The rich can afford personal care. The rest will have to make do with AI

The booming field of social-emotional AI takes on jobs people thought were just for humans – jobs that rely on emotional connections, like those of therapists, teachers, and coaches. AI is now widely used in education and other human services. Vedantuan Indian online tutoring platform valued at $1 billion, uses AI to analyze student engagement, while a Finnish company created “Annie Advisor”, a chatbot working with more than 60,000 students, asking them how they are doing, offering help and directing them to services. Berlin startup Claire and I offers an AI audio therapist robot that it calls “your 24/7 mental health ally”, while in the UK, Limbic owns a “Limbic Care” chatbot that he calls “the friendly therapy companion.”

The question is who will benefit from such automation? While the wealthy are sometimes early adopters of technology, they also know the value of human attention. One spring day before the pandemic, I visited an experimental school in Silicon Valley where, like a wave of other schools popping up seeking to “disrupt” conventional education, children were using computer programs for personalized lessons in many subjects, from reading to mathematics. . There, students learn primarily through apps, but they are not entirely independent. As the limits of automated teaching have become clear, this fee-based school has devoted more and more time to adults since its founding a few years ago. Now children spend all morning learning through computer applications such as Penne And Tinkerthen participate in brief, small-group lessons on particular concepts taught by a human teacher. They also have 45-minute one-on-one meetings per week with “counsellors” who track their progress, but also make sure to build an emotional connection.

We know that good relationships lead to better outcomes in medicine, counseling and education. Human care and attention helps people feel “seen,” and this sense of recognition underlies health and well-being as well as valuable social goods like trust and belonging. For example, a study carried out in the United Kingdom, entitled “Is effectiveness overrated?“- found that people who talked to their barista benefited more in terms of well-being than those who walked past them. Researchers found that people felt more socially connected when they had deeper conversations and reveal more during their interactions.

Yet fiscal austerity and the drive to reduce labor costs have overburdened many workers, who are now tasked with establishing interpersonal connections, reducing the time they have to be fully present with students and patients. This contributed to what I call a crisis of depersonalization, a widespread feeling of alienation and loneliness. US government researchers found that “more than half of primary care physicians report feeling stressed due to time constraints and other work conditions.” As one pediatrician told me, “I don’t invite people to open up because I don’t have time.” You know, everyone deserves as much time as they need, and that's what would really help people have that time, but it's not cost effective.

The rise of personal trainers, personal chefs, personal investment advisors and other personal service workers – in what one economist has dubbed “wealth work” – shows how the wealthy are solving this problem, making in-person service for the wealthy one of the fastest-growing types of professions. But what are the options for the less fortunate?

For some, the answer is AI. Engineers who designed virtual nurses or AI therapists often told me their technology was “better than nothing,” especially useful for low-income people who can't get the attention of busy nurses in community clinics , for example, or who cannot afford it. therapy. And it's hard to disagree, when we live in what economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “Private wealth and public poverty.”