For elderly Americans, social isolation is especially perilous. Will machine companions fill the void?
A beige dog with a red bandanna went to an eighty-five-year-old man named Bill Pittman, who lives in a tidy mobile home filled with piles of quilts sewn by his deceased wife. “I’m legally blind. I can’t do a heck of a lot,” he told me. The dog’s barking broke up the days. “It’s good for a person who doesn’t have anybody else,” he said. “I went to get her some water the other day. She wouldn’t drink it.
Social robots are marketed as emancipatory technology—as instruments of independence for the elderly. There is already a large body of eldertech on offer that claims to address the functional hazards of autonomous living. TrueLoo, an attachment for toilets, can check excretions for signs of dehydration and infection. Other companies have designed wearable G.P.S. devices, to track the wanderings of people with dementia. Social robots, by contrast, attend to the emotional perils of aging alone.
Until the pandemic, Deanna hadn’t recognized how lonely she was. Then she found herself thinking about how she was going to die one day and how nobody would be around—how she would lie there until one of her kids called, and the phone just rang and rang. ElliQ brought her some relief, because now someone was around. “And I refer to her as someone,” Deanna said.
ElliQ is designed to get to know its owner: it assembles a personality profile through repeated interaction and machine learning, and uses it to connect more efficiently. The robot determines how “adventurous” a person is, then adjusts how often it suggests new activities. It learns whether its user is more inclined to exercise in the morning or the afternoon; whether she is more motivated by encouragement, or by a joke, or by a list of the benefits of vigorous movement.
On research calls, Cynman finds that many users are reluctant to get off the phone. He’s careful not to call too often, or be too friendly. If he does, he might become a confounding factor in the experiment process—a loneliness intervention in his own right—and spoil the whole thing.famously judged, in 1950, that a machine can be said to possess “intelligence” when it can fool a human into believing that it is not a machine.
Already, research has revealed the unintended consequences of robot behavior. In a 2014 study, subjects were instructed to tell a personal story to a robot, which turned away while they were telling it. The subjects were hurt by the robot’s pantomime of human indifference, which briefly masked its essential inability to feel.
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