A baby, propped up in a stroller, is touching buttons on an iPhone or some cruder gaming device. Wearing candy-colored eyeglasses that look like a prize in a Cracker Jack box, the baby gazes contentedly at the screen. Stationed at the handles and absently steering along the sidewalk, is an adult caregiver, attentive to her own phone . . .

The traffic light at a mid-Manhattan intersection is a few ticks from turning red. Someone nearby is in urgent need of an egg and cheese sandwich, and a delivery pilot astride an ion battery-powered bike speeds toward the moment of truth: stop or go. A pedestrian approaches from the south on a dead run, facing the same judgment call. By God’s grace or dumb luck, they avoid a bone-crunching collision, though both were riveted to hand-held electronic devices, both detached from their physical surroundings.

Those four individuals were absorbed in what author Christine Rosen calls “mediated experiences,” by which she means engagement with some form of personal technology. My elementary examples here don’t appear in the pages of her new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, but they could have.

This “disembodied world,” the forfeiting of the physical space we occupy with its attendant abandonment of our physical selves, is but one unintended consequence (or maybe its consequences are intended, and that’s even scarier) of the increasingly digitized world we seem to prefer to live in.

Rosen would have no trouble admitting that shopping for groceries online, for example, is more convenient than trundling off to the market. Or that gambling on horses through a betting app can produce the same thrill as being at the racetrack, once the contestants reach the final quarter mile. Scrolling Instagram is an absurd waste of time, but it’s also fun. The author is no technophobe, and that gives her arguments that much more credibility.

Of course, you can’t judge the ripeness of an avocado through your laptop (not yet, anyway), you can’t smell the animals through a gambling platform, and watching a video of a loved one on social media is akin to, as one wag put it, standing next to a fire and seeing all of its light while feeling none of its heat.

Rosen is a gimlet-eyed observer; however, she’s realistic, not hectoring about the tradeoffs we make. It seems we always have something “better” and “more Important” to do. Our mediated experiences afford us the time we cry out for to accomplish other things (whatever they might be) in the busy, busy, lives we lead. But her caveats come attuned to the compromises we’re making, the things we’re giving up on a daily basis that in the aggregate amount to a sacrifice of our most fundamental birthright: our humanity.  Our electronic experiences, Rosen argues, are gaining primacy over our real-life ones. There’s no hint anywhere that this radical techno-embrace is about to reverse course. As we cede more and more of our flesh-and-blood engagement to a screen-based one—whether it’s groceries or horses or contact with those we love—we are subcontracting the grit and grip of life to marketers intent on selling us something, if not now, then soon (really soon). Using various algorithms formed from our search histories, which reveal our preferences, they dictate to us what it is we want before we know we want it. And this is not happening in some opaque future; we’ve been seeing precision targeted ads pop up on our screens for a while.

But this is America in 2024. We all have something to sell, and I’m less put off by sophisticated sales tools than I am by the outsourcing of emotion to machines that will soon be able to spell out—to myself, to intimates, to merchants—what the technology  discerns not just about what I want but about how I feel.

“Rather than grapple with the meaning of emotions or why we experience them,” writes Rosen, “our technologists seem eager to understand them so that they can exploit them. Consider the field of affective computing, described by one of its founders as computing that ‘relates to, arises from, or influences emotion.’”

Blithe tech-types from various institutions, including MIT, where this work began, pop up throughout the book, Dr. Strangeloves of today reporting on their latest research. The original intention of “affective computing,” we learn, was to help people—such as those on the autism spectrum—who struggle to identify facial expressions. Soon enough, the program morphed into a marketing tool for corporations keen to measure how successfully their advertising was going over. “But the things technology encourages,” as Rosen points out, “efficiency, predictability, repeatability, are not the things we necessarily value in our emotional lives.”

Consider for a moment the father of the bride at a wedding. If he’s any kind of father, no, if he’s any kind of human being, he’s going to feel several things at the same time. He may respect the man his daughter is marrying, may feel confident the happy couple will have a bright future; he might even be looking forward to grandchildren. But watching his daughter now, he recalls pushing a little girl in a swing, bandaging a scraped knee, celebrating academic or artistic achievements. Wasn’t that just yesterday? And is he certain he’s ready to give his child over to a relative stranger, handsome and charming as the groom may be, and loving?

That bittersweet jambalaya of emotion is among the most potent feelings anybody might encounter in life, the most memorable, the most cherished, the most enduring. Is anyone among us willing to offload this experience, to use a word, to some app or platform so that it can be repurposed as an algorithm?

Broadly researched and bolstered by the results of dozens of academic studies, enriched by references to a host of cultural icons from Pascal to Giacometti, The Extinction of Experience is a sharp piece of criticism-cum-philosophy. And although the book may be in some ways a cry in the wilderness, it couldn’t have come at a better time. I hope it’s not too late.