At this point, it’s a given that chatbots and other AI developments are going to fray our social fabric. Chatbots directly compete with therapists, clergy, and romantic partners as a way to feel “seen” and receive guidance from someone who “cares.” There’s nothing the bots remind me of so much as pica—the disorder where, lacking a necessary nutrient like iron, a person turns to compulsively eating a non-food, like paper or dirt. The hunger is real, the remedy is empty.
We’re at the beginning of an AI boom, and the most obvious social threat is that the tech will directly exploit our hunger for personal connection while sapping our desire to connect to real people. But there’s another, subtler threat to our society. When technology takes off fast, amity between the sexes can collapse. Societies struggle when men and women’s preferences and practices diverge without having time to reanneal.
Claudia Golden, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, recently took a closer look at why some of the countries that kept up their fertility through the 1980s and even the 1990s have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world today. In her December 2024 analysis, “Babies and the Macroeconomy,” what distinguished nations like Greece, Japan, Korea, and Spain was “rapid growth in GNP per capita after a long period of stagnation or decline.”
Essentially, the people of these countries were like time travelers, catapulted into a prosperous but alien future by a period of hyper-rapid modernization. Think of it as a version of the college student who comes back for their first Thanksgiving, on steroids. Suddenly, the rising generations of millennials and Gen Z are living in a world very different from that of their parents, and they may feel like their parents haven’t even noticed. The advice your mother and father gave you in good faith may be a terrible match for your present circumstances (as is the case today, when parents assume their child can apply to just a few colleges or drop off some resumes and expect an acceptance or job offer).
The moments where parents’ ways of living are obviously and jarringly miscalibrated to the world erode the trust across generations. And a few obvious failures can lead children to reject former ways of thinking wholesale, rather than sifting their parents’ experience and traditions to see what still holds true. In Golden’s analysis, “It is the speed with which tradition-bound people are catapulted into modernity that gives generations little time to adapt and brings old ways into sudden conflict with the new.”
Men and women tend to experience these economic and technological accelerations differently. The younger generation isn’t just growing away from their parents—young men and women are diverging from each other. In the countries Golden studied, men have a greater attachment to past traditions than women on average, and this puts the sexes out of sync. For the nations that Golden analyzed, a major point of sex-based divergence was women entering the workforce. But she was careful to note that it wasn’t women working, specifically, that collapsed childbearing. In fact, she observed a U-shaped curve, where countries with very high or very low female employment had higher fertility rates than those with a moderate amount of women working.
Essentially, the high female employment countries changed slowly, and eventually settled into a relatively stable equilibrium. Women couldn’t “have it all,” but there were shared, better expectations for how to balance work and family life. Men and women came to agreement about how to reset expectations for the home to make family life sustainable.
“I term this a generational conflict because it derives from men’s greater attachment to the past,” Golden writes. “But it becomes a gendered conflict when the husband’s desire for more children exceeds that of the wife’s, and when they must find a solution. When nations develop more continuously and across a longer time frame, less generational conflict arises and the fertility desires of men and women are more similar.”
What Golden saw in the low part of the U was women who were entering the workforce, but also expected to do everything they previously did at home. The old script didn’t match their new workload. When something had to be abandoned, it was generally the children they might have had. Not only does this decrease the fertility rate, it eats away at amity between the sexes, as husband and wife both feel like the other has broken faith—husbands feel cheated of children they may have expected, and wives feel cheated of a more harmonious domestic arrangement. When young men and women observe this mistrust in the marriages of their peers, they may decide to avoid the institution entirely. Indeed, in America, a large degree of our own fertility drop is driven by fewer people getting married, not by married couples having fewer children.
America has the advantage of already being on the high side of the U, with higher female labor participation and higher fertility than many of our peer nations. However, family sizes are still smaller than Americans say they want, and marriages are later and rarer than for prior generations. The question is what will break next when technology and employment change quickly.
Today, amid the economic disruption of President Trump’s worldwide tariffs, a brewing gender enmity has erupted even more into mainstream discussions. A small but noisy subset of men cheer for tariffs and government layoffs explicitly as a way of destabilizing the “email jobs” they believe have left women too independent of men. These men feel they were handed a cultural script for dating and marriage that relied on them being a breadwinner—and they don’t know how to win a woman in the absence of being economically necessary to her. Their anger echoes the generation and gender divisions that Golden identified—if you’re doing everything right according to the rules you were given, you must be being cheated by someone who broke the game.
And that game is becoming more complicated. With AI programs able to manage entry-level tasks and high level math challenges, some companies are already applying hiring freezes—and that’s the kind of technological leap forward that creates sharp divisions between winners and losers. The challenge we should prepare for is massive disruptions to industries and entry-level work which upend men and women’s plans for their own careers. A big change to the nature of work is likely to also accelerate the obsolescence of social scripts—and in particular, men and women meeting each other with even less confidence that they are operating within a set of shared expectations. And the less men and women know about how their career and timeline for children will unfold, the harder it is for them to find a compatible partner.
There are some ways that America is likely to be more resilient under this strain than the relatively culturally homogenous countries Golden examines. Americans already live in a pluralistic society, learning to code-switch, to navigate unfamiliar norms, to consider whether to convert to an alternate cultural cohort. We already do not expect bedrock under our feet.
But the world of dating does not look like a flourishing social bazaar, with many different, intelligible traditions to choose between and cleave to. Instead, many of the ways men and women met their spouses have faded in favor of online dating. This can only be a thin tradition, and it shows its weakness.
Instead of courtship and sexual norms being set by the pooled practice of friends, parents, coworkers, etc.—people known to and respected by the prospective couples—the rules are set by the interface and algorithm designers at a company bent on maximizing time on devices. The people who set you up will not dance at your wedding, sign the ketubah, or stand as godparents to your firstborn.
The present moment is like the first warning of a tsunami—the bare sand elongating the beach as the water rushes out, soon to return in force. The time to seek higher ground is now, before the actual wave is in sight.
The best way through the coming crisis is to be frank about the loss of cultural scripts we’ve already suffered, and to be curious about sifting the past to see what merits salvage. We should have a strong bias toward the human-mediated versus the machine-optimized, so that our longing for romantic connection depends on and strengthens friendship and family connections in its wake. Men and women need ways to come together for IRL projects, whether it’s romantic setups organized by friends or hosting a rotating dinner party. We need to prioritize the one-to-one or small group connections that allow for patience and forgiveness when advice doesn’t quite match the present moment. Adaptation has to be a collaborative project across the genders and the generations, not a moment of the young growing beyond the old or the sexes growing apart.
