Mark Zuckerberg will build you a friend

Of late, I have been writing with some intensity about what AI and social media are doing to our ability to process reality. Inherent in my criticisms is the suggestion that not dealing with reality has a downside – if we don’t know what is real, then we will fall for false claims about reality made by scammers, salesmen, and politicians alike.

Something similar is happening when it comes to the idea of friendship.

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, speaking about friends as if they are commodities in a market, said that the average American has three friends but there is “demand” for 15. He was talking about AI “friends” filling this demand and making people less lonely. Of course, he would want this demand to be fulfilled by “friends” his company supplies and in doing so, steal even more personal data than before so he can get rich off it. Good old capitalist profit-mongering. Did I mention there is already an AI service that will call your old parents if your busy schedule doesn’t allow you to?

Apparently, your friends don’t need to be human beings. Enough has been written and said about tech bros not knowing how humans work, so I will not add to it. But if there is anything we can take away from the proposed trend of replacing human connection with this complete lack of connection, it is that before you provide a solution, you have to understand what the problem is.

The problem isn’t that you don’t call your parents – that’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is that you don’t care enough. Similarly, the problem isn’t that you don’t have friends. That is a result of the problem that you aren’t meeting people and being part of real world communities and being vulnerable before other humans.

Greedy tech bros and their highfalutin AI tools aren’t actually solving problems because they doesn’t even recognise what the problem is. Not only do their solutions not solve the problem, they actually let the problem linger and prosper and acquire the appearance of normalcy.

You don’t call your parents? That’s perfectly okay and understandable. Here, our robot will do it for you. Fuck their actual need to hear from you.

You don’t have friends? That’s okay and you don’t need to. Here, our robot will pretend to be your friend even as it sends all that you share with it back to our servers so we can sell you stuff.

I lost my best friend three years ago. After his death, while talking to people about it, I learned that having a true friend is a rather rare thing. It had never crossed my mind that what I had with my best friend was something most people never get to experience. In fact, in the days following his death, whenever I found myself telling people what had happened, I found a kind of incomprehension in their eyes. They didn’t know what to say because they didn’t understand what had actually happened, what I had actually lost.

People understand the death of a parent, or a spouse, or a child on some level. But the presence of a friend is not easy to understand for most, let alone his absence. This is probably because in our times, the word friend has more or less come to denote an acquaintance, or a work colleague, or any number of random strangers who one follows and is followed by on social networking apps. So when I say “my friend is no more”, people don’t know what to do with it. They have no frame of reference.

Now, when I see instances of people making friends with AI chatbots, I see that this was a population primed for this transition into inhumanity. As I said in the beginning of this post, if we don’t know what is real, we will fall for false claims about reality.

The reason ChatGPT and its equally vacuous cousins cannot be your friends is because you don’t risk anything before them emotionally. They will agree with you if you tell them, they will be strict with you if you tell them, they will take on any personality you ask them to. They don’t have opinions or views. They lack the ability to think about you in ways that only a fellow human being can. Friends are way more than instruments that talk back when you need conversation.

AI friends are toys. A toy car isn’t a car and a toy elephant isn’t a real elephant. Thinking that a toy can replace what it has been designed to look like is to resign yourself to living in a dollhouse designed by a billionaire tech bro with a track record of treating the population of this planet as a farm to grow dollars in.