Khosla on friction collapse

Neal Khosla, CEO of the health-care company Curai, in a post on X, 2026-11-05.

Argument

Agents that act tirelessly for their users will break assumptions about human behavior built into everyday systems. Khosla calls this “friction collapse”.

His lead example is ticket sales. First come, first served works when people have to be watching at the right moment. If everyone’s agent watches all the time, thousands of buyers arrive in the same instant, and the sale goes to whichever agent is a fraction of a second faster. He expects the same pressure on job applications, restaurant and doctor’s appointments, apartment rentals, government benefits, sales outreach, and customer support, which cannot cope with a user who never gives up.

He also lists business models that depend on inertia: hotel and flight bookings that agents keep cancelling and rebooking at a lower price, subscriptions that get cancelled, retail price differences that agents arbitrage away, insurance denials that get fought every time, and bank fees that get avoided.

His general claim is that much apparent social order is “an equilibrium sustained by human inefficiency”: slowness rations, effort signals intent, inertia funds businesses, and attention is sold. He predicts a renegotiation of how markets allocate, how people signal, and how businesses earn.

Assessment

The post is a list of predictions, not a measured trend. Many systems already face bots, such as ticket scalpers and spam, so the open question is how much cheap, general-purpose agents change the scale. Some of the losses fall on businesses that profit from customers’ inattention, which many readers would welcome; others fall on rationing and signaling that have no easy replacement.

It defines Friction collapse and opens the Transitional pains path. Compare Proof of personhood for one response.