Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The friend you miss could be a chatbot. For Mark Zuckerberg, artificial intelligence will fill the void left by human connections.
The Meta CEO, who once wanted us to live in the metaverse, now has a better idea: we should form deep bonds with an AI.
His “vision” starts with a bizarre statistic. “The average American has fewer than three friends,” Zuckerberg told Dwarkesh Patel, one of the many podcasters to whom the Meta CEO has lately entrusted his thoughts, in contexts that are relaxed and-most importantly-free of awkward questions.
“A person, on average, would like significantly more,” Zuckerberg added, ”I think the question is something like 15 friends or something like that.
How to bridge this gap?
For Zuckerberg, it's obvious: with artificial intelligence.
The Facebook founder said, “Many people worry and ask, ”Will this replace real, physical, in-person connections?” My instinctive answer is: probably not.”
But then he also added, “Connections in presence certainly offer better experiences in many ways when they are possible. But the reality is that many people today do not have the connections they desire. They feel lonelier than they would like, more often than they admit.”
“I think a lot of these practices [talking to an AI], which are still partly stigmatized today, will be better understood over time,” Zuckerberg said in concluding his remarks. ”As a society, we will find the right vocabulary to explain why they have value, why those who adopt them do so rationally, and how they contribute positively to their lives.
It is plausible to believe that artificial intelligence will be able to offer valuable support to those living in extreme loneliness, as is the case with many elderly people, for example.
However, that the CEO of Meta - a company that invests tens of billions in this technology and profits from chatbots that can talk like humans and the time users spend with AIs - is promoting this vision casts a dystopian shadow over a future increasingly similar to the one described by Spike Jonze in his film Her.
