An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.

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. Some of these substitutes have meaningful upsides. But in many cases, the virtual substitutes are clearly inferior to what they’re replacing. 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. 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. Then, finally, as local embodied experience becomes less important than virtual alternatives, the power of substitution and distraction feeds a sense that real-world life is fundamentally obsolete. Unless the true A.I. doomsayers are correct, in the year 2100 there will still be nations, families, religions, children, marriages, great books. But 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.