The Loneliness Crisis Calls for Boring Tech

New devices are trying to fix the loneliness crisis caused by smartphones and social media. What we really need to is boring tech.

Introduction

Information technology is a great contributor to a pronounced sense of loneliness in today’s world.

That is no wonder if we think about how people are conditioned to live vicariously through smartphones and spend most of their waking hours in front of screens. It didn’t use to be this way before Facebook became a global platform in 2006 and the first iPhone model was released in 2007.

It’s unquestionable that the social media business model, the big tech companies’ hunt for quarterly profit margins combined with the small devices we constantly carry around in our pockets have profoundly changed our way of relating to each other. Overall, it has left us with more alone time in front of screens and less lively interaction time in the present moment with others. 

Can information technology help to turn around the loneliness trend it has so greatly contributed to?

I think the answer is a resounding yes but not in the way you imagine. 

Jonathan Haidt’s view that smartphones and social media are to blame for the youth’s mental health crisis is now a mainstream view in the US. It’s mirrored in a class action lawsuit by 33 state attorneys general against Meta. To mitigate the mental health and loneliness crisis, we will have to rethink the design, use, and role of smartphones and social media in society. We need boring tech. 

New Devices

Replacing or even substituting smartphones is a formidable and daunting task considering how people treat them as extended limbs and never leave their homes without them. BigTech companies have managed to penetrate daily life so deeply with smartphone usage that the devices have become indispensable to participate in modern life.  For this reason, a future without scrolling and swiping is still not on the horizon. However, a few challenger devices have emerged in recent years. 

Smartwatches and VR/AR headsets

Smartwatches have been popular for a while now. Virtual/augmented reality hardware such as the Apple Vision Pro (see my deep dive on the Vision Pro here), Meta Quest, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have been poised to be tools for a new computing paradigm. However, none of these newer devices leave us less distracted or less lonely compared to smartphones and laptops. In fact, the opposite seems to be true as they immerse us even further into a digital and personalized universe. 

Humane’s AI pin

Quite recently, Humane released the AI Pin, a small rectangular, device that can be clipped onto a jacket or a shirt, and fulfill smartphone functions such as sending texts, snapping images, translating languages, and answering questions. The screenless device is controlled by voice commands and can project a visual interface onto a person’s palm with a blue mini laser. 

Humane was founded by former high-ups in Apple, the married couple, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno. The first AI pins shipped to consumers for a starter price of $699 + a $24 monthly subscription fee.  

Unfortunately, reviews of the new device have been less than positive. The influential consumer tech reviewer Marques Brownlee famously called the Humane AI pin, “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed”. 

Rabbit’s R1

Rabbit’s R1 device evoked a lot of excitement in the days and weeks after it was presented at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu’s demonstration of R1 drew associations to Steve Jobs' historic presentation of the iPhone in January 2007. Personally, R1 made me think of a quote by former AI lead at Tesla and OpenAI, Andrej Karpath about how we should not think of LLMs as chatbots but as “the kernel process of an emerging operating system”. 

I envisioned a future with personal AI assistants - “rabbits” in Lyu’s terms - that could navigate the internet, take care of communication through and with other personal AI assistants, and handle regular online tasks. This is more sci-fi than a realistic near-term possibility but perhaps a future iteration or a similar device to R1 could enable a browser-less internet without a user interface that could substantially limit the impact and prevalence of screens. 

Unfortunately, Rabbit’s R1 device is not working well.  The LAM (Large Action Model) inside of R1 is not a new agentic AI model as claimed but ChatGPT with some hard-coded scripts and Rabbit’s founder Jesse Lyu has been exposed as a shady character who was previously involved in an NFT scam.  

Pendant and friend

Another AI gadget is Limitless Pendant (previously Rewind Pendant), a small device you can carry in a necklace or on the top of your shirt as it transcribes all your conversations throughout the day. The primary use case is transcribing meeting notes. The device can be pre-ordered for $99 and will be shipped in Q4 2024. 

The newly announced AI gadget, friend, is carried in a necklace and works in a similar way to Pendant. Except, not only is friend always listening in on conversations, but it actively uses this data to learn and communicate with its wearer via text messages and push notifications on the phone it’s paired to.

The idea for friend came from the bright mind of Avi Schiffman, a 21-year-old Harvard dropout who created an award-winning first website for tracking Covid-19 cases across the world when he was only 17. In 2022, Schiffmann launched a website that helped Ukrainian refugees connect with people in neighboring countries willing to offer them shelter. 

friend was announced on International Friendship Day, July 30, with this opening line from CEO Schiffmann:

“friend is an expression of how lonely I've felt.”

The premise for the products is that having a constant companion in the form of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 model - which is powering friend - can alleviate loneliness.

Well, can it? 

That depends solely on how helpful the AI model is perceived to be by the user. If a user of friend feels deeply understood by the AI model and it provides relevant input to his or her daily life, then yes, friend can alleviate loneliness. If friend is unconvincing and falls short of its name, then the product is annoying and without value. 

My hot take is that LLMs disguised as AI friends are not ready for prime time. Chances are they won’t be. In effect, I don’t think AI or any technology we have today is capable of genuinely mitigating loneliness for the average human. That doesn’t mean, however, that tech can’t support mental welfare or help to turn around the loneliness trend.