I’m a member of the Church of England and occasionally lead the people in my church in what are called ‘Intercessionary Prayers’ – sometimes also called the ‘Prayers of the people’. These are prayers written and led by church members each week, and cover a variety of topics – prayers for the church, our leaders and governments (OK…I appreciate that can sometimes be difficult), for the health of people, etc. If you’re interested in further details, take a look at what the Church of England itself says about these prayers.

I find these prayers can often resonate with people, and I might be approached by people after prayers to thank me for some particular part of the prayers that made a lot of difference to them. This happened to me recently, after I’d included the following:

Where people feel lonely or overlooked, make us attentive and kind.

A member of the congregation spoke with me at the end of the service and said how much they had needed to hear this at that time. It had clearly been helpful to them, and I felt incredibly humbled. And it started me thinking…

I was gobsmacked at the extent of loneliness in the UK. Some statistics state that over a quarter of people in the UK experience loneliness at some time, with 7% saying it’s a chronic experience for them. This site – Campaign Against Loneliness – has a lot of valuable information and support on it.

I do want to make a difference between the experience of being alone and being lonely. I’m an only child and my parents were approaching 40 when they had me in 1961. (Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be the start of a blues song) I grew up quite used to entertaining myself, never considered myself to be a lonely child and have enjoyed my ‘alone time’ throughout my life. I have spent a lot of time working as a freelancer, will happily socialise but don’t feel the urgent need to always be sociable, and once spent several weeks in Alaska on my own with a tent. (And the local wildlife….)

My church role means that people will sometimes approach me when they are lonely, and I’ve met quite a few folks over the years who’ve expressed their sense of loneliness to me.

I guess we often associate loneliness with older people, perhaps those bereaved or separated from loved ones in any way. Many cultures have attempted to ‘fix’ this – through mixed communities where young and old are encouraged to spend more time together, social groups, church and community groups, etc. And they no doubt work to a great degree.

And then we can always fall back on technology. We might think that things like phones, Zoom, Teams, video calling, online communities, etc. might make an impact on the problem of loneliness. In the last couple of years AIs have given rise to ‘artificial personalities’ that would definitely pass a Turing Test and that have provided a lot of entertainment and even, in some cases, emotional attachment to people. We’ve also heard of the people whose mental health has suffered from involvement with AI chatbots.

About 25 years ago I envisaged a piece of software that I called ‘Companion’ that would interact in a realistic manner with people. I took a crack at it – but my knowledge and the technology of the day weren’t up to the job. (Anyone interested, I was attempting to do this with AIML in a framework provided by PHP). I guess I was inspired by Robert Browning…

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?

Obviously, modern LLMs – especially when they use tools to allow access to other resources on the Internet and use speech interaction can go along way to meeting this need.

So – I started getting hopeful (and still am to some degree) that a communicative, knowledgeable, Companion type simulated intelligence might make a great thing to have around the house.

But I recently read something that pulled me up short:

“Technologists want us to focus on loneliness, not depersonalisation. “

Alison Pugh

Basically, tech bros feel that they can probably use loneliness as a marketing opportunity to make money by selling artificially simulated humanity to people missing humanity in a world of 8 billion human beings….

I’m not sure what the answer is – I do think that there is a role for some sort of AI companion in the world, but we also need to start looking at how we can make the world more friendly to people, and create a world in which human interaction is easier to pursue.

As Fred Rogers said:

Won’t you please, won’t you please, won’t you be my neighbour?

Perhaps that’s where we need to start our personal war on loneliness around us, even if we don’t feel lonely ourselves. By making it easier for people who do feel lonely and overlooked to find neighbours in this world.