According to the article, a recent trip to San Francisco led the author to summon a Waymo driverless car and experience a quiet ride that felt like an oasis for an introvert. The author and Susan Winslow, CEO of Macmillan Learning, both appreciated the lack of obligatory conversation, noting that the car’s smooth, undemanding nature allowed them to focus on work or thoughts without social friction. The piece then defines the “Waymo effect” as the phenomenon where a technology removes the friction of dealing with another human being, and users perceive that removal as a pure gain because the costs of the friction are visible while its benefits are not. The author cites Tim Wu’s idea of “the tyranny of convenience” and Albert Borgmann’s device paradigm to explain how frictionless options are taken by default, causing the underlying practices to disappear from notice. Applied to research, the article argues that large language models (LLMs) act as the Waymo of intellectual life: they are available at any hour, lack their own agenda, and will only challenge a user as explicitly requested, unlike human collaborators who bring inconvenient perspectives, challenge assumptions, and provide serendipitous insight. The value of a collaborator, the article states, lies precisely in their refusal to be an extension of one’s own mind. Beyond individual temptation, the article highlights three systemic forces that make decollaboration the rational choice: funding pressures that cut travel and workshop budgets, evaluation systems that reward speed and output volume, and the fact that LLMs never argue over author order or credit, offering a form of arbitrage in a credit‑based academic economy. The author warns that each conversation shifted from a colleague to a chatbot withdraws a thread from the social fabric of research, which is maintained through argument, apprenticeship, informal conference exchanges, and the shared ordeal of peer review. At scale, this erosion is termed “decollaboration,” and the piece urges research leaders to recognize the hidden costs of frictionless tools before the collaborative fabric frays further.
Key facts
- Author rode a Waymo driverless car in San Francisco and found the ride a quiet oasis for solo work.
- Susan Winslow, CEO of Macmillan Learning, shared the same appreciation for the lack of social obligation in the ride.
- The Waymo effect is defined as the gain perceived when technology removes human friction, while the benefits of that friction go unnoticed.
- The article compares LLMs to Waymo, noting LLMs’ constant availability, lack of personal agenda, and limited challenge to user‑posed questions.
- Three forces driving decollaboration are funding cuts to travel and workshops, evaluation systems that prioritize speed, and LLMs’ neutrality on author order and credit.
- Research’s social fabric relies on frictions such as spontaneous conversation, apprenticeship, and peer review, which are eroded when interactions shift to chatbots.
- The term “decollaboration” is proposed to describe the large‑scale loss of collaborative threads in science.