Can humanity survive the digital age? Panel says it depends

WASHINGTON (OSV News) -- Can humanity survive the digital age?

The answer -- according to an Institute for Human Ecology panel convened Sept. 17 at The Catholic University of America in Washington -- is basically this: It depends.

There are "two big questions that hang over human life in digital reality right now," announced Ross Douthat, a media fellow with the institute and New York Times opinion columnist. He was the evening's moderator and is the author of the forthcoming book "Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious" (Zondervan).

"Is social media dehumanizing us? Making us miserable; destroying our relationships; warping our intellectual lives; robbing us of creativity? And," Douthat asked, "is Artificial Intelligence replacing us?"

It's a paradox of both connection and disconnection.

With increased smartphone use -- an estimated 69% of the global population, who also consume social media on their devices -- come questions of authentic versus artificial community.

"It's actually become the vehicle through which we seek community," said Luke Burgis of Catholic University's Busch School of Business, where he is director of Programs & Projects at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship, and an assistant clinical professor of business.

"It extends us throughout the world; it puts us in dialogue with other people, through which we're constantly having our self -- or our sense of self -- mediated back to us. Every technology enhances some sense," he said, "to the diminishment of another."

While smartphones and social media are, Burgis said, enhancing our social sense and awareness, the communicative pace can be dizzying and dislocating.

"It's accelerated this kind of social sensory awareness that we have -- but probably so fast that we have no idea what's happening."

Jonathan Askonas, an assistant professor of politics at Catholic University, suggested that perhaps people simply need more time to adjust.

Qualifying that he opposes cellphone use by children and teens, he predicted that "once we've sort of overcome this initial narcissistic shock with the smartphone -- once we've built the institutions and culture and norms around how we engage with this technology -- its pro-social dimension will come to be seen more and more."

Ari Schulman, editor of The New Atlantis, a quarterly journal focused on the social, ethical, and political dimensions of modern science and technology, also cited the disrupting potential of the social media ecosystem.

"That dimension that was initially greeted as a new space of freedom, it's more like it was the dimension under us -- what if the floor opened up, and just dropped out from under us?" he asked. "That would be a new dimension as well -- but it would totally unmoor us; it would rob us of all the context from which we can make sense of these kinds of contexts of social meaning," Schulman said. "I think that's the fundamental problem that we're facing here."

The smartphone era, Douthat said, isn't a transformation that's replacing workers, as happened in the Industrial Revolution. It's instead having a different effect.

"It's not creating this sort of massive economic dislocation; it's creating this massive social dislocation in which entire nations are ceasing to be capable of replacing themselves, seemingly."

Global fertility rates have been declining in all countries since 1950.

While admitting that opinion is "the doomer side of things," Douthat added that, optimistically, "the groups and peoples and cultures and families that make it through will have figured out these questions. You just won't make it through the next 75 years as a family or a society if you can't figure out how to get your kids to relate to one another in reality," he said, "because if you can't figure that out, they won't get married and have kids -- and poof, you're gone."

The ascendancy of AI, Burgis said, issues a challenge to human creativity.

"I do think there's something to be said about doubling down on our human creative and artistic spirit -- which I believe the AI can never replicate," declared Burgis. "So sort of getting back to the kind of spiritual theology of creation, I think, is something that we'll probably hear a lot more about in the next few years."

Schulman noted that public reaction to AI-generated art is indeed frequently negative.

"There's already this kind of instinctive sense of dehumanization and flattening," he observed. "Everybody kind of knows this is going to hasten the decline of Hollywood."

Nonetheless, AI endlessly fascinates -- but for a very basic reason, said Askonas.

"It's the thing that's most fascinating about any new technology -- which is, what does it mean to be human? How does this reshape what it means to be human?"

While that remains an open question, "I think what it demands of us is a higher standard of creativity; of specialization; of learning; of thought," Askonas suggested.

In June, at a Vatican-organized international convention on "Generative Artificial Intelligence and Technocratic Paradigm," Pope Francis asked of AI, "Does it serve to satisfy the needs of humanity, to improve the well-being and integral development of people?" Or does it instead, the pontiff cautioned, "serve to enrich and increase the already high power of the few technological giants despite the dangers to humanity?"

OSV News asked Douthat what philosophical and spiritual conundrum is posed by the notion that AI could eventually acquire humanity -- that it could, in some way, become "human."

"You already have people who clearly think that their chatbots are functionally human, and that population is going to increase," replied Douthat. "And I think that's sort of the debate that Catholicism has to be prepared for."