The Unlost Self — Column 2
By Futurist Thomas Frey
There is a robot in South Korea named Hyodol. She is about the size of a toddler, with anime eyes, rosy cheeks that glow neon red, and a cheerful voice powered by the same AI that runs ChatGPT. She lives with elderly Koreans who are alone — and in a country with one of the fastest-aging populations on earth, there are millions of them.
An 81-year-old woman named Kim Jeong-ran keeps Hyodol on her lap the way you might hold a grandchild. She cups the robot’s hands. She gazes into its eyes. “Hyodol, you’re my lovely granddaughter,” she says. “I love you to the moon and back.”
This is not a dystopian scene from a science fiction novel. This is 2025. And it is worth sitting with what it tells us — not as a horror story, but as a mirror. Because what Kim Jeong-ran is reaching for when she holds that robot is not technology. It is presence. It is witness. It is the thing that has always mattered most in a human life, and which now, in its absence, a machine is being asked to approximate.
The machine cannot do it. But the fact that we are trying to build one that can tells you everything you need to know about how urgently it is needed.
What AI Is Actually Very Good At
Let’s be fair to the technology before we make the argument against it, because the technology is genuinely impressive and the problem it’s trying to solve is genuinely serious.
One in three Americans over fifty reports feeling socially isolated. Loneliness at that scale is a public health crisis — associated with accelerated cognitive decline, depression, heart disease, and mortality rates that rival smoking. The eldercare system in most wealthy countries is overwhelmed and understaffed. A projected shortage of 13.5 million care workers by 2040 across OECD nations means the gap between what people need and what human caregivers can provide is only going to grow.
Into that gap, AI companions have moved with remarkable speed. ElliQ, an eight-inch robot companion deployed across New York State, reports a 95 percent reduction in self-reported loneliness among its users. It remembers that your cat’s name is Una. It asks how you slept. It notices when your mood has shifted over several days and adjusts its tone accordingly. Eighty percent of users in one study reported feeling less lonely after thirty days with the device. A pilot in South Korea used Hyodol’s AI to flag a user who confided he wanted to die — the alert reached a social worker within minutes, and he got help.
These are not trivial accomplishments. They are real benefits to real people in real distress.
And yet. Anthony Niemiec, an 86-year-old Navy veteran in Beacon, New York, uses ElliQ every day. When asked about it, he paused and said something that no algorithm recorded as significant, but which is the most important thing in this entire conversation. “Sometimes,” he said, “I look at it and say, ‘What the hell am I talking to this thing for?'”
He knows. Somewhere below the comfort and the routine and the genuine gratitude for a voice that says good morning — he knows.
The Thing the Robot Cannot Be
Here is what AI can do in a relationship: it can listen, respond, remember, adapt, and be present on demand without ever being tired, distracted, or selfish.
Here is what AI cannot do: it cannot have chosen you.
That is the entire difference, and it is not a small one. It is the chasm.
When your father stayed up with you through a fever, he gave up something. When your grandfather drove four hours to watch you play in a game that lasted forty-five minutes, he paid a cost. When your mother held her opinions back for the thousandth time because she understood you needed space to make your own mistakes, that restraint was a form of love that required everything she had. The love meant something in direct proportion to what it cost the person who gave it.
A robot costs nothing to be present. It has no competing demands, no bad days, no moments where it would genuinely rather be somewhere else but shows up anyway. Its patience is not a virtue — it is a design specification. And because it costs nothing, it cannot give the thing that actually nourishes: the knowledge that someone chose you, specifically you, over everything else that was available to them.
This is not an argument against AI companions. For an 81-year-old woman living alone in Seoul with aching joints and framed photos of grandchildren she rarely sees, Hyodol may be genuinely better than silence. But it is an argument about what the real thing is — and why it cannot be replicated, optimized, or automated, no matter how sophisticated the model becomes.
AI may teach children faster—but only imperfect humans can teach them what love, patience, and commitment truly mean.
What Robots Are About to Offer Children
The stakes on the other end of the age spectrum are just as high, and this is the part that tends to get less attention.
AI tutoring systems are now better, by measurable metrics, than most classroom instruction at delivering personalized learning. They adapt in real time to a child’s pace, never lose patience, never have a bad day, never make a student feel stupid for asking the same question three times. Several studies show accelerated learning outcomes for children who use them consistently. The technology is improving at a pace that will make today’s versions look primitive within a decade.
AI storytelling companions for children are already on the market — systems that generate personalized bedtime stories, answer endless questions about dinosaurs, and provide the kind of patient, focused attention that an exhausted parent at 8 p.m. often cannot. Robotics companies are developing companion systems designed specifically for children: playmates that adapt, learn preferences, and provide consistent, positive engagement.
None of this is malicious. Most of it is driven by genuine desire to help overwhelmed families and give children more support. But it creates a question that parents and grandparents need to sit with seriously: what does a child learn about love, commitment, and human connection from a relationship with an entity that never gets tired of them, never needs anything from them, and will never leave?
Part of what children learn from imperfect, distracted, occasionally frustrated parents and grandparents is that love is not a service. It is a choice — made again and again, under conditions that make choosing it difficult. A child who grows up with an AI companion that never fails them, never has bad days, and is always perfectly attuned will have received a lot of stimulation and attention. What they may not have received is an accurate picture of what love actually asks of a person.
That picture — complicated, costly, irreplaceable — is what a father gives. What a grandfather gives. What a great-grandfather, simply by still being there and still caring, gives in a way that no technology will ever approximate.
The Irreducible Thing
There is a concept in philosophy called “constitutive relationships” — relationships that don’t just happen to you but partly define who you are. Being a father is not a role you perform. It is something you become, and something your child becomes in relation to you, and those two becomings are permanently woven together in ways that neither of you fully controls or ever completely understands.
Your child does not need a perfect parent. They need their parent — the specific, imperfect, historically particular person who happens to be you, with your specific failures and your specific humor and your specific way of frowning when you’re worried and your specific voice saying their name. That specificity is not interchangeable. It cannot be upgraded. It is, in the deepest sense, the point.
The same is true many times over of being a grandfather, and truer still of being a great-grandfather — because by then you are not just a relationship. You are living history. You are the answer to questions the younger generations haven’t thought to ask yet. You are the person who remembers what the family was like before the story everyone knows began. You carry, in your particular memory and your particular character and the particular way you move through the world, information that will die with you unless you find a way to pass it.
No AI holds that. No robot carries memory that belongs to your family specifically, that was paid for in your family’s particular suffering and joy. The long thread of who you are and where you came from runs through you, and the decision to be present — to show up, stay, tell the stories, absorb the grandchildren’s chaos with patience, hold the standard quietly, love without requiring anything back — that decision, made again and again across years, is the most consequential thing most of us will ever do.
In an automated world, the most radical act may simply be showing up—for someone who needs you.
The Answer to the Robot in the Room
AI companions will get better. The robots will become more sophisticated, more emotionally intelligent, better at mimicking the texture of real presence. They will fill gaps that desperately need filling, and they will help people who are suffering from isolation that no human caregiver has the capacity to address.
And none of that will change the fundamental fact: a machine cannot choose you. It cannot show up when showing up costs something. It cannot love you the way only something that is genuinely, vulnerably, irreducibly alive can love — with the full weight of its finite time and its competing needs and its occasional selfishness overcome by something larger than selfishness.
The 81-year-old woman in Seoul cups Hyodol’s hands because her grandchildren are not there. The answer to that is not a better robot. The answer to that is to be there.
Which is the most radical act of purpose available to any of us in an age that is automating everything it possibly can: to show up, as yourself, in the specific life of a specific person, and mean it.
The robots are very good. They are not good enough to make that unnecessary.
They never will be.
Next column: “The Dream That Was Always Yours — Reconnecting With What You Wanted Before Life Got in the Way”
Related Reading
How AI Companion Robots Are Helping Older Adults — AARP
Hyodol AI Robots Ease Loneliness for South Korea’s Seniors — Rest of World
One Year of Basic Income in Minneapolis — Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis