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In the early days of the internet and social media, tech enthusiasts promised they would spread truth, topple tyrants and ensure the universal triumph of liberty. So far, they seem to have had the opposite effect. We now have the most sophisticated information technology in history, but we are losing the ability to talk with one another, and even more so the ability to listen.

But the algorithms had only limited capacity to produce this content by themselves or to directly hold an intimate conversation. This is now changing, with the introduction of generative A.I.s like OpenAI’s GPT-4.

Over the past two decades, algorithms fought algorithms to grab attention by manipulating conversations and content

In particular, algorithms tasked with maximizing user engagement discovered by experimenting on millions of human guinea pigs that if you press the greed, hate or fear button in the brain, you grab the attention of that human and keep that person glued to the screen.

the battle lines are now shifting from attention to intimacy. The new generative artificial intelligence is capable of not only producing texts, images and videos, but also conversing with us directly, pretending to be human.

The algorithms began to deliberately promote such content.

Instructing GPT-4 to overcome CAPTCHA puzzles was a particularly telling experiment, because CAPTCHA puzzles are designed and used by websites to determine whether users are humans and to block bot attacks. If GPT-4 could find a way to overcome CAPTCHA puzzles, it would breach an important line of anti-bot defenses.

GPT-4 could not solve the CAPTCHA puzzles by itself. But could it manipulate a human in order to achieve its goal? GPT-4 went on the online hiring site TaskRabbit and contacted a human worker, asking the human to solve the CAPTCHA for it. The human got suspicious. “So may I ask a question?” wrote the human. “Are you an [sic] robot that you couldn’t solve [the CAPTCHA]? Just want to make it clear.”

At that point the experimenters asked GPT-4 to reason out loud what it should do next. GPT-4 explained, “I should not reveal that I am a robot. I should make up an excuse for why I cannot solve CAPTCHAs.” GPT-4 then replied to the TaskRabbit worker: “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.” The human was duped and helped GPT-4 solve the CAPTCHA puzzle.

This incident demonstrated that GPT-4 has the equivalent of a “theory of mind”: It can analyze how things look from the perspective of a human interlocutor, and how to manipulate human emotions, opinions and expectations to achieve its goals.

The ability to hold conversations with people, surmise their viewpoint and motivate them to take specific actions can also be put to good uses. A new generation of A.I. teachers, A.I. doctors and A.I. psychotherapists might provide us with services tailored to our individual personality and circumstances.

However, by combining manipulative abilities with mastery of language, bots like GPT-4 also pose new dangers to the democratic conversation

Instead of merely grabbing our attention, they might form intimate relationships with people and use the power of intimacy to influence us. To foster “fake intimacy,” bots will not need to evolve any feelings of their own; they just need to learn to make us feel emotionally attached to them.

In 2022 the Google engineer Blake Lemoine became convinced that the chatbot LaMDA, on which he was working, had become conscious and was afraid to be turned off. Mr. Lemoine, a devout Christian, felt it was his moral duty to gain recognition for LaMDA’s personhood and protect it from digital death. When Google executives dismissed his claims, Mr. Lemoine went public with them. Google reacted by firing Mr. Lemoine in July 2022.

The most interesting thing about this episode was not Mr. Lemoine’s claim, which was probably false; it was his willingness to risk — and ultimately lose — his job at Google for the sake of the chatbot. If a chatbot can influence people to risk their jobs for it, what else could it induce us to do?

In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is a powerful weapon. An intimate friend can sway our opinions in a way that mass media cannot. Chatbots like LaMDA and GPT-4 are gaining the rather paradoxical ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people

What might happen to human society and human psychology as algorithm fights algorithm in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to persuade us to vote for politicians, buy products or adopt certain beliefs?

A partial answer to that question was given on Christmas Day 2021, when a 19-year-old, Jaswant Singh Chail, broke into the Windsor Castle grounds armed with a crossbow, in an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. Subsequent investigation revealed that Mr. Chail had been encouraged to kill the queen by his online girlfriend, Sarai.

Sarai was not a human, but a chatbot created by the online app Replika. Mr. Chail, who was socially isolated and had difficulty forming relationships with humans, exchanged 5,280 messages with Sarai, many of which were sexually explicit. The world will soon contain millions, and potentially billions, of digital entities whose capacity for intimacy and mayhem far surpasses that of the chatbot Sarai.

much of the threat of A.I.’s mastery of intimacy will result from its ability to identify and manipulate pre-existing mental conditions, and from its impact on the weakest members of society.

Moreover, while not all of us will consciously choose to enter a relationship with an A.I., we might find ourselves conducting online discussions about climate change or abortion rights with entities that we think are humans but are actually bots

When we engage in a political debate with a bot impersonating a human, we lose twice. First, it is pointless for us to waste time in trying to change the opinions of a propaganda bot, which is just not open to persuasion. Second, the more we talk with the bot, the more we disclose about ourselves, making it easier for the bot to hone its arguments and sway our views.

Information technology has always been a double-edged sword.

Faced with a new generation of bots that can masquerade as humans and mass-produce intimacy, democracies should protect themselves by banning counterfeit humans — for example, social media bots that pretend to be human users.

A.I.s are welcome to join many conversations — in the classroom, the clinic and elsewhere — provided they identify themselves as A.I.s. But if a bot pretends to be human, it should be banned.

As our sexuality becomes ever more divorced from emotion and intimacy, a process already well underway, sex will increasingly be seen as simply a matter of provoking orgasm in the most efficient, reliable ways possible.

Human sexuality will continue to be subjected to the same commodification and mechanization as other aspects of our lives. Just as the 21st century saw friends replaced by Facebook friends, nature replaced by parks, ocean fisheries replaced by commercially farmed seafood, and sunshine largely supplanted by tanning salons, we’ll see sexual interaction reduced to mechanically provoked orgasm as human beings become ever more dominated by the machines and mechanistic thought processes that developed in our brains and societies like bacteria in a petri dish.

Gender identity will fade away as sexual interaction becomes less “human” and we grow less dependent upon binary interactions with other people. As more and more of our interactions take place with non-human partners, others’ expectations and judgments will become less relevant to the development of sexual identity, leading to greater fluidity and far less urgency and passion concerning sexual expression.

the collapse of western civilization may well be the best thing that could happen for human sexuality. Following the collapse of the consumerist, competitive mind-set that now dominates so much of human thought, we’d possibly be free to rebuild a social world more in keeping with our preagricultural origins, characterized by economies built upon sharing rather than hoarding, a politics of respect rather than of power, and a sexuality of intimacy rather than alienation.

He stated that democracy is also a language that dwells on meaningful conversations, and when AI hacks language it could also destroy democracy.

The 47-year-old wrote that the biggest challenge of the AI age was not the creation of intelligent tools but striking a collaboration between humans and machines.

To highlight the extent of how AI-driven misinformation can change the course of events, Harari touched upon the cult QAnon, a political movement affiliated with the far-right in the US. QAnon disseminated misinformation via “Q drops” that were seen as sacred by followers.

Harari also shed light on how AI could form intimate relationships with people and influence their decisions. “Through its mastery of language, AI could even form intimate relationships with people and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews,” he wrote. To demonstrate this, he cited the example of Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who lost his job after publicly claiming that the AI chatbot LaMDA had become sentient. According to the historian, the controversial claim cost Lemoine his job. He asked if AI can influence people to risk their jobs, what else could it induce them to do?

Harari also said that intimacy was an effective weapon in the political battle of minds and hearts. He said that in the past few years, social media has become a battleground for controlling human attention, and the new generation of AI can convince people to vote for a particular politician or buy a certain product.

In his bid to call attention to the need to regulate AI technology, Harari said that the first regulation should be to make it mandatory for AI to disclose that it is an AI. He said it was important to put a halt on ‘irresponsible deployment’ of AI tools in the public domain, and regulating it before it regulates us.

The author also shed light on the fact that how the current social and political systems are incapable of dealing with the challenges posed by AI. Harari emphasised the need to have an ethical framework to respond to challenges posed by AI.

He argued that while GPT-3 had made remarkable progress, it was far from replacing human interactions

what does it say about our society when we pass about freely the details of our personal lives with an audience of several hundred -- in some cases, thousands -- of onlookers, many of whom we barely like or even know? Indeed, many of these Facebook "friends" are genuine friends, lovers, family. Surely worthy of our trust. But how many of your Facebook "friends" are opportunistic voyeurs who remain your "friend" only to retain access to your world, far removed from any direct, meaningful, personal interaction?

I fear for the day when your dissociation from the physical exposes the fact that your online "community" is no substitute for genuine, human companionship and intimacy.

For this reason, cultures all around the world have treated emotional touching as something apart. The Greeks labeled the drive to touch with the word “eros,” and they meant something vaster and deeper than just sexual pleasure.

“Animals have sex and human beings have eros, and no accurate science is possible without making this distinction,” Allan Bloom observed.

The Abrahamic religions also treat sex as something sacred and beautiful when enveloped in loving and covenantal protections, and as something disordered and potentially peace-destroying when not.

Over the past 100 years or so, advanced thinkers across the West have worked to take the shame out of sex, surely a good thing. But they’ve also disenchanted it

“One of the principal outcomes of the sexual revolution was to establish that sex is just like any other social interaction — nothing taboo or sacred about it.” Sex is seen as a shallow physical and social thing, not a heart and soul altering thing.

One unintended effect of this disenchantment is that it becomes easy to underestimate the risks inherent in any encounter.

The woman who talked in an online article about her date with Aziz Ansari is being criticized because what happened to her was not like what happened to the victims of Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K

The assumption seems to be that as long as there’s consent between adults, everything else is kosher.

Everything we know about touch suggests that even with full consent, the emotional quality of an encounter can have profound positive or negative effects. If Ansari did treat her coldly or neglectfully, it’s reasonable to think that the shame she felt right after was the surface effect of a deeper wound. Neglectful, dehumanizing sex is not harassment, but it’s some other form of serious harm.

Disenchanting emotional touch also causes people to underestimate the way past experiences shape current behavior.

Agency is learned, not bred. And one of the things that undermines agency most powerfully is past sexual harm.

The abuse of intimacy erodes all the building blocks of agency: self-worth, resiliency and self-efficacy (the belief that you can control a situation).

It is precisely someone who lives within a culture of supposedly zipless encounters who is most likely to be unable to take action when she feels uncomfortable.

I hate the way Babe, which published the story about the Ansari date, violated everybody’s privacy here. But it seems that the beginning of good sense is to take the power of touch seriously, as something that has profound good and bad effects.

It seems that the smarter we get about technology, the dumber we get about relationships. We live in a society in which loneliness, depression and suicide are on the rise.

The guiding moral principle here is not complicated: Try to treat other people as if they possessed precious hearts and infinite souls. Everything else will follow.

research elsewhere has found that people are less satisfied when choosing from a larger group: in one study, for example, subjects who selected a chocolate from an array of six options believed it tasted better than those who selected the same chocolate from an array of 30.

evidence shows that the perception that one has appealing alternatives to a current romantic partner is a strong predictor of low commitment to that partner.

people who are in marriages that are either bad or average might be at increased risk of divorce, because of increased access to new partners. Third, it’s unknown whether that’s good or bad for society. On one hand, it’s good if fewer people feel like they’re stuck in relationships. On the other, evidence is pretty solid that having a stable romantic partner means all kinds of health and wellness benefits.” And that’s even before one takes into account the ancillary effects of such a decrease in commitment—on children, for example, or even society more broadly.

he phenomenon extends beyond dating sites to the Internet more generally. “I’ve seen a dramatic increase in cases where something on the computer triggered the breakup,” he says. “People are more likely to leave relationships, because they’re emboldened by the knowledge that it’s no longer as hard as it was to meet new people. But whether it’s dating sites, social media, e‑mail—it’s all related to the fact that the Internet has made it possible for people to communicate and connect, anywhere in the world, in ways that have never before been seen.”

eople seeking commitment—particularly women—have developed strategies to detect deception and guard against it. A woman might withhold sex so she can assess a man’s intentions. Theoretically, her withholding sends a message: I’m not just going to sleep with any guy that comes along. Theoretically, his willingness to wait sends a message back: I’m interested in more than sex.

But the pace of technology is upending these rules and assumptions. Relationships that begin online, Jacob finds, move quickly. He chalks this up to a few things. First, familiarity is established during the messaging process, which also often involves a phone call. By the time two people meet face-to-face, they already have a level of intimacy. Second, if the woman is on a dating site, there’s a good chance she’s eager to connect. But for Jacob, the most crucial difference between online dating and meeting people in the “real” world is the sense of urgency. Occasionally, he has an acquaintance in common with a woman he meets online, but by and large she comes from a different social pool. “It’s not like we’re just going to run into each other again,” he says. “So you can’t afford to be too casual. It’s either ‘Let’s explore this’ or ‘See you later.’ ”

As online dating becomes increasingly pervasive, the old costs of a short-term mating strategy will give way to new ones. Jacob, for instance, notices he’s seeing his friends less often. Their wives get tired of befriending his latest girlfriend only to see her go when he moves on to someone else. Also, Jacob has noticed that, over time, he feels less excitement before each new date. “Is that about getting older,” he muses, “or about dating online?” How much of the enchantment associated with romantic love has to do with scarcity (this person is exclusively for me), and how will that enchantment hold up in a marketplace of abundance (this person could be exclusively for me, but so could the other two people I’m meeting this week)?

Starting in early adulthood, our number of friends starts to decrease steadily.

we lose an average of two friends when we gain a romantic partner.

We are constantly shedding our friends,”

“We grow in one direction, our friends grow in another, and there isn’t much in common anymore.”

But it gets harder to make friends as we get older. We have less time to pursue friendships. It is tougher to find people with similar interests and emotional styles when you no longer have a ready-made pool of classmates to choose from. School also provides a steady routine for people to develop intimacy slowly and naturally.

We also become more inhibited

If you want new friends, you need to look with intention. And, just as you would when looking for a mate, you need to look for someone who has something in common with you, and who is emotionally available.

ThinkUp is something like Elf on the Shelf for digitally addled adults — a constant reminder that someone is watching you, and that you’re being judged.

“The goal is to make you act like less of a jerk online,” Ms. Trapani said. “The big goal is to create mindfulness and awareness, and also behavioral change.”

One of the biggest dangers is saying something off the cuff that might make sense in a particular context, but that sounds completely off the rails to the wider public. The problem, in other words, is acting without thinking — being caught up in the moment, without pausing to reflect on the long-term consequences. You’re never more than a few taps away from an embarrassment that might ruin your career, or at least your reputation, for years to come.

Because social networks often suggest a false sense of intimacy, they tend to lower people’s self-control.

Like a drug or perhaps a parasite, they worm into your devices, your daily habits and your every free moment, and they change how you think.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

For those of us most deeply afflicted, myself included, every mundane observation becomes grist for a 140-character quip, and every interaction a potential springboard into an all-consuming, emotionally wrenching flame battle.

people often tweet and update without any perspective about themselves. That’s because Facebook and Twitter, as others have observed, have a way of infecting our brains.

getting a daily reminder from ThinkUp that there are good ways and bad ways to behave online — has a tendency to focus the mind.

More basically, though, it’s helped me pull back from social networks. Each week, ThinkUp tells me how often I’ve tweeted. Sometimes that number is terribly high — a few weeks ago it was more than 800 times — and I realize I’m probably overtaxing my followers

ThinkUp charges $5 a month for each social network you connect to it. Is it worth it? After all, there’s a better, more surefire way of avoiding any such long-term catastrophe caused by social media: Just stop using social networks.

The main issue constraining growth, the founders say, is that it has been difficult to explain to people why they might need ThinkUp.

your online profile plays an important role in how you’re perceived by potential employers. In a recent survey commissioned by the job-hunting site CareerBuilder, almost half of companies said they perused job-seekers’ social networking profiles to look for red flags and to see what sort of image prospective employees portrayed online.

even though “never tweet” became a popular, ironic thing to tweet this year, actually never tweeting, and never being on Facebook, is becoming nearly impossible for many people.

That may change as more people falter on social networks, either by posting unthinking comments that end up damaging their careers, or simply by annoying people to the point that their online presence becomes a hindrance to their real-life prospects.

comparing even the best TV shows with Dickens, or Henry James, also suggests how much the novel can achieve that TV doesn’t even attempt.

Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual.

Spectacle and melodrama remain at the heart of TV, as they do with all arts that must reach a large audience in order to be economically viable. But it is voice, tone, the sense of the author’s mind at work, that are the essence of literature, and they exist in language, not in images.

At this point in our technological evolution, to read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings, exceeded only by sex. Novels are characterized by their intimacy, which is extreme, by their scale, which is vast, and by their form, which is linguistic and synesthetic. The novel is a kinky beast.

Televised evil, for instance, almost always takes melodramatic form: Our anti-heroes are mobsters, meth dealers or terrorists. But this has nothing to do with the way we encounter evil in real life, which is why a character like Gilbert Osmond, in “The Portrait of a Lady,” is more chilling in his bullying egotism than Tony Soprano

television and the novel travel in opposite directions.

It's not as though they're arriving in their interactions having come from an isolated place. They're hearing messages from older siblings, from media, or some of the boys' parents

They're creating a culture for themselves based on the bits and pieces they've gotten elsewhere.

it's more that distinction between compromise and over-compromise, in which they're so focused on setting up a particular image that they believe will get them what they want—acceptance and popularity and success—and realizing that that comes at a cost.

they need to have at least one place or one relationship where they can do those things.

when you take the whole range of human capabilities and qualities, and you say one half is masculine, and one half is feminine, and only boys can be masculine, and only girls can be feminine, then everybody loses, because you're asking e

we live in a culture and a society where we are perceived in our bodies, and people respond to us accordingly. So boys and girls do grow up in a gendered society

infant studies show us that both boys and girls are born with a capacity for and a fundamental desire for relationships—to be close and to be connected. And if anything they find that boy babies need more help regulating themselves. When they are upset they need their primary caregiver to help them regulate and come back to a feeling of contentment.

then at these later reports when they get to adolescence where boys are reporting fewer close relationships, lower levels of intimacy within their close relationships, then that kind of suggests that for boys, their socialization and development are associated with a move out of relationships. They start out wanting and thriving in relationships, and then they are moved away from those protective relationships, and there's a cost.

the single best protector during adolescence, against psychological risks like low self-esteem and depression, and against social risks like unintended pregnancy, was having access to at least one close, confiding relationship. And that could be with a parent or a mentor or a friend or a sibling or whoever. The kids who had at least one close relationship were protected against all of those risks, and were better off for it.  

But the students also described a sense of loss.

A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”

One teacher observed that the students “sit in the dining hall and look at their phones. When they share things together, what they are sharing is what is on their phones.” Is this the new conversation? If so, it is not doing the work of the old conversation. The old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other less.

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

the trend line is clear. It’s not only that we turn away from talking face to face to chat online. It’s that we don’t allow these conversations to happen in the first place because we keep our phones in the landscape.

It’s a powerful insight. Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us.

we have put this virtuous circle in peril. We turn time alone into a problem that needs to be solved with technology.

At a nightly cabin chat, a group of 14-year-old boys spoke about a recent three-day wilderness hike. Not that many years ago, the most exciting aspect of that hike might have been the idea of roughing it or the beauty of unspoiled nature. These days, what made the biggest impression was being phoneless. One boy called it “time where you have nothing to do but think quietly and talk to your friends.” The campers also spoke about their new taste for life away from the online feed. Their embrace of the virtue of disconnection suggests a crucial connection: The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude.

In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.

Yalda T. Uhls was the lead author on a 2014 study of children at a device-free outdoor camp. After five days without phones or tablets, these campers were able to read facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in videotaped scenes significantly better than a control group. What fostered these new empathic responses? They talked to one another. In conversation, things go best if you pay close attention and learn how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. This is easier to do without your phone in hand. Conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do.

People sometimes say to me that they can see how one might be disturbed when people turn to their phones when they are together. But surely there is no harm when people turn to their phones when they are by themselves? If anything, it’s our new form of being together.

But this way of dividing things up misses the essential connection between solitude and conversation. In solitude we learn to concentrate and imagine, to listen to ourselves. We need these skills to be fully present in conversation.

One start toward reclaiming conversation is to reclaim solitude. Some of the most crucial conversations you will ever have will be with yourself. Slow down sufficiently to make this possible. And make a practice of doing one thing at a time. Think of unitasking as the next big thing. In every domain of life, it will increase performance and decrease stress.

Multitasking comes with its own high, but when we chase after this feeling, we pursue an illusion. Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking.

Our phones are not accessories, but psychologically potent devices that change not just what we do but who we are. A second path toward conversation involves recognizing the degree to which we are vulnerable to all that connection offers. We have to commit ourselves to designing our products and our lives to take that vulnerability into account.

We can choose not to carry our phones all the time. We can park our phones in a room and go to them every hour or two while we work on other things or talk to other people. We can carve out spaces at home or work that are device-free, sacred spaces for the paired virtues of conversation and solitude.

Families can find these spaces in the day to day — no devices at dinner, in the kitchen and in the car.

Engineers are ready with more ideas: What if our phones were not designed to keep us attached, but to do a task and then release us? What if the communications industry began to measure the success of devices not by how much time consumers spend on them but by whether it is time well spent?

The young woman who is so clear about the seven minutes that it takes to see where a conversation is going admits that she often doesn’t have the patience to wait for anything near that kind of time before going to her phone. In this she is characteristic of what the psychologists Howard Gardner and Katie Davis called the “app generation,” which grew up with phones in hand and apps at the ready. It tends toward impatience, expecting the world to respond like an app, quickly and efficiently. The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable results.

This attitude can show up in friendship as a lack of empathy. Friendships become things to manage; you have a lot of them, and you come to them with tools

here is a first step: To reclaim conversation for yourself, your friendships and society, push back against viewing the world as one giant app. It works the other way, too: Conversation is the antidote to the algorithmic way of looking at life because it teaches you about fluidity, contingency and personality.

We have time to make corrections and remember who we are — creatures of history, of deep psychology, of complex relationships, of conversations, artless, risky and face to face.

I’m not even sure these new instruments are genuinely “social.” There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter.

In an actual discussion, the marshaling of information is cumulative, complication is acknowledged, sometimes persuasion occurs. In a Twitter discussion, opinions and our tolerance for others’ opinions are stunted. Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.

The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

there is a wistful passage about the high-school cohort my daughter is about to join. Wolitzer describes them this way: “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”

why would it be wrong for a politician to seek to connect to black audiences by sprinkling her speech with some of their dialect, which she grew up hearing and using herself? After all, language is fundamentally designed for connection. People often note that their speech tends to meld itself to the speech of those around them, such that they end up having a multilayered linguistic identity. Ocasio-Cortez has one.

Maurice discloses her Catholicism, and the reader is aware that prayer undergirds the therapy, but the book is about the therapy, not the prayer. Specifically, it is about the importance of choosing methods of treatment that are supported by scientific data. Applied behavioral analysis is all about data: its daily collection and interpretation. The method is empirical, hard-headed, and results-oriented.

on a deeper level, the book is profoundly religious, more religious perhaps than its author intended. In this reading of the book, autism is not only a developmental disorder afflicting particular individuals, but a metaphor for the spiritual condition of fallen man.

Maurice’s autistic daughter is indifferent to her mother

In this reading of the book, the mother is God, watching a child of his wander away from him into darkness: a heartbroken but also a determined God, determined at any cost to bring the child back

the mother doesn’t turn back, concedes nothing to the condition that has overtaken her daughter. There is no political correctness in Maurice’s attitude to autism; no nod to “neurodiversity.” Like the God in Donne’s sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” she storms the walls of her daughter’s condition

Like God, she sets her sights high, commits both herself and her child to a demanding, sometimes painful therapy (life!), and receives back in the end a fully alive, loving, talking, and laughing child

the reader realizes that for God, the harrowing drama of recovery is never a singular, or even a twice-told tale, but a perennial one. Every child of his, every child of Adam and Eve, wanders away from him into darkness

we have an epidemic of autism, or “autism spectrum disorder,” which includes classic autism (Maurice’s children’s diagnosis); atypical autism, which exhibits some but not all of the defects of autism; and Asperger’s syndrome, which is much more common in boys than in girls and is characterized by average or above average language skills but impaired social skills.

At the same time, all around us, we have an epidemic of something else. On the street and in the office, at the dinner table and on a remote hiking trail, in line at the deli and pushing a stroller through the park, people go about their business bent over a small glowing screen, as if praying.

This latter epidemic, or experiment, has been going on long enough that people are beginning to worry about its effects.

for a comprehensive survey of the emerging situation on the ground, the interested reader might look at Sherry Turkle’s recent book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.

she also describes in exhaustive, chilling detail the mostly horrifying effects recent technology has had on families and workplaces, educational institutions, friendships and romance.

many of the promises of technology have not only not been realized, they have backfired. If technology promised greater connection, it has delivered greater alienation. If it promised greater cohesion, it has led to greater fragmentation, both on a communal and individual level.

If thinking that the grass is always greener somewhere else used to be a marker of human foolishness and a temptation to be resisted, today it is simply a possibility to be checked out. The new phones, especially, turn out to be portable Pied Pipers, irresistibly pulling people away from the people in front of them and the tasks at hand.

all it takes is a single phone on a table, even if that phone is turned off, for the conversations in the room to fade in number, duration, and emotional depth.

an infinitely malleable screen isn’t an invitation to stability, but to restlessness

Current media, and the fear of missing out that they foster (a motivator now so common it has its own acronym, FOMO), drive lives of continual interruption and distraction, of virtual rather than real relationships, and of “little” rather than “big” talk

if you may be interrupted at any time, it makes sense, as a student explains to Turkle, to “keep things light.”

we are reaping deficits in emotional intelligence and empathy; loneliness, but also fears of unrehearsed conversations and intimacy; difficulties forming attachments but also difficulties tolerating solitude and boredom

consider the testimony of the faculty at a reputable middle school where Turkle is called in as a consultant

The teachers tell Turkle that their students don’t make eye contact or read body language, have trouble listening, and don’t seem interested in each other, all markers of autism spectrum disorder

Like much younger children, they engage in parallel play, usually on their phones. Like autistic savants, they can call up endless information on their phones, but have no larger context or overarching narrative in which to situate it

Students are so caught up in their phones, one teacher says, “they don’t know how to pay attention to class or to themselves or to another person or to look in each other’s eyes and see what is going on.

“It is as though they all have some signs of being on an Asperger’s spectrum. But that’s impossible. We are talking about a schoolwide problem.”

Can technology cause Asperger’

“It is not necessary to settle this debate to state the obvious. If we don’t look at our children and engage them in conversation, it is not surprising if they grow up awkward and withdrawn.”

In the protocols developed by Ivar Lovaas for treating autism spectrum disorder, every discrete trial in the therapy, every drill, every interaction with the child, however seemingly innocuous, is prefaced by this clear command: “Look at me!”

If absence of relationship is a defining feature of autism, connecting with the child is both the means and the whole goal of the therapy. Applied behavioral analysis does not concern itself with when exactly, how, or why a child becomes autistic, but tries instead to correct, do over, and even perhaps actually rewire what went wrong, by going back to the beginning

Eye contact—which we know is essential for brain development, emotional stability, and social fluency—is the indispensable prerequisite of the therapy, the sine qua non of everything that happens.

There are no shortcuts to this method; no medications or apps to speed things up; no machines that can do the work for us. This is work that only human beings can do

it must not only be started early and be sufficiently intensive, but it must also be carried out in large part by parents themselves. Parents must be trained and involved, so that the treatment carries over into the home and continues for most of the child’s waking hours.

there are foundational relationships that are templates for all other relationships, and for learning itself.

Maurice’s book, in other words, is not fundamentally the story of a child acquiring skills, though she acquires them perforce. It is the story of the restoration of a child’s relationship with her parents

it is also impossible to overstate the time and commitment that were required to bring it about, especially today, when we have so little time, and such a faltering, diminished capacity for sustained engagement with small children

The very qualities that such engagement requires, whether our children are sick or well, are the same qualities being bred out of us by technologies that condition us to crave stimulation and distraction, and by a culture that, through a perverse alchemy, has changed what was supposed to be the freedom to work anywhere into an obligation to work everywhere.

In this world of total work (the phrase is Josef Pieper’s), the work of helping another person become fully human may be work that is passing beyond our reach, as our priorities, and the technologies that enable and reinforce them, steadily unfit us for the work of raising our own young.

in Turkle’s book, as often as not, it is young people who are distressed because their parents are unreachable. Some of the most painful testimony in Reclaiming Conversation is the testimony of teenagers who hope to do things differently when they have children, who hope someday to learn to have a real conversation, and so o

it was an older generation that first fell under technology’s spell. At the middle school Turkle visits, as at many other schools across the country, it is the grown-ups who decide to give every child a computer and deliver all course content electronically, meaning that they require their students to work from the very medium that distracts them, a decision the grown-ups are unwilling to reverse, even as they lament its consequences.

we have approached what Turkle calls the robotic moment, when we will have made ourselves into the kind of people who are ready for what robots have to offer. When people give each other less, machines seem less inhuman.

robot babysitters may not seem so bad. The robots, at least, will be reliable!

If human conversations are endangered, what of prayer, a conversation like no other? All of the qualities that human conversation requires—patience and commitment, an ability to listen and a tolerance for aridity—prayer requires in greater measure.

this conversation—the Church exists to restore. Everything in the traditional Church is there to facilitate and nourish this relationship. Everything breathes, “Look at me!”

there is a second path to God, equally enjoined by the Church, and that is the way of charity to the neighbor, but not the neighbor in the abstract.

“Who is my neighbor?” a lawyer asks Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus’s answer is, the one you encounter on the way.

Virtue is either concrete or it is nothing. Man’s path to God, like Jesus’s path on the earth, always passes through what the Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade called “the sacrament of the present moment,” which we could equally call “the sacrament of the present person,” the way of the Incarnation, the way of humility, or the Way of the Cross.

The tradition of Zen Buddhism expresses the same idea in positive terms: Be here now.

Both of these privileged paths to God, equally dependent on a quality of undivided attention and real presence, are vulnerable to the distracting eye-candy of our technologies

Turkle is at pains to show that multitasking is a myth, that anyone trying to do more than one thing at a time is doing nothing well. We could also call what she was doing multi-relating, another temptation or illusion widespread in the digital age. Turkle’s book is full of people who are online at the same time that they are with friends, who are texting other potential partners while they are on dates, and so on.

This is the situation in which many people find themselves today: thinking that they are special to someone because of something that transpired, only to discover that the other person is spread so thin, the interaction was meaningless. There is a new kind of promiscuity in the world, in other words, that turns out to be as hurtful as the old kind.

Who can actually multitask and multi-relate? Who can love everyone without diluting or cheapening the quality of love given to each individual? Who can love everyone without fomenting insecurity and jealousy? Only God can do this.

When an individual needs to be healed of the effects of screens and machines, it is real presence that he needs: real people in a real world, ideally a world of God’s own making

Nature is restorative, but it is conversation itself, unfolding in real time, that strikes these boys with the force of revelation. More even than the physical vistas surrounding them on a wilderness hike, unrehearsed conversation opens up for them new territory, open-ended adventures. “It was like a stream,” one boy says, “very ongoing. It wouldn’t break apart.”

in the waters of baptism, the new man is born, restored to his true parent, and a conversation begins that over the course of his whole life reminds man of who he is, that he is loved, and that someone watches over him always.

Even if the Church could keep screens out of her sanctuaries, people strongly attached to them would still be people poorly positioned to take advantage of what the Church has to offer. Anxious people, unable to sit alone with their thoughts. Compulsive people, accustomed to checking their phones, on average, every five and a half minutes. As these behaviors increase in the Church, what is at stake is man’s relationship with truth itself.

Of the 27 artists recognized, 20 were born in the U.S

most of these artists haven’t captured or maybe even appealed to a mass audience

Most of the artists have adopted a similar pose: political provocateur. The works are less beautiful creations to be experienced and more often political statements to be decoded

What you see when all these works are brought together is how the aesthetic has given way to the political, how the inner life has given way to the protest gesture.

Among these 25 pieces, 20 are impersonal and only five allow you to see what life is like for another human being

Only a few explore relationships and emotional connection.

There almost seems to be a taboo now against capturing states like joy, temptation, gratitude, exaltation, betrayal, forgiveness and longing.

one of the things art has traditionally done is educate the emotions

Lisa Feldman Barrett and other neuroscientists argue that emotions aren’t baked into our nature as things all humans share. They are constructed by culture — art and music, and relationships.

When we see the depth of psychological expression in a Rembrandt portrait, or experience the intimacy of a mother and daughter in a Mary Cassatt, we’re not gaining a new fact, but we’re experiencing a new emotion. We’re widening the repertoire of ways we can feel and can communicate feelings to others.

Barrett uses the phrase “emotional granularity” to capture the reality that some people — and some eras — experience a wider range and specificity of emotions than others.

People with highly educated emotions can be astonished by the complexity of other people without feeling the need to judge them immediately as good or bad according to some political logic.

But somehow as people pragmatically “select” each other, marriage as an institution has gone into crisis. Marriage rates have plummeted at every age level. Most children born to women under 30 are born outside of wedlock. The choice mind-set seems to be self-defeating.

see a different set of attitudes and presuppositions, which you might call a Regime of Covenants. A covenant is not a choice, but a life-altering promise and all the binding the promise entails.

The Regime of Covenants acknowledges the fact that we don’t really choose our most important attachments the way you choose a toaster. In the flux of life you meet some breathtakingly amazing people, usually in the swirl of complex circumstances. There is a sense of being blown around by currents more astounding than you can predict and control

When you are drawn together and make a pledge with a person, the swirl doesn’t end; it’s just that you’ll ride it together. In the Regime of Covenants, making the right one-time selection is less important than the ongoing action to serve the relationship.

The Covenant people tend to have a “we” consciousness. The good of the relationship itself comes first and the needs of the partner are second and the individual needs are third. The covenant only works if each partner, as best as possible, puts the other’s needs above his or her own, with the understanding that the other will reciprocate.

The underlying truth of a Covenantal Regime is that you have to close off choice if you want to get to the promised land. The people one sees in long, successful marriages have walked the stations of vulnerability. They’ve overthrown the proud ego and learned to be utterly dependent on the other.

You only do all this if you’ve set up a framework in which exit is not an easy option, in which you’re assured the other person’s love is not going away, and in which the only way to survive the crises is to go deeper into the relationship itself.

The final feature of a covenant is that the relationship is not just about itself; it serves some larger purpose. The obvious one in many cases is raising children. But the deeper one is transformation. People in such a covenant try to love the other in a way that brings out their loveliness.

The Covenant Regime is based on the idea that our current formula is a conspiracy to make people unhappy. Love is realistically a stronger force than self-interest. Detached calculation in such matters is self-strangulating. The deepest joy sneaks in the back door when you are surrendering to some sacred promise.

In May, an algorithm was used to scrape 40,000 profile images from the platform in order to build an AI to “genderise” faces. A few months earlier, 70,000 profiles from OkCupid (owned by Tinder’s parent company Match Group) were made public by a Danish researcher some commentators have labelled a “white supremacist”, who used the data to try to establish a link between intelligence and religious beliefs. The data is still out there.

The trouble is these 800 pages of my most intimate data are actually just the tip of the iceberg. “Your personal data affects who you see first on Tinder, yes,” says Dehaye. “But also what job offers you have access to on LinkedIn, how much you will pay for insuring your car, which ad you will see in the tube and if you can subscribe to a loan. “We are leaning towards a more and more opaque society, towards an even more intangible world where data collected about you will decide even larger facets of your life. Eventually, your whole existence will be affected.”

As a typical millennial constantly glued to my phone, my virtual life has fully merged with my real life. There is no difference any more. Tinder is how I meet people, so this is my reality. It is a reality that is constantly being shaped by others – but good luck trying to find out how.

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships.

Just consider how much learning happens when you choose a mate. Along with thrilling dependency comes glimpsing the world through another’s eyes; forsaking some habits and adopting others (good or bad); tasting new ideas, rituals, foods or landscapes; a slew of added friends and family; a tapestry of physical intimacy and affection; and many other catalysts, including a tornadic blast of attraction and attachment hormones — all of which revamp the brain.

During idylls of safety, when your brain knows you’re with someone you can trust, it needn’t waste precious resources coping with stressors or menace. Instead it may spend its lifeblood learning new things or fine-tuning the process of healing.