“In a weird way, societies require friction. And when you take away frictions, even frictions that you didn't realize existed, all of a sudden it has consequences. … blithely removing all of them is kind of creating in tech parlance almost a denial of service attack on modernity.”
The Ezra Klein Show · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Kedrosky was responding to examples of AI agents robocalling restaurants and people using language models to file small-claims suits. His point is that the backlash against AI is partly a reaction to everyday frictions disappearing all at once.
Transcript
this. I love, sorry, I love this stat in one of your newsletters recently that more people pay for GLP1s. A larger number of Americans paid for a GLP1 than for AI.
…system and we're going to have to figure out how to deal with it. I now pay, it's not a lot. I pay about a buck a month to my phone operator to screen out spoof phone calls that are essentially robocalls. And that's what's going to happen. And we're going to call that GDP. Those additional costs.
I think one of the things that's your comment, Ezra, really reminded me of this is that we have this idea in sort of Western capitalism that it's always about efficiency. In a weird way, societies require friction. And when you take away frictions, even frictions that you didn't realize existed, all of a sudden it has consequences. You know, there have been examples of people using large language models to launch claims in small claims court, for example. Do we want that to be more to have less friction? Do we want more of that? Do we want this, you know, your example of this of the restaurants? And we have all of these frictions that exist in society, and blithely removing all of them is kind of creating in tech parlance…
And what's going to happen is that it's going to be these two AIs bouncing things back and forth. And it's just going to be a more and more and more unpleasant economy, which is why I do think there are going to be large areas where people just say maybe not. So I want to end on this question…
Well, there are so many risks that we have talked about, and there's all the complexity and fragility in the financing. The thing that keeps this on the other side of healthy is whether real customers are spending real money and getting real results. So the thing that would make me uneasy would be…
There's so many. I mean, I'm convinced I'm wrong about most things. So I'm always happy to find more things I'm wrong about. So I just look at economic data. So if we began to see, I don't know, productivity growth go well beyond trend, that would be striking, right? So far, we're sitting at around…
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