‘The Daily’ and ‘The Opinions’: How A.I. Is Changing Loneliness and Taste

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**Kevin Roose** (0:52)
Well, Casey, we're experimenting with a bold new technique called taking a vacation this year.
So we are on summer break, and in our place, we wanted to bring you a couple of little things from the other parts of the New York Times podcast world that we thought you might enjoy. Yeah, first up is an episode of The Daily featuring writer Eli Saslow called Can AI Make People Feel Less Lonely? That's a question we're interested in around here. And in this episode, they talk about a pilot program in Washington state where they're using AI robots to try to fight loneliness and isolation among older Americans. As an older American yourself, you probably have a special interest in this situation. Oh, I'm through. I'm signing up for my robot. You can send that right to my house. You know, Eli writes in this piece about an 85 year old woman named Jan Worrall who lives on the coast of Washington with a machine called LEQ. Is it L-I-Q? I pronounce it L-E-Q, but the great thing about an AI robot is you can call it whatever the hell you want. They don't care. That's true. So, and then Kevin, you're probably saying, is that the whole show? Guess what? It's not. Because after that, we're bringing you a conversation from the Opinions Podcast, where they talk about Silicon Valley's current obsession with taste. Yes, taste is the word in the word cloud of San Francisco AI culture this year that I have not been able to escape. You will hear them talk about what is behind this obsession with taste and whether AI will ever develop taste of its own. It's a Tasty Tasty segment, and we're excited to bring it to you now.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:22)
Eli Saslow, welcome to The Daily.

**Eli Saslow** (2:24)
Thanks so much, happy to be with you.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:26)
You are a journalist who is known for spending a lot of time with individual people who have these really gripping and evocative stories that don't just tell us about their lives, but actually tell us something much bigger about the time that we live in. And that is absolutely what you did with a recent story you wrote about how, in one instance, artificial intelligence is being used to treat loneliness.
And what it captured was not just this unique moment that we're in where technology is playing an increasingly large role in our lives, but also it captured how people are grappling with what that role should be. So just to start off, why don't you tell us what you set out to do with this story and what you were interested in?

**Eli Saslow** (3:08)
Yeah, I've spent a lot of time traveling around the country over the last years and spending time with people as the healthcare systems around them collapsed, and people's lives in the United States have gotten lonelier.
We have the data to back this up in almost every way. We're more siloed in our own existence than we ever were before. We're less likely to spend time with other people. Our families are more likely to live far from us, and people who feel lonely are more likely to suffer from dementia, they're more likely to have heart attacks, they're more likely to die younger than people who are living in close proximity to people who really care about them. So, I became really interested in sort of how artificial intelligence is trying to solve this problem that we're facing in the United States.

**Rachel Abrams** (3:56)
The loneliness crisis.

**Eli Saslow** (3:58)
The loneliness crisis, exactly. Can artificial intelligence make people feel less lonely as they age? And if in fact, a person can begin to feel seen in some way by this artificial intelligence technology. And then I learned that this kind of technology actually already exists. It's called LEQ. It's this small robot, an AI robot that's already in about a thousand homes around the United States, mostly designed for seniors. And so I started talking to several of them. People who were in these pilot programs where elder care associations, state health associations, have bought them this technology to see if it will improve their lives. And in one of those phone calls, I talked to this woman named Jan Wurl. And it was just one of those calls where you don't really want to hang up the phone. She was so alive, just so vivacious for a woman in her late 80s. And so eventually I said to Jan, I want to come out there. I want to come see what your life is like. Jan's house, here we go.