Like most red-blooded American boys, from the beginning of middle school on, I was very interested in girls. Indeed, I spent pretty much the entirety of my teenage years trying to figure out how to get girls. I never did find a formula, but I was forever looking. For the most part, my days were filled with sports of every type, from scuba diving to motocross to baseball, football, golf, karate, the gym, etc. But the entire time, all of that, and school, was set against a mental backdrop of how to get girls, how to get a date…and, umm…more. That pretty much was it, and from what I could tell from my friends, that was pretty much normal. Some guys were more successful, some were less successful, but we were all basically in the same game.
Image created by Vince Coyner.
But here’s the thing: For virtually all of us growing up (except those lucky few Casanovas), getting girls was always a challenge. I don’t mean a challenge that someone put you up to—although sometimes it was that—but rather that the entire process of getting girls was challenging. You might admire a girl from afar and practice what you’d say when you approached her, but then you’d chicken out. Or when you bumped into her around a corner, you somehow forgot how to speak English correctly. There’d be the nervousness, the dozen times you’d pick up the phone to call but hang up before you dial that last digit, and more.
Being a young man was often hard when it came to girls, but that was life. (It no doubt was hard to be a girl too, likely for different reasons, but I can’t really speak about that…).
You’ll notice I said was and not is. It might still be, but it’s different.
If you’ve ever seen the Joaquin Phoenix movie Her, you’ll have an idea where I’m going. In it, a lonely Theodor (Phoenix) strikes up a friendship with an Artificial Intelligence, Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The friendship evolves into a relationship that seems to be everything Theodor wants, except that Samantha is an operating system.
Given the physical limitations of being a program, Samantha arranges for Theodor to be with a real woman surrogate. It’s a disaster and soon thereafter the relationship begins to crumble when Theodor discovers Samantha is simultaneously having similar relationships with thousands of other men.
That movie was made in 2013. A decade later, we have actual, personalized AI that can carry on conversations like humans and offer compassion and companionship. What’s more, companies are putting AI into anatomically correct robots. They may be less than perfect now and expensive to boot, but technology and efficiency are moving forward at light speed.
Of course, these developments would be nothing but a sideshow if it weren’t for the fact that they’re occurring at the exact time young people are losing interest in sex and relationships, and those who might have an interest are increasingly confused about who they are.
All of this matters because fewer Americans are getting married, and those who are marrying are doing so later and, therefore, having fewer children. The United States’ fertility rate is already below replacement and going in the wrong direction. Indeed, it was just reported that 2024 recorded the lowest birth rate in American history! (And we’re not alone.)
The United States is experiencing something of a perfect storm of non-self-perpetuation. The only growth the country is experiencing is coming from immigration, much of it illegal. That’s a problem because many of the immigrants who are coming to the United States don’t share the cultural values the nation was built upon, things like freedom of speech and religion, capitalism, private property, and the rule of law. With enough people who don’t share its values, a society collapses into conflict, chaos, and eventually civil war or worse.
To all of this, we add the woke notion of “toxic masculinity,” microaggressions, and men losing jobs for addressing women as “ladies.” What is one to make of male and female relationships in a 21st-century America?
The reality is that dating is one of the most consequential adventures humans ever embark on, particularly in a free society where individuals make their own match choices. Again, I can only speak about this from a male perspective, but trying to get up the courage to ask a girl out, getting shot down, and mustering the courage to try again has a tremendous impact on your psyche.
Trying out different approaches to see what works and what you’re comfortable with is a journey unto itself. There may be no more powerful passion in a young man’s life than infatuation, that moment when a young romance is just blossoming, and it basically becomes your raison d’être and makes you do things you probably wouldn’t do if you were rational.
Frequently, the lessons a young man learns and the character he builds during the challenges associated with romance and courtship help form his personality and guide him through much of the rest of his life. That rite of passage is a key element of what it means to become a well-rounded, mature man. Because of technology, fewer and fewer young men are running that oh so important gauntlet, and with the combination of AI and robotics, we’re likely to see even less.
When faced with the choice between, on the one hand, the awkwardness of talking to a girl or a woman along with the fear of getting rejected or having your heart broken by her, on the other hand, with a beautiful and lifelike AI robot that’s programmed to treat you like a king and never reject you, a significant number of boys/men will choose the latter.
That’s a problem. It’s a problem that must be addressed because, for civilization to continue, civilized people need to reproduce. The greatest advancements in human history have come from Western civilization, not the places where fertility rates are actually above replacement. If things continue this way, there are two possible outcomes.
The first is that Western civilization continues to import millions of people from nations and cultures that do not share its values. Eventually, freedom and the rule of law and prosperity disappear as the West regresses toward the mean of human civilization, one characterized by violence, scarcity, and tyranny, like much of what we see in the third world today.
The second outcome is a world where technology replaces most things men do, leaving an elite who control that technology and the superfluous masses controlled by it. Tyranny of the elites will settle in quickly, and while the façade of human civilization may continue for a while, eventually the technology will advance beyond the ability of humans to control it. We then become not only expendable, but very possibly will become slaves or seen as a virus to be eliminated, à la The Matrix.
This may sound like hyperbole, but make no mistake, a collapsing birthrate and an unchecked, exponentially advancing AI are both dangerous on their own. Together, they are a recipe for an extinction-level event.
Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA