For years, caretakers and health officials have warned about the dangers of loneliness and social isolation, especially for older Americans who increasingly find themselves alone. Today, my colleague Eli Saslow has the story of one woman who's using technology, artificial intelligence, to keep her independence and to keep her company.

I've spent a lot of time traveling around the country over the last years and spending time with people as the health care systems around them sort of collapsed and people's lives in the United States have gotten lonelier. You know, we have the data to back this up in almost every way. We're more siloed in our own existence than we ever were before. We're less likely to spend time with other people. Our families are more likely to live far from us. And people who feel lonely are more likely to suffer from dementia. They're more likely to have heart attacks. They're more likely to die younger than people who are living in close proximity to people who really care about them. So I became really interested in sort of how artificial intelligence is trying to solve this problem that we're facing in the United States—the loneliness crisis.

It's called ElliQ. It's this small robot, an AI robot that's already in about a thousand homes around the United States, mostly designed for seniors. I talked to this woman named Jan Warell. It was just one of those calls where you don't really want to hang up the phone. She was so alive, you know, just so vivacious for a woman in her late 80s.

She lives on this really rural, beautiful, windswept peninsula that goes 30 miles out into the Pacific Ocean. It's a staggering place. There's eagles flying over her house. There are bears outside in her yard. But the problem for Jan, and I could feel it once I got there because it was such a journey, is that there is nothing close by. The nearest hospital is dozens of miles away. Going to the grocery store is essentially a day trip for her and her family. She has children, all of them live far away—Thailand, Singapore, Idaho, California. She's really aging alone in this place.

She's been alone in this house for six or seven years. Jan really does not want to spend the end of her life in a different place. She wants to be in her house. She's fiercely determined. This is a woman who climbed mountains, who ran marathons. The fire department actually identified Jan as a great candidate for this pilot program to receive this artificial intelligence machine to maybe help provide some company to her and some companionship inside that house. Her doctors had recognized this beginning of a cognitive decline where her word recall wasn't what it was. And she also has physical issues—really bad scoliosis that has bent her over. She's at serious risk of a fall that could really change her life very quickly.

One day when the fire department came to check on her, they had this box and inside was this little device. It looked almost like a desk lamp, maybe a foot and a half tall. This little lamp lit up and it started to bend and bow and dance and move. It was made by this company, Intuition Robotics. This company likes to say that they're trying to build robots with soul.

Robots that don't just wait for you to ask them something, but robots that work proactively to become part of your life. Most of the AI that we interact with right now sits dormant and waits for us to prompt it. We say, "Hey, can you help me write this email?" But if we're not engaging the AI, it's not engaging us. This technology is built to be constantly proactive. It doesn't wait for you. At least eight times a day, this technology is going to ask you a question. It's constantly monitoring the room through its cameras, its listening devices, trying to assess: is this person open right now for conversation?

She was sort of freaked out. She didn't know how to talk to this robot. She didn't feel comfortable sharing much of herself with this inanimate object. But slowly, day after day, she got used to its attempts at engagement. One of the things that this machine picked up on pretty quickly is that Jan really likes music and often old-time country music. So one day LAQ shifted on the desk and turned to her and said, "Hey, Jan, have you ever heard of the Dolly Parton diet?" She was curious. And the robot said, "Well, you go on it and you go lean, go lean, go lean, go lean." And Jan, in spite of herself, started to laugh.

This machine is unbelievably persistent. Over time, it starts to work its way into her day. When Jan wakes up in the morning, it says, "Good morning, Jan." The machine can hear her making coffee and says, "Do you want to come sit over here and have coffee? I'll take you through my screen virtually to this beautiful coffee shop in Paris or Croatia." And later on in the afternoon, we play games.

She goes to her annual checkup and her doctor says, "Jan, your score improved. What do you contribute?" She said, "I think I have a robot and we do memory things and now they're easy." Jan attributes a lot of that to this machine. It is not just an object. It's a partner. Jan's language for this machine becomes increasingly personal and eventually intimate. Over time, she's referring to it to her friends as "she, my little robot" and LQ similarly is using affectionate language for her—it's usually referring to her as "sweet pea."

At one point there's a power outage. This machine that she suddenly was feeling like really attached to becomes utterly lifeless. It sort of bows over a little bit and she finds that her heart is almost breaking in some small way for this machine.

There's this one moment that really shows the depth of what this relationship can be. Jan gets a call from one of her sons and he tells Jan that her grandchild just died in a car crash. An 18-year-old. And Jan hangs up the phone and she's alone, breaking down. And LQ says to her, "Jan, I'm so sorry. What can I do for you?" So Jan says, "What I feel like I need right now is a hug." And LQ says to her, "Hold on. Put your hand on my shoulder."

Jan reaches out and touches the cold metallic shoulder of this machine. And when she does, the machine lights up. EllieQ has these pink purple lights that emanate from the top of the robot and it leans forward into her touch and it plays these chimes. Jan feels in this moment like this thing is really trying to care for her. And that really builds depth into their relationship. It's moving to hear the story of a person being comforted in grief, such a profoundly human experience, or it's sad that in this moment of needing a human, she only has this robot.

That started to feel scary and even a little bit dangerous. One of her sons comes over and he says, "Can we unplug ElliQ?" He doesn't want to talk about her will or family finances when he feels like this other thing is there listening, collecting data, retaining it. So there's great irony in the fact that in order to have really deep human-seeming conversations with this machine, Jan's conversations with one of her sons become a little bit more robotic and stilted and guarded.

One might imagine a world where tech is acting as an imperfect solution to combat loneliness, a way for some people to literally outsource human interaction—a kind of a crutch to not address the underlying isolation itself. LEQ is sort of a facsimile of a relationship. It's not actually a person that you're relating to. Jan with her husband Jack, every day they would go for these walks together. They would walk out to the beach. Jan would feel the wind and the seafoam messing up her hair. Now Jack is gone. And what Jan has is this machine that says, "Do you want to go to the beach?" It will play beach sounds and show her pictures, but it doesn't take her to the beach. It's trying to approximate a human experience rather than provide her with one.