How fast do you have to strike a match to make it light? I’m not asking about the chemistry of ignition—I mean the actual speed, in metres per second, that the little wooden stick and its bulbous head need to move to spark the chain reaction that creates a flame.
This question came from a sleepless night. And there, in the dark, I did the one thing you’re not supposed to do if you want to fall back asleep: I picked up my phone. Before I knew it, 3am had turned into 5am. I learned about what’s in the friction strip (red phosphorus, crushed glass) and the match head (potassium chlorate, antimony trisulphide, wax), and that a safety match won’t light if you strike it against anything else. I found slow-motion videos of a match strike filmed at 3,500 frames per second. But nothing about the speed.
Still searching for an answer, I sent my question to the tobacco company Swedish Match, and then I emailed two professors: one a chemist in Tasmania, the other a thermodynamics professor at Imperial College London. At 5.30am, I finally fell back asleep, a little frustrated and wondering if Claude would have given me the answer I wanted in seconds.
For nearly twenty years, Silicon Valley has been selling us seamlessness instead of friction, and we’ve been eager buyers. A few months ago, I felt a small jolt of disgust at a LinkedIn post where the author described how much she preferred Amazon’s recommendation algorithm to bookstores. The algorithm, she wrote, knew her, so it was efficient—implying that getting lost in a maze of authors and covers you might or might not connect with was a waste of time. It was friction.
Imagine being offered the Louvre, I thought when I read that post, without the desire to linger.
Life happens in the slowed-down space of possibility that friction creates. AI, on the other hand, is like a luge of endless acceleration that turns reflection—which needs time—into certain defeat. “If we impose human oversight for every split-second decision, it won’t work,” the head of France’s department for integrating AI into defence told Libération. “We’ll have already lost.” Putting AI at the edge of life and death like that is the kind of thing that keeps you tossing and turning at night.
I used to joke that someday my own children would see me as an old reactionary when it comes to “robot rights.” He’s such a humanist, they might whisper—which by then will have become a contested word, if not an outright insult. I never imagined, in the blissful pre-large language model days of the late 2010s, that my timing might be off. That a clash between those who see an early form of consciousness in how pattern-matching “neural networks” work, and those who see a maddeningly complex, Daedalian kind of trick, might happen before I even left my 30s. And yet, here we are.
Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest financiers, like Marc Andreessen, boast about their own lack of introspection, seeing it as a waste of time. This is the spirit of AI—fueling the unexamined life—and I can’t help but see an epic spiritual crisis emerging from the wreckage. A social emptiness, a dryness left in place of what the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector hints at when she writes about “the force of body in the waters of the world” and how it “captures that other thing that I’m really saying because I myself cannot.”
The search for frictionlessness drains this indescribable “other thing”—which I might roughly call the space between what we say and what we know, and knowing itself. AI collapses this space, and in that flatness, there is no there there. Pattern-matching algorithms produce mimicry, not meaning; inside the black box of their output is a copy of what it means to live through experience, but nothing that truly approaches it.They create images, but not art; text, but not literature; sound, but not a symphony—nothing that could make your skin tingle with the feeling that this is the closest we can get to how the composer truly felt. A pattern-matching algorithm isn’t a living body in the world. It can’t know laughter, silence, grief, or love. It can’t sin, forgive, or sacrifice.
What drives us to try and pull a being out of a linguistic Droste effect—seemingly endless, but ultimately just a loop of itself? Maybe we’re drawn to the idea that a technological mirror might show us who we are, if only we feed it enough data, enough of our shared history and soul. But we won’t find God by projecting her into a machine.
When Sam Altman compared the energy needed to train an AI model to the twenty years of food a human consumes to “get smart,” Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at HuggingFace, called that thinking the “Black Mirror stage” of capitalism. I’d go further and say it’s capitalism’s final stage: a world of pure capital, with no labor. At least, no human labor—the kind that exists in biological time, that eats, sleeps, socializes, and does all the things capitalism can’t put a price on, the things that make life on Earth what it is. Should we really be surprised by this shift from planned obsolescence of goods to planned obsolescence of people?
It turns out most people outside Silicon Valley don’t actually want this. They’re more worried than excited about the surge in AI use. If anything gives me a sliver of hope, it’s the backlash. I think it will start as a pushback against treating AI use as a “key performance indicator” for Western economies, and end with a revival of humanism.
In this way, AI eats itself. By some measures, AI output now makes up more than half of the internet. The algorithm is like an ouroboros, endlessly retraining on its own output: slick, seamless, and unmistakably hollow. Eventually, even those who see hints of the divine—or, more unsettling, a soul—in it will realize they’re just seeing wisps.
In the week after my insomnia, all three of my queries got replies. Swedish Match told me they just didn’t know. Nathan Kilah, a chemistry professor at the University of Tasmania, wrote back that I’d need to talk to a physicist, but that friction force equals the coefficient of friction times force in Newtons, and that speed could vary depending on pressure. Erich Muller, a thermodynamics professor at Imperial, advised me to rethink the question in terms of minimum ignition energy (0.2 millijoules to ignite the red phosphorus on the friction strip), and that from there, we could take the mass of a match and guess the strike velocity. And Claude? I never checked. That was never really the point.
Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the quote by Alexander Hurst covering the concept of human friction versus AIs frictionless nature
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What does friction mean in this context
It means the daily struggles delays annoyances and emotional effort that come with being human Things like traffic jams a slow internet connection a misunderstanding with a friend or having to wait for something you want
2 Why does Hurst say AI supporters will never understand this
Because AI is designed to remove friction It gives instant answers perfect grammar and logical solutions It never gets tired frustrated or makes mistakes because of emotions Supporters often see friction only as a bug to be fixed not a valuable part of life
3 Is friction a bad thing
Not necessarily The quote argues its a defining thing While some friction is painful a lot of it teaches us patience resilience and creativity The struggle to learn a skill or fix a mistake is often where we grow
4 Can you give a simple example of good friction
Learning to play a musical instrument Its frustrating slow and full of wrong notes But that struggle is what makes finally playing a song perfectly feel so rewarding An AI could play the song instantly but you wouldnt experience the pride of learning
Advanced Deeper Questions
5 How does this quote relate to the concept of flow state
Flow is a state of deep focus where friction is low but its achieved through mastering friction A runner hits their stride after pushing through pain A writer finds flow after wrestling with a bad first draft AI offers a fake flow stateits just easy not earned
6 What are the dangers of a frictionless world according to this idea
It could make us impatient entitled and less resilient If every obstacle is removed you never build the mental muscles to handle realworld problems It also removes serendipitythe happy accidents that happen when things dont go as planned
7 Does this mean we should avoid using AI for everything
No The point is about
