Online friends or robot friends?
From time to time, I run across a magazine article pushing technology as a solution to loneliness. Not, as you might expect, because the internet gives isolated, socially inept or odd-looking people a chance to exchange information and ideas with people all over the world and chat with people who won’t treat you as an idiot because of your childlike appearance , autism , or lack of control over your body . In general, I’m in favour of these, considering my personal debt to an online dating site. On the other hand, as one of my friends in the past year has been scammed by a boyfriend she met on line, I’m aware that you can meet dangerous people on the internet, just as you can in any other context. The media are constantly full of reports of teenagers being driven to suicide by online bullying . It’s tempting to assume that lonely people are safer if they only interact with machines, rather than with each other via machines, but then the question is: what is companions