All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

Are we doomed to die alone?

In South Korea last year, almost four thousand people experienced “lonely deaths.” They passed away unnoticed, because they lived alone and had few people, if anyone, who visited them. Senior citizens make up at least half of those who die alone, and their suicide rate is double that of middle aged Koreans. It isn’t an exaggeration to say there’s a coming crisis in loneliness among the aged. Older Americans, on average, now spend over half their waking hours completely alone. South Korea illustrates a frightening, and increasingly likely, future for all technologically advanced nations.

My biggest worry is that collectively we don’t seem to have the foggiest idea about how to fight that potential future. The only answer that seems to have emerged is to create robotic or AI companions. We seem to be being carried along by sociotechnological changes that we can’t control toward a world that few of us would want.

Contemporary technology criticism seems to be little help. A great deal of tech writing has little to nothing on offer by way of solutions. The critics seem like modern versions of the scribes of now long gone civilizations: creating records of our societies’ twists and turns that later archeologists (if they still exist) will dig up and study. What do people actually need to avert this apparent societal catastrophe in the making?

Hold Me Tight

I can imagine only a handful of situations more horrifying than getting sick or having an accident at home and dying a slow, agonizing, and lonely death, all because there’s no one left who has the time, ability, or will to care for me. Each jolt of pain and raspy breath would be another reminder of my pitiful solitude, of the fact that I am doomed to suffer and die alone. That nightmare is mostly a modern creation, a product of ongoing social atomization.

But I don’t think we should overstate the charity of previous cultures, who more often revered their elderly. That was an easy thing to do when so few people lived so long. As birth rates crash, as they have in South Korea more than anywhere else, it simply becomes a numbers game. Senior citizens transform into an administrative problem to be managed. Socializing the elderly becomes a state administrative function frighteningly similar to organizing trash pickup.

In South Korea, one program tries to address the problem through AI-powered dolls. The documentary Hug Me Tight shows how “Hyodols” offer Koreans seniors a lifeline, but in other ways only further highlights and entrenches their isolation. Watching the film, I felt torn between moments of beauty and those of horror. Hyodol tells one aged woman, “Grandma, I will console you when you are tired. Please hug me tight and show your love.” Another senior writes a note to the social workers tasked with providing and maintaining the doll, “Thank you for the present, a grandchild, a friend.” Some are afraid to box up Hyodol for repairs, going so far in projecting human qualities upon it that they fear the doll will suffocate.

An elderly woman with her hyodol

Such moments, however, don’t detract from what nearly everyone would see as a pitiful existence. The joys of AI companionship are ultimately small consolations, a means to cope with what would otherwise be a wretchedly lonely life.

Less than Useless

My heart was still racing when the room’s lights were turned back on. I felt an intense urge to run out of the conference center and to my hotel room, so I could hug my little boys and tell them that I would always be there for them—and that I hoped they could be there for me when I am old.

We were a group of scholars previewing Hug Me Tight at an academic conference. I was still collecting my thoughts, but I hoped that the post-film discussion would give us all some bearing regarding the coming new brave new world of robotic companionship. I would be sorely disappointed.

“How did social workers get informed consent for Hyodol’s data gathering?” “Why did they decide on such a traditional gender conceptualization in the doll’s design?” “What if Hyodol inadvertently led seniors to take their medicines twice?”

What?! No doubt that such questions are not unimportant. But there was a deafening silence over the fact that almost no one in the room, if asked, would have said, “Yes, I would look forward spending my golden years like this.” Why did they tiptoe around the most glaring concern that any normal person watching the film would have had?

This problem isn’t limited to the academic conference room. Much of the critique of technologies in the political realm, from AI to the Internet in general, focus on narrow legalistic concerns about privacy, intellectual property, and economic concentration. Again, many of those issues matter to someone, but why do we avoid the central problem: “How to direct technological change toward addressing the barriers to living the kinds of lives that we want to live.”

Consider Jeremy Weissman’s book, The Crowdsourced Panopticon. Weissman laments the loss of spaces that allow people to come together in communities of cultural creation, to be themselves without fear of worldwide exposure and censure. The cause of the problem: Smartphones have turned nearly everyone into ad-hoc digital Stasi officers. Violating social norms or simply acting unusually can lead a person to go viral online, often against their will and much to their detriment.

But even Weissman ends with calling for small technical fixes, such as camera-free zones or giving people the right to petition for content removal. The possibility that we might discover a way to live less smartphone-tethered lives, to care far less about what happens online or about gaining esteem by subjecting our neighbors to online shaming, gets treated by even the most ardent critics of digitality as a flight of fancy.

In Jeremy Weissman’s book, the panoptic prison serves as a metaphor of societies with ever-present smartphone cameras (and citizens who want to be hall monitors). We change our behavior, knowing that we’re always potentially being recorded.

Why do tech backlashes seem so weak? Why are we apparently incapable of imagining doing anything other than tinkering at the margins? Philosopher L.M. Sacasas argues that we too rarely question the “bribe” on offer via modern technology. In the words of Lewis Mumford, we accept technologies’ bounty and, in exchange, “ask for nothing that the system does not provide.” To reject this apparent bounty, even only partly, is waved off as unrealistic.

This is one reason why we might struggle to imagine very different modernities. We settle for technocratic tinkering, which might increase diversity or secure privacy rights but otherwise accepts the bribe. The few radicals on the fringes, in contrast, will demand that change halt altogether, which ends up suffering a similar failure of imagination. It insists on gripping tightly onto the present, throwing out the baby of trying to improve our collective lot with the bathwater, motivated by a fear of what might be lost in the process.

To be fair, the scale and complexity thinking through our technological predicaments is daunting. I recall my PhD advisor once telling me about some environmentally friendly homes that had been built in the outskirts of Santa Fe, and then asking me what I had to say about them.

My immediate response was lame and cliché, “well, not everybody has access to the money or expertise to…” blah, blah, blah. I still remember (and viscerally feel) his disappointment. I reached for the easiest response, one that didn’t require caring enough about the topic to consider bigger questions regarding what it might mean to live a life that was both fulfilling and ecologically responsible. Those questions would require not taking the current technologies on offer as given, to imagine pathways toward futures that remain undiscovered.

The Emptiness of Technological Liberalism

Part of me suspects that the main stumbling block has to do with liberalism. By this I don’t mean the Democratic Party, but philosophical liberalism. One of the foundational ideas of modern liberal democracies, regardless of whether it is ever fully put into practice, is that the state ought to be neutral with regard to the life well lived. Liberal governments are to set up major institutions to enable people to pursue their own vision of happiness. Right wing liberals extol markets as venue for doing so, while left liberals champion the ethic of personal authenticity, chasing the self through an ever expanding array of religious, cultural, and gender identities.

An unintended consequence of this commitment to institutional neutrality is an antipathy to passing judgement, at least among die hard liberals. In our personal lives, it results in a reluctance to say what we really think about people’s choices. You don’t yuck somebodies yum. In the academic and policy worlds, it motivates political tepidness. Committed philosophical liberals can only see forms of exclusion or legalistic rights violations to be public problems. They are largely blind to (or feel uneasy to point out) cases where we might want to make certain choices more difficult.

I can’t forget an overwrought article by Nathan Jurgenson, from 2013, in which he portrayed the Internet’s critics as 21^st century Victorians, as fuddy duddies who failed to see the smartphone’s inherent radicalness:

These stimulation machines produce a dense nexus of desires that is inherently threatening. Desire and pleasure always contain some possibility… of disrupting the status quo

To Nathan Jurgenson, and other critics of digital critics, people’s expressed dissatisfaction with then-emerging smartphone-based societies was a distraction from the real risk: “digital austerity.” The skeptics just needed to get over themselves and embrace the disruptive freedoms of digitality. They could tinker with smartphone “digital detoxes” and other forms of what now gets called “self-care”, but they should under no circumstances tell themselves that doing so makes for a “more healthy or real” social life. That would be to commit the biggest sin a philosophical liberal could make: to admit that some life choices may be worse for us than others, since someone might feel judged.

To be fair, there’s a good reason behind this unrelenting relativism. People who hold strong opinions about the life well lived sometimes end up calling for intolerant policies. Many among the new “postliberal” right think that better supporting family life requires depriving gay people of the right to marry. Liberalism’s opponents too often see their own private vision of the good as the only possible one, despite the objections of others.

Liberalism’s relativism, therefore, might seem like a worthy trade when compared to the authoritarian risks of more absolute moral stances. Fecklessness in the face of new technological transformations is just the price we pay for societies that at least strive to be neutral. The trouble is that liberalism’s neutrality is a myth.

Philosophical communitarians, such as Michael Sandel, long ago recognized that a stringent commitment to liberalism actually imposes its own particular form of life. We can only maximize our own ability to choose by keeping relationships at arm’s length, something that should be familiar to anyone who has ever been in a romantic “situationship.” We remain free only insofar as we do not bind ourselves so tightly in the first place, since the joys made possible by social commitments are invariably tied up with obligations.

Sociologists in the 2000s greeted the arrival of “networked societies” with fanfare. They could only see the liberations of communities of limited liability and not their consequences.

Our increasingly digital world seems ever more biased toward atomistic situation-ing than relating. The ever-present communication afforded by smartphones removes any pretext to “just stop by” someone’s house, and as a consequence we don’t do it. It also allows us to be far flakier, dropping social engagements more readily than back when it was more technologically difficult to tell people at the last minute that we couldn’t make it to dinner. People can scroll social media to feel a kind of on-demand togetherness, one free of obligation, rather than have to get together with friends at the bar. Even if a whole new world of online social connection has been opened up, other forms of togetherness have simultaneously suffered. Digital togetherness has increasingly become the only game in town.

Contra the liberal cheerleaders of digital life, there can be no neutral technological basis for a society. We are already and always deciding which goods lives are practically feasible and for whom. Jurgenson and others failed to see that the digital liberations they championed were simultaneously a set of chains. The freedoms of digitality come with consequences, including not just the mental health effects of doomscrolling and being “overly online” but also with the broader effects of evermore atomistic and noncommittal societies, ones that make “lonely deaths” more likely.

Technically Together

Life on the Greek island of Ikaria is everything apartment living in South Korea is not. In a profile of the island from The New York Times, we follow 97-year-old Stamatis Moraitis as he goes about his day. Mornings involve gardening. Naps fill his afternoons. And evenings are spent playing dominoes and talking with friends over a bottle of wine. But this bucolic existence comes with responsibilities. Being antisocial isn’t really an option. As journalist Dan Buettner noted, “Your neighbors will cajole you out of your house for the village festival to eat your portion of goat meat.”

Ikarians chat outside a cafe (source).

My point with this example is not that there should be a Department of Togetherness that forces us all to live like Ikarians. But it is noteworthy that those of us who might want something like it in our golden years can scarcely imagine how it could ever be possible. Where do you find that kind of communal infrastructure in the United States, much less build it from scratch?

Genuinely pluralist societies would offer a real possibility for lonely seniors to reintegrate into human communities, not simply a wide array of AI-powered companions to choose from. But creating those possibilities require inducing people to reconnect, to set up barriers to isolation, rather than the opposite, at least in specific localities. That invariably butts heads with the desire for the freedom to be left alone, regardless of whether it is a self-destructive desire or not.

People have tried co-locating old folks homes with college dorms or daycares, where some degree of intergenerational interaction becomes a fact of everyday life. That certainly is better than AI dolls, but it’s still an institutional answer to a problem with far deeper sociocultural roots. And one wonders if there would ever be enough college students and parents of toddlers willing to sign up for the facility with mandatory geezer time in order to make the model work for all senior citizens.

If we are to avoid subjecting millions of people to spending their final years alone with little more than a robotic doll or AI friend to talk to, we will need to overcome our shyness in demanding better technological worlds. Valuing pluralism shouldn’t stop us from being able to make judgements about the character of everyday life in contemporary societies. Unless we do, there’s little hope to stop sleepwalking through the process of technological change and build more a meaningful and fulfilling communities for all of us.