Transcription
Good morning. This is a very impressive crowd. It's a great pleasure to be here with you.
Um, on what is, I understand, a record-setting day for the United Kingdom, which my children are experiencing right now in an Airbnb, sadly deprived of air conditioning because their father booked it thinking of his last trip to the United Kingdom in summer when it was 70° and raining every day. And I know I'm supposed to be here providing answers and hope for our civilizational crisis, but I'm afraid I've become a bit of a monomaniac. And so my answer to everything right now is air conditioning.
What? What will? What will save? Yeah, that's right. That's right. Start off. What? What will save Europe from a long slide into a dark night of barbarism? Air conditioning. What will enable us to think great thoughts and dare greatly and build great things? Obviously, air conditioning. And I could continue in this vein, but honestly, if you'd like to hear more, you can find me on a small packing crate in the Hyde Park Speakers' Corner after this event, where I'll just be shouting about air conditioning to passersby.
I want to talk for a moment about what you might call the technological substrate of our civilizational challenges today. So, I'm going to talk a little bit less about politics and ideological conflict and a little bit more about what life under digital conditions means for human beings. Because I think a lot of our present difficulties and derangements are layered on top of an underlying condition that isn't just a threat to Western civilization or civilization generally, but to the existence of human beings as human beings. That sounds like a dark statement, and I know I'm doing a pivot to optimism and hope. So, I promise to get there at the end. But, let's talk about digital existence for a moment.
What has the digital world meant for human beings, younger human beings especially, growing up under very online, very iPhone-driven conditions over the last 20 years? I would submit to you that it has involved three forces building off one another. The first force is the force of substitution. What we have lived through as a culture is a substitution of digital goods for in-person, real, flesh-and-blood goods. Over and over again, technology has offered to us opportunities to do things online that we would have previously done in person. And some of those substitutions have been beneficial. I write a column for the New York Times and run a podcast, so you could say that I've built my entire career on a certain kind of substitution, where I'm offering you wonderful conversation on the internet instead of in real life. So, I can't be too critical of these trends. But, I do think that overall, in many, many cases, the effect of this transformation has been to substitute inferior goods for superior goods.
Online dating has made many happy and successful marriages, but overall, the culture of online dating is inferior as a mechanism for bringing men and women together relative to a culture that emphasized school, church, community organizations, family members, social networks, going to your local pub as a mechanism for bringing the sexes together. We've substituted, and gotten worse. The same is true of friendship and personal relationships. I've made many wonderful friends on the internet. Some of them are here in this room with me right now, somewhere out there. It's just like the internet, you're somewhere, you're somewhere out there in this room. And, and I'm appreciative of that, but overall, you can see this in the data, online life is good for loneliness and bad for fundamental human connection. And the same is true in politics. Online politics is a simulation. It's a world where you can sort of perform, and performance breeds ideological extremism, it breeds disconnection from actual lived reality, and it breeds disconnection even from the ordinary work of political organizing and engagement and persuasion, such that people confuse a life lived entirely on social media for a life as an engaged citizen of a democratic republic. So, in all of those different ways and more, the substituted goods are inferior.
But then the second step comes in, and that step is distraction. The goods are inferior, but they're always available. They pull you in. They're designed to be addictive, to give you dopamine hits, to let you scroll through the screen infinitely and lose hours and days and large swaths of your life experiencing life as streaming video and online conversation and TikTok and YouTube and everything else. So, even though you know at some level, some level of your human self, that this is a non-ideal way to live, it's still an incredibly sticky way to live. It's incredibly hard to get out of it. So, you have substitution, you have distraction, and then finally you have obsolescence.
And this is where artificial intelligence and the age of artificial intelligence comes in. You have technologies that make ordinary everyday human life feel first inferior and subpar, maybe compared to what you're seeing on Instagram or in celebrity coverage or anywhere else on your tiny screens. And then the further AI advances, the more actual human engagement seems unnecessary to production, writing, aesthetic creation, um, all kinds of things that have heretofore seemed fundamental to human beings. And when you put these forces together and combine them with an era that was already suffering through a crisis of faith, a crisis of faith in God, a crisis of faith in what human beings can accomplish, a crisis of faith in national purpose and national capacity, a crisis of faith in the basic goodness of Western civilization, the result is a large environment of drift and ennui and despair in which a lot of things can simply and very quickly disappear.
And so the story of the next 25 to 50 years is very likely to be a story of mass extinction. And by extinction, I don't mean that everything will disappear or that, you know, the world, the world will simply vanish, but I mean that all kinds of habits and behaviors and forms of cultural transmission that people take for granted and expect to happen just fairly naturally. Like, of course, you know, your children will go to school and get a job and get married and have kids. All of that will not happen naturally. It will only happen under conditions of profound agency and intentionality. Whether you're trying to preserve an inheritance of fine arts, if you're interested in maintaining the existence of a college or university, if you're trying to make sure that people are still interested in the opera or the ballet, if you're interested in making sure that young people still read books or read anything at all, and if you're just interested, and this is the somewhat absurd and yet incredibly important part, in the basic continuity of the human race. The ability of families to have kids and societies to reproduce themselves and continue, none of that will happen automatically under digital conditions. All of it will happen only through conscious decision and conscious choice, and people and nations and cultures and institutions that don't choose consciously will find themselves disappearing. And I do mean entire nations. It's entirely possible that over the next 50 years, nations from Southern Europe to the Pacific Rim will cease to exist for demographic reasons in anything like the way that they exist today.
So, what survives? I just said agency and intentionality survives, but fundamentally what drives agency and intentionality is faith. Faith that human life is worth living. Faith that human beings have a cosmic destiny that they need to fulfill. Faith that life is worth living even under incredibly difficult conditions, even when success is not guaranteed. So, it's a mixture of optimism of the kind that you get from Elon Musk and the rocket builders and people who want to take us to Mars, and religious faith. A faith that says that even when it doesn't seem like things are going your way, even when you're not a trillionaire, even when your culture feels besieged and your everyday life feels difficult, still there is purpose and meaning in the struggle. In the struggle to wake up five children in your sweltering Airbnb before their father goes off to give a talk here, just to pick an example that for some reason is floating around in my mind.
But this, this is good news, I think. Fundamentally good news for people of faith, for people who already carry those beliefs, who already carry that confidence. Because I think the story of the next few decades is that those beliefs are going to be selected for in a kind of ruthlessly Darwinian fashion. That we are passing through a kind of bottleneck, a kind of evolutionary intensification of pressures on human beings. And everyone who has faith, everyone who believes that human life is worth living, everyone who believes that civilization is worth continuing, is trying to find the modes and ways of being and forms of building and forms of community that survive this period of pressure and come through and build whatever world awaits on the other side. And in that environment, it's also the case that a lot of forces that seem very powerful today, maybe including some of the forces that Michael was talking about in his prior remarks, may just be likely to not make it. In precisely because they lack the kind of intentionality and cosmic optimism that's required to get through the bottleneck. It may be that a lot of forces that seem very powerful and threatening today, over the next generation, will simply evanesce. Will simply go, precisely because they don't have confidence, optimism, and above all, faith.
But in the last minute, I will just offer a caution, which is that there are many different kinds of faith and many different kinds of belief in human cosmic destiny. And it may be that all of us in this room should be thinking as much about the forms of faith and forms of cosmic destiny that currently animate Silicon Valley and the world of artificial intelligence. And those are realms of great faith and profound optimism. But a quite different faith and a quite different optimism from Christian faith, the traditional biblical faith of Western civilization. There is some overlap, some room for common ground, but there are fundamental conflicts and fundamental ways in which the project that the people building the most important technology of our time, the technology that may drive a lot of the trends I started with, are just engaged in a battle with us to shape the world that will exist on the other side of this period of profound pressure on everything that we hold dear.
So the choice for us then in that conflict is to go back, to go back to the beginning and to go back to the biblical admonition. I have set before you today life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, let us all, let all of us choose life, that ourselves and our descendants may live. Thank you very much.