There is no shortage of power in New York this week. Black SUVs sweep through Midtown with security details in tow. Heads of state and ministers compete for access to the secretary of state and the president. Technology companies pursue machines of ever greater capability. And the UN General Assembly brings its annual concentration of political ambition and motorcade-induced paralysis to Manhattan.
In the middle of it all, at the Concordia Annual Summit, George Logothetis offered a different measure of what matters. The executive chairman of Libra Group and co-chair of Concordia’s Leadership Council told a packed room Monday morning that humanity “cannot survive as a collection of avatars on a screen.”
The line captures one of the contradictions of modern life. We possess the most elaborate machinery for human connection ever devised, yet increasingly encounter one another as representations: online profiles, photographs, posts, preferences, data points and identities compressed to fit a screen. An avatar can be accurate and still omit the person. Temperament, memory, contradiction and context — the untidy material from which character is made — do not compress particularly well.
“We have a generation of children being socialized by algorithms, not being socialized by the village.”
George Logothetis
Artificial intelligence raises the stakes. Machines can already write, remember, recommend and increasingly imitate conversation.
Logothetis’s concern was more immediate. “We have a generation of children being socialized by algorithms, not being socialized by the village,” he said, warning of “the richness of real community being hijacked by the illusory connection of an online community.”
Virtual connection, in his telling, is not community. The latter requires more than access. It demands proximity, obligation and the inconvenience of dealing with people who resist easy categorization.
The room at Concordia supplied the evidence. The summit, Logothetis said, brought together people “different in origin, experience, and beliefs, yet bound by the simple fact of being human.” He described them “sitting side by side, seeing, being seen, talking, listening, listening, being human.”
That repetition of “listening” was telling in a culture built for broadcasting and reaction. Everyone can publish. Everyone can respond. What is harder is to remain with another person long enough to discover that he may not be quite what we had already decided he was.
From there, Logothetis moved to democracy, invoking the historical journey “from subject to citizen, from the ruled to the governing, from autocracy to democracy.” We usually tell that story through institutions. But institutions depend on something they cannot manufacture: the recognition that people who disagree, sometimes bitterly, still belong to the same civic order.
Democracy does not require affection. It requires recognition.
Against the tendency to reduce people to abstractions, Logothetis offered three words: “Community, humanity, meaning.”
“A meaningful life is not an easy life, but it is a good life,” he said. Meaning, in this formulation, is not another problem to be optimized. Difficulty, dependence and vulnerability remain part of living among other people.
Logothetis reached the argument through a childhood memory. At 11, he interviewed his 85-year-old Welsh-Greek great aunt, Georgette, for a school project and asked which year of her life had been the best. She answered without hesitation: “1940.”
Britain was at war. Bombs were falling. Why, he asked, would she remember it so fondly?
“Yes, my boy, but we were oh so united,” she told him.
“Many of the threats my aunt faced were visible and tangible. Many of ours are invisible and intangible,” Logothetis said.
That contrast gives his argument its force. Her world announced its dangers openly. Ours can arrive disguised as convenience, as digital connection gradually substitutes for presence and community.
In an age increasingly preoccupied with the AI race, algorithms, agents and the fashionable language of the “agentic,” the conversation about humanity becomes more important, not less. The search for meaning is not a computational problem. It does not emerge from artificial superintelligence, however powerful the machine becomes. It remains bound up with consciousness, experience, vulnerability and that stubbornly irreducible question of what it means to be human.
That was the argument beneath Logothetis’s warning.
“Humanity cannot survive as a collection of avatars on a screen,” he said.
read also
The Deals Are Becoming American Diplomacy
Spending this week inside Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s press pool gave me an unusually close view of where American diplomacy is moving. It was not the familiar reel of world leaders’ speeches at the United Nations that told me the most. It was what happened several blocks away, behind the doors of the Lotte…
Trump to Tell U.N.: ‘While Others Have Talked, I Have Acted’
President Trump will use his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday to present American power as the answer to threats from Iran, drug cartels and instability in the Western Hemisphere, while warning international institutions against encroaching on U.S. sovereignty. In advance excerpts of the speech obtained by The Pavlovic Today, Trump casts…
Inside the Rubio-Tajani Critical Minerals Deal
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani signed a critical-minerals agreement Monday that creates a new channel for the U.S. and Italy to coordinate on supply chains, investment and the security of strategic industries. The signing, held at the Lotte New York Palace on the sidelines of…
