I’ve spent 25 years studying loneliness. AI is about to make it much worse

Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve our lives in powerful ways. But after two and a half decades researching why human connection gives life meaning, I’m worried about where we’re headed. Americans are spending more time alone, marrying less, and making fewer friends than in previous decades. And it isn’t going well: A 2025 American Psychological Association survey found that around half of adults report feeling isolated, left out, or lacking companionship. Academic research suggests that around 37% of Americans suffer from moderate to severe loneliness. For the past 25 years, I have studied what makes human life feel meaningful — and what happens when that sense of meaning erodes. My research on nostalgia, the bittersweet longing for the past, revealed something that surprised even me: the memories people return to most powerfully are almost never about personal achievement. They are about other people. Being cared for. Showing up for someone else. Belonging to something larger than themselves. That work led me deeper into the psychology of loneliness, because the two phenomena are deeply intertwined. Loneliness is one of the most common triggers of nostalgia, and nostalgia reveals what true connection requires: conditions under which we matter to someone, and they to us. What I’ve learned is that Americans are not simply short on social opportunities. They are losing the conditions under which genuine human bonds form and hold. Now some of the most powerful people in tech are offering a seductive solution. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued that AI can help fulfill people’s unmet social needs. Many Americans are putting this idea to the test. According to a report published in Harvard Business Review, therapy and companionship is are now the number one use case for generative AI—up from number two the year before. The market is growing fast. Downloads and revenue are up sharply, and new AI companion apps are launchin