Mya Fernando Montalvo Summary

Unbeknownst to most people, technology has been around much longer than we expect and the rate of these innovations actually coming to grips with the community is a slow one. While many scientists and engineers may be in the lab as we speak creating a robot, we

Loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults and spared out in elders’ everyday life where social isolation has become a cause of early death because we cannot cope alone.

Oftentimes, people confuse loneliness with the state of being alone. When looking at the overall big picture, it is easy to forget that loneliness is temporary. People are not alone because even back in primitive times, they bore a natural instinct to strive for companionship in order to survive. Human imagination creates companions in cases of extreme loneliness which contradicts the state of being alone. Due to societal and family standards, others in society make it practically impossible to be alone. Mankind often goes through life without realizing the overwhelming amount of human contact and support. People are never alone, they are just simply

“Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for” (Dag Hammarskjold). Loneliness is a scary thing. As a child, I was very shy and timid and I suffered from it. My life was sheltered by my parents and I desperately wanted a sibling. Along with my parents, the private school I had gone to all my life never gave me the experience of stranger interaction. The thought of starting a conversation with someone I have never met made me drench in sweat. I dreaded the day of going to a public high school. Never in my dreams would I have imagined how it would affect my life and mold me into the person I am today.

Taking a further step into this subject, Margaret asked why would we expect robots come into our lives and she answered this question in an ironic tone that “Because, deep down, we desire them.” By listing the artistic works and realistic inventions ranging from the story of a Sumerian

At work, people are claiming to be too busy on their devices to be able to have conversations. In fact, they do not want to have the face to face interaction, but would “rather just do things on [their] blackberry” (136). Moreover, a “sixteen-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says wistfully, ‘Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation’” (136). The reliance on technology has increased significantly and the necessity for conversation has pivoted. A teenage boy confesses that he feels more comfortable talking to an “artificial intelligence program” (138) about dating instead of his own father. Similarly, many people want “Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, [to become] more advanced, [because] ‘she’ will be more and more like a best friend” (138). Robots are being given more credit for comforting humans than humans themselves. Not only are the younger generations thinking this, but also the elders. When Turkle brought a baby seal robot to a nursing home, an elder woman began to speak to it and feel comforted by it. It is a tragedy that humans are feeling a deeper connection with robots than other humans. Humans have the experiences and the feelings that the robots are not capable of having. Hence, there is confusion about the difference between conversation and

Nouwen (1975) describes loneliness as a universal experience that affects even the most intimate relationships. He identifies loneliness as one of the universal sources of human suffering. Some of the mental suffering in the

Not only that, these sociable robots inadvertently change the way we view reality around. In today society what was once taboo like talking to an inanimate object is now acceptable because of new technology. Even the

Another effect is loneliness is not a matter of external conditions but rather more of a psychological state, which can cause neuroticism, or anxiety with due time. For example, John Cacioppo, the director of the center for cognitive and social neuroscience at the University of Chicago, says the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human physiology. And in one experiment, Cacioppo confirmed “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.”

Stephen Marche’s article, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely” explores the complex issues regarding loneliness. “Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing…” (The Atlantic), Marche states. Loneliness is a physiological mantra and a projection of an individual’s feelings about life and their surroundings. Loneliness is by far one of the most detrimental epidemics because it is sly; many people do not identify loneliness to be an actual factor of bad health. Bad health can originate from a prolonged feeling of being alone therefore can affect the human body itself. In his article, Marche continues to discuss several scientists’ perspectives and references a myriad of social experiments composed around the issue of correlation or causation between

To conclude, this essay in overall reviewed two journal articles on the topic loneliness in older people. It examined the

This study investigated the difference between emotional and social loneliness using structural equation modeling, evaluated whether a two-dimensional or unidimensional conception of loneliness provides a better fit to the data. Second, the extent to which positive and negative social exchanges are associated with older adults’ loneliness was examined. Third, they also investigated whether the structure and social-exchange correlates of loneliness differ for currently married versus formerly married older

Many of the goods and services we depend on daily are now supplied by intelligent, automated machines rather than human beings. Robots are doing the things we should be doing. People are now ordering stuff online so they don’t have to deal with other people. Conversations are now mainly on electronics whether it’s on a phone call or texting. Humans are losing relationships and human interaction.

According to George Monbiot’s article “The Age of Loneliness Is Killing Us” Monbiot states that society is shifting into isolation and loneliness. Instead of having the age of sharing and socializing. Each and every individual is wanting to stay alone with their own solitude and loneliness. Monbiot recognizes this damaging effect on society and states that how much dangerous it is. To start off. Monbiot claims that we as humans are social beings and always will be “We were social creatures from the start,” by disagreeing with Thomas Hobbes’s claim on our human state of nature “of every man against every man.” Monbiot sees this idea of every person on their own an epidemic of loneliness in today’s age, and how it

Loneliness seems to have become a common characteristics that individuals share around the world. Although this is a subject that has been a part of discussions and a focus of research for many years in philosophy , theology, psychology and literature, the scientific study has had a relatively short record. In this day and age there have