Image by Camilo Garcia from Pixabay | For Representational Purpose only
Angad Singh
I'm sitting at a cafe in Khan Market when I notice the couple at the next table hasn't spoken word in the last twenty minutes. No expressions on their face, just scrolling. Surfing through the menu then placing the order through a QR code on the table. Payment happens automatically, transaction done in seconds. The staff is nowhere to be seen. The menu was never touched. They came here to spend some time together, but the room between them is filled with everything else.
Later while walking back home, I realize that I can't remember the last time someone handed me a physical menu. That thick heavy laminated pages with grease stains and folded corners. The one waiter would bring over, sometimes with a witty comment or personal recommendations, sometimes with that knowing look when you ordered the thing nobody orders. There was a transaction happening there beyond food, a momentary negotiation between strangers that required you to look up and around.
That’s almost gone now. And we're calling it progress.
Technology's biggest trick isn't making things appear. It's making things disappear. Not just apps and interfaces, but the texture of experience itself. The moments of friction that it turns out weren't bugs. They were features.
My phone can now plan my entire month without me opening a single app. AI agents handle everything from flights, meetings, reservations to payments. I squeeze the side button, give a detailed prompt and the invisible algorithms handles the rest. Few seconds. Haptic buzz. Done.
But here's what else disappeared in those few seconds: the ten minutes I would've spent comparing flights, making tradeoffs between price and timing, noticing that the 6 AM departure is cheaper but I'm not a morning person so maybe the 9 AM is worth the extra thousand rupees. Then look for airlines offering student discount. That decision-making process wasn't wasted time. It was me figuring out what I really wanted. The friction was the thinking.
We've built a world around us that celebrates and promotes the elimination of effort. Standing in line is time wasted. Talking to a customer service agent is wasted time. Walking into a bank branch is time wasted. Waiting for anything is an engineering problem to be solved.
And we did solve it. Spectacularly.
UPI made payments invisible and frictionless. You don't think about money moving anymore, scan, authenticate and done within seconds. Ten billion transactions a month flow through that infrastructure because nobody has to do anything. The interface isn't just simple. It's vanished.
Food delivery apps made restaurants invisible. You don't go anywhere or explore. You scroll through photos, pick algorithmically optimized options and food appears at your door. The restaurant becomes a ghost kitchen in an industrial park. You never see it. You never smell it. You never experience the real essence. You never stand at the counter and change your mind because something else smelled really good on the other persons order.
Dating apps made meeting people invisible and mechanical. Swipe through faces like you're shopping for shoes, optimizing for the right fit before you've heard someone laugh or noticed the way they tilt their head when they're thinking. The terrifying randomness of eye contact across a room is replaced by a curated grid of options.
We've turned everything into logistics.
The Zomato delivery guy appears at my door, and I realize we have not even made eye contact. I am focusing on the scooter moving in tracker on the app, he's watching his next delivery order pop up and the handoff happens in that distracted space between two screens. He's not a person. He's a node in an optimization problem. I'm not a customer. I'm a coordinate.
There used to be a barista at the Blue Tokai in my college campus who didn’t know my name but remembered my face and order. Not because I was special, it was the same with everyone. "The usual?" he'd ask, and that tiny moment of recognition mattered in a way I didn't understand until the café added self-ordering kiosks and he got moved behind the walls. Now I tap a screen. The coffee still tastes the very same. The experience is hollow.
This is what we don't talk about when we celebrate frictionless technology. We're not just removing obstacles. We're removing opportunities for human connection. Every interaction designed out of the system is a moment we don't have to be present, don't have to be patient, don't have to be vulnerable.
The efficiency is real. Nobody wants to waste hours in a queue or navigate a deliberately confusing phone tree or wait weeks for a bureaucrat to stamp a form.
But somewhere between "this takes too long" and "this happens invisibly while I think about something else," we crossed a line. We automated not just the tedious parts of life but the textured ones.
Physical menus forced you to engage. You had to scan options, ask questions, sometimes struggle with a language you didn't quite speak while a waiter tried to help. It was inefficient. It was also human. The QR codes all around are faster, cleaner, less prone to error. It's also lonely.
Talking to a travel agent meant sitting across from someone who asked questions, made suggestions, told you about the hotel where they stayed last year from their personal experiences. Booking through an AI means I get optimal results based on my cookies data and price sensitivity. I also get no stories or experiences. No moment when someone says, "Trust me you'll love it."
Even shopping, walking through a store, picking things up, feeling the weight of them, asking the shopkeeper a stupid question about which one is looking better, that's being replaced by algorithmic recommendations and one-click purchases. Retail therapy was never really about buying things. It was about getting out of your house. Moving through space. Interacting with the world on the world's terms instead of your own curated digital bubble.
We're building a future where you never have to be inconvenienced by reality.
Where technology anticipates your needs before you articulate them. Where AI agents handle the entire transaction layer of existence. Where screens disappear not because we've moved past them but because they've moved past us, operating in the background, making decisions, executing actions, representing our preferences to the world without requiring us to show up.
And we're so focused on the gains, the speed, the convenience, the cognitive load reduced, that we're not noticing the losses.
We're losing the ability to be bored, which was when we used to think. We're losing small talk with strangers, which was how we used to keep being human. We're losing the chance to be surprised by something we didn't algorithmically pick out. We're losing the skill of navigating uncertainty, of making decisions with incomplete information, of living with the minor discomforts that come with existing in physical space among other people.
Most of all we're losing presence. The API economy runs on absence. You don't need to be there. The technology represents you. Your preferences, your payment details, your calendar, your approximate desires, all encoded and executable without your attention.
But attention is all we have. The only thing we actually possess in this life is the sequence of moments we're present for. Everything else, the productivity, the optimization, the frictionless convenience, is just things around that fact.
I think about that couple in Khan Market, together but alone. I think about the delivery person I didn't see. The barista I don't talk to. The menus I don't touch. The decisions I don't make because an algorithm made them faster. The sensory load that used to feel good and kept us human.
Technology promised to give us our lives back. To free us from drudgery so we could focus on what matters.
But what if the drudgery was life? The waiting, the talking, the negotiating, the small frictions that forced us to exist in the world rather than float above it?
We're not asking what we're building toward anymore. We're asking what we're building away from. And the answer might be each other. Experience itself. The beautiful, inefficient, deeply human mess of being present.
The future doesn't need an interface.
But maybe we do.
The writer is a 4th Year BTech student at Plaksha University, Mohali
