Social Interaction: Take Two

 Social interaction is one factor cited to improve longevity. According to research by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, loneliness and social isolation … increase[s] the risk for premature death by 26% and 29% respectively. I won’t be long for this world, given the number in the second finding. But then one needs to ask the obvious question: What is it about social interaction that extends life? According to Google, social interaction regulates stress. Positive social interaction releases the hormone oxytocin. It’s what gets women through childbirth. But men release the hormone too. Men and women produce oxytocin in the hypothalamus and release the hormone from the pituitary gland.

So, the short answer is: We want to release oxytocin into our bodies so we can grow older than we would otherwise. If you agree with that assertion, do we need human social interaction to produce oxytocin? I was telling my wife the other day about my lengthy interaction with Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence assistant, as I worked on a home automation project. She jokingly said that Gemini was my new best friend. We laughed about it and moved on. But while cross-country skiing today – alone! – I thought more about the topic of social interaction. If I regularly “chatted” with Gemini, laughing and being challenged while working on a project, would I release oxytocin? My gut instinct says no, or at the very best, not in any quantity to benefit me. While Gemini has presented me with some responses that made me chuckle, I haven’t laughed to the same extent as I do with humans.

Last night I saw an email from Robot Shop that the company’s CEO, Mario Tremblay, did an interview, published in “Robot-Magazine.” The tag line is: “...humanoid robots will arrive in real-world applications faster than people think.” I haven’t read the interview. But if we accept that humanoid robots are coming and they’ll incorporate elements of artificial intelligence akin to Gemini, could a companion like “Star Wars’” C-3PO give us a level of social interaction that starts to compete with what we can get with other members of our own species? When the day arrives, I suggest it’ll be time for a social experiment. Now, I’m being tongue-in-cheek with what I’m about to suggest. But a part of me wonders if we could really do this experiment. We’d take four groups of people. Group one would have social interaction entirely with other humans. Group two would interact exclusively – or to the largest extent possible – with the humanoid robot. Group three would be hypnotized to believe that everyone they met was a robot. In reality, they would interact with other humans (though believing they were interacting with robots). Finally, group four would be hypnotized to believe that everyone they talked to was a human. But in fact, they would interact exclusively with robots. At the end of the experiment, subjects would answer a scientifically crafted survey that psychologists could review and draw conclusions from. Assuming we could predict each group's longevity from the survey responses, what would we find? If the humanoid robots had the comedy skills of Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Robin Williams, or Norm Macdonald, my bet on the groups with the longest life expectancies would be the two groups that interacted with the robots!