We have had small robots in our home for close to 20 years. My husband loves gizmos and gadgets. He invests in some on Kickstarter and then finds others throughout the web. We had the first Roomba by iRobot. He bought me Google Glass (this may have been a ploy to make me look as dorky as possible around any other men) and Alexa has had many iterations in our home. I’m sure he has already placed an order for one of Elon Musk’s robots that are promised in the next year, which I am not thrilled about.
We have a little robot dog that, when turned on, freaks out our four Chiweenies, sending them into a barking frenzy. It looks like a robot. It’s metal and has blinking lights for eyes. It’s like something you’d see scampering around the set of Terminator!
Well, this week, Colin Angle, the inventor of the Roomba, unveiled his next act through his new company, Familiar Machines & Magic. It’s not a Roomba. It’s Familiar: a mid-sized, baby bear-like machine about the size of a lab puppy. It is covered in fuzzy, touch-sensitive skin, running generative AI locally so it learns your household’s habits without phoning home.
It won’t talk. It makes sounds like a pet. It’s designed to read emotion, context, and routine. Angle says it’ll ship in 2027 at “pet-comparable” pricing, plus a monthly subscription. As a dog-mom to four miniature dachshund-chihuahua mix pups, that means the cost will be a few thousand dollars! The pitch: a “warm presence” that fits in your life the way a real animal would. Plenty of early coverage points to one obvious use case… adults living alone…without other dogs!
Read that again. We’ve reached the point where the cure for loneliness is a battery-powered companion that pretends to know you. I’m sad.
I’m not knocking Colin. The man’s solving a real problem. The U.S. Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic in 2023, declaring it a public health crisis on par with smoking. About one in two American adults reports experiencing it. Older adults are the most visible casualties, but they’re not alone in being alone. Gen Z reports some of the highest rates of workplace loneliness of any generation. Remote workers feel disconnected from their teams. Founders describe entrepreneurship as “the loneliest job in the world.” We built the technology that scaled isolation, and now we’re building more technology to soften the blow.
But here’s the part that gets me: most of us spend forty-plus hours a week with the same group of humans, and somehow we still feel alone. That’s not a robot-dog problem. That’s a community problem. And it’s solvable without a charging cable.
The Real Cost of Lonely Work
Gallup has been tracking workplace friendship for years. Their finding: people who say they have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be fully engaged. They produce higher-quality work, are better at engaging customers, report higher wellbeing, and are less likely to get injured on the job. Only about 30% of workers say they have one.
Friendship at work isn’t fluff. It’s infrastructure.
When I opened The Village Workspace, I wasn’t trying to sell desks. I was trying to give people a place where they’d be missed if they didn’t show up. That’s the thing missing from most “workspaces” — and most workplaces. Belonging.
You can’t outsource that to a robot.
10 Ways to Build Real Community Where You Work
Some of these are obvious if you’re in a coworking space. Others work whether you’re remote, hybrid, or hot-desking from your kitchen table. Pick two or three and start this week.
- Coffee Roulette. Once a week, randomly pair two members or coworkers for a 20-minute coffee chat. No agenda. The randomness is the magic — it forces you out of your usual routine conversations.
- Borrow a Brain session. Once a month, members sign up for 20-minute slots and bring one stuck problem to the group. Everyone else weighs in. It’s part mastermind, part therapy, part free consulting — and people remember who helped them.
- A community curiosity board. Make it analog. A real corkboard near the coffee station. People pin questions, asks, recommendations, what they’re learning. The slowness of paper-and-pin is the point — it forces people to stop, read, and respond in person.
- Show-and-Tell Fridays. Five minutes per person. Share something you made, learned, or screwed up this week. The “screwed up” version creates more bonding than the highlight reel ever will.
- Walking meetings. Replace one sit-down a week with a walk. Conversations go deeper when people are side-by-side instead of across a table. Bonus: it counts toward your steps.
- Skill-swap circles. Member A teaches Canva for an hour. Member B teaches how to use Asana. No money changes hands. This is how community used to work before we monetized everything.
- The newbie buddy system. Every new member or new hire gets paired with someone for their first 30 days. It’s their buddy’s job to introduce them around, answer the dumb questions, and grab lunch in week one. Loneliness in a new place is mostly about not knowing who to ask.
- Open-door office hours. Pick one hour a week. Your door is open, your laptop is closed. Anyone can walk in. You’ll be surprised what gets said when there’s no calendar invite involved. I take it a step further and just sit in our open space–the Cafe–and chat with folks walking through. I absolutely love it.
- Cross-pollination lunches. Pull together five people from five different industries once a month. The marketer learns from the bookkeeper. The therapist learns from the contractor. New ideas only happen when different worlds collide. We do a lot of Lunch-n-Learn events here at The Village for this reason. People in the same room, sharing and learning, will form better relationships.
- Voice memos instead of texts. This one’s a hard one for me to even write. When you’d normally fire off a text to a colleague or member, send a voice memo instead. People hear your tone. They hear that you’re a person. It’s the smallest possible swap with the biggest possible payoff. The reason it is hard for me is I hate getting voice texts that require me to listen more than once for information or if I didn’t understand something the person said. I do like the idea when it is something that may be misunderstood because of emotions or to just connect with friends. Let me know your thoughts on this one.
What the Robot Dog Misses
“Familiar” will probably help some people. A warm presence beats no presence at all, and I’d rather see a lonely grandparent with a robot companion than a lonely grandparent with nothing. Angle’s team is doing thoughtful work, and the choice to prioritize emotional intelligence over conversational AI is a good one.
But a robot can’t introduce you to a future business partner. It can’t notice you’ve been quiet for a week. It can’t celebrate your win or sit with you in your loss. It can’t stop you in the kitchen and say, “Hey — how are you, really?”
Real community is messy, inconvenient, and slightly inefficient — and that’s exactly what makes it work. The friction is the feature.
If you’re a founder, a freelancer, or someone leading a team, the question isn’t whether your people have access to the latest AI companion. The question is whether they have someone at work who would notice if they disappeared.
Build that, and you won’t need a robot to keep anyone company.
I want to hear from you. Which of these ideas could you try this week? If you work or live alone, would you want a furry critter-bot laying at your feet?