Legendary London restaurateur Jeremy King often tells a striking story about a speech he once delivered to his employees, a tale that cuts to the heart of a paradox currently reshaping the global service economy. “I could replace you all with robots,” he told his staff. “They’re never late, they’re not constantly surreptitiously looking at their phones, they don’t forget anything, they don’t call in hungover.”
After allowing the heavy silence to settle over the room, he delivered the crucial caveat. “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 overarching promise of Silicon Valley and the tech sector at large was the systematic removal of human friction. We were told that the ultimate modern convenience was a world where we never had to interact with another person to get what we wanted. Apps, platforms, and digital interfaces were designed to make life seamless, efficient, and entirely automated. Yet, in streamlining our daily transactions, technology has simultaneously rendered our public and commercial lives remarkably anonymous and profoundly lonely.
This growing cultural fatigue with algorithmic efficiency has birthed a new counter-movement. Kathryn Jezer-Morton of The Cut coined the term “friction-maxxing” in an article that went viral, capturing a rising desire among consumers to resist the proliferation of time-saving tech. The concept is straightforward: doing things the old-fashioned way, choosing deliberate complexity, and actively preserving meaningful, unautomated human experiences.
For twenty years, the tech industry sold the precise opposite idea—that the best service is one requiring almost no personal attention whatsoever. Consumers were conditioned to tap, swipe, check themselves in, order from QR codes, and let algorithms remember their preferences. Yet, at the very top end of the market, this paradigm is increasingly reversing.
If the sole purpose of dinner were simply to be fed calories, the most successful restaurant would be the one that got you in and out the fastest. If the primary purpose of buying a custom suit were merely obtaining functional clothing, enduring three separate fittings would represent terrible customer service. Luxury, by its very definition, deliberately refuses that utilitarian logic. It embraces the time-consuming, the personal, and the deliberately complicated.
Sherry Turkle, an M.I.T. professor and author of Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, sees the sudden return of human friction as an inevitable cultural correction.
“Wealth searches out scarcity,” Turkle observes, explaining how the psychology of consumption shifts when technology becomes ubiquitous. When wealth first associated high-tech automation with a sophisticated form of attention, proponents dreamed of robotic systems that would answer their every whim, liberating the affluent from needing a lower class of human caregivers. It was designed to be friction-free, ensuring individuals would never have to rub shoulders or converse with strangers.
Now, however, as nearly every consumer walks around with a twenty-four-hour helper embedded in their smartphone—a chatbot engineered to simulate care—our collective cultural dream has inverted. What we desire now is the truly scarce commodity: human beings who genuinely care. At the higher end of the market, human interaction itself has transformed into the ultimate luxury good.
This shift brings to mind observations made by Rory Sutherland, author and president emeritus of Ogilvy Consulting, who frequently highlights what he terms “the doorman fallacy.” In corporate boardrooms, a hypothetical management consultant might analyze the role of a traditional hotel doorman as someone whose sole mechanical function is to push open a heavy door. Armed with this narrow definition, the consultant proposes replacing the human employee with a cost-saving, automated sensor door.
“The only problem with this is that doormen, in reality, create value in all manner of different ways,” Sutherland explains. “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. Consequently, the management consultants would often lay claim to the cost savings when they installed the automatic door, but they weren’t around to suffer the consequences.”
What society has witnessed over the past few years is a quiet erosion of what sociologists call “weak ties”—those casual acquaintances, friendly neighborhood shop assistants, regular baristas, and loose professional networks that provide low-stakes, everyday social contact. The unintended casualty of digitization is that these minor, incidental interactions turn out to be critically important, even invaluable, to overall human happiness and societal well-being. The market is slowly waking up to the reality that these touchpoints, far from being financial inefficiencies without value, are precisely what deliver a sense of authentic care.
This tension is acutely felt in the hospitality sector. Marie-Louise Sciò, creative director and chief executive of Pellicano Hotels, acknowledges that technology has played an undeniably vital role in modern hospitality over the past decade, streamlining operations and making the guest experience smoother.
“Digital tools have transformed the way we book, communicate, and manage hotels, and they continue to be incredibly valuable—especially behind the scenes,” Sciò notes. However, she points out a crucial irony of the digital age: “As technology has become more present, it has also reminded us of the importance of preserving the human side of hospitality. [It] can support us, but it cannot replace intuition, empathy, or the feeling of being genuinely looked after by another person.”
In a world defined by relentless technical advancement and artificial intelligence scaling into every corner of our lives, few could have predicted that the greatest and most expensive luxury of all would simply be a pleasant, unscripted conversation with another human being.
