How AI Is Quietly Changing What It Means to Be Alone

Addendum to Derek Thompson’s “The Anti-Social Century”

Journalist Derek Thompson has a must-read essay on The Atlantic’s February cover: The Anti-Social Century. It’s a broad look at the trends that have defined America’s society (also Europe, I can attest to that) for the last 30 years, especially “rising solitude” as he puts it. I don’t want to do Thompson’s work a disservice by summarizing it half-heartedly so I urge you to go read it (after you read this).

I won’t go over his ideas in detail but build on top of them by focusing on what’s coming from AI. Things will get even worse if we don’t first recognize the challenge and then set out to solve it. I see two possible paths ahead. One leads to a garden. The other to a desert. The garden demands collective awareness and action; the desert, nothing — it’s the default, the path we’re already on. And it’s where we’ll remain unless, as Thompson, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and others have long warned, we correct the wrong turns we’ve taken.

If you know how the world works — namely, its immense inertia — you’ll forgive me for not being as optimistic as I’d like in this post. Meta’s AI-generated content creators, which I discussed recently, are just the latest piece in a much larger puzzle. Meta has shelved the project temporarily due to backlash, but they’ll be back — this time wiser from their mistakes, our energy to resist slightly depleted, and their bottomless coffers, well…