy.”
And nobody can remember her name.
For most of human history that conversation either resolved itself eventually or just died on the table. Then search engines arrived. You pulled out your phone, typed in “actress curly blonde hair 1980s” and twenty seconds later you were back in the conversation. Moving on. No one looking at you like you needed a memory intervention.
Are you sorry to have given up that struggle? I’m not.
So when I hear that AI is going to prevent productive struggle, I have to ask: Which struggle exactly are we trying to preserve? Because some struggle builds skill, deepens understanding, and develops the kind of expertise that stays with you when the power goes out. That struggle matters. We should protect it and design for it intentionally.
But some struggle is just friction. It doesn’t make you better at your craft. It doesn’t build anything. It just burns time and makes you feel bad at dinner.
We have always used tools to eliminate the friction so we can save our energy for the work that actually matters. That’s not laziness. That’s intelligence.
The conversation worth having isn’t whether AI creates productive struggle. It’s whether we’re thoughtful enough to know the difference between struggle that builds something and struggle we just got used to because we had no other choice.