Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But 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.
When college students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies. . . .
When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.
And when, because people don’t pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that’s the last squeeze, the tightest part of the bottleneck, the literal die-off. . . .
This isn’t just a normal churn where travel agencies go out of business or Netflix replaces the VCR. Everything that we take for granted is entering into the bottleneck. And for anything that you care about — from your nation to your worldview to your favorite art form to your family — the key challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it’s still there on the other side.
That challenge is made more complex by the fact that much of this extinction will seem voluntary. 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.
In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make 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.
Interesting, but I think this is a minor challenge compared to what happens when AI-powered robots can do literally everything better than we can. I am also not especially worried that humanity will go extinct. A transition to a much smaller population, as in Korea, will be hard, but for most of our history there were only a few hundred million of us and we did fine.
4 comments:
A transition to a much smaller population, as in Korea, will be hard, but for most of our history there were only a few hundred million of us and we did fine.
Sure - we humans, as a speciesmight do fine! But what about the shareholders and Wall Street, etc?!? Won't someone think of the poor Capitalists?!?
What a catastrophic, apocalyptic perspective, so typical of old age pessimism. No, there is no bottleneck, that is pure invention, either woke- or maga- derision talk. The one and only real threat to human kind is overpopulation, the continuous growth, either geometric or exponential. That is what is exhausting the planet. turning our cities into hell, our transport systems into chaos and failure, our schools and universities into mass medicritization; our food production into a large variety of food poisoning, our local epidemies into worldwide dramas, the pollution from industry, uncontrolled consumption, massive constant travelling and disasters. Nothing to do with tchnologies, new or old, nor with media or AI; no 'new era' is killing us softly, we are comitting suicide by excessive rates of procreation - excessive for this planet. And the end of this will NOT be a small elite vs. large numbers of retarded or deficient human beings. but simply a worlwide war, probably nuclear. That is what happens when our race is desperately competing for resources. Either some survive and we will have a new era, possibly better managed, or not.
I wonder if the formula, "for most of our history there were only a few hundred million of us and we did fine," doesn't take the easy-breezy optimism schtick too far, even for John. After all, one could say the same about the Black Death, or brutalist architecture. Among other things, it assumes that women will start breeding again at replacement rate, at least, and continue doing so indefinitely. How would that happen? Finest-hour-style "let's all make babies for the sake of the species" enthusiasm isn't working very well so far, and seems a flimsy foundation for group survival.
I suppose "patriarchal religious cultism" might step in to fill the breach, and indeed this pair of posts is making me consider that pre-modern societies may have been broadly characterized by an at least social, if not always strictly religious, quasi-indoctrination that might seem pretty cult-like to contemporary westerners. But in the post-post-postmodern circumstances we're positing, would that be viable? Would it be bearable?
The blunt fact is that declining birthrates are the result of choice. This suggests that a) reproduction itself, as opposed to sex, may be less of an instinct than is, or used to be, commonly supposed; b) pre-modern societies survived and expanded demographically because training, raw coercion, and lack of reliable birth control technology circumvented choice in this matter, or, among women, limited it to a tiny few; c) possession of the capacity for choice may be biologically maladaptive, unless culture counteracts it in the most biologically essential matters; and d) the only way that the species could survive with a modern culture of personal freedom--which I, for one, wouldn't want to live without--would be if technology could turn reproduction into a matter of machines. This last, of course, raises, at least at the margins, the familiar question of a future in which humans become the pleasure-seeking adjuncts or pets of machines, a future that seems dystopian to me, but may not be to those who live it.
Proximate versus ultimate causes.
So say the biologists and evolutionary psychologists. Proximate -- hormones, pleasure of sex, etc. lead to the ultimate cause -- intercourse. As you say, science and modern freedoms have broken the connection. And we are no longer cavemen, so why not!
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