Ascending Friction as Collective Action Problem

Ascending friction is Edo Segal's term for the phenomenon by which AI eliminates difficulty at one level of creative work (syntax, debugging, mechanical labor) while creating new difficulty at a higher level (vision, architecture, product judgment, ethical discernment). This volume reinterprets the phenomenon through Olson's framework: the higher-order skills that ascending friction makes important are themselves produced by institutional infrastructure — mentoring, apprenticeship, communities of practice, educational systems oriented toward depth — that is a collective good subject to the free-rider problem. The individual who can produce competent output without investing in the developmental process has no private incentive to invest in that process, even though the collective interest in maintaining the developmental infrastructure is enormous. She free-rides on the existing stock of expertise without contributing to its replenishment.