Robots for the Lonely Crowd & Aching Hearts

Only the lonely
One of these Singles’ Days sooner than later e-commerce orders into online stores like Alibaba, Taobao or its cousin Tmall are going to sizzle with orders for personal robots, new, used or otherwise.

These future blockbusters aren’t for cleaning, although Singles’ Day is well-known for selling robot vacuums: last November 11th, Ecovacs rang up $47 million worth in a blistering 24 hours of e-commerce. Rather, personal here means a robot companion: a pal, a friend, a confidante and live-in buddy. A chum with which to kill time and share oneself. 

Asia, especially China, has something more important for home robots to do than to sweep up dust; there’s a massive black hole of loneliness on the rise that needs filling; and it’s not just the aloneness experienced by ageing shut-ins.

Traditional, multi-generational family life in Asia, where everyone lives together, happily or not, is fading fast. For example, today in China, “160 million Chinese households, or 40 percent of the nationwide total, now consist of only one or two people.”  That’s a huge, looming problem in a country where familial harmony and togetherness are as old as Confucius.

Stuffing millions of those one-person or two-people households into massive, mega-multi-story filing cabinets is proving to be a perfect formula for high-rise loneliness or depression…or worse.

According to the Psychiatric Times, 30 percent of the world’s suicides take place in China; 50 percent of all suicides by women.

East Asian loneliness
It’s not that China has a corner on East Asian loneliness, Korea and Japan tilt the harmful solitude index as well. It’s just that China’s size and checkered social history over the past thirty years tend to make its every action more pronounced than those of its neighbors.

What about Korea?
The Korea Herald captures it well: “Recent statistics have shown that more Koreans are living alone, spending less time with their families while feeling disconnected to the world. From 2010-2015, the proportion of single-person households increased significantly from 15.8 percent to 27.1 percent.

“According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data last year, 28 percent of Koreans said they have no meaningful social support network at all — not a single person they can speak to or rely on — in times of crisis.”

And Japan?
Japan’s Industry of Loneliness similarly paints a bleak picture: “By 2035, 40 percent of Japan’s population will be living alone. They will wake up alone, make breakfast for one, go to work and come home to an empty apartment. It will be the norm.

“In fact, households including married couples will decrease by 23 percent according to research, and Japan’s market is gearing up for this shift by creating a variety of services marketed towards lonely people.”

Kim Suk-joo, a psychiatrist at the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul warns: “Social isolation is the biggest cause of almost all mental diseases.”

Then goes on to hint at how personal robots might fill the void: “When suffering from unfulfilling relationships with close friends and family, some people start to form relationships with objects and animals. You give meanings to them, and every single object becomes simply unreplaceable.”

It’s “some people start to form relationships with objects” that is the clue for an in-home, machine to potentially be an “unreplaceable” companion.

Regardless of the actual reasons, which aren’t expected to reverse themselves any time soon—if ever, millions of young, old and middle-aged Asians are being sucked into a void of loneliness at an alarming rate.

Ghost city test tube
With China’s former “ghost cities”, like Lingang on the outskirts of Shanghai, finally beginning to fill up with residents, there’s an eerie future awaiting new arrivals.

A greying couple moving into an apartment, say on the fortieth floor, experiences the eeriness immediately when they realize that to walk in the garden below is a forty-story elevator trip down and then back up again, when previous to moving in, a garden stroll was merely a few feet out the back door.

It’s a new reality of displacement and then replacement somewhere that doesn’t resemble home in the least, where family and friends are either far away or too busy or too disinterested to visit.

A report released by China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), “shows that Chinese families have become greyer and more isolated, with fewer children.”

In an article “Will China Get Lonely Before It Gets Rich?” Foreign Policy writes: “Three demographics increasingly stand out: Unmarried young workers, couples who have delayed or foregone childbirth, and elderly empty-nesters…In the decade between 2000 and 2010, when urbanization was at full throttle, the number of solo households doubled, and the number of two-member households increased by 68 percent.”

The lonely crowd
The NHFPC statistics on China are grim:

• 90 percent of China’s elderly live at home instead of assisted living facilities. But their children and grandchildren often choose not to live with them, or cannot live with them, which is very counter to millennia of tradition.
• Over 40 percent of senior citizens above the age of 80 live alone.
• 37.5 million elderly Chinese citizens [equal to the entire population of Poland] lacked the ability to care for themselves in 2013.
• 45.4 percent of unmarried residents live alone.
• 80 percent of Chinese households say they are worried about supporting their elderly relatives.

What next? Is it too late to recapture the magic
that made this robot dog loved by so many?