All the lonely people. Where do they all come from?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said he hopes artificial intelligence chatbots will soon serve as buddies, therapists, and business partners for people who lack human interaction. This is from the man who hollowed out the meaning of “friend” and made much of online social interaction purely performative.
It’s hard to think of a prescription that would be less helpful in addressing what former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called a loneliness epidemic.
“The average American, I think, has … fewer than three friends,” Zuckerberg told podcaster Dwarkesh Patel.
It’s true. According to data from Pew and elsewhere, Americans spend less time with friends than they would like. Meanwhile, 8% admit they have no close friends at all. Younger generations, in particular, are increasingly lonely.
The solution to this problem, Zuckerberg said, would be the creation of a digital companion who “feels like it’s a real person.”
Former Instagram executive Meghana Dhar observed, “It almost seems like the arsonist coming back and being the fireman.”
Still, Zuckerberg may exemplify the social sickness of the digital age — he may have even exploited it — but he’s not to blame for its prevalence and persistence. It’s everywhere.
Here’s something another prominent technologist, Elon Musk, said last week in reference to his company’s humanoid robot: “Optimus will perform ballet perfectly.”
These two assertions — that pixels could replace friends and that robots could do ballet “perfectly” — are, in essence, the same. Zuckerberg and Musk are among the brightest minds of our age. They are both trying to replicate human flourishing, yet neither has a clue what that is.
What exactly would it mean to do ballet “perfectly”? For a robot, presumably, it would mean hitting all poses exactly within a micrometer, landing on each beat within a microsecond. It would mean, in other words, that ballet is merely a series of tasks to be executed, then marked as “accomplished.”
One can readily imagine Musk watching with ho-hum satisfaction as his life-sized action figure completes a routine. Nice job, team. Ballet over. We’re done with ballet. Next assignment.
Yet, real dance is never finished. The classic symphonies in motion are performed again and again, and they are new every time because the people doing them are new. The billionth little girl in a tutu ever to struggle her way through Swan Lake is no less a delight to her parents because Misty Copeland exists. The point of dance is to do it. Likewise, the point of books is to read them. The point of friends is to be one.
What is friendship? It’s a dance as well. What do dancers have? They have one another, certainly. But they also have the music. The finest form of friendship, the one most worth having, is the one that draws two people together around some beautiful thing. Old wines, weird books, pickleball. You love the people who love the same good things you do.
“Being true to themselves, they also remain true to one another,” Aristotle said.
Friends are drawn first to what they most sincerely love, and only then can they be sincerely drawn to each other.
“The typical expression of opening friendship,” C.S. Lewis similarly observed, “would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”
AI chatbots, as Zuckerberg pointed out, already know what you love. At least, they know what you want.
“I think people are going to want a system that knows them well,” he posited, “and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do.”
It is therefore impossible for AI to love the things you love because, among other reasons, it is too busy fixating on you and your preferences.
The quintessential experience of a great and enduring friendship is discovering someone who has independently come to love what you also love for its own sake. That can’t be done by a machine designed to gravitate toward things because you love them. Everyone knows that needy clingers tragically repel the people they most want to befriend by reflexively imitating whatever interests their targets express. This is why.
IN PRAISE OF ERRORS: CHATGPT IS SCRAMBLING CAMPUS VALUES
Cicero said, “The power of friendship is to make, as it were, one soul out of many.”
The power of AI is to create a mirror that reflects one soul back at itself, endlessly. Mistaking that image for a relationship would be a tragic error, forgetting entirely what it means to be human.
Spencer A. Klavan is associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and author, most recently, of Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science through Faith.