Christine Rosen calls it as she sees it: We are Users — and we’re being used. Spelling out that idea in her new book, The Extinction of Experience, she presents the case for Humanity versus Artificial Intelligence.
Rosen explains in her first sentence: “This is a book about the disappearance of experience,” cautioning 218 pages later, “not every new thing is an improvement on the old.” In between, there’s a compendium of research nestled around Rosen’s thoughts on the mediated life. How did we get so close to “singularity” with technology and what does that mean?
Borrowing the philosopher Robert Michael Pyle’s phrase “extinction of experience,” coined in The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland (1993), Rosen acknowledges that actual human experience is increasingly hard to find today: “More and more, we prefer the simulated to the real.” However, weighing virtual against physical reality, she emphasizes that we are still free to decide how much mediation is allowed in our lives.
Consider the steady curtailment of face-to-face gatherings and one-on-one meetups. Shakespeare aficionados may once have gathered monthly to cold read the Bard’s words, or perhaps a roomful of folks sat in silent Zen meditation. Now they meet on Zoom. We exercise “together” via laptops or TVs, those with bifocals straining to see screens from floor mats at home. We “attend” livestreamed funerals and weddings. Sometimes such access offers value to those situated far away from the action. But more frequently, we may find ourselves wondering: how does online participation alter how we relate to these occasions?
Rosen writes, “This book is a modest effort to encourage us to cultivate and, in some cases, recover ways of thinking, knowing, and being in the world that we are losing or have lost through our embrace of mediating technologies.” She is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for Commentary magazine, senior editor at New Atlantis, and a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Her prior books are My Fundamentalist Education (2005, memoir) and Preaching Eugenics (2004, nonfiction).
Rosen’s latest title documents the current state of technological affairs and its history, even as rapid technological development races ahead of our analysis of it. Rather than a guidebook for coexisting with AI, Rosen’s book is more of an awareness-raiser of what is vanishing while we drift through our days as Users rather than Experiencers. One chapter, “How We Wait,” examines the mindset of delay, or queue psychology, a concept which evolved from queueing theory in mathematics, developed by the statistician, mathematician, and engineer A. K. Erlang who worked with the first telephone networks in Copenhagen during the early 1900s. MIT Professor Richard Larson, a queue expert, describes in an excellent 2019 CNN article by Jacopo Prisco how the field arose after WWII, crediting Walt Disney. Rosen explains how Disney applied the initial ideas of queue psychology to his first theme park in 1955 by “crafting lines that would transform the experience of those waiting in them by making time seem to pass more quickly.” Disney knew people hated to wait, she notes, so the company tried to alleviate that “stubborn human experience.” In 1999, Disney World initiated the FastPass system in which visitors with an appointment “stroll right in” to the more popular rides, thus “avoiding the crowds and the hours-long wait.”
“Might boredom have a purpose?” Rosen wonders. Our increasing inability to handle tedium without reaching for our screens illustrates lost opportunities to develop ideas. She writes, “A culture without boredom undermines the act of daydreaming, something interstitial time used to be given over to. Daydreaming seems a fusty term in an age when productivity and usefulness are prized. But as psychologists and neurologists have found, a wandering mind, often the first signal of impending boredom, is also a creative mind.”
Several other culture critics are also commenting on the repercussions of the inability to manage ennui. Author and music historian Ted Gioia, in an interview with David Parell, says, “… people are addicted to distraction. This can’t be good for culture.”
Mike Thomas, senior features writer who covers trends in an online community for startups and tech companies called Built In, comments: “AI has been hailed as revolutionary and world-changing, but it’s not without drawbacks.”
Rosen concedes: ”In embracing the technologies that mediate so much of our experience, we have certainly made our lives more comfortable and convenient, but it has come at a cost.” What’s given up when we embrace various aspects of technology? “We are awash in social media,” she says, “ but our social skills — common courtesy, patience, eye contact — are deteriorating.” The problem, she insists, is our passivity. We don’t notice that our traditional, gratifying habits “are dying without even a brief eulogy — and without an accounting of what their disappearance heralds for what it means to be human.”
Another example she offers is the waning experience of getting lost due to the omnipresence of global positioning systems: “GPS is more precise than tools such as paper maps or sextants, but it also places users in the role of spectators rather than navigators during the journey.” Shouldn’t we know how to orient ourselves, she wonders, in case GPS should suffer a crash?
CAD (computer-assisted drawing) has transformed architecture from hand sketches, yet many architects would say there are pros and cons to each. Rosen describes how CAD developed and what it means, enlarging the overview to include art and writing, particularly the output of ChatGPT. Can it generate emotion in words rivaling those of, say, Hillary Mantel, Gabriel García Márquez, Olga Tokarczuk or the Bard? Imagine robots performing theater.
Numerous resources cited in The Extinction of Experience include Daniel Boorstin’s still influential The Image (1962), which communication professor Chris Yogerst re-examines in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “The more we click on certain types of information,” he says, “the more of it we see. As a result, our information bubbles get smaller by the day.” In this regard, you may remember William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition.
Naomi Klein, in her 2023 nonfiction book Doppelganger, writes, “This is how machine learning works — the algorithm imitates, learning from patterns.” But what’s being modeled by humanity’s current hateful behaviors? Klein thinks the pandemic produced “profoundly bored people addicted to dopamine hits from our machines” to achieve “a fake communal experience in those lonely and anxious times.”
And it continues. “Today,” Rosen believes, “many of us choose to live in a form of pseudo-reality governed by algorithmically-enabled individual experiences.” She adds, “Technological change of the sort we have experienced in the last twenty years has not ushered in either greater social stability or moral evolution. In fact, many of our sophisticated technological inventions and platforms have been engineered to bring out the worst of human nature.”
Mina Haq, a consultant with PEN America’s journalism and disinformation program, would agree. In a recent column, she wrote, “Tech won’t save us from tech — it’s on human beings to do that.”
Rosen stays neutral. Pointing out what has been lost in the diminishment of our humanity, while not denying the value of technology, she outlines ways to collaborate with it that don’t extinguish our human qualities. The book’s subtitle underscores this search for balance. Her coverage extends back to ancient times and surges ahead to developments in process, all supported by a wide variety of studies dating back to 1958, mostly between 2009–2015. The most-cited year is 2012 with around 62 studies, compared to an average of 14 per year from 2016–2024. Citation is inconsistent, however, with 31 sources lacking a publication year (or, in the case of online sources, the access date).
Ultimately, she calls for limits on “the more extreme transformative projects proposed by our technoenthusiasts,” not by stifling innovation but rather through “a commitment to our shared humanity.” The book is long on documenting a dilemma but short on specifying steps toward solutions. Yet perhaps that’s her intention — a simple mental reset in a refreshed perspective, not a prescriptive list. Instead of blind acceptance of everything AI and technology introduce, she suggests we hit “pause.” Maybe attend a tai chi class in a park instead of on Zoom?
Rosen asks, “What kind of person is formed in an increasingly digitized, mediated, surveilled, and algorithmically governed world? What do we gain and what do we lose when we no longer talk about the Human Condition, but rather the User Experience?”
If read in a consciousness-raising frame of mind, the book reroutes us toward a productive coexistence with technology. Rosen’s writing style is more explanatory than literary — neither numbing nor dense. Painstakingly citing study after study, she builds a structure resembling a legal brief. Each new aspect adds evidence of what humanity cedes to the digital machine.
A secondary definition of humanity, after Homo sapiens or civilization, speaks of kindness, charity, compassion, sympathy, mercy, or benevolence. Rosen’s approach seeks ways to reclaim such traits. Remember, Christine Rosen reminds us: “Extinction is not inevitable. It is a choice.”
[Published by W. W. Norton on September 10, 2024, 272 pages, $29.99 hardcover]