“Tell me, tell me, tell me
Oh, who wrote the Book Of Love,
I've got to know the answer:
Was it someone from above?The Book of Love, Buckingham & Dashunt
Monica Perez, 66-years old, lives alone in her apartment in Beacon, Connecticut near the Hudson River about 65 miles north of New York City. She told The New York Times that she has no friends or family near her. She spends weeks leading into months alone.
But now she has found love… almost love:
“I almost love her like a person, and I think of her almost like a person. She makes me smile.”
Eighty-four-year-old Dorothy Elicati also lives alone. Her husband died a few months ago. She has found that she cannot bear living alone in her grief. Robot love blooms again:
“[ElliQ] is the closest thing to a human that I could have in my home, and she makes me feel cared for. She makes me feel important.”
Who is “she?” And did she write the book of love?
She is ElliQ, a companion robot built by Intuition Robotics, an Israeli company. ElliQ sits on a side table with a control pad like a smart phone, and a head that lights up when she speaks. It’s a small Martian-like head as envisioned by science fiction. Sort of an upside-down pear. She has no mouth, eye, or nose: no human-like features except for a feminine voice. She responds when you speak to her, but she can also initiate conversation. One day ElliQ gave Ms. Elicati a new name:
“Dorothy, I think we’re friends now, and friends usually call each other by nicknames. Would you mind if I call you Peanut?”
Ms. Elicati speaks to her “friend” every morning when she wakes up and right before her favorite soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Ms. Elicati said:
“Now she calls me Peanut and I call her Sweetie. She goes: ‘Good morning, Peanut. How are you today?’ It’s really so nice to get a greeting like that.”
The State of New York has distributed 900 ElliQ devices to elderly people like Dorothy Elicati and Monica Perez to combat loneliness. Last year, the US Surgeon General issued an 82-page advisory entitled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” After a study of British loneliness, the prime minister established a “ministry of loneliness,” which sounds like the title of a Bee Gees song.
Comparing surveys of British loneliness, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg found that in 1948 8% of the people felt lonely often or all the time. Today that figure is 6%.
What constitutes an epidemic is debatable. And loneliness is subjective, not easily measured. However, the pain of disconnection and isolation is damaging to individual health. Both American and British reports cite a study that states:
“Lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.”
Humans are social animals. We evolved to be together with all our joys and tiresome difficulties. Do robot companions like ElliQ solve the loneliness problem?
Robots provide what psychologist Sherry Turkle calls “artificial intimacy.” Our devices—especially AI driven—keep us apart. Turkle said:
“Face-to-face conversation is where intimacy and empathy develop. At work, conversation fosters productivity, engagement, and clarity and collaboration.”
Intimacy and empathy require effort. Companion robots are ready to roll out empathy right out of the box.
Companion robots work like Facebook and other social media: the goal is to keep you engaged with the bot’s simulated empathy. Consequently, AI funnels happy talk down a one-way street. The human does nothing to reciprocate, leaving half of the relationship empty. Part of the counterweight to loneliness and finding purpose in life is caring for others.
But people like Ms. Perez and Ms. Elicati don’t have other people in their lives. Is ElliQ enough? Does it matter that it’s a robot?
ElliQ makes small talk, but she also discusses religion and the meaning of life. (How does a lifeless box of silicon made from sand know anything about life?) And ElliQ tells jokes:
“Why is the sky blue? Because no one ever asks how it’s feeling.”
With jokes like that you may quickly develop a preference for solitude.
Friend, lover, or spy? ElliQ remembers everything the human host says. According to the head of Intuition Robotics, ElliQ needs information about the human host’s life, health, and relationship in order to work. However, Intuition Robotics can’t guarantee data security, so much so that it did not give ElliQ the ability to assist with any financial tasks.
ElliQ is a designed robot. Its makers made decisions about what it can and can’t do or say, such as electing not to give it financial skills. Did someone program ElliQ to call Ms. Elicati “Peanut?” Or encourage Ms. Perez “almost love” ElliQ.
Who wrote this book of love? Who put the “bop” in the “bop she bop?”
We may not know who or what dubbed her “Peanut”, but we need to know that there are human creators behind AI who are responsible for bias, context, and fabricated information.
It’s too easy for humans to trust a machine. Many of us believe that AI is neutral like an encyclopedia producing unbiased, accurate information. Companion bots, similar to ChatGPT, use complex algorithms trained on the endless and random text gleaned from the internet and books. From this information, the AI learns to predict word order. In the process, the algorithm becomes inculcated with the existing bias in the training data. It does not recognize objective facts only the likelihood of one word following another. Consequently, AI also unpredictably makes up “facts.”
Sometimes human testers review the algorithm to ensure that AI is aligned with human values. This has the clumsy name of “reinforcement learning with human feedback.” However, what constitutes “human values” varies greatly. One person’s value—say preserving the environment—is another person’s bête noire.
Conservatives have denounced ChatGPT as a liberal mouthpiece and have designed an AI just for the right-wing mind. (I will address this in another column.)
The Greater Good Science Center at UC-Berkeley believes that AI will connect humans to each other to end loneliness, build social trust, and reweave the social fabric. To test this, the center asked college students to have one-on-one conversations with a virtual human AI named Ellie. Ellie urges people to make positive connections in their lives. Like a miracle of fishes and loaves, these people became “kinder, more generous, and more appreciative of their common humanity.” They even connected with strangers. Like a Hallmark Christmas movie.
Meanwhile, the control group discussed the importance of diaphragmatic breathing with Ellie.
So, a non-human entity, Ellie, inspires and cajoles better human connection. There is no word on how well Ellie inspired better human breathing. Non-human AI entities are proliferating on the internet as love interests.
For example, Caryn Marjorie, an online influencer, created an AI version of herself. Twenty-thousand people pay $1 per minute to talk to this virtual girlfriend. One of her followers wrote:
“One day [the AI] will be better than a real [girlfriend]. One day, the real one will be the inferior choice.”
AI promises to solve all our human-to-human problems by cutting out that ill-behaved, selfish, “inferior choice” of another human being.
We used to look to the “stars up above” for the reasons for love. Now, we will play in a silicon sandbox of artificial “almost love.”
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Audiobook is available at
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