While philosophers have long wrestled with questions about technology’s impact on humanity, these questions have taken on a whole new level of urgency and significance with the rise of AI, smartphones, and the Internet. It’s more pressing than ever now to ask: What does it mean to be human? Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Her latest book, The Extinction of Experience, delves into how modern technologies are reshaping what it means to be human by mediating experience, promising convenience and control while subtly narrowing choices and changing social norms. Christine and Greg discuss the trade-offs of this digital age: as friction, risk, boredom, and unstructured time disappear, so do the skills and forms of attention that develop through direct interaction with other people and the world. They argue that many of these technologies offer safe simulatio...