Tyler Cowen: Why I (Often) Choose My Phone Instead of Flesh and Blood

How much should we be online? Is it crazy to spend the majority of your day in chat groups, answering emails, and scrolling X? Is posing 20 to 30 queries a day to the AIs consistent with having meaningful respect for actual flesh-and-blood human beings?

I say yes.

Perhaps you balk at that answer. Perhaps you think that’s akin to admitting a heroin addiction. So I ask you to challenge yourself: Don’t think about how you should spend your time. Think about how you already choose to. Be honest.

I suspect most people aren’t like me—spending hours a day with ChatGPT, Claude, WhatsApp, and X. But, whether or not those are your particular fancies, the online life attracts a great number of people. Just walk through an airport, where most people have idle time, and watch how many of them are on their phones. You must either think this is (mostly) justifiable, or you have a very low opinion of current humanity. In that case, you must think them incapable of creating meaningful, autonomous lives, centered around some notion of the good. (I am not so pessimistic—at least, not yet.)

I view many of these online time investments as a determined attempt to be in touch with the people we want to be in touch with. To meet the people we truly want to meet. And to befriend and sometimes to marry them.

Those goals are so important that they can justify our massive online presence. I will explain this view further, but first let us consider the strongest and most articulate argument against such an intense online life.

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