Context: This series is a deep dive into the framework of The Curatorial Mind, based on my original essay. It explores the defining human skill of the AI era which is the practice of discernment and judgment in an age of digital abundance.
We were promised that AI would eliminate the friction from our professional lives. The dream was simple: offload the tedious drafting, the manual data sorting, and the grunt work to the machine so we could focus on high-level strategy. But as anyone working in the trenches of AI-enabled workflows knows, friction is a law of nature. It does not simply disappear; it relocates.
In the old world, work slowed down because execution was physically or technically hard. Today, work slows down becauseintent remains unresolved. We see this daily in the proliferation of alignment meetings and endless re-work cycles. The AI produces a draft in seconds, but because the human didn’t spend the time wrestling with the initial idea, the output lacks a core. The project advances at light speed only to hit a wall later because the original decision didn’t have enough weight to hold.
This relocation of friction is a critical concept in The Curatorial Mind. Not all friction is waste. Some resistance is necessaryto create coherence and conviction. In the NY Times panel on AI, policy researcher Helen Toner offered a brilliant distinction that every professional should memorize: Is your work a construction site or a gym? On a construction site, you use an excavator to lift heavy things so you can build faster. But at the gym, the whole point is the resistance. You need the weight to grow your own capacity.
With AI, we are often treating our brains like construction sites when we should be treating them like gyms. We areoffloading the friction of thinking to the machine. As a result, we are building systems that are fast to deploy but structurallyfragile. As Nathan Lambert has noted, when we prioritize speed over vision, we fill our organizations with plausible additions that eventually degrade the entire system. The goal of the Curatorial Mind is to decide where friction belongs. Itis about intentionally slowing down the choosing so that the doing actually matters.
The Curator’s Practice: Identify one natural pause in your workflow that has been removed by speed this month. What would happen if you intentionally re-introduced that friction to force a moment of deeper judgment?