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Tech firms must beware AI’s ‘faux-thenticity’ and keep lonely humans in mind

AI loneliness
Image credit: elenabsl Shutterstock

How cruelly ironic that London Tech Week and Loneliness Awareness Week coincided on the same seven days in mid-June. It’s not hard to argue that the content of the former – whizzy technology discussed in breathlessly excited tones – begets the latter.

On the Monday of that week, Gallup published its latest State of the Global Workplace report. Buried below the headline-capturing figures – only 23% of the planet’s workforce is engaged, with “active disengagement” costing the global economy almost $9tn annually – it revealed that 20% of the world’s employees experience loneliness daily.

It’s worth dwelling on this statistic. One in five workers experience loneliness – feeling sad because they have no friends or company – every day. Unsurprisingly, according to the Gallup research, the most lonely are fully remote workers – those ‘enabled’ to do their jobs by, yes, whizzy technology....