AI and the end of loneliness | Paul Bloom

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Are you lonely right now? Have you ever been? However you answered, you've got a lot of company. Studies suggest about one in five people describe themselves as often or always lonely, and the group most at risk is young adults. Psychologist Paul Bloom thinks there's a cure for loneliness that may be coming, and it might already be in your pocket. And you can view these cures for loneliness as akin to a powerful painkiller. Like a powerful painkiller, it can alleviate suffering.

0:43But like a powerful painkiller, this can sometimes come at a terrible cost. That cure Paul is talking about? You may have guessed it. AI. And he knows how that sounds. He says a piece he co-wrote called In Praise of Empathic AI was the most hated thing he's ever published. Because the idea of turning to a machine for companionship strikes a lot of us as bleak, even dangerous. In this talk, Paul takes that discomfort seriously and he makes a counterintuitive case that AI companions might genuinely ease loneliness but at a cost. Because loneliness, he argues, isn't a flaw to be engineered away. It's a signal that pushes us to connect with other humans.

1:29Your mother loves you. Your AI doesn't love you. Your mother has feelings. Your AI has no feelings. And stick around after the talk. Paul sat down with me at TED 2026 in Vancouver to dig into the difference between what an AI offers and what a person does. why a little discomfort might be good for us, and the personal experience that shaped how he thinks about all of this. That's coming up right after a short break.

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3:28And now, our TED Talk and conversation of the day. I have a couple of questions for you, but they're personal, so I'm not going to ask for a show of hands. First, right now, at this stage of your life, are you lonely? And if not, have you ever been lonely? My favorite description of loneliness comes from Zoe Heller's book, Notes on a Scandal. And in it, the narrator, who is played in the movie by Judi Dench, distinguishes between passing loneliness and something deeper. So she observes that people think they know what it's like to be lonely. You know, they had a bad breakup or a rough time in summer camp.

4:10But then she says this. About the drip-drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jerking trick-or-treaters. And she concludes with this, I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I'd cry out in the fall, flailing to the ground. I like this quote for a few reasons.

4:45It talks about solitude, and solitude's a big source of loneliness. But it also talks about love. You could be with somebody, but if you're not loved, not needed, not respected, it. You might feel lonely. And then there's understanding. Suppose you have something in your head that's important to you, that matters a lot to you, but you feel others don't get it, or don't care to get it, or aren't trying hard enough to get it. This too could cause loneliness. Loneliness ravages the body as well as the soul. A report by the Surgeon General associates it with greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and the like.

5:20It's the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Studies in the United States, United Kingdom, find that about one in five people describe themselves as often or always lonely. And the most at-risk group is young adults. I'm here to talk about a possible cure for loneliness and what it might mean. And I think we could see loneliness as similar to boredom. I'm old enough to remember when people were bored all the time. Long train rides, long car rides, long plane rides. Late at night when the TV station switched off and you were all alone and you had to read.

6:04But now, most of us carry around our phones. And those phones offer podcasts and movies and books and music and social media and so on. And so, for many of us, boredom is a thing of the past. Well, the cure for loneliness may also be found in our phones and in our laptops, and it is, of course, generative AI. Last year with some friends, I wrote an article called In Praise of Empathic AI. If that title makes you cringe and makes you kind of angry, you're not alone. Our colleagues hated it. It was probably an article written that most people hated. But bear with me. We started making a sort of simple point, which is review a set of studies that have involved, like, you get a whole lot of people interacting with other people.

6:53Sometimes doctors, sometimes therapists, sometimes just regular people. And you get a whole lot of people interacting with chatbots. And then you ask them later, how did it go? What's your experience? And people tend to rate the chatbots as more empathic, more caring, more understanding. And it's no surprise. AIs are built to be attentive, to be present, to be interested. An AI is never going to impatiently wait for you to finish telling your story so it could tell you one of its own. An AI is never going to say, dude, I'm busy, get back to me later, I've got things going on.

7:31Suppose some future, I don't think it's happening now, but some future AI could serve as a cure for loneliness. Would this be a good thing? Well, to some extent, yes, obviously yes. think about the many millions of elderly people many in institutions who go for their days and nights without talking to anybody in perfect agony of isolation many of them have dementia many of them are difficult to interact with for other reasons they don't have family and friends to spend time with them and there's not enough money in the world to pay people to come and talk to them for hours on end If some future version of chat or clod or Gemini could ease these people's suffering, it would be a godsend.

8:19But for the rest of us, it's more complicated. And you can view these cures for loneliness as akin to a powerful painkiller. Like a powerful painkiller, it can alleviate suffering. But like a powerful painkiller, this can sometimes come at a terrible cost. And to make sense of the cost, you have to think about what loneliness is for. So the neuroscientist John Cassiope, who founded the modern science of loneliness, argued that it's a biological signal akin to hunger, thirst, and pain. And as such, it does two things for us. It could sometimes be paralyzing, but when it works out well, it has certain evolved functions that improve our lives.

9:02So one, just as a hunger motivates us to seek out food, loneliness and other forms of social suffering, motivate us to seek out and maintain social connection. Because we get lonely that we accept an invitation to a party, we invite a friend out to brunch, we open up the dating apps. It also helps us regulate relationships. It helps us try to repair a relationship gone wrong, to apologize for messing up, to try to show genuine interest in our relationship with somebody else. A second thing that loneliness does is it helps us grow as people. It's a truism in psychology that we learn from failure.

9:45We learn, they call it trial and error learning, they call it reinforcement learning. The idea is nicely summed up in the movie Batman Begins, where young Bruce Wayne's father asked the future Batman, why do we fall? And he answers so we can learn to pick ourselves up. This is literally true for toddlers who learn to walk by falling and stumbling and going things wrong. It's true for a comedian who learns to improve her act by bombing on stage, by having her jokes fall flat. It's true for a boxer who learns to evade a punch by getting repeatedly smacked in the face. Well, failure in the social realm is associated with loneliness.

10:27And can you imagine what it would be like if people never got this signal of failure? Imagine a teenage boy who never learned to cut short his monologues because his AI companion never got bored. Imagine an adult who never learned to apologize because their AI companion never needed an apology. Imagine a world where the answer to the question, am I the asshole, is always a firm and resounding no.

11:03Now, you might think this has an easy technological fix. You could just go into the settings and make it less sycophantic. And in fact, I don't use AI myself for social purposes, but I use it a lot for my work. And after a while, I got tired of chat and Claude just saying, oh, brilliant question, Paul. Oh, oh, such a clever idea. How did you get to be so intelligent? So I went into the settings and they said, Stop. Do not praise me. Be blunt. Just be honest. Tell me it like it is. Then a month later, I changed it back.

11:46I kind of missed it. You can call this Cordelia's problem. In Shakespeare's King Lear, the king brings together his three daughters to try to decide how to divide up the kingdom. him, and he has his daughters tell him how much they love him. And his first two daughters praise him. They love him infinitely. He's the center of their lives. Then Cordelia comes up and says, I love you like a daughter should love her father. No more, no less. The king is enraged and banishes her from the kingdom. Now, Kingler is a tragedy. His two sycophantic daughters didn't love him at all, and they betray him in the end.

12:29Now, some of you are probably thinking, well, I'm not like King Lear. I like pushback. I don't want that sort of sucking up. And maybe, maybe, but I think some of us more like the performance of pushback rather than pushback itself. So yeah, something that immediately that always says, yes, you're wonderful, gets a bit cloying. But a properly attuned AI won't do that. A properly attuned AI will resist you, will argue against you, say, oh, push back. And then finally, in a very satisfying way, say, I guess you win. You've totally persuaded me. And I worry that this sort of intelligent and titrated sycophancy is more corrosive to the soul than a sort of sucking up yes-men AIs we deal with now.

13:15For some of you, the solution will be clear. Treat these hyper-social AIs like the powerful painkillers they are, make them available to the people who need them the most, and forbid their use for the rest of us. But this is not the solution that I believe in. I'm not a catastrophist when it comes to AI. Just like there are people who deal with AI companions in a normal way and benefit from it, and it doesn't have harm to their life, just in the same way that there are people who resist technological temptations more generally. People who, when faced with the unholy trinity of TikTok, Pornhub, and Wordle, nonetheless, go to the gym, meet with friends, touch grass.

14:07The second reason I don't want to ban these things is more personal. When I was 11, my mother died of cancer. And I then entered a period of great pain. And then problems with social relationships. And then a period of loneliness that lasted for years. I would have benefited so much from someone, or fine, something, that would listen to me. That would express interest. That I could talk to. That I could share my feelings with. It seems like a betrayal of my past self to say, tough, do without, suffer and learn from your suffering. I wonder if the best of all possible worlds is to create imperfect companions.

14:56Companions that somehow alleviate the pain of loneliness without destroying our humanity. Companions that are difficult enough to deal with that we learn from interacting with them. Companions that are sufficiently imperfect that we ultimately abandon them to deal with people. Now, I'm pretty confident we could build such things. I'm less confident that there's money to be had by doing so. I accept that it might be a bad business model to create AIs that users ultimately outgrow. But I hope there are people who care enough to do it anyway. Thank you.

15:42That was Paul Bloom, and stick around. When we come back, Paul and I get into the question at the heart of all of this. Can an AI actually be empathetic, or is it just a very convincing performance? Plus, the difference between empathy and love and how he would design an AI that could genuinely help a lonely teenager. That's coming up right after a short break. This episode is brought to you by Perk. Do you ever get to the end of the week and wonder where the time went? Most of us spend hours on a second job nobody hired us for, submitting expenses, matching card receipts, and booking travel for work.

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17:37Paul Bloom, congrats on your talk. Thank you so much. This has been a blast. I love Ted. Yeah. How are you feeling now that you're off the stage and it's done? Hugely relieved. Hugely relieved. I no longer have the first line of my talk running through my head over and over and over again. I had the same experience. As it's been running for the last several weeks. I had the same experience. Do you think somebody who raised their hand in the audience about feeling lonely during the talk, should they jump on a chat with AI? I don't think it's the first thing they should do. I think that loneliness comes in very different flavors and different intensities.

18:11Take somebody who's 90 years old, has severe dementia, no family, no friends, but is lonely, wishes they could talk to somebody. I think then offering them the solace of chat would be a wonderful idea. But if there's a 16-year-old and he says, you know, I don't have any friends, I don't have any connections, I would be cautious about connecting him to chat or Gemini or Claude just because I think the first resort we try to get connections with people. And then I think these AIs do have a role, but I don't think they should be the first thing you try it for. Right. I'm a fan of your book, The Sweet Spot.

18:44Oh, thank you. In which you argued that suffering can be a crucial component to a good life. In this talk, there's a similar strain in which you talk about discomfort that's brought to us by loneliness and that the pushback that we get from socializing with other people is kind of worth paying attention to. Do you think discomfort is generally good for human flourishing? I appreciate the connection. I've been thinking a little bit about that. There's some discomfort, which is useless, which just makes the world worse. I mean, there's a bad back, and it just hurts them for a while, or the pain of cancer or something like that.

19:17For me to say, oh, how wonderful, lucky you, it's going to make you a better person. No, it's just pain. It's just pain. It's no good. If there's a drug or a pill, whatever, make it go away. That's wonderful. Yeah. But some forms of discomfort, and the word friction comes to mind, do all sorts of good things for us. They make things valuable. I once ran a marathon, and it took me a long time to get into shape for it and to do well in it and all that. But if it was super easy, it would have had no meaning for me. I wouldn't be telling you about it now so many years later. Right. It also, and this is part of what I mentioned in my talk, it helps you grow.

19:48So I think we benefit a lot from conversations that are a little bit difficult. It makes us better people. If everything I say is to you, oh, how charming, how funny, how brilliant, then— I wouldn't mind. You wouldn't mind in the short term. Right. But I don't think it would be good for you. Suppose, in fact, I'm not charming, really, and funny, or I got a bit of a ways to go. The way I'll get there, the way I'll become a better person is by telling jokes and somebody says, huh, it doesn't find it very funny. I start telling my story and they're rolling their eyes. I express some sympathy and it isn't quite right.

20:21And that's what life is. This is why conversations are hard. Social interactions are hard. It's why many of us sort of avoid them. You know, my friend Nick Epley tells me I should be talking to people more. But it's hard. but I think it's a good heart. I think it makes us better people. I think it also instills meaning in social relationships. So is that an argument for actively seeking out some of this discomfort and friction that you talk about? I think it is in the domain of social relationships, which is what I'm most interested in. There's something super comfortable in relationships between people who are like good friends and so on, and those are great.

20:57But I think sometimes we should try to extend ourselves. You know, take a TED talk. It's not the same as social relationship, but preparing for this was stressful and difficult. But I think I benefited from the challenge and maybe now I'm a bit of a better speaker. I've learned something from it. And the same thing with social relationships. There's people I'm nervous to talk to. But I'm nervous to talk to because I feel maybe they won't like me. They'll find me boring. I'd be bothering them. I think making the step to do it is a good thing. It makes me a better person and also makes the relationship more meaningful.

21:28Yeah. Yeah. And it sounds like what your friend Nicholas Epley, who also spoke at this TED, was arguing was that there is research that shows we are overly pessimistic about how these interactions are going to go. We kind of have a negative bias about talking to a stranger, for example. That's right. I think talking to a stranger is one of the large class of things that takes a little bit of work to decide to do so. It's much easier for me to stick and listen to my podcast or read my book. But what Nick's research finds afterwards, words, there's a satisfaction to it. You feel good about it. Yeah.

21:59Okay. Jumping back to follow up on the talk, what's the difference between AI and the kind of unconditional love you might receive from a real human being, from your mother, let's say? Yeah. Your mother's a person, and I think a lot rests on that. AI is right now. Let's put aside the future. I mean, maybe in the future, things will change. But right now, they're simple machines. And an interaction with an AI in that way is no different than interacting with a calculator or toaster. Your mother loves you. Your AI doesn't love you. Your mother has feelings. Your AI has no feelings. Your mother has needs as an adult making through the world.

22:36You're talking to other individuals who have things they want, who have needs, and you could provide these needs. You make somebody laugh when they're feeling down. You provide a sympathetic ear when they want to talk to somebody. None of this will happen with an AI. Right now, a sufficiently advanced AI could fake it, could pretend to find what you say funny, could maybe even, if you program it right, could say, I need something from you. Could you provide it? But it's just bogus. And so I think there's a world of difference between interacting with a person versus interacting with a machine, even if the words that they say are the same.

23:09Because for the person case, they reflect real wishes, desires, consciousness. In the machine case, it's just a trick. So back to human relations then, could you talk us through the difference between empathy and love? Empathy means different things. It sometimes means caring for people. It sometimes means putting yourself in another person's shoes. I wrote a book years ago called Against Empathy, where I argued that sometimes when you put yourself in a person's shoes, it leads you awry. It causes mistakes. So I'm kind of critical of empathy sometimes, but I'm not critical at all about love. Love doesn't mean reflecting what a person feels.

23:44It doesn't mean trying to make the person happy right now. It means really valuing them. valuing them in a similar way to which you value yourself and appreciating them for what they are. And to be the target of love is a wonderful thing. To feel loved is a wonderful thing. Like, you know, it must be wonderful to be in some way like a toddler. It doesn't get any more unconditional than when you're very young and then, you know, your mom or your dad is very close to you. It's not everybody's lucky enough to have that. But more adult relationships are always more complicated. Even in the most fantastic, loving, romantic, sexy relationship, It's more complicated and unconditional love of a parent.

24:20Yeah. I want to go back to the statistic that you cited, that young adults are the most affected by the loneliness crisis. But you qualified that AI might not be the solution, and you mentioned the 16-year-old earlier in this interview. How would you modify AI specifically for young people? Well, here's one proposal. I'm not saying this is original. I'm sure other people have talked about this before. But suppose you're 16 years old and you are lonely. And in part, you are lonely because you are shy. Maybe you find it hard to talk to people of the same sex, even harder to talk to people of opposite sex.

24:55Maybe you're not very good at it. And people, you know, sometimes teenagers can be cruel and it's not working out well. Tell me about it. And so you're lonely. Well, I'm very much against, well, fine, let's get you an AI. You'll never be lonely again. That does not seem like the right move. But what if you could have an AI that will let you practice your social skills? When I was young, I found it very awkward to talk to girls. But suppose I had an AI that was, you know, to say, like, okay, let's have a conversation. Right. And while it's easier to talk to an AI, and I start saying something, and the AI could gently say, no, why don't you express an interest in what I'm doing and do it differently.

25:28Give you the gentle feedback that's very painful to get from a person. I feel one of the great things about AIs is that we can learn from them, and corrective feedback from an AI is much easier to take than from a person. Do you think we as a society could muster the collective will to create an AI that's sort of imperfect enough, as you described towards the end of your talk? I don't know. I'm a fan of John Haidt's work on social media. And John says basically a profit motive to get people hypnotized and entranced, particularly young people on social media, is very high. And to get around that, you have to have sort of government-level interference.

26:05And I think the profit motive to create chatbots that we'd love to be with, that we just cannot live without, that press all of our buttons, is very, very high. So I could imagine somebody taking up my challenge and building a sort of imperfect companions. But I also could imagine it gets crowded out by all the perfect companions that are also on the market. So I don't know. What sort of guardrails would you want to see on any interactions with chatbots themselves? I am very much believe in free speech and believe adults should be allowed to do what they do with some limits. But I feel the situation is different with regard to children.

26:43So I would be very much against any restrictions on chatbots for adults. But for children, and, you know, we could argue what age should be, I don't know. But if somebody says, you know, you should not give children below the age of 10 access to artificial companions, I'd be in favor of that. I feel that most of them could actually, in some way, in a kind of an unpleasant way, replace human companions like parents, could cause your own to fail to develop important social skills you only get by dealing with complicated, occasionally annoying, frictionful people. So the main guardrail that comes to mind is one based on age.

27:16You mentioned in your talk that loneliness might go the way of boredom. So I'd love for you to draw the parallels between the two and how loneliness could essentially be eradicated in the same way by technology. So the parallel goes in a couple of ways. So the parallel I talked about in my talk is that for many of us, not all of us, some people are still bored, but for many of us, the technological distractions of phones and so on mean we're never really that bored. I think for many of us, the distractions by a phone are more powerful. And so they get rid of boredom. Similarly, I think the best way to get rid of loneliness is by talking to an honest-to-God real person, a friend, a lover, a parent, a child.

27:56But maybe AI chatbots could, just like a phone satisfies the anxiety of boredom, a chatbot could satisfy the anxiety of loneliness. But the second way the parallel goes is I think the endless distraction of a phone is kind of a crappy way to get rid of boredom. I think some boredom is good. and also I think endless foolish distractions, playing Tetris all the time or whatever, may alleviate boredom in some ways but still leave you unsatisfied. Similarly, a super friendly chatbot might alleviate loneliness in some superficial way but still leave you not fully satisfied. You might feel, you know, there's more to life than this.

28:34This lacks depth. Yeah. We were talking before this interview started about the various kinds of maxing, protein maxing, looks maxing. There's also friction maxing, which it sounds like from the school of Paul Bloom, you know, to essentially be bored or to wait in line a little longer. So I'll be careful about that. Apparently there's people who talk about raw dogging airplane flights. Yes, yes. Which essentially means, for listeners who don't know, like not having a book, not having a device, and just sitting on an airplane. There's a wonderful Seinfeld episode where Elaine is on a plane sitting next to her boyfriend who's just sitting staring at it.

29:11I said, what, you didn't bring a book? You didn't? No, no. He was early to the movement. He was early to the movement. And I am not a fan of the movement. I think that we want some friction in our lives. But I hate the maxing movement. So maybe that's why I'm responding. But someone who is relentlessly seeking out friction and difficulty is, I think, overcorrecting. I think there is something to eating M &Ms. There is something to watching a TikTok video. There is something to a superficial conversation. I think struggle adds a lot to life. But it doesn't have to be all struggle. I don't want to be the guy who says you should raw dog life.

29:44You should seek out friction wherever you go. For one thing, anybody who knew me would say this is not an adequate description of my own life. Okay. And speaking of books, what are you reading? What are you recommending to folks? Oh, my gosh. Most often. I'm now in a phase where I'm reading a lot of novels. So I read Flesh by David. I'm not going to pronounce his name right. David Selassie. Yes. My partner read this last year, and he couldn't stop talking about it. I loved it, and now I'm on a binge. So I've read five of his books. There's something about the voice of that book, right? Yes. People have described this as the voice of a man with no inner life, a sort of pathology of masculinity.

30:18And I thought, well, he seems to think just like me. I don't know what you're talking about. So also I have a six-week-old. So one thing I do is while I do feedings or stay up at night with the kid, I'll read novels and so on. So I'm really into that. I'm curious for you what's next now that your TED Talk is finished. Is there a question that's noodling around? Like everybody else, I'm really interested in AI. And we were talking before, and I said, I can't write a book on AI because by the time the book comes out, everything will be different. But I'm mostly interested in AI and what it tells us about ourselves, about what our human needs are, needs involving issues of loneliness and having friends and romantic companions.

30:57And so maybe I'll write a book about that, about human relationships, using AI as a way to explore them, but basically being about the human relationships, not about the AI. Paul Bloom, thank you so much for sitting down with me. This has been great. Thank you for having me.

31:13That was Paul Bloom at TED 2026 and in conversation with me, Elise Hugh. Our conversation was recorded in Vancouver in April 2026. And that's it for today. If you're curious about TED's curation guidelines, visit TED.com slash curation guidelines. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was produced by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team. Additional support for this episode from Maren Larson, Maria Alexa Cavanaugh, and Maggie Bishop. This episode was mixed by Steve Bone, and the interview was recorded in Vancouver by Dave Palmer and Rich Amies of Field Trip.

31:50The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. Thank you.

32:42with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. On the TED Radio Hour, in the middle school cafeteria, Ty Tashiro always sat with his equally nerdy buddies. The socially awkward kids who were the furthest thing from cool. And he often wondered, why am I so socially awkward? and what am I going to do about that? Now Ty is a psychologist and expert on awkwardness and he has some answers. So awkward. That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Subscribe or listen to the TED Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.