Solutions and Other Problems

The tech industry is notoriously fixated on solving things. All products are "solutions", all problems are fixable, all friction is anti-productive waste that deserves to be eliminated. We've hacked our workflows and our homes and our lives, automated the boring stuff, and Gotten Things Done. Throwing LLMs into the mix has only amped up this rhetoric.

But not all friction is waste. Some of the things that we call "problems" are doing the necessary work of teaching us something, building our capabilities, and raising important opportunities to ask questions and double-check assumptions. Optimising this type of problem away creates a short-term win, but the longer-term losses are often much harder to see.

We've also taken steps into a landscape where many everyday acts of problem-solving are being delegated to webs of AI "agents", who will autonomously "decide" which things are problems, solve them on our behalf, and ping us to tell us when they're done. But how often do they create additional problems as they solve others? How well can humans understand and build on the "solutions" that emerge? And what does it do to the development and maintenance of human expertise along the way?

This talk digs into why problems, friction, and "inefficiency" are our some of our greatest allies, especially with AI in the picture. We'll look at what researchers like Robert and Elizabeth Bjork and Renée Gosline have shown about the importance of friction, discuss how to distinguish problems worth solving from problems worth preserving, and interrogate the reasons why we are compelled to solve certain problems in the first place. You'll leave this talk with ways determine which problems deserve your tools, and which ones deserve your time.

(With apologies and thanks to Allie Brosh for the title.)