Issue Loneliness treated as a public health policy domain

Summary

The idea of social rewilding asks people to rethink how they spend free time and to focus on genuine human connection and real-world experience. Building and keeping social ties at work may become harder as the number of robots in workplaces is expected to rise sharply. That shift also raises questions about security, control, identity and responsibility. Loneliness affects one in six people and is linked to roughly 100 deaths every hour, more than 871,000 a year. Dubai Future Foundation therefore suggests social connection may need to become a new area of public health policy, focused on awareness, support and environments designed for interaction.