By now, everyone is accustomed to the idea that technology has disconnected us from the world and one another. By design, smartphones, apps, and social media lure us in and capture our attention. These technologies consume as much of our time as we allow them. Technology has normalized taking our work home with us, answering emails and messages at all hours of the day. Teenagers and the elderly alike scroll infinitely, if on different platforms.
This situation is often lamented for its connection to addiction, disinformation, radicalization, and social disharmony—among other concerns. But as a technology critic who has written about toasters and slippers in addition to smartphones and the internet, I see another, more widespread effect of technological disconnection: It has robbed people of the small acts and moments of connection to the real, physical world.
No doubt, AI threatens to exacerbate this disconnection. But I would argue that AI also has the potential to offer a solution—to help people look away from their screens and reconnect with the physical world. It may sound ironic, but what if AI could make us more gratified?
Today, you don’t tear a paper towel from the airport restroom; you wave your hand under it hoping the thing will see you. You don’t feel the texture and narrow shape of the concert tickets in your pocket or hand; you scan a QR code instead. A consequence of this process of dematerialization is a loss of gratification—my name for the sensory enchantment of everyday life. All those tiny acts don’t always seem important, but they add up, offering an easy path to contentment.
Generative AI is also having a dematerializing effect on contemporary life. Services such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini promise to take over even more of daily life, replacing work and home tasks with automated, almost magical efficiency. Now even writing emails might be automated—and your recipient might automate reading them, too.
As a writer, a university professor, artist, and designer, I worry about the risk that generative AI might destroy the delightful, human experience of carrying out acts of creation, not to mention making careers in the pursuit of that creativity unviable. Whether or not AI will improve work or destroy jobs, it already distances people from some of the moment-to-moment acts that might have felt gratifying just a few years ago. If AI can write your emails, then you don’t need to feel the click of keys under your fingertips or hear the clack they produce when you type with them. If AI can generate a gift list for the holidays or a vacation plan for Spring Break, then you don’t need to swipe through catalogs or thumb through guidebooks. In this way, AI can amplify the same dematerializing effects of technology people have encountered for years.
But that’s not the whole story. As critical of AI as I sometimes am, I have also found that AI can direct people back toward the physical world and the gratifying feelings it offers. LLMs can be quite adept at helping people figure out how to plan and carry out real-world tasks, such as fixing a plumbing leak, repairing a car, or learning a new hobby.
Over the past year, I’ve found myself surprisingly delighted by how effective Claude or ChatGPT can be at synthesizing and explaining problems I have encountered in my ordinary life. Earlier this spring, a wayward sprinkler technician identified—but did not fix—a leak in my irrigation backflow, a mysterious mechanism meant to prevent contaminated outdoor water from mixing with indoor taps. The weather was getting hot, and I worried for my lawn’s fate. After feeding it a couple photographs of the device, ChatGPT was able to identify the model, the parts it needed, and the steps to attempt a repair—at least one good enough until I could get a licensed professional out to permanently fix and certify it. Unlike message boards or YouTube videos, AI was able to home in on the specifics of a situation (I used it again on a surprisingly complicated broken oven thermostat) and point me back toward particular parts, manuals, and guidelines.
Of course, AI services don’t always get the facts right, but they do strive to provide answers instead of luring people deeper into the attention-sink of social media. In this way, they have the potential to actually push people away from screens and back into the world. For example, AI-driven advice about diet or fitness can help people focus on those non-computer activities with greater purpose, inviting them to focus on what they are doing away from the machine instead of on it. Plus, AI’s efficiency and adeptness at processing information—such as a photo of a broken part—may also have the potential to reduce the distraction of smartphone life, inviting people to use it briefly and purposely and then return to their bodily, sensory life with other people and different apparatuses.
The future of AI is still murky and uncertain. It still risks devolving into more of the same, especially if AI services start using the same advertising- and attention-driven business models that cursed earlier internet technologies. But a path still exists for AI to repair some of the public’s lost physical connectivity with the world outside their phones, and to recapture some of the gratification lost from that era.