The friction is the point

AI can show you things you'd never think of on your own. That's handy. But there's potentially a longer-term downside.

You ask a question, and the robots suggest an angle you hadn't thought of, maybe a half-clever phrase you wish you'd written. Feels good. Feels like progress. And in some sense, it is progress. Except your brain doesn't know whether that insight came from work or luck. The buzz is the same, but when we work for it, it stays in our brains.

John Nosta calls this the "Cognitive Corridor". He says it's like driving at night with dipped headlights, then someone flicks the full beams for a second and you see the landscape ahead. That light helps you notice where you might go next. But it's not understanding. It's just illumination.

The friction is the point. Learning science backs this up. The struggle is where the wiring happens. The friction isn't a tax on learning. It is the learning.

Say you're learning to cook. You could ask AI for the perfect risotto recipe, follow it step by step, and end up with something smooth enough to post online. But you wouldn't know why it works, or what to do when it doesn't. The person who's scraped burned rice from the pan has something better than a recipe. They've got judgment. And a new pan.

Psychologists call this the generation effect. You remember more when you make the thing yourself. Every time you reach for an idea, you strengthen the path to it. Skip that bit and you've eaten without digesting.

We're doing this in marketing too. AI can give us campaign ideas, strategy frameworks, neat charts. But effectiveness lives in why things work, not what might work.

The strategist who's had to watch their ideas fail, who's tested and learned and changed tack, has built a kind of scar tissue. That's judgment. Someone running AI playbooks is borrowing someone else's.

The Cognitive Corridor isn't the destination. It's the hallway that shows you which doors might be worth opening. Let it spark ideas, ask odd questions, point you somewhere new. Then maybe close the chat…and think.

I discussed this with Claude. It agreed (naturally). It told me that the answer is almost a side effect. The learning is the goal. Wish I'd written that.