Growing Alone

My thoughts turned to my parents when I read this story about a companion bot for the elderly. While they have each other for company that will inevitably change at some point. I wondered if something like this could help them or anyone else in that position - the surviving spouse with children far away. There no good options at that point. When you have left home at eighteen and the physical distance has only grown over time, there is no path to being together again when both sides have aged and firmly settled in their ways. That said, like the author it made me sad to think that is the best we can do for the elderly in our lives.

ElliQ has laudable ambitions and is a pragmatic solution to a growing problem we are short on ideas for. But on some level it saddens me, because it’s another example of AI replacing people, and a robot is no replacement for a human companion or a medical professional. (To be fair, the company makes no such claims, and ElliQ does encourage you to speak to people.) Still, it’s humbling, and perhaps slightly worrying, how easily AI can manipulate us into anthropomorphizing machines. That debate and what it means for our future are beyond the scope of this review.

I know an old man who became a widower a few years ago. He lives a continent away from his only son and waits all year for the son to visit. He says at his age, the feeling of loneliness and purposelessness can slowly kill. He experiences both but there are too many logistical complications for this family to do anything different.