AI and the End of Loneliness | Paul Bloom | TED

I have a couple of questions for you -- but they’re personal. So I’m not going to ask for a show of hands. First, right now, at this stage of your life, are you lonely? And if not, have you ever been lonely? My favorite description of loneliness comes from Zoë Heller's book "Notes on a Scandal." And in it, the narrator, who is played in the movie by Judi Dench, distinguishes between passing loneliness and something deeper. So she observes that people think they know what it's like to be lonely. You know, they had a bad breakup or a rough time in summer camp. But then she says this. "About the drip, drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette, or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters." And she concludes with this: “I have sat on park benches and trains and school room chairs feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing to the ground."

I like this quote for a few reasons. It talks about solitude, and solitude is a big source of loneliness, but it also talks about love. You could be with somebody, but if you're not loved, not needed, not respected, you might feel lonely. And then there's understanding. Suppose you have something in your head that's important to you, that matters a lot to you, but you feel others don't get it, or don't care to get it, or aren't trying hard enough to get it. This too could cause loneliness. Loneliness ravages the body as well as the soul. A report by the Surgeon General associates it with greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke and the like. It's the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Studies in the United States [and] United Kingdom find that about one in five people describe themselves as often or always lonely. And the most at-risk group is young adults. I'm here to talk about a possible cure for loneliness and what it might mean.

And I think we could see loneliness as similar to boredom. I'm old enough to remember when people were bored all the time. Long train rides, long car rides, long plane rides. Late at night when the TV stations switched off and you were all alone, and you had to read. (Laughter) But now most of us carry around our phones and those phones offer podcasts and movies and books and music and social media and so on. And so for many of us, boredom is a thing of the past. Well the cure for loneliness may also be found in our phones and our laptops. And it is, of course, generative AI. Last year, some friends and I wrote an article called "In Praise of Empathic AI." If that title makes you cringe and makes you kind of angry, you're not alone. Our colleagues hated it. It's the article that I've written that most people hated. But bear with me. We started by making a sort of simple point, which is [to] review a set of studies that have involved -- like, you get a whole lot of people interacting with other people, sometimes doctors, sometimes therapists, sometimes just regular people.

And you get a whole lot of people interacting with chatbots. And then you ask them later: “How did it go, what’s your experience?” And people tend to rate the chatbots as more empathic, more caring, more understanding. And it's no surprise. AIs are built to be attentive, to be present, to be interested. An AI is never going to impatiently wait for you to finish telling your story, so it can tell you one of its own. (Laughter) An AI is never going to say, "Dude, I'm busy. Get back to me later. I got things going on." Suppose some future -- I don't think it's happening now, but some future AI could serve as a cure for loneliness. Would this be a good thing? Well to some extent, yes. Obviously, yes. Think about the many millions of elderly people, many in institutions, who go for days and nights without talking to anybody, in perfect agony of isolation. Many of them have dementia.

Many of them are difficult to interact with for other reasons. They don't have family and friends to spend time with them. And there's not enough money in the world to pay people to come and talk to them for hours on end. If some future version of Chat or Claude or Gemini could ease these people's suffering, it would be a godsend. But for the rest of us, it's more complicated. And you can view these cures for loneliness as akin to a powerful painkiller. Like a powerful painkiller, it can alleviate suffering. But like a powerful painkiller, [it] can sometimes come at a terrible cost. And to make sense of the cost, you have to think about what loneliness is for. So the neuroscientist John Cacioppo, who founded the modern science of loneliness, argued that it's a biological signal akin to hunger, thirst and pain. And as such, it does two things for us. It could sometimes be paralyzing, but when it works out well, it has certain evolved functions that improve our lives.

So one, just as hunger motivates us to seek out food, loneliness and other forms of social suffering motivate us to seek out and maintain social connection. Because we get lonely, we accept an invitation to a party, we invite a friend out to brunch, we open up the dating apps. It also helps us regulate relationships. It helps us try to repair a relationship gone wrong, to apologize for messing up, to try to show genuine interest in our relationship with somebody else. A second thing that loneliness does is it helps us grow as people. It's a truism in psychology that we learn from failure. They call it trial-and-error learning, [or] reinforcement learning. The idea is nicely summed up in the movie "Batman Begins," where young Bruce Wayne’s father asks the future Batman, “Why do we fall?” And he answers, "So we can learn to pick ourselves up."

This is literally true for toddlers who learn to walk by falling and stumbling and doing things wrong. It's true for a comedian who learns to improve her act by bombing on stage, by having her jokes fall flat. It's true for a boxer who learns to evade a punch by getting repeatedly smacked in the face. Well failure in a social realm is associated with loneliness. And can you imagine what it would be like if people never got [the] signal [of] failure? Imagine a teenage boy who never learned to cut short his monologues because his AI companion never got bored. (Laughter) Imagine an adult who never learned to apologize because her AI companion never needed an apology. Imagine a world where the answer to the question, "Am I the asshole?" is always a firm and resounding no. (Laughter and Applause) Now you might think this has an easy technological fix.

You could just go into the settings and make it less sycophantic. And in fact, I don't use AI myself for social purposes, but I use it a lot for my work. And after a while I got tired of Chat and Claude just saying, "Oh, brilliant question, Paul. Oh, oh, such a clever idea. How do you get to be so intelligent?" So I went into the settings, and I said, “Stop. Do not praise me. Be blunt. Just be honest. Tell it like it is.” Then a month later, I changed it back. (Laughter and Applause) I kind of missed it. (Laughter) You can call this Cordelia's Problem. In Shakespeare's "King Lear," the king brings together his three daughters to try to decide how to divide up the kingdom, and he has his daughters tell him how much they love him. And his first two daughters praise him. They love him infinitely. He's the center of their lives.

Then Cordelia comes up and says, "I love you like a daughter should love her father, no more, no less." The king is enraged and banishes her from the kingdom. Now "King Lear" is a tragedy. His two sycophantic daughters didn't love him at all, and they betray him in the end. Now some of you are probably thinking, “Well, I’m not like King Lear. I like pushback. I don't want that sort of sucking up." And maybe, maybe. But I think some of us like the performance of pushback rather than pushback itself. So yeah, something that always says, "Yes, you're wonderful" gets a bit cloying. But a properly attuned AI won't do that. It will resist, it will argue against you, it'll push back. And then finally, in a very satisfying way, [it’ll] say, "I guess you win. You've totally persuaded me." And I worry that this sort of intelligent and titrated sycophancy is more corrosive to the soul than a sort of sucking up yes-men AIs we deal with now.

For some of you, the solution will be clear. Treat these hypersocial AIs like the powerful painkillers they are. Make them available to the people who need them the most and forbid their use for the rest of us. But this is not the solution that I believe in. I'm not a catastrophist when it comes to AI. Just like there are people who deal with AI companions in a normal way and benefit from it, and it doesn’t harm their life. In the same way there are people who resist technological temptations more generally, people who, when faced with the unholy trinity of TikTok, Pornhub and Wordle, nonetheless -- (Laughter) go to the gym, meet with friends, touch grass. The second reason I don't want to ban these things is more personal. When I was 11, my mother died of cancer.

I then entered a period of great pain and then problems with social relationships and then a period of loneliness that lasted for years. I would have benefited so much from someone, or find something, that would listen to me, that would express interest, that I could talk to, that I could share my feelings with. It seems like a betrayal of my past self to say, "Tough, do without, suffer and learn from your suffering." I wonder if the best of all possible worlds is to create imperfect companions, companions that somehow alleviate the pain of loneliness without destroying our humanity. Companions that are difficult enough to deal with that we learn from interacting with them. Companions that are sufficiently imperfect that we ultimately abandon them to deal with people. Now I'm pretty confident we could build such things.

I'm less confident that there's money to be had by doing so. I accept that it might be a bad business model to create AIs that users ultimately outgrow, but I hope there are people who care enough to do it anyway. Thank you. (Applause)