Will Android Shrinks Treat Digital Loneliness?

I recently had a discussion with an eight-year-old about the potential for the future of humanity to be entirely digital rather than biological. His first thought: “Wouldn’t it be really lonely?” This is decidedly NOT what I was expecting from a member of a generation seemingly born attached to a screen. In addition, this particular representative of youth has an intense fascination with virtual reality video games, but he somehow still is differentiating between the digital contact with others in the game and the biological contact he has with people without technological intermediation. While I believe the migration from biology to bytes will help us overcome loneliness, it is worth exploring why an eight-year-old, steeped in technology, might not trust that evolving into digital versions of ourselves will satisfy the most deep-seated needs of Homo sapiens.

The idea that we might be approaching a time when biology becomes obsolete is popular among futurists and was discussed in a previous post. However, even if humans never have to make a choice between remaining biological and becoming entirely digital, the draw of online games such as Second Life and the enhanced quality of virtual reality environments suggests the possibility that we face a future where most of our interactions with others will be digitally intermediated. In other words, even if we ourselves never become machines or meld with algorithms, we may nevertheless find ourselves physically isolated from one another, communicating only via technology.

We have evolved as a social species, and evidence suggests that our ability to cooperate is a key reason we sit at the top of the global hierarchy (or believe we do). Consequently, a large part of our brain is dedicated to reading social cues and facial expressions, and, barring certain disorders or extreme introversion, we crave contact with others of our species. Anthropologists typically agree that ancient humans lived in groups of up to 150 individuals in situations that involved daily, close, physical contact. In modern society, we live in more dispersed social groups, and technology facilitates this. Social media allows a scattered community to communicate regularly, forging ties across barriers that would traditionally have precluded interaction.

However, the result is significantly fewer face-to-face exchanges. Not only does this circumvent our ability to incorporate body language into our assessment of each other – leading, in some cases, to disastrous results – it also deprives us of corporeal contact. Studies looking at hormone activity indicate that touch stimulates the release of oxytocin and suppresses production of cortisol. This floods us with feelings of well-being, solidifying our connections with others, and decreases stress. Touch is the way we communicate compassion, and our highly cultivated need for community is one of the things that defines us as human.

If we move to an entirely digital framework, though, perhaps this need will cease, programmed out either by choice or as a consequence of our new non-biological forms, whatever they may look like. (For instance, silicon-and-metal spheres would be unable to touch in more than one, tiny spot.) The idea that we could choose to banish loneliness is tantalizing, given the cost it currently imposes. In the close-knit, tribal bands of our past, the elderly were cared for collectively, but today, almost half of women over 75 in the US live alone, many not by choice, and approximately 10% of seniors fall below the poverty line. Depression, which often is sparked by loneliness, imposes a $210bn annual burden on the US economy, according to one study, and that does not include the immeasurable emotional cost. If people could opt out of loneliness, the benefits would spread beyond just their own happiness.

Even those who don’t live with loneliness every day might prefer never to experience it, which introduces the question of whether the feeling has positive corollaries that we would thwart if we erased it. Clearly, if being a social species conveys advantages, loneliness would naturally evolve as a subliminal signal to remind us of that, prodding us back toward the safety of the group whenever we strayed too far into solitude. The predators of the past were more easily overcome with physical cooperation – picture the takedown of a mastodon by a closely coordinated group of hunters, acting together according to a pre-arranged strategy. However, in a digital world, the predators are likely to be diffuse, so even if social cooperation is still of value in overcoming them, it is unlikely to need to be in proximity, obviating one historical impediment to isolation, at least of the physical variety.

As mentioned earlier, though, touch still conveys information that is important to our ability to trust, so it is possible that, rather than eliminating touch, we might choose digital forms specifically to maximize this aspect of our biological lives. Even a world of virtual reality could conceivably incorporate haptic sensors that accurately mimic the neurological effects of actual touch. Just as video-conferencing technology has enabled far-flung employees to participate in staff meetings without losing body language cues, gatherings could increasingly incorporate virtual reality formats that allow for not just encouraging nods through a screen but also the congenial shoulder slaps and elbow nudges that bind a group together. A fully digital world could continue this tradition.

In the conceptualization presented above, vanquishing loneliness relies on our ability either to reprogram our needs or to recreate the stimulus-response mechanism via technology, neither of which is far-fetched anymore. While these developments might address the concerns of the aforementioned eight-year-old, some people will still believe that something would inevitably be missing. This concern has overtones of the mind-body problem that has bedeviled philosophers for millennia and which has led some to posit the existence of a soul. Many of the futurists who believe that we are on the brink of merging with artificial intelligence argue that identity is the totality of our neurological impulses, a combination of electricity and chemistry. To them, the soul is an extension of that, not separate from it, and would be easily incorporated into an individual’s digital representation.

Not everyone, however, believes that our essence can be condensed to the electricity in our brains. Some come from a religious perspective and postulate that God is in each of us and cannot be reduced to chemistry.* Others hypothesize that identity includes too many feedback loops from our environment to be localized and thus distilled. This is not a question that science can answer yet, and the overarching quandary of whether loneliness in all its configurations will be subjugated or heightened by shedding our biology is still based primarily in belief rather than reason. In the end, though, however one defines identity, at least we can address some forms of loneliness by incorporating the technology of touch into our world as it is currently organized, especially given recent advances in virtual reality. I think eight-year-olds – and eighty-year-olds – everywhere would be pleased.

*Note that the futurist model in the previous paragraph is not necessarily atheist, since it does not preclude a Deist conception of the origins of the universe.

**Many thanks to Kalel, the perspicacious eight-year-old who sparked this post.