Strategic Inconvenience: AI Writing Assistants and Practical Wisdom in an Age of Frictionless Composition

Jacques Ellul warned that a culture ruled by technical efficiency sidelines moral judgment. This worry is realized in AI writing assistants, which promise frictionless generation while eroding the formative struggle of writing. Building on Shannon Vallor’s analysis of “frictionless virtues,” this article develops strategic inconvenience—the cultivated capacity to choose friction over optimization when human flourishing demands it—as a technomoral dimension of practical wisdom. Using AI writing assistants as a case study, we draw on Aristotelian virtue ethics to argue that strategic inconvenience is the practical wisdom to identify the mean between uncritical technological optimization and blanket rejection. Drawing on Heidegger’s enframing and Illich’s distinction between convivial and manipulative tools, we discuss how the struggle of manual composition sustains the deliberative space required for this practical wisdom. Finally, we address objections concerning efficiency, privilege, and progress; ask what refusal means when AI is infrastructural; and propose practices for cultivating this judgment.