Ironically, the age group experiencing the highest amounts of loneliness are young adults aged 18-34. The American Psychiatric Association reports that 30% of the people in this age group experience chronic loneliness.
People in the 35-65 age bracket aren't fairing much better.
Most unexpectedly are the people who are 65 and older: only 22% of them experience chronic loneliness.
I would have thought that loneliness would increase as one got older and that the 18-34 age group would be the least lonely. Boy did I get that wrong! Completely backwards in fact!
If we're making bots to help lonely people, then it'd be nice to have some regulations around the behaviors they'd be encouraging, discouraging, and the handling of potentially very sensitive personal information. At the minimum, there should at least be bot-user privilege that law enforcement can't subpoena. We should start looking at these bots as therapeutic entities and start treating them, and regulating them, appropriately.
Very interesting. I'm sure this phenomenon will increase.
I felt a lot of sadness reading this. I wonder how much of my own patterns of engaging with the world are in some sense self-contained simulations of a broader, richer reality that are somehow still rich enough to satiate me.
People in the 35-65 age bracket aren't fairing much better.
Most unexpectedly are the people who are 65 and older: only 22% of them experience chronic loneliness.
I would have thought that loneliness would increase as one got older and that the 18-34 age group would be the least lonely. Boy did I get that wrong! Completely backwards in fact!
If we're making bots to help lonely people, then it'd be nice to have some regulations around the behaviors they'd be encouraging, discouraging, and the handling of potentially very sensitive personal information. At the minimum, there should at least be bot-user privilege that law enforcement can't subpoena. We should start looking at these bots as therapeutic entities and start treating them, and regulating them, appropriately.