
And this is where I sit with genuine unease, because it will work. For the widow with no one left, for the teenager who cannot find their people, for the ageing societies of Japan and Europe where the loneliness is now demographic – a machine that reliably eases that pain is not a gimmick. It is mercy. To dismiss it is a luxury of people who are not suffering.
But mercy and truth are not the same thing. A signal of connection is not connection. If we learn to manufacture the feeling of being loved without the fact of being loved, we treat the symptom and quietly deepen the disease. We could raise a generation that has never been lonely and has also never truly been met by another human being.
The answer is not to refuse the technology. The suffering is too real for that. The answer is to be honest about what we are building – a bridge to other people, or a replacement for them. Those lead to very different centuries, and we should choose which one we are making while we still can.
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