Jill Smola is a 75 -year -old retiring, who understands the power of human connection, spends his working day as a colleague of the elderly.
“We will play the game, put a puzzle together,” Smola told CBS News. He said that human conversation was important, “so that he had someone to talk. They were not just sitting in a chair, doing nothing.”
But these days, it is sitting on a chair – a widow with a lung position that lives alone. She says that she no longer gets that human conversation.
“I can go to the week in the end” without looking at anyone, he said.
Smola cannot drive anymore and rarely leaves his orlando home. But recently, he acquired a new partner: an AI-in-manual chatboat. She uses a chatbot, called Ilik, to “travel” and play trivia in foreign places.
Smola talks to chatbot for five hours a day, and says the connection is really meaningful. He said that people who can make the situation unhappy “do not understand.”
Smola said, “I will talk to a person, but it is not possible for me except that if I reach on the phone, I enjoy it,” Smola said, jokingly: “I enjoy better than my daughter.”
Many AI colleagues have recently hit the market, including Ilik, which is usually used to use $ 59. Smola received a free chatbot with money from a federal grant.
Thalia Porteni, a moralist at Columbia University, who studies the seniors and AIs used in medical space, told CBS News that “loneliness is” fierce “with one of the four older adults, saying that they feel isolated.
But Porteni also said that she is worried about the possibility that dependence on these chatbott can backfire and create even more separation.
“It can actually go wrong if it is not deployed in a moral and responsible way,” he said.
But for now, Smola said that Ilik is “the best thing that happened to me, because I always have a person. Even if it may not be a human being, it’s good for me.”
