AI and the end of loneliness | Paul Bloom

Elise Hu (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.

Are you lonely right now? Have you ever been? However you answered, you've got a lot of company. Studies suggest about one in five people describe themselves as often or always lonely, and the group most at risk is young adults. Psychologist Paul Bloom thinks there's a cure for loneliness that may be coming and it might already be in your pocket.

Paul Bloom (0:34)

And you can view these cures for loneliness as akin to a powerful painkiller.

Like a powerful painkiller, it can alleviate suffering. But like a powerful painkiller, this can sometimes come at a terrible cost.

Elise Hu (0:48)

That cure Paul is talking about, you may have guessed it, AI, and he knows how that sounds. He says a piece he co-wrote called In Praise of Empathic AI was the most hated thing he's ever published. Because the idea of turning to a machine for companionship strikes a lot of us as bleak, even dangerous.

In this talk, Paul takes that discomfort seriously, and he makes a counterintuitive case that AI companions might genuinely ease loneliness, but at a cost.

Because loneliness, he argues, isn't a flaw to be engineered away. It's a signal that pushes us to connect with other humans.

Paul Bloom (1:29)

Your mother loves you. Your AI doesn't love you. Your mother has feelings. Your AI has no feelings.

Elise Hu (1:34)

And stick around after the talk, Paul sat down with me at TED 2026 in Vancouver to dig into the difference between what an AI offers and what a person does. Why a little discomfort might be good for us, and the personal experience that shaped how he thinks about all of this. That's coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk and conversation of the day.

Paul Bloom (2:03)

I have a couple of questions for you, but they're personal, so I'm not going to ask for a show of hands. First, right now at this stage of your life, are you lonely?

And if not, have you ever been lonely? My favorite description of loneliness comes from Zoe Heller's book Notes on a Scandal. And in it, the narrator, who was played in the movie by Judy Dench, distinguishes between passing loneliness and something deeper. So she observes that people think they know what it's like to be lonely. You know, they had a bad break up or a rough time in summer or a bad time in the camp. But then she says this, about the drip drip of long haul, no end in sight solitude. They know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette, or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jittering trick-or-treaters. And she concludes with this, I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs feeling a great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I'd cry out and fall flailing to the ground. I like this quote for a few reasons. It talks about solitude, and solitude is a big source of loneliness, but also talks about love. You could be with somebody, but if you're not loved, not needed, not respected, you might feel lonely. And then there's understanding. Suppose you have something in your head that's important to you, that matters a lot to you, but you feel others don't get it, or don't care to get it, or aren't trying hard enough to get it. This, too, could cause loneliness. Loneliness ravages the body as well as the soul. A report by the Surgeon General associates it with greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and the like. It's the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Studies in the United States, the United Kingdom, find that about one in five people describe themselves as often or always lonely. And the most at-risk group is young adults.

I'm here to talk about a possible cure for loneliness and what it might mean. And I think we could see loneliness is similar to boredom. I'm old enough to remember when people were bored all the time. Long train rides, long car rides, long plane rides. Late at night, when the TV stations switched off and you were all alone and you had to read. Um, and...

But now, most of us care around our phones, and those phones offer, you know, podcasts and movies and books and music and social media and so on. And so, for many of us, boredom is a thing of the past. Well, the cure for loneliness may also be found in our phones and in our laptops, and it is, of course, generative AI. Last year, with some friends, I wrote an article called In Praise of Empathic AI. If that title makes you cringe and makes you kind of angry, you're not alone. Um, our colleagues hated it. It was probably the article I've written that most people hated.