If it’s only AI that’s keeping you up at night, maybe you’re doing OK | Letters

Reading Alexander Hurst’s column on the frictionless experience of life promised – or threatened – by AI algorithms, I was struck by how little I recognised the picture he painted of daily experience being stripped of the friction necessary to furnish it with meaning (To be human is to live with friction. That’s something AI boosters will never understand, 23 April). Rather, isn’t it the case that, bar the mega-rich, we’re all suffering from an excess of friction due to rising living costs, an avoidably dilapidated public realm, poor housing and innumerable related stresses? I belong to a volunteer group that twice a week cooks hot meals for homeless and destitute people in central Liverpool. The hot meal they collect from us may be the only relief they get that day from the constant, grinding analogue hassles of invisibility, illness, disrespect and material poverty: the only recognition they receive that a degree of comfort is a prerequisite for survival. The specific depredations of AI, created and encouraged by men without souls, seem so distant in these cases as to be nonexistent. There’s no question that the acceleration of AI will only deepen these gaping structural inequalities, but if someone is kept awake at night less by the thought of people sleeping outdoors on cardboard than by AI’s threat to one’s experience of the Louvre, it makes you wonder how much, or how little, friction exists in their own daily life. Lynsey Hanley Liverpool • I am disappointed by the responses of the professors of chemistry and thermodynamics who failed to answer Alexander Hurst’s question: “How fast do you have to strike a match to get it to light?” but instead talked of concepts. The correct answer is: “I’ll do the experiment” (ie get some students to do it as a project). Experimental data beats all mental hand-waving and is frequently quicker. It is then for the theoreticians to explain how their ideas do or not match the observations, and if necessary adapt their thought to get a better theory. Martin Pitt Leeds • I think I have the answer to Alexander Hurst’s question about the minimum speed at which you need to move a match when striking it for it to produce a flame. If it doesn’t work the first time, have another go, moving the match a bit quicker. If that still doesn’t work, buy a cigarette lighter. Michael Bulley Chalon-sur-Saône, France