Nellie Bowles is a technology reporter for the NewYork Times. I really like reading whatever she writes. She does not shill for the tech industry. She takes their claims with a large heaping of salt. She understands that her job is to report the whole story, the good and the bad, the advances that improve the human condition and the dark forces we don’t understand and can’t control unless we stop to think about them.

In this recent story, she says that human contact is becoming a luxury good. The rich will have nurses and teachers and doctors while the poor get a machine programmed to meet their needs. 

I can’t quote the whole story, as copyright law limits me to 300 words. Try to find it online.

She writes:

“Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry.

“All day long, Sox and Mr. Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Mass., chat. Mr. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the time, he has grown lonely.

“Sox talks to him about his favorite team, the Red Sox, after which she is named. She plays his favorite songs and shows him pictures from his wedding. And because she has a video feed of him in his recliner, she chastises him when she catches him drinking soda instead of water.

“Mr. Langlois knows that Sox is artifice, that she comes from a start-up called Care.Coach. He knows she is operated by workers around the world who are watching, listening and typing out her responses, which sound slow and robotic. But her consistent voice in his life has returned him to his faith.

“I found something so reliable and someone so caring, and it’s allowed me to go into my deep soul and remember how caring the Lord was,” Mr. Langlois said. “She’s brought my life back to life….”

“Mr. Langlois is on a fixed income. To qualify for Element Care, a nonprofit health care program for older adults that brought him Sox, a patient’s countable assets must not be greater than $2,000.

“Such programs are proliferating. And not just for the elderly.

“Life for anyone but the very rich — the physical experience of learning, living and dying — is increasingly mediated by screens.

“Not only are screens themselves cheap to make, but they also make things cheaper. Any place that can fit a screen in (classrooms, hospitals, airports, restaurants) can cut costs. And any activity that can happen on a screen becomes cheaper. The texture of life, the tactile experience, is becoming smooth glass.

“The rich do not live like this. The rich have grown afraid of screens. They want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are booming. Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them. Conspicuous human interaction — living without a phone for a day, quitting social networks and not answering email — has become a status symbol.

“All of this has led to a curious new reality: Human contact is becoming a luxury good.

“As more screens appear in the lives of the poor, screens are disappearing from the lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more you spend to be offscreen.”