Get Out and Get Under the Moon

From my house I can hear baseball games at our local stadium. In my youth it hosted a Single A team that regularly sent players on to the majors. Today it hosts a collegiate team under the same name for top college players to stay active during the summer, and American Legion games with teams of players age 13 to 19 sponsored by local Legion Posts. This year I made a commitment to make some games, having not been since I myself was 13. Sports are not my thing, but showing up now is.

I was shocked by the attendance on beautiful June nights for games with $3 and $7 admission. There were far more people on the field and in the dugouts than in the stands. The infrastructure is there. A brand new beautiful field resodded just in time for the season, exciting announcing, diverse, affordable, and high quality local concessions, a radio station hosting contests for kids between innings.

The usual community supporting institutions all work together to create an enjoyable night out, but the community spends the night in. At the games sponsored by the American Legion, I wondered where the Legionnaires were. When our local team plays, I wonder where everyone is. As a kid in the ’80s and ’90s these games were packed, the areas behind the bleachers swarming with ten year olds hoping to catch a foul ball. Dads in reserved seats tracking the game with a pencil on a score sheet for reasons I still don’t understand. If you left early because it was a school night you could hear the game on the radio. And people listened that way from work or from home on nights they couldn’t make it.

Since smart phones came on the scene in 2007 it has become harder and harder to get people to show up for live events. With rare exceptions, the major established rock and pop festivals have seen cratering attendance, especially in the last five years. But it isn’t just music. It is sports, both as a participant or spectator, and all sorts of hobby clubs. A nice park or playground may still feel active, but even those numbers are down. Restaurants sit empty as Doordash drivers line up for their go trays.

When I played youth hockey, my coaches were often guys in their 30s who played in bar leagues. Leagues for working class men who booked ice time for the love of the game and camaraderie. Not only are those teams gone, most of the small corner bars that sponsored them have closed, and many that remain won’t outlast their owners. These were already “old man bars” in the 90s, but now all bars are old people bars as young people refrain, not just from alcohol, but from public life.

Billions have been spent giving us more endorphins watching a tiny screen than going out. Thirty years ago, a local ball game with the family was an escape; now, for many people, it feels like too long not to be scrolling their phone. It isn’t just the young. While people over fifty are more likely to have a reflex to show up and participate, they are still susceptible to the pull of the screen.

In 2022, half of Americans didn’t read a single book, and the biggest decline in reading is among the cohorts that used to do the most of it, with college graduates dropping from an average of 22 books a year to 14 since the late ’90s (those numbers are still skewed by older college graduates with a lifelong reading habit). Even time spent watching movies and TV shows has begun a rapid decline as people can no longer bring themselves to look up from 30-second reels long enough to follow them. There are members of Gen Alpha (under 15 years old) who will tell you proudly that they “don’t watch scripted programming,” as if refraining from all narrative art forms was an achievement.

The problems of participation and attention are snowballing, and the dawn of AI is about to make it immeasurably worse.

In May, a new AI video tool was released that creates video that could convince nearly everyone most of the time that it was real footage. With a few hundred dollars and an idea you can bring a short film to life that would have taken real actors and tens of thousands of dollars three months ago. At this point it is mostly being used for comedic effect, with part of the joke being that it is AI, but we are within a year of someone being able to video chat in real time with an AI friend that looks every bit as real as someone on a video call. Two years, at the most, before you can wear glasses that place that “friend” in the chair next to you on the porch.

I have seen what is on the other side of the uncanny valley, and it is acceptance. If an AI meme creates genuine laughter, or inspires any other real feeling even people who dislike AI won’t care it is AI. Almost instantaneously, they don’t care. It isn’t that people won’t know the friend their glasses show sitting across the table is AI, they just won’t care. As a species we anthropomorphize everything from cars to houseplants. The uncanny valley was that space of almost convincing but somehow off putting human replicas that was an exception to that. From here on out, they are convincing.

Parasocial relationships with online influencers and podcasters already fill a lot of the need for fellowship that humans naturally crave, it is one of the reasons they no longer feel called to sit next to their neighbors at a baseball game. The humans talking to them from their phone are more entertaining than the people in their real lives, and there’s never any conflict or doubt.

AI friends are about to rock society even more than smartphones did. I am not talking about AI girlfriends and boyfriends, I mean the social network of many people becoming a set of AI personalities that they interact with at work and at home.

The change is unavoidable now, and has already begun in earnest, but it isn’t completely grim. These AI friends can help people with loneliness and social isolation, especially the elderly and homebound. With the right controls they can be therapeutic, positive influences that encourage good mental health, productivity, and overall well-being. They can be a patient teacher of new skills. They can help you make human friends and to be a better friend to them. But it will be a profound change in the societal fabric, and I think it will be another nail in the coffin of public events, at least temporarily.

If you are reading this paper you are probably a show-upper. Now more than ever, society is counting on the show-uppers to preserve what is left of the world before, when bowling leagues and local jazz societies created real human connections across communities. It may seem like a losing battle; how can our traditional jazz society sponsoring a band playing a gazebo in the park compete with TikTok? First, you have already won by showing up. You yourself got to be there. That is enough. But there is something else on the horizon that may make all of our efforts to preserve jazz societies and festivals, and support bands playing near us, worth it in the long run.

According to McKinsey, AI will displace a third of the workforce by 2030. First jobs requiring intelligence, expertise, and decision making will be replaced. One lawyer with a firm of AI agents will replace a firm of 500 lawyers. The entire office staff of a manufacturer, from sales and marketing, to record keeping, logistics, design, product engineering and refinement, and customer service, will be replaced by a set of programs the owner can monitor and direct himself using the same language he does with his human employees now. Then, a few years later, the physical jobs will be replaced by specialized robots. Their rollout out slowed only by the ability to manufacture enough of them. I see that hitting a critical mass only after 2035, maybe even later.

Unlike prior inventions like the car or word processing software, there are very few new job possibilities created from AI that AI can’t also do. The 400 million people worldwide displaced by AI by 2030 will not all find jobs directing AIs to do things. By the time robots are dexterous enough to replace a plumber they can also do any new physical job humans or AIs can think up. A former plumber may be at home monitoring his fleet of robots on their house calls in 2050, but the other plumbers are out of luck.

Back in the 1950s, people thought that by 1990 we would have 22 hour work weeks, six months of vacation a year, and retire at 40 years old. Accepting his party’s nomination for president in 1956, Eisenhower envisioned an American future enabled by science, technology, and “labor saving methods” where:

“The material things that make life interesting and pleasant will be available to everyone. Leisure, together with educational and recreational facilities, will be abundant, so that all can develop the life of the spirit, of reflection, of religion, of the arts, of the full realization of the good things of the world.”

The near future may feature a dramatically shorter work week as envisioned in the ’50s, or a Universal Basic Income from a tax on the AIs that enables a large portion of the public to not work at all. Maybe single earner families become the standard again, or even single earner extended families. However it works out, there is not going to be as much work for humans a decade from now. So what will everyone do?

My hope is that they will embrace the extra time, learn to get over smart device addiction the way society has largely gotten over tobacco. Wearable devices that you talk to rather than stare at may help get people’s eyes back in the real world. Once there I hope that people will start going to baseball games with all the kids they start having again, free of worry for their economic future. And, of course, I hope that they join a jazz band and play the jazz festivals that you and I helped get over this hump and begin to value niche publications written by humans. My hope is that this trend towards social isolation, which can be traced right back to the dawn of radio, was a rough adjustment to technology that we hadn’t evolved to process and that the correcting forces may be in the wings. That might sound optimistic, but I also think it happens to be likely.

I am going to keep showing up regardless, because just getting out and under the moon is its own reward. For what it is worth, I wrote this mostly in June, and with each July game I attended the audience was just a little bit bigger at the ball park. Once you start heading out the door it becomes a habit.