Ross Douthat, as we learn from Wikipedia, is a conservative American author and New York Times columnist. That's Douthat, above.
Douthat writes on religion, politics, and society, and in a column that appeared in the Easter Sunday edition of The Times, Douthat warns us that "An Age of Extinction Is Coming."
The challenge that is upon us, and that Douthat is writing about, is not, as you might guess, the growing likelihood that we will stumble into a world-ending nuclear war. Neither is Douthat writing about the potential extinctions that may be produced by Global Warming. The threat that Douthat sees, and is warning us about, is something else. Douthat is warning us about the "digital revolution" in which we are now living. Douthat is concerned, in other words, that our digital technologies, and artificial intelligence, may end up destroying the "real world." Douthat tells us that we are facing a challenge that is made much more complex by the fact that "much of this extinction will seem voluntary."
The age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete (emphasis added).
Here is a further discussion, making clearer what Douthat is talking about:
It starts with substitution: The digital age takes embodied things and offers virtual substitutes, moving entire realms of human interaction and engagement from the physical marketplace to the computer screen. For romance, dating apps supplant bars and workplaces and churches. For friendship, texting and DMing replaces hanging out. For entertainment, the small screen replaces moviegoing and live performance. For shopping and selling, the online store supplants the mall. For reading and writing, the short paragraph and the quick reply replace the book, the essay, the letter.Some of these substitutes have meaningful upsides. There are forms of intellectual and scientific work that were impossible before the internet annihilated distance. Remote work can be a boon to family life even if it limits other forms of social interaction. The online popularity of long podcasts might betoken a retreat from literate to oral culture, but it’s at least counterexample to the general trend of short, shorter, shortest.But in many cases, the virtual substitutes are clearly inferior to what they’re replacing. The streaming algorithm tends to yield artistic mediocrity compared with the movies of the past, or even the golden age television shows of 20 years ago. BookTok is to literature as OnlyFans is to great romantic love. Online sources of local news are generally lousy compared with the vanished ecosystem of print newspapers. Online friendships are thinner than real-world relationships, online dating pairs fewer people off successfully than the dating markets of the prior age. Online porn — well, you get my point.But this substitution nonetheless succeeds and deepens because of the power of distraction. Even when the new forms are inferior to the older ones, they are more addictive, more immediate, easier to access — and they feel lower-risk, as well. Swipe-based online dating is less likely to find you a spouse, but it still feels much easier than flirting or otherwise putting yourself forward in physical reality. Video games may not offer the same kind of bodily experience as sports and games in real life, but the adrenaline spike is always on offer and there are fewer limits on how late and long you can play. The infinite scroll of social media is worse than a good movie, but you can’t look away, and novels are incredibly hard going by comparison with TikTok or Instagram. Pornography is worse than sex, but it gives you a simulacrum of anything you want, whenever you want it, without any negotiation with another human being’s needs.So even though people ultimately get less out of the virtual substitutes, they still tend to come back to them and eventually depend on them. Thus under digital conditions social life attenuates, romance declines, institutions lose support, the fine arts fade and the popular arts are overrun with slop, and the basic skills and habits that our civilization took for granted — how to have an extended conversation, how to approach a woman or man with romantic interest, how to sit undistracted with a movie or a book — are transmitted only weakly to the next generation (emphasis added).
Is the "digital world" really an entryway into oblivion, into anything that could properly be called "extinction"? As I read Douthat, he's not kidding. He believes it:
Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward....
All of this describes our trajectory before artificial intelligence entered the picture, and every force I’ve just described is likely to become more intense the more A.I. remakes our lives. You can have far more substitution — digital workers for flesh-and-blood colleagues, ChatGPT summaries for original books, A.I. girlfriends and boyfriends and companions. You can have far more distraction — an endless stream of A.I.-generated content and entertainment and addictive slop from a “creator” whose engine never tires. And you will absolutely have a stronger sense of human obsolescence or superfluity — economic and social, artistic and intellectual — if A.I. travels just a little bit farther along its current lines of advance. It’s as though all the trends of the digital era have been building up to this consummation of its logic (emphasis added).
Does Douthat have any suggestion about how to survive? Here is his best thought:
How much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices — the choice to date and love and marry and procreate, the choice to fight for particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews, the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master.Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read.
As the bottleneck tightens, all survival will depend on heeding once again the ancient admonition: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live (emphasis added).
I think that Douthat's worries are well-founded. We are losing contact with "reality," and our contemporary politics reflect this fact. Our current president, for example, is taking what amount to random actions that are based upon his personal prejudices and preferences, and the "experts," whose advice he deigns to recognize, are telling us that our economy - in fact, the world economy - and the cohesion and continuation of our political and social order - have been put in significant jeopardy.
It is encouraging to see millions on the streets, out and about, and protesting and "resisting" in the real world, in public squares and along city streets. We are coming "offline," and coming out, back into that real world which is not, ultimately, a human creation, but the mysterious gift that has been given to all humans.
Douthat's advice, phrased as I like to say it, is pretty clear:
Real life friends is what I am talking about - and I don't mean online! Join up with them now!
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