What happens to civilisation when we\u2019re so deep in our separate, virtual worlds that we feel no comradeship?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It\u2019s a proof of Rosen\u2019s point that my friends and I increasingly find ourselves reminiscing about our pre-smartphone reality-based childhoods, like refugees remembering a country left long ago. We recall the endless waiting with no way of knowing how long the wait would be, and the various means we used to pass the endless time.<\/p>\n
We became extremely involved with the very near environment. We examined paving stones. We peered into cracks and picked satisfying paint flakes from walls. In the car, we misted the glass with our germy breath and raced the raindrops. We chewed paper; bit our own forearms, inspecting the little dented marks; spent hours face-down on lawns, studying grass.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019d asked us back then, which no-body did, we\u2019d have said we were bored to death and that the extinction of this sort of experience could only be a blessing. But we lived in constant communion not with a touchscreen but with the close-up real world, and in retrospect it was sort of wonderful.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s been a lot written about the disastrous effect of smartphones on our private lives, what you miss when you chat, even date, via a screen. But just as disturbing, says Rosen, is the extinction of experience from public life: the lack of acknowledgement that we\u2019re all here in the same space. I\u2019m a slack parent in most ways, but a fanatical enforcer of that little wave of gratitude a pedestrian gives a car which stops for them at a zebra crossing. This gesture is the bedrock of civilisation, I reckon, and there\u2019s hell to pay when my son forgets. But it\u2019s a dying convention. Barely one in five passers-by now gives the wave. And almost no one on the street looks at each other any more.<\/p>\n
\u2018Civil inattention,\u2019 Rosen calls it. I\u2019ve been trying, just for fun, to make eye contact with the twentysomething baristas in the caf\u00e9s round my way \u2013 the very serious purveyors of impeccable flat whites. They hate it. Their eyeballs slide sideways and widen with terror. Smartphone-induced, contact-avoidant anxiety. Or could be that they just think I\u2019m dangerously insane?<\/p>\n
What happens to public life, and what happens to civilisation, when we\u2019ve sunk so deep into our separate, virtual worlds that we feel no sense of comradeship with the humans right next to us? Rosen thinks there\u2019s a terrible price to be paid. \u2018Our use of technology has fundamentally changed not just our awareness in public spaces but our sense of duty to others,\u2019 she writes. \u2018Engaged with the glowing screens in front of us rather than with the people around us, we often don\u2019t notice what is going on.\u2019 Worse: we don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n
In 2019 a man violently attacked a 78-year-old woman on the New York subway. No one intervened, but all manner of people whipped out their phones, filmed the fun event and shared it online, where it was viewed more than ten million times. \u2018It was not long ago that witnessing the death by suicide of another human being would have registered as a traumatic event,\u2019 says Rosen. \u2018But now we read stories about a woman in New York who purposely used a suicidal man on the bridge as a backdrop for a selfie.\u2019 Police in America and the UK have had to issue statements begging people who witness an assault to call for help before they start to record it.<\/p>\n
If I could, I\u2019d like to get a copy of Rosen\u2019s book to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, proud father to ChatGPT, and one of the leaders in the great global AI race. Last week Altman addressed the world on the subject of the coming AI apocalypse, the point at which computers overtake us in intelligence and the world is forever transformed. \u2018In still very important ways, the 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before,\u2019 he wrote. \u2018We are building a brain for the world\u2026 We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out.\u2019<\/p>\n
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