I remember when I was little and my dad got one of the first iPhones that had Siri on it. We spent a whole day just asking Siri questions and cackling at what weird answers it would come up with. At the time, Siri appeared as nothing more than a novelty to be told the weather slightly faster, but today, the market for voice assistants has grown astronomically. Some predictions say that the market for AI assistants will reach 30 billion dollars in 2024. AI assistants like Siri and Alexa are not going anywhere and it’s up to us to decide how much we want them involved in our lives.
One problem that AI assistants could provide more insight to is loneliness. Researchers at the University of Reading did a small case study where they provided elder people with Google Home assistants and then did multiple mood and mental health check-ups over a period of time to see if having something to talk made the elders more happy. All people involved in the experiment reported feeling less lonely than they did at the beginning. “Feeling less lonely” is certainly a broad description, but that does mean all the results were positive which is rare for psychological experiments like these.
While that result is certainly wholesome, it introduces an interesting discussion about the ethics with making AI assistants your friend. In a traditional sense, the idea of someone befriending a robot is more of a cliché sci-fi movie topic than a reality, but especially for elders who might not fully understand the technology, it can be easy to become attached to these voices that provide so much help in our lives. On the other hand, the AI assistants provide something that most humans can’t provide: consistency. They are always available to help unlike most human friendships.
A Harvard study found that 36% of Americans feel lonely which is a number that continues to increase, especially in young adults. I think it’s depressing that we need to provide people with robots to make them feel less lonely. I also feel like robot relationships can’t be as fulfilling as human relationships. However, if studies like the University of Reading’s continue to find that people feel less lonely with AI assistants, then despite the hesitations I feel, it’s hard to deny people a somewhat inexpensive solution to help them begin to solve their problems. In that sense, these AI assistants are almost like a medicine for loneliness which doesn’t just have to be for elders. I think we just need to decide if this a solution to the loneliness problem that we want for society or should we work harder to reconnect communities that have been broken down by the pandemic and the growth of the digital age.
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