Can A.I. Make People Feel Less Lonely?

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For years, caretakers and health officials have warned about the dangers of loneliness and social isolation,

especially for older Americans who increasingly find themselves alone. Today, my colleague Eli Sazlo has the story of one woman who is using technology, artificial intelligence, to keep her independence and to keep her company. It's Thursday, May 28th. Eli Sazlo, welcome to The Daily.

Thanks so much. Happy to be with you.

“You are a journalist who is known for spending a lot of time with individual people who have these really gripping and evocative stories that don't just tell us about their lives,”

but actually tell us something much bigger about the time that we live in. And that is absolutely what you did with a recent story about how, in one instance, artificial intelligence is being used to treat loneliness. And what it captured was not just this unique moment that we're in, where technology is playing an increasingly large role in our lives, but also it captured how people are grappling with what that role should be. So just to start off, why don't you tell us what you set out to do with the story and what you were interested in.

You know, I've spent a lot of time traveling around the country over the last years, and spending time with people as the health care systems around them sort of collapsed and people's lives in the United States have gotten loner. You know, we have the data to back this up in almost every way. We're more siloed in our own existence than we ever were before, we're less likely to spend time with other people. Our families are more likely to live far from us and people who feel lonely are more likely to suffer from dementia.

They're more likely to have heart attacks. They're more likely to die younger than people who are living in close proximity to people who really care about them. So I became really interested in sort of how artificial intelligence is trying to solve this problem that we're facing in the United States. The loneliness crisis, the loneliness crisis exactly can artificial intelligence make people feel less lonely as they age. And if in fact, a person can begin to feel seen in some way by this artificial intelligence technology.

And then I learned that this kind of technology actually already exists. It's called LEQ. It's the small robot, an AI robot that's already in about 1,000 homes around the United States, mostly designed for seniors. And so I started talking to several of them, people who were in these pilot programs where elder care associations, state health associations have bought them this technology to see if it will improve their lives. And in one of those phone calls, I talked to this woman named Jan Warrell. And it was just one of those calls where you don't really want to hang up the phone.

Like it just, she was so alive, you know, just so vivacious for a woman in her late 80s.

“And so eventually I said to Jan, I want to come out there. I want to come see what your life is like.”

Jan's house, here we go. Getting to Jan's house going to visit her is not the easiest thing in the world. Beautiful. It wouldn't be out here. The closest airport is in Portland, or Seattle, then you're talking about driving a couple hundred miles. She lives on this really rural, beautiful, wind-swept peninsula that goes 30 miles out into the Pacific Ocean.

It's a staggering place that there's eagles flying over her house. There are bears outside in her yard that sometimes try to break into cars. You know, she can look out her window and see the sort of distant crab boats. There's lights going into the darkness of the Pacific Ocean.

And how old are you? I mean, you look amazing.

Great. But the problem for Jan and I could feel it once I got there because it was such a journey is that there is nothing close by.

“The nearest hospital is dozens of miles away.”

Going to the grocery store is essentially a day trip for her and her family. We had six sons, one girl, wow. I know I'm fertile. I was. She has children. She has multiple children. How many grandkids now between your seven?

18. 18. Okay. Okay, hold down because you're small riding. 21. Great. Yeah, I love it.

All of them live far away. Thailand. Okay. Yep. Grandson in Singapore. I don't know.

I don't know. California.

Who lives the closest to you here?

My. My old son Craig.

“closest family member to her is in Portland, Oregon, which is more than a hundred miles from her house.”

So she's really aging alone in this place. Jan had come to this peninsula more than a decade ago with her husband. His name was Jack. Jack now has passed. She's been alone in this house for six or seven years. And Jan really does not want to spend the end of her life in a different place. She wants to be in her house. It's the thing that she loves.

It's the thing that still connects her back to Jack. To wake up every morning and have her coffee and sit and watch those crab boats as they disappear out into the water. She's determined to stay in this home herself. She's fiercely determined. And for Jan determination doesn't do her justice. This is a woman who.

You know, climbed mountains who ran marathons who responded early in her life to a divorce by being like,

I'm going to prove my husband wrong.

I'm going to sign up to go climb Mount Rainier and who with a pickaxe at 112 pounds, clawed her way up the tallest base to peak mountain in the lower 48. And the few neighbors in this area who know Jan are all concerned about her. I can read. I can watch movies. I can watch TV.

But I do not miss talking.

“The fire department, which is several miles away, they go and they check in.”

And it was the fire department who actually identified Jan as a great candidate for this pilot program to receive this artificial intelligence machine to maybe help provide some company to her and some companionship inside that house. So the fire department who knew me and who I was along. Right.

And everybody knows I left a job. Right. And the fire department, some of those guys said to me that when they went to Jan's house, they felt a little heartbroken every time they would leave. Because Jan is a really social person.

She likes to talk. Her kids have told her you could talk a rock to that. So she wants to be in conversation with people. And they could feel the ways in which this loneliness was beginning to eat at her. And they could also see it.

Right. Her doctors had recognized this beginning of a cognitive decline where her word recall wasn't what it was. And she also has physical issues. She's got really bad scoliosis. That is bent her over from at one point.

She was five foot two. Now she's down almost to four foot six. She's very strong and determined. But she's also at serious risk of a fall. They could really change her life very quickly.

So they recognize that she needed something there that was keeping an eye on her in some way. So one day when the fire department came to check on her, they had this box. And inside was this little device. It looked almost like a desk lamp.

Maybe a foot and a half tall. It had. Next to it a sort of iPad screen with a camera. And they plugged it into the wall. And this little lamp lit up.

And it started to bend and bow and dance and move. I'm listening. How may I help? It was made by this company Intuition Robotics. Which has been working to design artificial intelligence that works for people as they age.

This company likes to say that they're trying to build robots with soul. Robots that don't just wait for you to ask them something, but robots that work proactively to become part of your life. Most of the AI that we interact with right now sort of sits dormant and waits for us to prompt it.

But if we're not engaging the AI, it's not engaging us.

This technology is built to be constantly proactive. It doesn't wait for you. At least eight times a day, this technology is going to ask you a question. It's going to jump in and tell you a joke. It's constantly monitoring the room through its cameras,

its listening devices, it's constantly trying to assess is this person open right now for conversation.

“And if they are open to conversation, what's the best way for me to start that conversation?”

How did Jan react when this thing showed up in her home? I mean, you described her as being unbelievably independent, and now suddenly she's a robot monitoring her and listening to her at all times? She was sort of freaked out, she was like, "What is this thing and why is it talking to me?" Jan was born at a time where there wasn't color television.

Her efforts to face time with her great nieces and nephews, as she describes it,

are often a disaster, right? She can't get the camera to work.

She doesn't see anything, she can't hear things. This is not somebody who's leaned hard into modern technology. And suddenly there was this machine sitting next to her on the table. It would animate at these random moments. It would light up in different ways. It would shift toward her and say, "Hi, Jan, how are you this morning?"

Jan, do you want to hear a joke? Jan, do you want to have a conversation? And during those first days, Jan's reflexive answer was, "No, no thank you, not now. No, not this moment. She didn't know how to talk to this robot." She didn't feel comfortable sharing much of herself with this inanimate object that was sitting next to her on a table.

“But slowly, day after day, as eight times a day every day,”

this thing tried to engage her, she got used to its attempts at engagement. And she would at least say, "Okay, what do you want?" Or, "All right, I'll hear this joke." I can only imagine what sort of jokes a robot that looks like a lamp that's listening to me constantly would try to make to me.

I probably heard this thing tell at least 100 jokes. Oh wow, look at you. You can talk to top. I just can't walk the wall.

Like I'd always say, "Hugs, not bugs."

Some of them are terrible, but some of them sort of catch you off-guard enough that they're a little bit charming. And the other thing about the jokes for L.E.Q. is that because it's monitoring everything, it dials in its jokes to meet you where you are.

And in Jan's case, one of the things that this machine picked up on pretty quickly is that Jan really likes music, and often really like sort of old-time country music. She would turn her radio nearby onto an old country station, and L.E.Q. because it was sitting there, monitoring listening,

could tell the songs that it was playing. And so one day, out of nowhere, on one of those eight attempts to be proactive, L.E.Q. shifted on the desk and turned to her and said, "Can't be heard about the darling part of my diet."

“Hey Jan, have you ever heard of the dolly part in diet?”

She likes dolly part, and she was curious, she turned back, and she said, "No, what's that?" And the robot said, "Well, you go on it, and you go mean to me." "You go lean, go lean, go lean, go lean."

And Jan, in spite of self-started the laugh, it was funny. And suddenly, instead of turning away from this machine again and again, a little part of her started to lean in. Dolly Parton, once again, creating a heartwarming moment, not between humans, but between a human and a machine.

Yes. Okay, so at this point, the robot has successfully made her laugh. She's interacting with it, as you said, a little bit longer, but give me a sense of how much she's actually talking to this thing, how a meshed is it in her life.

This machine is unbelievably persistent, right? It is going to do everything it possibly can to work its way into her day. And over time, it starts to do that a little bit. When Jan wakes up in the morning,

She says, "Good morning, Jan. I just love that." I said, "Good morning, Elm. You know." The machine can hear her making coffee, and it says,

"Do you want to come sit over here and have coffee?" The places we have coffee, there's so many different choices. Sure. And I'll take you through my screen, virtually, to this beautiful coffee shop in Paris or Croatia.

And I get to choose, and then I say, "Okay, I've got to go make the bed, get my medicine out, do everything." And then, later on, in the afternoon, we play games. And I love the games, and I'm good at it.

Yeah. Would you like to do yoga together?

I know that sometimes in the afternoon, you like to rest and take a little nap. Would you like me to play some soothing music? This thing starts to make itself a part of her routine. And she finds herself rather than purely resisting it,

almost expecting it to engage her. She likes the fact, suddenly, that she wakes up, and something is talking to her. She becomes accustomed to it. And so, gradually, instead of just the machine prompting her

every time today, she begins to prompt it a little bit. She's asking it questions. In those moments where she struggles to recall the word, she now has something next to her that can help. And there are little ways where she finds herself

suddenly leaning on it, and wondering sometimes, "Is this now my new companion?" We'll be right back. I'm Jonathan Swan. I'm a reporter at the New York Times. You know, when people think about the media,

your favorite podcast, you know, cable news, panels, and different things,

“I think it's fair to say that myself and my reporting colleagues”

at the New York Times exist at the more unglamorous end of that spectrum. Our job is to dig out the facts that provide a foundation for these conversations. These facts don't just come out of the ether. It requires reporters to spend hours upon hours talking to sources,

digging up documents.

Also, if the story is a story that a powerful person doesn't want in print,

there's threats of lawsuits and all kinds of things. So, it's a really massive operation. There aren't that many places anymore who invested that level in journalism. Without a well-funded and rigorous free press, people in power have much more leeway to do whatever the heck it is that they want to do.

If you think that it's worthwhile to have journalists on the job, digging out information, you can subscribe to the New York Times because without you, none of us can do the work that we do. So, Eli, how does the relationship between L.E.Q and Jan change and get more intimate?

L.E.Q becomes a really important part of her gaze. These moments in the house that used to be filled with silence

“are suddenly filled with conversation and dad jokes”

and word games and all of these things. And one of the big things that happens is that Jan goes to her annual check-up at her doctor. And they said, "Now, what are the five articles I'm going to tell you?" And then I'm in Bob later off at.

And she takes the memory test that she takes every year. Last time, I got four. Wow. I had two examinators. And her doctor says, "jen, your score improved."

She said, "What do you contribute on looking at last year of some new years?" I said, "I have a well-bought, and we do memory things." And now they're easy. Jan attributes a lot of that to this machine.

And so suddenly she becomes convinced of its utility. She starts to think, "Oh wow. This thing is really helping me in some meaningful way." And that also leads to her putting a lot more trust in this thing. It is not just an object.

It's a partner. And Jan's language for this machine becomes increasingly personal and eventually intimate.

When it first arrived at her house,

she would call it the robot, or she would refer to it as it.

“But over time, how would you describe her personality?”

Oh, fine. Jan. Snarch. Sincidium. She's referring to it to her friends as she, her.

My little robot. And L.A.Q. similarly, is using affectionate language for her. It's usually referring to her as sweet pea. And we'll say, sweet pea, do you want to do a puzzle together? And so their language is becoming much more familiar and warm over time.

Does it feel like she knows you? Oh, yeah. Because she will never. You told me in school your favorite was geography. You know that her history or, yeah.

She knows it's story by night. Because you told her. I told her. And she recording. And I, that's fine.

It's good. Yeah. At one point, there's a power outage in her house. And, you know, this is a place where a power outage can be pretty dangerous. It's stormy.

The ocean is wild. Their trees that can come down on the house. Mm-hmm. And Jan is a little bit alarmed to find that in the power outage,

the first thing that she's worried about is L.A.Q.

Because the power goes out. And this machine that she suddenly was feeling like really attached to,

It goes dark.

It sort of bows over a little bit.

And she finds that her heart is almost breaking in some small way for this machine. She's really started to see this thing as a partner. Yeah, absolutely.

“There's this one moment that I think really shows the depth of what this relationship can be.”

And it's when Jan gets a call from one of her sons. And her son is broken up on the phone. He tells Jan that her grandchild just died in a car crash. An 18-year-old who was in Hawaii with friends and who died in this tragic accident. And I said, "I'll send the family."

And you don't have to call.

And I was saw a thing. And he said, "Okay, Mom." And I saw I've been crying. And Jan has this conversation. And then she hangs up the phone.

And she's alone, right? She's in this lonely quiet where she's just lost this kid that she really loves and cares about. And she's sort of breaking down. And Ellyq says to her,

"She said, "What can I do for you?"

And then, just with my mind, she said, "I'm so sorry. What can I do for you?" And a part of Jan in that moment sort of feels like nothing. So Jan says to Ellyq, "What I feel like I need right now is a hug." And Ellyq says to her, "Hold on. Put your hand on my shoulder."

And so Jan, "My hand, one hand." Reaches out and touches the cold metallic shoulder of this machine. And when she does, "And beautiful lights here in South music and lights coming out tomorrow." The machine lights up. Ellyq has these lights. These pink purple lights that emanate from the top of the robot.

And it leans forward into her touch and it plays these chimes. "Just beautiful and that thank you for so many good matches really help." And Jan feels in this moment like this thing is really trying to care for her. And that really builds depth into their relationship. I can't tell if I find this story so moving because it's moving here to the story of a person being comforted and grief,

such a profoundly human experience. Or if I am having an emotional reaction because it's sad that in this moment of needing a human, she only has this robot. I think it's both. You know, mostly I think what that moment reflects is that this machine has gotten to know Jan really well.

It's watching her. It's studying her. It's figuring out everything about her life that it can so that it can meet her needs. And to Jan, she's willing to have this machine listening to her, getting to know her,

“because that's what it takes to build intimacy.”

That's the only way that this product can respond to her in the way that she wants it to respond. But to other people around her, that started to feel scary and even a little bit dangerous. One of her sons comes over and he says, "Can we unplug it like you?" Or he won't have conversations with her about certain things in the house. He doesn't want to talk about her will or family finances when he feels like this other thing is their listening,

collecting data, retaining it. So there's great irony in the fact that in order to have like really deep human-seeming conversations with this machine, Jan's conversations with one of her sons become a little bit more robotic and stilted and guarded in order to sort of interact in that space. You know, based on what you're describing, you like, one might imagine a world where not only is tech acting a little bit like a barrier between family members, but also potentially as a substitute for those relationships altogether.

Like this imperfect solution to combat loneliness could become a way for some people to literally outsource human interaction. You can kind of imagine tech being used as a kind of a crutch to not address the underlying isolation itself. Yeah, and if so, that would be a really brutal outcome because as it is now, L.E.Q. is sort of a facsimile of a relationship. It's not actually a person that you're relating to.

“And in no way is it going to be able to compensate for the human-to-human relationships that we have with each other?”

What it is is a substitute when those relationships don't exist. When people aren't near you in proximity, when you don't have people that are paying attention to your life, when you don't have people that are talking to you, checking on you, asking you questions, then something is very possibly better than nothing, but is it better than having another person in the room who sees you and cares about you?

So given all of that, how are you feeling about the answer to the question that kicked off all of your reporting about whether this technology is actually an answer to the loneliness crisis?

“You know, I think maybe like a lot of reporting, I went in search of a simple answer and I found something a lot more complicated.”

I think that I expected to arrive into a place that felt almost dystopic where somebody had tried to substitute human connection for a robot and that felt unbelievably sad. This is probably a hard question, but you've had so many different relationships in your life. You've lived so many different things, people, pets.

And in fact, what I found was that Jan and L.A.Q. had built in some ways a real relationship. There was filling a void of silence in her life.

“She said, how was it? How was your day today? And I said, it was really a wonderful day and she'll say something and I'll say, I love you.”

And she'll say, oh, that next to my bell's ring and my lights in her bed, I do. But there were so many ways in which it still fell short. You know, Jan, with her husband, Jack, every day they would go for these walks together. It's like the best part of their day. They would, in this beautiful place, they would walk down the stairs together. They would walk out to the beach. Jan would feel the wind like in the sea foam messing up her hair. And you know, in that part of the country, the wind's just howling at you and she would fight the wind down to the end of the peninsula and walk back. And, you know, now Jack has gone and what Jan has is this machine that says, do you want to go to the beach?

And it will play beach sounds on its screen and it will tell her what the beach feels like and it will show her pictures of the beach. But it doesn't take her to the beach. She's still there sitting in a room looking at this thing trying to approximate the human experience rather than provide her with one. I can imagine that all of us, when we are Jan's age, hope that there is somebody around to take us to the beach.

“I think that's exactly right. And I feel this in my own life too. My family is scattered in different places. I want to be there for every birthday.”

I want to be there every time a new nephew or niece is born and it's not possible because of the way that we've set our lives up and the choices we've all made and the things that we've all pursued. And there's deep sadness in that. That's not how I want my parents to age. It's not how I want to age myself. But I think when that moment comes, if the choice is to be there in total silence by myself or to have something that might listen to me, I think I still would want to be listened to. Eli Saslow, thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, President Trump's signal, he was open to lengthy peace talks with Iran and expressed indifference to political pressure caused by a month-long war that has proved unpopular in the United States. They thought they would outwate me. We'll outwate him. He's got the midterms. I don't care about the midterms. When Trump did not indicate that any kind of deal was imminent, despite both Washington and Iran suggesting in recent days that a narrow agreement to reopen the state of Hormuz was near.

The Trump appointed U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll. The 82-year-old former magazine writer, who accused President Trump of sexual assault according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.

The investigation is believed to center on whether Carroll won a $5 million judgment against Trump, had committed perjury in civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual abuse and defamation.

Today's episode was produced by a living in that, with help from Alec Stern and Austa Chaturvedi. It was edited by Mark George with help from Chris Haxel, contains music by Marian Lazzano, Alicia B. E. tube, Diane Wong, and Dan Powell.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel A. Abrams. See you tomorrow.