The warm bridge
Our series lands where it hurts, with loneliness. Artificial intelligence can ease it, and artificial intelligence can preserve it. The distance between the two is uncomfortably short.
Researchers at Harvard found that an AI companion eases loneliness about as well as a conversation with another person. That is wonderful and unsettling at the same time.
Four essays have been about what artificial intelligence can give our fellowship. I stand by every word. Though Ridderrennet was not founded to make everyday life more efficient, we were founded to fight back against loneliness and exclusion, with fellowship as the method. So the most uncomfortable question has to be asked as well. What happens on the day the machine meant to ease loneliness sits down in the chair where a person should have sat?
What the researchers find
This is being measured. The findings point in two directions at once.
In controlled experiments, Julian De Freitas of Harvard Business School and colleagues found that digital companions could ease loneliness in the moment. A fifteen-minute text conversation with a chatbot brought roughly as much relief as a similar exchange with another person, and more than watching YouTube videos. Feeling heard was central to the effect. The machine could offer the comfort of an attentive listener, but the researchers’ week-long study found no lasting reduction in loneliness between conversations.
A more complicated picture emerged from a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The researchers followed a group of people through four weeks of daily chatbot use. Those who spent more time with the chatbot tended to report greater loneliness, stronger emotional dependence on it, and less social contact with other people. Though participants chose how much time to spend, the study could not establish which way cause and effect ran. In OpenAI’s separate analysis of more than three million conversations, emotionally charged exchanges were concentrated among a small group of highly active users.
The research is young, and much remains unresolved. A chatbot can offer comfort through a dark hour. Heavier use is also associated with greater loneliness and emotional dependence, though the direction of cause and effect remains uncertain. Whether that comfort helps people reconnect or becomes a substitute for human contact over time is still an open question. The relief can be real. Its place in a person’s life is harder to judge.
The price of friendship
The machine friend is comfortable because real friendship comes at a cost. A friend can be out of sorts, contradict you, have a rotten day, and need something back. That is not a flaw in friendship, but the price of it being real, and the price is the glue itself. A machine that removes all friction also removes what binds people together. What remains relates to friendship roughly as the ski simulator relates to the mountain. Everything is right, except the wind.
For our community, this is not theory. People with disabilities report loneliness twice as often as the rest of the population. The people with the most to gain from a digital friend are the same people who have the most to lose from being left alone with it. We have warned about a Paralympics of loneliness before. We do not intend to hand out more race numbers.
Junction box, not terminus
Our answer is to give artificial intelligence the right job description. Junction box, not terminus. I have called it a matchmaker. The technology can find the one person out there who also loves mountain walks and has lost a spouse, and bring you two together. The assistant can steer you to the conversation group, the local club, or the café where like-minded people sit. The screen can open a door out.
The test is mercilessly simple. Are you left with more people in your life, or fewer? If the tool sends you out, it is doing good. If it keeps you in and 'content', it has done harm with a smile.
We ride at dawn
Stordahl asked 'why not' and refused to accept the answer. Morisbak told us to shape the tool around the person. The research has delivered the final verse. A screen can be a bridge into life or a wall around it, and the difference lies not in the technology but in what it connects you to.
Nobody crosses the finish line alone. Not in the tracks, not in life. If you're there for us, we're there for you. We ride at dawn.
That was the final part of the series 'AI & fellowship'. Thank you for riding with us. One afterword remains, about what we at Ridderrennet do with the tools, back in our own workshop.
