Should we eradicate loneliness?

In Apple TV’s addictive new series Pluribus, every man, woman, and child on Earth (except for thirteen individuals) find themselves suddenly fused into a single collective “hive brain”, sharing one consciousness and the sum of humanity’s knowledge, creativity, and memory. They appear unnaturally content, prodigiously efficient, and infinitely compliant, eager to assimilate the few immune individuals into the mind. The show is a convincing exploration of loneliness in the age of AI.

In a recent New Yorker essay titled “A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem”, Paul Bloom makes a similar point. Loneliness, he argues, isn’t a malfunction; it’s a signal. It reminds us that we need other people and pushes us back toward connection.

Loneliness is not trivial. It’s a public-health crisis, as deadly as smoking or obesity, and especially brutal for the elderly.

Yet even though AI companions do already provide a good substitute for human empathy, we risk losing something essential if we rely on technology to eradicate loneliness.

Like powerful people surrounded by sycophants, we risk cultivating bad social habits if we only interact with AI companions programmed to always agree with us. Acquiescent chatbots may turn us into moral narcissists: never wrong, never challenged, never having to put in the effort to step into other people’s shoes and realise that empathy is a two-way street.

A world without loneliness might feel blissful at first. Then, quietly, it would become thin, sterile, less human. Loneliness is the bruise that teaches us where we end and others begin. In silencing it, we risk forgetting why we ever needed one another at all.