The burgeoning field of social-emotional AI is tackling the very jobs people thought were reserved for humans: jobs that rely on emotional connections, such as therapists, teachers and coaches. AI is now widely used in education and other human services. Vedantu, a $1 billion Indian web-based tutoring platform, uses AI to analyze student engagement, while a Finnish company has created 'Annie Advisor', a chatbot that works with over 60,000 students and asks how they are doing. she goes, offers help, and refers to services. Berlin-based startup Clare&me offers an AI audiobot therapist that it calls “your 24/7 mental health ally,” while Limbic in Britain has a chatbot “Limbic Care” that it calls “the friendly therapy companion.” mentions.
The question is: who will be on the receiving end of such automation? While the wealthy are sometimes the first to adopt technology, they also know the value of human attention. On a spring day before the pandemic, I visited an experimental school in Silicon Valley, where kids — like a wave of other schools popping up that sought to “disrupt” conventional education — were using computer programs for customized lessons in many subjects, from reading to arithmetic. . There students mainly learn via apps, but they are not completely alone. As the limitations of computerized learning became apparent, this fee-paying school has been adding more and more adult time since its founding a few years ago. Now the children spend the morning learning computer applications such as Quill and Tynker, and then take short group lessons for certain concepts, taught by a human teacher. They also have weekly 45-minute one-on-one meetings with 'advisors' who monitor their progress but also ensure they are emotionally connected.
We know that good relationships lead to better outcomes in medicine, counseling and education. Human care and attention help people feel 'seen', and that sense of recognition underlies health and well-being, as well as valuable social goods such as trust and connection. For example, a study in the UK entitled 'Is Efficiency Overrated?' found that people who spoke to their barista achieved greater wellbeing benefits than those who walked directly past them. Researchers have found that people feel more socially connected when they have deeper conversations and reveal more during their interactions.
Yet budget cuts and the push to reduce labor costs have overburdened many workers, who are now tasked with forging interpersonal connections, cutting into the time they have to be fully present with students and patients. This has contributed to what I call a depersonalization crisis, a feeling of widespread alienation and loneliness. US government researchers found that “more than half of primary care physicians report feeling stressed due to time pressure and other working conditions.” As one pediatrician said to me, “I don't invite people to open up because I don't have time. You know, everyone deserves as much time as he or she needs, and that would really help people to have that time, but it's not profitable.
The rise of personal trainers, personal chefs, personal investment advisors, and other personal service providers – in what one economist has called “wealth work” – shows how the wealthy are solving this problem, making personal services to the wealthy one of the fastest growing set of professions . But what are the options for the less fortunate?
For some, the answer is AI. Engineers who have designed virtual nurses or AI therapists often told me that their technology was “better than nothing,” especially useful for low-income people who, for example, can't get the attention of busy nurses in community clinics, or who don't care can afford therapy. And it's hard to disagree when we live in what economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “private prosperity and public misery.”
