Only the lonely

I'm a BIG fan of assistive technology that will assistive us old geezers into being able to stay happily and contentedly in our very own homes. Some sort of kitchen doodad that can open a jar of Talenti pistachio ice cream? Bring it! A drone robot that can fly up to the top of the staircase ceiling and change a lightbulb? Absolutely. Telemedicine? I'm so there, holding my arm up to the camera: Doctor, does this bull's eye booboo look like something that will give me Lyme disease?

But a robotic pet - or just a robotic gizmo that looks like a nightlight - to keep me company and fulfill my emotional needs? Hmmmm. Gotta think about this for a sec. Thought about it. And it's a hard 'no.' At least for now.

Ask me again in another decade or so.

Maybe I'll be lonely then. 

Knock on quartzite countertops, but I'm good for now.

That's me. 

If you get comfort from a robotic cat or dog, it beats sitting around being lonely.

And the robotic cat does sound pretty cat-like, without having to put up with the smell of cat food and raking out the kitty litter box. For 92-year-old Virginia Kellner, who was given a "pet" by the department of aging in her rural upstate New York county, Jennie gives her a big lift.

Virginia likes the pet’s green eyes. She likes that it’s there in the morning, when she wakes up. Sometimes, on days when she feels sad, she sits in her soft armchair and rests the cat on her soft stomach and just lets it do its thing. Nuzzle. Stretch. Vibrate. Virginia knows that the cat is programmed to move this way; there is a motor somewhere, controlling things. Still, she can almost forget. “It makes you feel like it’s real,” Virginia told me, the first time we spoke. “I mean, mentally, I know it’s not. But—oh, it meowed again”(Source: The New Yorker )

Virginia has all her marbles, and she has family nearby who are attentive and caring. Still, she lives by herself, and it's nice having Jennie around. (Virginia had sweetly named her pet after a woman from the county department of aging. Another woman mentioned in the article named her cat "Sylvia Plath." I hope someone is keeping an eye on her - the woman, not the feline robot. I guess it'll be okay if all she does is stick the robot cat's head in the oven...)

Back to Virginia:

... “I can’t believe that this has meant as much as it has to me.” 

Good that having a fake pet around helps with isolation and loneliness.

Both are thought to prompt a heightened inflammatory response, which can increase a person’s risk for a vast range of pathologies, including dementia, depression, high blood pressure, and stroke.

A research study found that medical problems stemming from "social isolation adds nearly seven billion dollars a year to the total cost of Medicare, in part because isolated people show up to the hospital sicker and stay longer." 

Note to self: don't let yourself get isolated and/or lonely.

But if I do. there'll be plenty of assistive stuff available.

Eldertech. The isolation economy. Emancipatory technology. 

There's a lot going on out there with respect to elder care. Good thing, since the Boomer cohort is geezering up before our very (dimming) eyes.

On the companion end of things, the cats like Jennie and Sylvia Plath from Joy for All (which makes robot doggos, too) compete with devices that look more like a nightlight. 

Why, here's Gramps hanging out with one from ElliQ.

Unlike the cats and dogs, ElliQ isn't cuddly. It looks like a nightlight, or a good-for-nothing table lamp that's doesn't emit enough light for you to read by. 

Although owners have been know to draw faces on to ElliQ, 

The robot’s designers had decided not to give it humanoid facial features, so that it would “stay on the right side of the uncanny valley.”

Uncanny valley, you ask? That's the relationship between a robot who looks sort of human (or feline, or canine) and the emotional response someone has to it.

Anyway, it looks to me as if Gramps - a.k.a., A Study in Brown - has crossed that uncanny valley. He sure seems to be smiling benevolently on ElliQ when he could just as easily have been smiling on the old baseball mitt - brown, naturally - resting on his late wife's (brown) Lane hope chest.

Unlike the robot cats and dogs, which fake purr and fake bark, ElliQ is a talker. It greets its owner, and (like Alexis) can answer questions. And thanks to machine learning, ElliQ gets to know the human being it's moved in with.

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...With new developments the company is working on, ElliQ will one day be able to remind users about a broader array of health-care tasks: taking meds, reporting side effects, describing symptoms.

I guess getting attached to your ElliQ beats getting attached to a Roomba vac, which one study found was happening.

Still, there's something a bit troubling about swapping out authentic human interaction with inauthentic interaction with a robot. 

The article mentioned several times that a lot of old folks try to hang on to extend telephone conversations with support people they don't even know. They invite the person who's dropping off their Meals on Wheels chow to sit down and visit for a while. 

Robots  to the loneliness rescue are well and good, but maybe the should be augmented with real human contact. It seems more than fair. After all, robotics/AI/machine learning are going to do away with millions of jobs over the next few decades. Maybe we need a new job category: visitor, conversationalist, human being. 

I'll all for it, and I bet the cat ladies and A Study in Brown would be, too. 

Nothing wrong with relying on the comfort of robots to save us from loneliness. We just might need to add in a bit more human-based TLC. Even if it is the comfort of strangers, there's no real substitute for the human touch.