Comment by 100ms
9 hours ago
Substituting one form of media for another does not improve the hypothetical situation at all, giving a senior nothing to do all day except talk to a spreadsheet is not a solution to that senior being lonely, it is a false dichotomy. Far lower tech solutions can be (and are) used. In my locale we have volunteer schoolchildren active in the community, as far as I know that's quite common, and even half an hour biweekly with a fake grandkid is many orders of magnitude healthier and more meaningful than swapping out their TV for this generation's take on Fox News.
It goes without saying all these tools are still largely in their pre-advertising state, it won't last.
I speak from experience. The last few weekends I've been taking a friend to see her grandma at a Senior Facility in Sonoma County, and it is really depressing to watch them either lying in bed, listlessly, or in a wheelchair, gazing away in the distance.
They need interaction. And a suitably prompted LLM _can_ provide such interaction. I'm not saying hook them up with ChatGPT and let them loose, but that with the right harnesses and guardrails, they could have a more interactive life.