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Loneliness Is A Problem That A.I. Won't Solve

reading comprehension

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Marie-Christine L
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319 views1 page

Loneliness Is A Problem That A.I. Won't Solve

reading comprehension

Uploaded by

Marie-Christine L
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Loneliness is a problem that A.I.

Won't solve
Jessica Grose, The New York Times, May 18th, 2024

When I was reporting my ed tech series, I stumbled on one of the most disturbing things I’ve read
in years about how technology might interfere with human connection: an article on the website of
the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
It opens with this quote from someone who has apparently fully embraced the idea of having a
5 chatbot for a significant other: “The great thing about A.I. is that it is constantly evolving. One day it
will be better than a real [girlfriend].” The article goes on to breathlessly outline use cases for “A.I.
companions,” suggesting that some future iteration of chatbots could stand in for mental health
professionals, relationship coaches or chatty co-workers.
This week, OpenAI released an update to its ChatGPT chatbot, an indication that the inhuman
10 future foretold by the Andreessen Horowitz story is fast approaching. GPT-4o (“o” stands for
“omni”) is meant to encourage people to speak to it rather than type into it.
There have been lots of comparisons between GPT-4o and the 2013 movie “Her,” in which a man
falls in love with his A.I. assistant, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. There’s been plenty of hype about
the potential for humanlike chatbots to ameliorate emotional challenges, particularly loneliness and
15 social isolation.
But the notion that bots will one day be an adequate substitute for human contact misunderstands
what loneliness really is, and doesn’t account for the necessity of human touch.
Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University explained to me: “The major issue I have
with loneliness metrics is they often fail to distinguish between the ordinary healthy loneliness,
20 which gets us off our couch and into the social world when we need it, and the chronic dangerous
loneliness, which prevents us from getting off our couch, and spirals and leads us to spiral into
depression and withdrawal.”
Why I worry about chatting with bots as a potential solution to loneliness is that it could be an
approach that blunts the feeling just enough that it discourages or even prevents people from taking
25 that step off the couch toward making connections with others. And some research indicates that a
lack of human touch can exacerbate feelings of isolation.”
I was struck by this quote from Murali Doraiswamy, professor of psychiatry and geriatrics at
Duke University “Right now, all the evidence points to having a real friend as the best solution,” she
said, and added “But until society prioritizes social connectedness and elder care, robots are a
30 solution for the millions of isolated people who have no other solutions.”
What if even a tiny portion of the billions being spent developing A.I. chatbots could be spent on
human and physical things we already know help loneliness? As Klinenberg put it, to help lonely
and isolated people, we should be investing in things like collaborative housing, parks, libraries and
other kinds of accessible social infrastructures that can help people of all ages build connectedness.
35 “The real social challenge and policy challenge and human challenge is for us to find ways to
recognize these people and to attend to them, to care for them,” Klinenberg said. “In a way,” he
added, “it’s our social failure that has created this opportunity for A.I. and technology to fill in the
void.”

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