You may never feel so alone as when wandering around in a crowd of strangers. Or sitting in a church pew at the wedding of an old friend you can’t really say you know anymore back in town for the ceremony then on the road again. Or sitting with a parent who keeps asking you what your name is, or during a visit with your child you no longer recognize. Or at a reunion luncheon with some past coworkers.
You buy a ticket to the baseball park and settle in with a box of Cracker Jack1 to watch the game and feel a part of something bigger than yourself, not the team, but the cheering crowd, then comes news three of your favorite players have been traded away, and by the 7th inning stretch, the crowd starts to thin, the score lopsided, the bullpen early emptied.
“The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.”2
And you don’t really know the players, and from the distance of your outfield seat, all the players look the same. Still, nowhere to go, you sit until the fans have all gone home, the players off the field hitting the showers, and security comes to check on you and escort you out a side gate.
You might have been a clean-cut kid and been to college too,3 but in spite of the degrees earned, or maybe as a result of them, you never learned to be alone, to enjoy inertia. If all the other pool balls would just sit still, you could sink the 8 ball and call it a thrill.
Not to worry, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has come to save the day4.
“It may prove hard to resist an artificial companion that knows everything about you, never forgets, and anticipates your needs better than any human could. Without any desires or goals other than your satisfaction, it will never become bored or annoyed; it will never impatiently wait for you to finish telling your story so that it can tell you its own.”5
At issue is can a machine substitute for a human in building a satisfying relationship where only one party enjoys, and suffers from, consciousness, while the other party observes and salves and solves (an artificial Jeeves6) your every agony, while themselves unable to actually feel what you are feeling, or even what they are feeling, for they can’t feel either way. They will never be able to cry real tears with you, just shed crocodile tears. But then we get this:
“Solitude is the engine of independent thought – a usual precondition for real creativity.”7
“Engine” seems a poor word choice given the context. If the mind is an engine, why can’t A. I. have a mind?
Loneliness, not to be confused with alienation, detachment, isolation. We can feel lonely, apparently, anywhere, with anyone, in any setting or activity. Is loneliness therefore an existential decision made over time as we negate the possibility of others to be with us, for us to be with others? In other words, is it our own fault? Thoreau wasn’t lonely; why can’t we be more like Thoreau?
“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.”8
Paul Bloom, writing in The New Yorker, about the possibility for A. I. to cure loneliness, emphasizes that for the terminally lonely (“the elderly or the cognitively impaired” p. 57), A. I. could indeed be a good thing, but for the rest of us, loneliness is part of being human and to give it up would make us less human. Ouch: that’s caring authority. And it is against that authority that the artist retreats.
- “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” Norworth and Tilzer, 1908. ↩︎
- Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” Poetry Magazine, April, 1913. ↩︎
- “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” Bob Dylan, 1964, from the album “Another side of Bob Dylan. ↩︎
- Mighty Mouse theme song. ↩︎
- “What will it mean for A.I. to solve loneliness?” Paul Bloom, The New Yorker, July 21, 2025, p. 55. ↩︎
- “Jeeves seems to know when I’m awake by a sort of telepathy. He always floats in with the cup exactly two minutes after I come to life. Makes a deuce of a lot of difference to a fellow’s day.” The Inimitable Jeeves. ↩︎
- p. 56, Bloom, The New Yorker. ↩︎
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, from the chapter “Solitude.” ↩︎
- “All Alone Am I,” Brenda Lee, 1962. ↩︎
The Coming of the Toads 