Technologies of Loneliness

Step 5: How to Succeed in the AI World

This series of Substack posts is designed to help us prepare for the enormous challenges that lie ahead in an AI dominant world. If you haven’t done so already, please read the previous posts. And please share the posts with family, friends, and colleagues.

Charles Darwin wrote that six universal emotions appear across all human cultures: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise. His theory, published originally in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, claimed that these emotions can be interpreted from innate facial expressions that serve as forms of communication.

Four of the six basic emotions are negative—sadness, fear, disgust, and anger. Surprise can be negative or positive.

One deep negative emotion that aligns with sadness but does not have a distinct facial expression is loneliness.

Loneliness Epidemic

We now have the most powerful communications technologies ever invented but we no longer talk to each other!

Emotional health, especially for young men, is weakening. Why?

Changes in the labor market

An alarming decline in the employment status of young men in recent years has taken place in part because men often lack the highly marketable, communication-based “soft skills” that women are more likely to possess. Adding to the problem, poor and less educated young men typically follow more traditional lifestyles, making even slight changes in gender roles difficult to navigate.

The information revolution has meant that work using the hands and body traditionally done mainly by men—farming, industrialized labor, construction, transportation, maintenance, and security, for example—is being replaced by new varieties of office employment.

Much more than ever before men must compete with women for jobs, recognition, and raises in pay. Women have now become the breadwinners in nearly half of American families. And according to Pew Research, pay differences between men and women continue to decrease.

Artificial intelligence looms as a permanent threat to everyone’s employment status, further undermining cultural traditions where men imagine themselves as the head of household

Changes in everyday culture

Partly blaming the “great rewiring of childhood” that has replaced outdoor play with time spent on the internet and video games, Jonathan Haidt describes the quandary of young males today as a “failure to launch”—to move successfully from adolescence to adulthood and its associated responsibilities.

Free play outdoors started to decrease in the 1980s while the personal computer was becoming a time-consuming indoor distraction. These interacting cultural and technological factors have brought about a transformation from “play-based childhood” to “phone-based childhood.”

While young females on average spend more time than young males with social media, many males have turned habitually to video games and pornography.

Over the years this behavior has led to the emergence of “broke and lonely” males in Scott Galloway’s words—bored, poorly educated young men who become addicted to technology and have little or no commitment to in-person relationships including friends.

In-person dating—traditionally initiated most often by males—has disappeared or changed radically. Gender fluidity for both sexes further complicates matters, contributing to the isolation of many young men socially and sexually.

Technology and Togetherness

Let’s put what’s happening today in historical perspective.

The connection that individual people have with each other has changed radically since electronic media first appeared.

Radio and television in the mid 20th century did two significant things: (1) it brought people together to share a common cultural experience, and (2) it distracted everyone from the routines and responsibilities of everyday life.

Broadcast television turned into cable TV, then to satellite TV, and later to streaming services. Smaller and cheaper TV sets encouraged individual viewing in different rooms in the home.

The Accelerant

Personal computers and smart phones greatly accelerated the individualization of cultural consumption and provides constant distractions, which extend way beyond childhood.

Emotional Expression

Negative by-products of the privatization of experience are (1) the lessening of meaningful real-time conversations, and (2) less in-person emotional expression. For example, easy-to-use emojis stand for feelings that are much better delivered in person. Touch and talk are far more comforting than clicks and likes.

Social Communication Reduces Loneliness

Emerging social communication skills—which allowed our ancestors to cooperate and trust each other—are what made Sapiens the most successful species on Earth.

The key to personal happiness in an AI dominant world extends this communication-based evolutionary process. Being willing and able to share your thoughts and feelings with others in person, and listening sensitively to theirs is crucial. Feeling more connected, content, and happy is going to depend increasingly on our ability to communicate well without machine intervention.

Adapt to Survive and Thrive in any Environment…

The perspective presented in my Substack posts is based on science that explains how communication drives the development of organic life, culture, and technology. Please go to my YouTube channel to learn more about the ways communication functions as the motor of evolution.