Dr. Zohar Lederman1
1Rambam Healthcare Campus
Loneliness is a major public health concern, particularly during pandemics such as Covid. It is extremely common, and it poses a major risk to human health. Technological solutions including social media, robots, and virtual reality have been advocated and implemented to relieve loneliness, and their use will undoubtedly increase in the near future. This manuscript explores the use of technological solutions from a normative perspective, asking whether and to what extend such measures should indeed be relied upon. The conclusion is that technological solutions are unquestionably part of the solution to loneliness, but that they cannot and should not constitute the whole solution. Important to note- this is not a straw-man argument, as several organizations and scholars have strictly relied on such technological solutions for loneliness.
Biography:
Zohar is an emergency medicine physician and a postdoc fellow at the Medical Ethics and Humanities Center, University of Hong Kong