Recently I went to see my doctor for a follow-up to spine surgery that alleviated much of the severe pain that had been limiting my life in serious ways. The surgery was a success, and with less pain came more mobility, better sleep, and increased vitality. All these were extremely positive things, and I couldn’t wait to update him on my progress. I’ve had the same doctor for eight years, so there is a certain amount of familiarity, and as we briefly caught up he set down on the table a bright orange smartphone-like device and stated, “This is our new transcription service powered by AI, it will record our session to make it more efficient!”
Except it didn’t.
Several days later, when I logged on to my medical portal to read the notes, rather than its detailing the utter success of my surgery, which has led to increased stamina, more exercise, excellent blood work, and significant weight loss, I was confronted by just the opposite. It translated a very positive face-to-face conversation into something negative, to the point where it got most of the “facts” wrong in a way that was tragicomic. It translated what is, in effect, an AI hallucination. This set in motion what became an extremely inefficient process (multiple phone calls, paper forms mailed to my house, etc.) of correcting my medical record.
While this is a personal anecdote, it feels ripped straight from the pages of Christine Rosen’s new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has written widely about culture and technology for over two decades. Her latest book is essentially a cataloguing of the many ways that our technology-saturated culture is blurring the lines between what constitutes “real” experiences and virtual ones and trying to discern how it matters. In a mix of historical, sociological, and psychological investigations (theological anthropology is curiously absent), Rosen describes the current moment as one of an increasingly technological existence. She demonstrates throughout the book the myriad ways in which we are “formed in an increasingly digitized, mediated, hyperconnected, surveilled, and algorithmically governed world.”
Engaging these themes has been a preoccupation of science fiction writers for decades. Movies like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and The Matrix have all dealt with these topics in popular culture. And there’s the rub. I would argue that most people have already embraced/succumbed to this mode of being, become comfortable in a digitally mediated world of experience. In her chapter on human proximity, and what is lost when devices and software become our default ways of communicating, she states that “mediated life is becoming normal life, but we don’t register the transformation as revolutionary—or in many cases even register it at all.”
The main strength of The Extinction of Experience emerges from Rosen’s interest in what counts as “human experience.” What does it mean to be “embodied”? Is our existence a problem to be solved? Is efficiency in all things really a virtue?
On the flip side, some will look at the themes explored and accuse the author of contributing to the alarmism of the techno-pessimists. She deals with this head on: “Social critics of technology are often accused of inciting a misguided moral panic. When it comes to our understanding of experience, however, we could use a great deal more moral panic—if moral is understood as reminding of our obligations to one another.”
For example, Rosen’s chapter “Hand to Mouse” is an exposé of what it means for a culture to lose the idea of working with our hands. Rampant de-skilling is happening, whether it’s the loss of cursive writing, doodling and drawing by hand (rather than using CAD), or genuine craftsmanship of goods. It’s telling that many new architects cannot draw without the aid of computer software and that almost anything “handmade” is a luxury because of the time-intensive nature of crafting truly durable goods. This is why Rosen explains that “some critics argue that our desire for handmade goods is increasing because so much of what we buy is now mass-produced, alienating us from a human connection to the objects we use.”
She also argues that
the human condition is embodied, recognizes its fragility, frequently toggles between the mediated and unmediated, requires private spaces, and is finite. By contrast, the User Experience is disembodied and digital, it is trackable and databased and usually always mediated. It lacks privacy and promises no limits.
One of the strongest aspects of the book is Rosen’s grappling with the assumption that, once we submit to the use of digital tools in all areas of life, we will come to expect that “efficiency in human interactions is innately superior, an ideal that society should embrace. This expectation encourages the misguided notion that we should each act like technicians of our private lives, mimicking the technological virtues of efficiency, predictability, and repeatability in our interactions with one another.”
She demonstrates this emerging “mediated carnality” most poignantly in the changing patterns of how we eat, play, and have sexual experiences. One obvious example of the accelerated nature of this worldview is with the adult portal OnlyFans, which gets over one billion visits each month. At the zenith of its popularity in the 1970s, Playboy magazine had only five million “readers.” These numbers are staggering. And OnlyFans absolutely mints money. Financials released in early September show the company posting record revenue and profits, to the point that the CEO received $472 million in dividends after gross payments rose to $6.63 billion. While many people are lauding the many recent surveys showing a decline in teenage promiscuity and teen births (and many other risky behaviors), it’s obvious that the majority of our lusts are being satisfied algorithmically. As Jacques Ellul stated in 1977: “If it is wrong to call modern society a megamachine, we still should not forget that some people greatly desire to make it one.”
For readers in the know, many of the usual subjects are to be found in The Extinction of Experience: Montaigne, Adorno, Skinner, Orwell, Huxley, Pascal, Weil, Mill, Taylor, James, Weizenbaum, Nozick, Mumford, McLuhan, Ellul, Postman, Sennett, Berry, Carr, Turkle, et al. Yet Rosen also introduces in a manner worthy of an investigative reporter many new and updated sources, clearly documenting her skills as a researcher and social critic. That being said, an uncomfortable truth emerges when confronted by these arguments: in one form or another, they’ve all been expressed before. And this isn’t necessarily a critique of her book. I think Rosen combines some familiar ideas in ways that are truly thought-provoking and necessary. You will be challenged to think about what it means to be human in this hyper-efficient age. But I’m coming to the conclusion that these arguments are deafeningly obvious to a small remnant but becoming less convincing to mass-man. The hype cycles in the history of technology are well documented, and yet cunning marketers continue to find ways to convince us to call the Artificial Intelligence used in certain applications at work as our “colleagues” and to frame boredom as the enemy of personal fulfillment.
If you could curate a “frictionless” world full of manufactured serendipity, vicarious pleasures, and extreme individualization, would you? Are you? Even if it was an illusion?
We are wittingly participating in a modern retelling of the Ring of Gyges. The more we see the “other” as a problem to be solved, avoided, and manipulated, without considering virtues like justice and self-control, the strands of what it means to be part of the human race, each struggling within the human condition, will continue to be severed. And the more AI “hallucinations” may come to be regarded as reality, if even out of an exhausted resignation. It is right here, however, where a more full-throated, theologically bolstered anthropology might have helped guide us in holding fast to our integrity as incarnate beings, even ones grateful for the good gifts technology can bring.
