In this great New-York Times article ‘Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good‘, the issue of diminishing daily human interaction is addressed. “Screens used to be for the elite. Now avoiding them is a status symbol.”
Our lives and interactions are indeed increasingly held through screens; not mentioning upcoming AI applications that will make us increasingly interact with virtual entities.
Of course, replacing humans with screens is cheaper, and requires specifically much less maintenance and management. Screens don’t have free will and are much less complex to manage.
And the luxury is now to avoid screens and have a direct human interaction. Moreover, the very rich increasingly try to avoid screens – like for their children.
As the article mentions, this is a very swift change from the 1980s and 1990s when having screens was a luxury, to the opposite now that they have become cheap and ubiquitous.
I think human contact remains much needed, and we need to find ways to both benefit from the productivity and convenience provided by screens, while keeping the density of human interaction. The balance will not be easy to find, and there may be substantial differences in outcome depending on wealth. Definitely an issue to keep in mind moving into the Collaborative Age!
