While AI pals may provide entertainment, and a shell of comfort to lonely souls, true friendship cannot be replaced.
At your computer? Feeling lonely? Scrolling through the bleak oblivion of X? Hoping your work buddy will invite you to the game next weekend, while you watch the same TikTok on loop?
Well, does Mark Zuckerberg have the solution for you!
Meta’s CEO recently announced that his company is working on building personalized AI friends to fill the void.
Zuckerberg begins with an anthropological observation:
The average American, I think, has fewer than three friends . . . and the average person has demand for meaningfully more . . . like, 15 friends or so. The average person wants more connection than they have
In short, Zuckerberg identifies an unmet demand in the market — and Meta is happy to fill it!
Zuck offers an eerie description about the progress Meta is making on this front:
Once the personalization loop kicks in and the AI just starts to get to know you better and better, I think [the results] will just be really compelling.
To be fair, he admits that AI bots can’t replace in-person connections, and that there are benefits to “physical connections when you can have them.” “But the reality is,” he continues, “that people just don’t have the connection, and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”
So, although AI besties are only a Band-Aid to the bullet hole, better than nothing, eh?
No — fake robot friends are much worse, actually.
Human time is limited. Our attention is finite. Apart from the obvious time sink of engaging with a bot on a screen, that to which we give our time and attention shapes us in return. Conversing with a nonhuman algorithm will dehumanize the user in due course.
And, of course, friendship itself depends on mutuality. One cannot be friends with a table, nor can one be friends with (properly speaking) a cat or a dog. Even at the human level, an adult cannot be friends with a toddler.
Aristotle, perhaps the original philosopher of friendship, writes in his Nicomachean Ethics that “perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves.”
The key part here is “alike in virtue,” or in other words, mutuality. True friendship relies on the mutual virtue and goodwill of the other — faculties only humankind, i.e. rational animals, possesses.
While AI pals may provide entertainment, and a shell of comfort to lonely souls, true friendship cannot be replaced.