Solving The Loneliness Crisis with Technology
Humans are getting more detached from each other and more lonely. What can we do?
This story will be about reimagining smartphones and our whole approach to technology to tackle the loneliness crisis.
There is a lot of talk about lonely young men today, but they are not alone. There are also more lonely young women than before. As a parent, I have seen how the current generation is evolving in a very different way from my own.
It feels ironic to be of the first generation of home computer users, with parents always telling me to go outside and always hearing stories about "back in my day." No doubt, my parents spent a lot more time outside and roamed around more than I did. Interestingly, there is a map that made the rounds on Reddit (discussion forum) some years ago comparing four generations of Brits and how far their children could roam.
What we see is a trend. I may have moved less around than my parents, but I was still a lot more around and about than my kids. I used to roam around an abandoned shipyard, or walk up to a bomb shelter in the maintain side.
Because there was no internet, I would walk or bike quite far to friends and acquaintances to swap floppy disks with games on them. Wanted to learn how to program or get through a difficult level in a game? I couldn't Google, so I had to walk to the magazine store and buy a computer magazine.
My kids are not the only ones affected. I simply don't go as many places anymore because there seems to be less of a point. My wife and I are still nostalgic about our Saturday walks to the video rental store to find a cool movie to watch in the evening. We had a very cool store that had a very fancy Brio train track setup that my oldest son loved to play with as a toddler when we got the movie rental place.
The magazine store Narvesen was a Mecca for me for many years. I loved looking at all the variety of magazines for computer hobbyists, model train builders, hunters, petrol heads, sailers or just about anything you could imagine. I loved browsing through the magazines. I would sit on weekends at breakfast reading a new magazine.
The internet killed all of that. Narvesen, which for decades was the goto place for Norwegians to get magazines on every topic and from all corners of the world, entirely stopped selling magazines. It was as if the gas station stopped selling gasoline and only sold hotdogs.
These descriptions are not exactly the descriptions of a very social and outgoing person, I must admit. I never was, but the point is that even a geek like me was nudged to go out of the house on a regular basis. There was exciting stuff in the physical world outside, even for people who were not into socializing with other people. Now, society has removed one reason after the other for stepping outside, and we cannot only see the effect on ourselves but also on our children.
We are a kind of nerdy family so I thought it was maybe just affecting us. But I started talking to parents with more outgoing and sporty kids and learned that even the kids who played soccer or other sports spent a lot more time at home without friends.
Every day I sit on the subway and I see just rows of people with their faces buried in a smartphone. I am one of those people. Luckily, all this happened after I got into a relationship, married and had kids. I dread what my life would have been if I had been younger. I am 46 and internet dating was a thing in my time as well, but I actually dated the old fashion way. Or let me correct that. I am not American and so the whole thing I see in movies with the guy picking up the girl at her house, taking her to dinner and bringing her home, never was a thing here.
What I am talking about is people meeting up, friends and so on, and then you get to know a girl at a party of through friends. That sort of thing. Norwegians are too shy and socially awkward to actually ask a perfect stranger out on a date.
The benefit of the old fashion way is that you get a chance to connect with people that don't match any of your carefully crafted criteria. I did not match the kind of guy my wife thought she was looking for, and my wife was not the kind of girl I thought I was looking for.
Studies show that, in fact, the lists we make about what matters to us are mostly bullshit. Ultimately, it isn't what matters. We are all just really bad at articulating what it is we want. With dating apps, you never get to interact with a person who doesn't fit your profile.
Now men and women are often lonely without even trying to meet others. They just sort of gave up. I know the feeling because I've been there many years ago. In the end, it worked out for me because I was actually socializing with people. My wife was not someone I deliberately pursued. We just hung out until I realized she was actually the one.
How Do We Deal With All This?
I watched a video with Dr. K talking about lonely men, social media and the transformation society is going through. His advice was around things like doing meditation, which I am considering trying out based on his description. I have done meditation in the past based on work by Sam Harris. Dr. K also talked about how we all needed to help each other.
This kind of approach isn't really something I have much faith in. A Million of people aren't suddenly going to be more caring towards each other or take up meditation. I don't think there is a way around major societal changes, and that means actual political changes.
Humans need help. We cannot do it alone. This question is so big that I cannot tackle all of it here. Instead, I am going to discuss my imaginary Rave AI phone shown below.
I tried to look at my own life and challenges. Carrying around my smartphone at all times, always ready to bring up and look at YouTube, Twitter or whatever strikes my fancy is not a good thing. It becomes addictive, and you never get real space for yourself.
Simple, don't bring the phone. Cannot do that either. I got to be reachable. So, get a dumb phone? I have tried that as well, but I require numerous important services such as the ones for logging into my bank, authenticating to various services.
Our life has been built up around smartphone usage. There is no easy way to escape it, so what can we do?
The way I see it we need a device who achieves two things at the same time:
It allows you to carry out most modern services, such as authentication, internet banking, looking people in an address book, check email.
Avoid being entertaining and desirable to use. To hook the user.
The dumb phones I have had were frustrating to use, as I hated typing things in with a 3x3 grid of number buttons. Also, key services such as internet banking or authentication is not available.
The way I see it, a voice — controlled AI phone is the solution. Give it a collection of physical buttons, sliders, and dials which can be configured by voice to what you want for quick access to frequently used functions. A slider or dial could be volume, for instance. A button could be to call your wife, husband, or somebody else important.
With voice controlled AI you get the benefit of doing almost anything you need of more advanced features but without the distraction of the screen. Reflecting on my usage of phones, I think that listening to podcasts or music was always less of an issue than looking at the screen.
You can listen to music while looking at the surrounding landscape, the people. You can be dialed in, in an entirely different way.
In other words, not having a screen is a feature. It is a variant of the idea of the iPod Shuffle by Apple. You design a devise explicitly for not having a screen.
Regulation of the Rave AI Phone
To make such a phone a practical reality I proposes that it is built partly as a device for blind. Thus, the government can mandate that crucial services must be implemented with a non-display solution which is only AI voice controlled. That secures the Raven AI phone as a credible alternative.
Otherwise, you end up with a chicken and egg problem. I remember this problem with the Windows Phone Series as an app developer. Microsoft would pay us to make Windows variants of the apps, as there was little incentive to do it satisfy a market. Without a market developers will not make apps, and without apps a phone will not have appeal in the market.
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