Legendary London restaurateur Jeremy King often tells a striking story to his employees about a speech he once delivered to his staff. It is an anecdote that cuts to the heart of modern commerce, automation, and the shifting definition of value in an increasingly digitized world. “I could replace you all with robots,” he told them, pointing out the supposed perfection of automated systems. “They’re never late, they’re not constantly surreptitiously looking at their phones, they don’t forget anything, they don’t call in hungover.”
Yet, the punchline of his address reveals the modern paradox of service. “But I’m not going to,” he continued. “Because they also have no empathy, no instinct, no intuition, and they can’t love.”
For the past two decades, the technology sector has operated on a singular, relentless premise: that human friction is an inefficiency to be eradicated. Silicon Valley has systematically sold the world the idea that the best service is the one requiring almost no personal attention whatsoever. Consumers have been nudged toward a frictionless existence defined by taps, swipes, self-check-ins, QR-code orders, and algorithms designed to anticipate personal preferences without a word being spoken.
The promise was a seamless life. But as platforms and apps have streamlined daily routines, they have frequently rendered them anonymous, sterile, and profoundly lonely. Technology was built to remove the minor inconveniences of human interaction, but in doing so, it has stripped away the very elements that make interactions meaningful.
For the economic elite, however, friction is often the entire point. It manifests as a maître d’ who immediately remembers a preferred table, a bespoke tailor who insists on three separate fittings rather than a quick digital measurement, a hotel manager who knows a guest’s mother’s name, or a handwritten note welcoming a traveler to their suite.
This cultural pushback has even birthed a new lexicon. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a writer for The Cut, coined the term “friction-maxxing” in an article that went viral earlier this year. The concept describes the deliberate choice to do things the old-fashioned way—resisting the proliferation of time-saving technologies in order to preserve authentic, tangible human experiences.
While mass-market retail and hospitality race toward complete automation, the trend at the very top end of the market appears to be moving in the exact opposite direction.
If the primary purpose of dinner were simply to be fed calories as efficiently as possible, the best restaurant would naturally be the one that got patrons in and out the fastest. If the purpose of buying a tailored suit were merely obtaining functional clothing to cover one’s body, enduring three separate fittings would represent terrible, inefficient service. Luxury, by its very definition, deliberately refuses that utilitarian logic. It trades speed for care, and efficiency for connection.
Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, views this emerging return to human friction as an inevitable societal correction.
“Wealth searches out scarcity,” Turkle explains, observing the shifting behaviors of affluent consumers. She points out that when wealth first associated high technology with a novel form of attention, elites dreamed of automated systems and robots that would answer their every whim, insulating them from the world and relieving them from needing a lower class of caregivers. It was designed to be entirely friction-free, ensuring individuals would never have to rub up against strangers or navigate messy interpersonal dynamics.
Now, however, the landscape has radically shifted. Nearly everyone carries a 24-hour helper in their pocket—a chatbot engineered to pretend it cares, an algorithm designed to mimic empathy. Because digital compliance and simulated attention have become cheap and ubiquitous, society has begun to dream of what is now truly scarce: human beings who genuinely care.
At the higher end of the contemporary market, authentic human interaction itself has transformed into a luxury good.
This dynamic brings to mind what Rory Sutherland, author and president emeritus of Ogilvy Consulting, terms “the doorman fallacy.” Sutherland describes a hypothetical management consultant who looks at the traditional role of a hotel doorman, defines their job strictly as someone who pushes or opens a heavy door, and promptly replaces them with a cost-saving automatic sliding door.
“The only problem with this is that doormen, in reality, create value in all manner of different ways,” Sutherland notes. “They hail taxis, they recognize frequent guests, they perform a measure of security, and they exchange important information with other doormen on potentially criminal guests.”
The ultimate flaw in the reductionist approach to business is that the individuals who install the automated systems are rarely around to suffer the long-term consequences of lost customer loyalty and diminished institutional knowledge. They claim immediate cost savings on a balance sheet while quietly eroding the soul of the enterprise.
What observers have witnessed unfold over the past few years is a systematic replacement of what sociologists call “weak ties”—the casual acquaintances, friendly neighborhood shop assistants, chatty local merchants, and loose professional networks that provide low-stakes social contact throughout an ordinary day. The modern realization is that these casual interactions are not useless friction to be pruned away by software; they are invaluable to human happiness and mental well-being. The market is slowly waking up to the fact that these moments of contact, far from being devoid of value, are precisely what deliver real quality of life.
Industry leaders are beginning to navigate this tension carefully. Marie-Louise Sciò, the creative director and chief executive officer of Pellicano Hotels, acknowledges that technology has played an undeniably vital role in hospitality over the past decade, streamlining operations and making the guest experience vastly more efficient behind the scenes.
“Digital tools have transformed the way we book, communicate, and manage hotels, and they continue to be incredibly valuable—especially behind the scenes,” Sciò says.
Yet, she notes that this very digital ubiquity has highlighted what cannot be digitized. “As technology has become more present, it has also reminded us of the importance of preserving the human side of hospitality,” she adds. “[It] can support us, but it cannot replace intuition, empathy, or the feeling of being genuinely looked after by another person.”
In an era defined by breakneck technological advancement and artificial intelligence capable of mimicking human speech, few would have predicted that the greatest luxury money can buy would simply be a pleasant, unhurried conversation with another human being. In a world rushing headlong toward absolute automation, perhaps wanting to slow down and interact with the world isn’t madness after all.
