Don't Innovate My Hurdles Away

Technology that makes life easier is *almost always* the correct answer

The Water Carrier by Francisco de Goya, ca. 1808-1812

I. Easy isn’t always better

I saw this exchange on X:

Dave: Listen, you’re asking the wrong questions—it’s not that my art looks AI, it’s that AI looks like me—they’re stealing from me and artists like me.

Charlie: Do you see this as a positive contribution to society?

Dave: I don’t believe simply making things easier is always the correct answer.

It caught my attention because Dave, despite being an artist reasonably angry at AI—like many others—didn’t end up with “this tech is trash” or “AI just makes things worse faster,” or some other typically contemptuous remark toward digital innovation. Instead, he said something I agree with both in nuance and substance:

Simply making things easier isn’t always the correct answer.

In case you’re inclined to disagree let me share two quick examples that illustrate how Dave’s position is trivially true.

Say it’s January 10, 2025. For the year’s resolution, you’ve committed to losing 30 pounds (most of them gained, no one doubts it, during 2024’s Christmas holidays). Ten days have gone by with no major missteps but you’re starting to feel that urge. Those leftover sweet cookies are calling you. And the chocolate fudge… oh my god! You could gobble down the entire thing.

Short-term, that’s the right choice. It would make the anxiety easier to endure. However, by making today easier, you’d be nuking the entire journey down the harder path.

Talking about nukes, was it easier to defeat WW2 Axis powers because the US dropped Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan? Yes, kinda. It accelerated its surrender. Is the world a better place because we have nuclear weapons? Hard no for me. We’re on the verge of self-devastation with every international geopolitical conflict because we can devastate the planet. In hindsight, building the atomic bomb wasn’t the correct answer.

Making things easier is a laudable metric insofar as it remains a means to live better. Sometimes, as economist Charles Goodhart realized, we fixate on the metric and forget the greater goal. That’s when we risk binge-eating junk amid a New Year’s resolution diet or dropping three dozen kilotons to end a finished war, killing 200,000 people in the process.

Making art with AI by typing a prompt that copies some style is easier than learning to hone yours by hand, from scratch, over the years. But, as Dave says, it’s not necessarily better.

Dave and Charlie’s exchange lingered on my mind a few more minutes and I kept coming up with examples in favor of Dave’s side. I was ready to forget the whole interaction—and go mourn the distant catastrophe that was WW2—when I remembered one of Noah Smith’s best essays, Toward a Shallower Future.

II. Easy is better by default

Noah—economist by training, blogger by trade—thinks an easier life is a better life. Making things easier is inherently the correct answer. He’s not worried about edge cases and exceptions because eventually, even those get better. The negative long-term trade-offs I emphasized above are more an illusion than a reality. Let me reformulate my examples from Noah’s lens.

Want to lose weight but dieting is hard. So perhaps eating Christmas candy makes the whole weight-loss journey achievable in the first place. Slower and bumpy but achievable—how many of you have given up because the diet was too strict? Or you can take Ozempic. Easier and better.¹

I won’t defend the existence of nuclear weapons, but let me pose this as a moral dilemma: how would WW2 have played out if the US had never used the atomic bomb and Japan hadn’t surrendered? What ended up happening was terrible—one of recent history’s greatest tragedies—we just don’t know if by making WW2 end faster, the US also made it less deadly.²

And it’s not like technology has only one path to emerge. The US (or someone else) would have built the atomic bomb later anyway because instead of a cold war, they’d have had a hot war with the USSR—no “mutually assured destruction” so no restraint—with the concurrent incentives for dangerous innovation. Imagine if the first atomic bombs had been dropped in the 1960s on Moscow or New York instead. Would that have been better? (It was never an unlikely scenario either.)

If you squint your eyes, you will recognize modern wars as the unusual state in between longer periods of broad peace. The opposite of the world a thousand, or even a hundred years ago. I like to believe we’re living through a preparation phase before an age of eternal peace.³ Maybe those who fought in past wars and gave their lives to the effort, in body or spirit, were the reason we can dream of such a utopian future at all.

That’s the utopian future Noah dreams of. A life that’s easier and better thanks to the gifts of technology. Including AI. The real trade-off, he argues, is that such a life would be inevitably shallower.

His essay leaves no doubt on this point: It’s worthwhile anyway.

But for me, it’s hard to grapple with the implications. A shallow world without adversity or struggle implies no fighting, no growth, no pride, no beauty—a truly hollow world, unable to be, as Dave feared, the source of great art: Is AI good because it makes the process easier or bad because it makes the world shallower?

Noah doesn’t judge the value of AI as an artistic tool but answers instead the broader question implicit in Dave’s worry: “Adversity is not worth the price of adversity.” An easy life is better just because it’s easier:

. . . Unfinished Painting is a great work of art, but it wasn’t worth the price of Haring’s life. Without AIDS, the world might have been a bit shallower, with less tragedy for humans to struggle against. But no one in their right mind wishes for tragedies to continue just so that human life can continue to be filled with pathos. Adversity is not worth the price of adversity.

It’s hard to accept this, right? Even if we know it is what we should want, it isn’t what we feel like wanting.

Tragedy enables art. It arouses intense emotions, making us late witnesses of those harsh memories once engraved in paint or stone. It teaches us. It enriches us. Without the lowest lows, there would be no highest highs. Beauty exists in contrast to ugliness, pleasure to pain, admiration to struggle. Tragedy becomes art. It reminds us that life is this eternal path with infinite obstacles and it’s the obstacles—overcoming them or perishing before them—that make us feel alive. The worst of disgraces made the past a gift in the form of artistic lessons and stories to tell. They give harrowingly evocative masterpieces a reason to be in a museum exhibit. They are The Third of May 1808 and Guernica. They are Unfinished Painting and Saturn Devouring His Son. The present world, in contrast, is not romantic enough, not heroic enough, not adverse enough, not tragic enough. It’s a shallow world.

“Wrongly shallow,” you say as you read these lines. With a cup of hot coffee in one hand and your iPhone 15 Pro in the other, you glance out the window of your two-story home. The air conditioning is on, and soothing lounge music plays in the background. You look outside and meet, with a mix of nostalgia and unwitting delusion, the strange world that unfolds beyond the glass without touching you, “So wrongly shallow.” Exactly. It is hard to accept from the observant seat that protects us from the worst of disgraces and tragedies, that life is better without them. We seldom notice it, but it’s precisely the shallowness of modernity that allows us to dare miss and yearn for heroism, adversity, struggle—all those things. Otherwise, you’d be busy running from them.⁴

Noah concludes:

Romanticists need to accept that the nobility of suffering has always been a coping mechanism—a way to sustain hope through the long twilight of apparent futility. And they need to accept that heroism is always inherently self-destroying—that saving the world requires that the world is worth having been saved. . . .

The modern world of push-button marvels has lost something, but it has gained more than it has lost. By celebrating it, we honor the countless millennia of heroes who worked in some small way to bring it about, even as we dedicate ourselves to continuing their great enterprise. Our legacy is to fill the Universe with children who laugh more than we were allowed to.

I was ready to give Noah the win but, deep in thinking flow as I was, an intriguing counter to his counter popped out of nowhere. It feels so obvious now that I wonder why Noah didn’t consider it himself.

III. A life worth living needs mild struggle

What does the world look like if we extend Noah’s argument to its ultimate form? If life is 100% easy—if nothing is ever again a struggle—what is it worth? What does life even look like? Let me clarify the kind of absolute scenario I’m considering.

Do you want to philosophize and rejoice in your thought? Oh, no—that requires mental effort. Instead, take this pill we call Knowitall and put an end to your struggle. Okay, so you want to listen to music and contemplate art for the sake of doing it, without thinking about meaning and stuff? Certainly not! Your brain would be active, interpreting the colors your eyes see and the sounds your ears hear. Can you imagine the amount of computations needed to keep your attention on a painting or a melody? No. You take this other pill we call Nothingatall so you can truly relax into a literal state of convenient anesthesia.

Zero struggle implies, necessarily, nothingness. Wasn’t this a dystopia? We’re not that far anyway from a future where we don’t think anymore. It doesn’t look any good. Are we making life easier—or just faster? Former broker Brett Scott thinks we’re confusing the two and brings back AI once again, contesting Noah’s views:

Believing that AI will save time is like being a person in the late 1800s seeing their first car and thinking “oh how easy it’ll be to get to the meadow now!” People back then didn’t imagine that by the 1960s we’d be stuck in traffic jams for hours in mega-cities. Now apply this to AI. If we fast-forward a decade, it will have recalibrated the entire economy to a state of higher acceleration where you’ll be expected to do far more, at much greater scale, in the same amount of time. At that point, if you’re not using it you’ll feel like a 19th century villager who finds themselves trying to walk to work in the middle of modern Los Angeles.

I love this collage (Credit: Brett Scott)

And you will say, “those examples are nonsense… the Knowitall and Nothingatall—it’s not what this is about!” I agree. And Noah surely does, too. I imagine he’d say something like, “No one wants that.” No one does, right? But that’s the extreme of making life easier, free of struggle. It’s that shallower future we said we wanted—the shallowest one indeed. Okay, watch this:

Journalist Derek Thompson says “There is a genre of 21st century male ‘I have perfected the game of life’ routine that essentially assumes the absence of other people.” What I see is something else, an absence of struggle. No adversity, no foe to defeat but oneself. In the ways Noah cares about, this guy’s life is as easy as it gets. Conflict engineered out of it. He lives in so much abundance that his only concern is how to gamify his day to create some friction, something to beat. So he wakes up every morning and does this and wonders at night, every night, whether he’ll manage to optimize his existence one-tenth of a second more the next day. Until he dies.

It’s performative, I know. That’s not his real life. But even the performance itself is a sign of the lack of struggle. The only consolation we have left is that, at least, he doesn’t hurt anyone else. Political economist Francis Fukuyama already warned us about the alternative:

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

This is what we do when no battles are left to be fought. We make them up. It’s a fake kind of adversity but what else can you do in this shallow world? Funnily enough, that guy could instead enjoy the challenge of learning to make art without AI.

So I agree with Dave, but also with Noah but then, again, also with Dave. That leaves me with a conundrum that I now pose here—for them, for me, and for you: Where do we draw the line? Perhaps that’s the big question after all. As things get easier, we will have to figure out what’s worth struggling for.

1. People who think taking Ozempic is cheating can’t face the harsh truth: they’re afraid to be pioneers and will instead wait for it to be socially acceptable—which is fine but shows cowardice, not moral superiority.

2. Weapons are a bad thing overall, there’s no denying that because I’m taking here an inward view of humanity. If I speak on behalf of my tribe I’m suddenly glad to have military superiority over my geopolitical enemies. In that sense, it’s a good thing. A good thing that’s less and less required over time. Except if aliens ever come here looking for carbon-based life resources—then we’ll be happy to have those weapons.

3. It’s hard to say this given what’s going on in the Middle East, on the easternmost coast of the Mediterranean Sea. However, without taking away an ounce of importance from current events, historical context, and statistical analysis provide a bird’s eye view that would be otherwise affected by the emotional baggage of the present moment.

4. This is for the footnote lovers who agree with this sentiment. You may tell me, “Would Western culture and the philosophical tradition that infused it with wisdom be the same if the Peloponnesian War never happened? Would we be able to admire Thucydides’ writing? What about Plato’s thoughts on the ideal state? Perhaps they would have never written at all!” And I would tell you: “Still, if you traveled back in time and asked Athenians and Spartans for their opinion on the war and the deaths of their fellow brothers, fathers, and sons, they’d say—screw you.” A battlefield to die on is only desired by those who wrongly believe shallowness is the worst you can have. —Your turn.