*The No-Phone Challenge | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | October 24, 2024*
It all started when I read a forecast by Ray Kurzweil about the future — and more specifically, about our future with AI.
.
Not just any forecast. Kurzweil is one of the world’s most famous futurists. He predicted the explosion of the internet and the astonishing rise of artificial intelligence decades before they happened. He has published books, founded companies, launched technologies, served as a senior executive at Google, received major awards from three different U.S. presidents, and to this day people flip through his 1999 book as if it were scripture, checking what he predicted for each year and calculating how many times he was right and how many he missed.
.
He claims his forecasts are accurate 84 percent of the time. That’s a lot. Some say the number is lower. Either way, the man isn’t often wrong. And that, for me, is where the trouble begins.
.
Because according to Kurzweil, within five years AI will encompass all human knowledge, and then surpass it. When that happens, he says, we’ll enter a decade in which humans and machines will merge - literally - through nanotechnology: microscopic AI chips implanted in our brains, connecting the human mind to the great cloud of all knowledge and memory. At that stage, human consciousness will become virtually infinite. I’ll admit that reading this gave me a mild wave of nausea, but Kurzweil, unlike me, appears to be thrilled -
.
He’s genuinely excited about the coming inventions born from our human-AI-fused brains. He predicts that solar energy will replace most other sources, that life will become vastly cheaper and more accessible to everyone, leading to the end of global scarcity and an age of abundance. Blessed are the believers.
.
His most radical prediction, though, concerns medicine - and it’s dizzying to read. He foresees that by 2034 - that’s nine years from now - technology will allow people to reverse aging, so that each additional year of life will make us one year younger. Just before I completely lost track, I read that Kurzweil himself believes in this so deeply that he invested in a company that preserves the human body after death, ready for the day they’ll resurrect and rejuvenate him. He’s 78 now, and it seems he’s not the kind of man who enjoys dying naturally or leaving loose ends.
.
Anyway, when I finished reading, I realized that I’d been so absorbed these past two years in the war, in Jewish identity, in antisemitism, that I hadn’t lifted my head to see what else was happening in the world — and meanwhile, so much has.
.
So I asked myself what we’re supposed to do if this prediction happens to fall within Kurzweil’s 84 percent of accuracy. What then? “Time to go back to the forests,” someone wrote in the comments under the article, and got four thousand likes. I immediately liked it too, as if that would help.
.
“No way this will ever happen,” someone else wrote, and I liked that one too. A little mutual comfort.
.
“Let’s all learn to live without technology,” a third person suggested, and I nodded at the screen. I suddenly felt like a Stone Age creature, but I didn’t mind. My fellow cave-dwellers were right there with me in the comments, and none of us had any idea what to do.
.
And so it happened that not long after reading Kurzweil’s forecast, I began a phone fast.
A fast meaning: the phone is off. Not on airplane mode, not silenced, not in meditation mode. Actually off, just a slab of titanium resting in my bag. For a week now, I’ve been spending two hours a day without checking messages, sending emails, or replying to anyone. Luckily there’s a ceasefire, because I’m also off the rocket-alert channels. Silence.
.
After I began, I discovered it’s actually a thing! Online they call it a digital fast, or intermittent phone fasting - a play on intermittent fasting, where you fast for 16 hours and eat for 8. People fast from their phones for different lengths of time. The strict ones keep them off all day and switch them on only briefly.
.
Well, I’m not there. For me, even two hours feels huge. At first I was honestly terrified people would start worrying, panic, send search parties. But nothing of the sort happened. No one came looking. At most, a few tired, polite WhatsApp messages showed up: “Get back to me whenever you can.”
One evening I even caught myself wondering, why isn’t anyone looking for me? Maybe I don’t have enough friends? Maybe my friends don’t care? Where’s my family?
.
But that thought quickly dissolved, because the real thing that happened this week was that for two hours each day, I wasn’t looking for anyone. I wasn’t reaching for messages, alerts, sirens, photos, posts. I carved out so much silence that two hours felt like far more. They felt like a whole world of time.
.
And somehow, my fear of being merged with machine chips eased a bit. For two hours a day, I was simply human.
.
Since I was already into the trend, I started reading why others practice digital fasting, and learned, for example, that scrolling delays the release of melatonin, the sleep hormone, causing hormonal imbalance, weight gain, poor metabolism, bad sleep, and a cascade of health issues.
.
I learned that without realizing it, we spend hours frozen and motionless, losing muscle mass, hastening aging, and shortening our lives.
.
I learned that people fast from their phones to regain focus and attention, to be more present with their children, to become better parents or partners, and to ease the mental overload caused by the endless flood of information on our screens.
.
A good friend of mine who keeps Shabbat heard all this and said, “So what’s new? That’s me every week.”
So I’ll just say - it was new for me, the secular one.
And it is on weekdays too. I found myself maintaining eye contact with my daughters. I finally started reading a few books that had been waiting by my bed forever. I went back to painting. Honestly, apart from my morning routine, these became the best two hours of my day.
.
And really, it always feels good to draw a boundary, to fence off a little time and space around yourself and guard them fiercely.
.
So I’m probably writing this to recommend it to you too, or maybe to hear how you keep yourselves from merging with the machine. Either way, you’re welcome to join me in this wonderful no-phone challenge.
Wishing us all Shabbat Shalom,
.
*Maya Tevet Dayan*