It first hit us during Covid—with face masks, social distancing, and Zoom—but it’s been building for a long time.  I mean the way technology,  AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the internet are robbing us all of face-to-face, touch-to-touch, and breath-to-breath intimacy.  That kind of closeness has been our birthright as human beings for two million years, and suddenly, in the space of a historical instant, we are being robbed of it.  I remember reading an article by a man reflecting on his Covid experience; he said that the thing he missed most during Covid was dapping—the elaborate multipart handshake  that wordlessly expressed friendship, trust, and intimacy.  Back when Covid was rampant I remember thinking that people who resisted face masks were scientifically ignorant and/or making some kind of political statement.  Now I think differently.  There is nothing so important, in human interaction, than seeing each other’s faces.  I’ve read that much of our brain matter is given over to the task of facial recognition.  That makes sense.  We’re primates, after all, and highly social animals.  Being able to read a face, understand its subtle social cues, and know whether the person you’re looking at is friend or foe, is essential to primate harmony and survival.  People of every political stripe were genuinely freaked out when we were all masked.  Nobody liked it. We had lost a primal source of connection and intimacy.

What did we have to fall back on? Especially in those early days when there was no vaccine and hospital wards overflowed with dying people on ventilators, we relied on Zoom—a tool of the internet.  At least we could see each others’ faces on Zoom, and hear each others’ voices. (Today of course, with deepfake video and audio, all that can be simulated). But there was always something weird about Zoom.  You weren’t touching the real person, the real body, the real flesh and bone.  You were seeing a robotic, pixalated simulacrum—with little or no body language to go with it. It was a sort of connection, but it wasn’t intimate.  It wasn’t satisfying.  What does that tell us about the kind of beings that we are, and what are our most deeply felt needs in our connection with other people? We need to be with the body.  We need to touch, we need to hug, we need to awaken all the deepest intuitive tools our evolutionary bodies offer to be connected.  During Covid we all got depressed, anxious, disoriented, out of touch.  That was particularly true for teenagers, who rely on social contact for their developing identities.  Even though Covid is gone, those psychological disturbances are not.  Social media, addictive internet scrolling, and now AI continue to perpetuate them.  It’s like Covid has kept going as an underground river.

They’re saying now that Artificial Intelligence is well on its way to equaling, even exceeding, the capacities of the human brain.  I don’t buy it.  AI entities may talk like us, even look like us (robots are getting more and more lifelike), write like us, and sound like us.  Robots already walk like us. In so many ways they emulate us. But they are not us.  Not by a country mile.  I’m a professionally trained musician and I play music with other musicians. We play  “acoustic” instruments—trumpet, string bass, clarinet, piano.  Of course we’re all conversant with digital instruments—electronic keyboards, guitars, and so on—but making music together on “real” instruments made of metal and wood and crafted by real people is different.  It has intimacy, it has breath, it has—to use a term common among jazz musicians—Soul.  There are some musicians—I think of Miles Davis or Yo Yo Ma—whose sound, whose Soul, is so distinctive, that after just hearing a few notes, musicians can tell: Yeah, that’s Miles; right, that’s Yo Yo. You’re not just hearing a trumpet or cello, you’re not just hearing notes, you’re hearing Soul.  Can AI do that? Not bloody likely, as the British say. 

So there it is.  We could say that the burgeoning, suffocating, omnipresent domain of internet and AI technology is robbing us of Soul.  Dapping is Soul; hugging, touching, and handshaking are all Soul.  Making love is Soul.  Where is the resistance to all this? From whence will it come? Will there at some point be a planet-wide primal scream as we all realize that the magicians of AI and social media apps are plundering the living heart of what makes us most human?

I don’t know if we’ll wake up in time.  Keeping us asleep may not be the primary goal of social media and AI (though making some people huge amounts of money is) but we are more and more asleep—just as in the Matrix movies, where human beings slept in metallic pods serviced by the robots that ruled the world.  Is there a red pill that will wake us all up, as it did Neo in those movies? Art so often predicts what reality will later become.  The first step is to say what is happening.  The next steps are unclear. 

Yet I remain optimistic.  I trust in the power of Soul.