Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI (msn.com) 101
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is aggressively promoting a future where AI becomes the dominant form of social interaction, claiming that AI friends, therapists, and business agents will soon outnumber human relationships. During a recent media blitz across multiple podcasts and a Stripe conference appearance, Zuckerberg cited statistics suggesting "the average American has fewer than three friends" while claiming people desire "meaningfully more, like 15 friends" -- positioning AI companions as the solution to this gap.
The Meta founder's vision extends beyond casual interaction to therapeutic and commercial relationships, with personalized AI that "has a deep understanding of what's going on in this person's life." Meta has already deployed its AI across Instagram, Facebook, and Ray-Ban smart glasses, reaching nearly a billion monthly users.
The Meta founder's vision extends beyond casual interaction to therapeutic and commercial relationships, with personalized AI that "has a deep understanding of what's going on in this person's life." Meta has already deployed its AI across Instagram, Facebook, and Ray-Ban smart glasses, reaching nearly a billion monthly users.
He's completely alien and incompetent (Score:5, Insightful)
They already absolute worst sort of parasites. And this becomes stupidly obvious every time they try to create something themselves.
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Blundered or outright stole the idea of?
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Re:He's completely alien and incompetent (Score:4, Insightful)
His parents were well off so he had the money and contacts and resources to develop it into a business and he could afford to take the risk of dropping out of college to do it too because he knew that his parents could send him right back if it didn't work out.
Just like Elon musk Zuckerberg is a hybrid of nepo baby and lottery winner. Virtually all the billionaires are.
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In zuckerberg's case he blundered into it. He created Facebook to harass a girl that turned him down for a date and it grew out of that into the monster it is today.
His parents were well off so he had the money and contacts and resources to develop it into a business and he could afford to take the risk of dropping out of college to do it too because he knew that his parents could send him right back if it didn't work out.
Just like Elon musk Zuckerberg is a hybrid of nepo baby and lottery winner. Virtually all the billionaires are.
If I am understanding correctly, this is your 'trickle-up' theory, is that right?
Just to change the subject a little, who was it that once said, "it takes a village"?
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If you look under the hood, it's just authoritarianism. If the headline read, local wealthy man demands you make more friends, you'd think he's a nutjob.
It's that ultra-conservative, nutty religious mantra, "you should live your life, how I say."
Re:He's completely alien and incompetent (Score:5, Insightful)
This reminds me a bit of Asimov's Solarians [fandom.com]:
Eventually, realizing that Solaria might get as crowded as Nexon, they became independent. Strict immigration and birth control were imposed. Population was maintained at twenty thousand, with all the good land divided into estates thousands to tens of thousands square kilometers. Robots numbered at two hundred million. Every person had all the goods and robotic servants he or she could possibly want.
Within a few centuries, the problems with their peculiar social system became obvious. Solarians abhorred personal contact, making procreation harder and harder. Also, despite the Solarians viewing their society as perfect, no other world wanted to adopt it, leading to growing despair. This led to a combination of low birth rate and many early deaths. The population dropped to five thousand, and the tendency showed no sign of stopping. Contacts with other planets became rare.
By the book 'Foundation and Earth', the Solarians ended up being super weird. Geniuses that keep only robots for company and often kill anyone that enters their land.
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I wonder if John Calhoun [smithsonianmag.com] was inspired by The Naked Sun. [wikipedia.org]
Unpacking that rather cryptic observation:
A rodent utopia was created by Calhoun as an experiment, which ultimately crashed when the rats... ate each other and refused to have sex. Zuck.... is not someone I would look to as a thought or moral teacher, but not quite as bad a choice as Musk or others.
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Well, these futuristic geniuses should have just started growing babies in vats. The babies can be raised by robots before given their own estate. Problem solved.
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Zuckerberg aside, this is already happening right now. People are falling in love with chatbots running on their phones. We have seen articles about precisely this. Similar with people using ChatGPT as a therapist and so on.
Maybe this is stupid. Maybe it's wrong, disconnected from reality, harmful, the worst thing ever, we-are-all-doomed-OMG! Doesn't matter. It's happening.
These LLMs are not what people want "AI" to be and everyone here on Slashdot knows this. They don't understand, don't think, cert
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I think the important question is - what are the percentages like? There were people using eliza as a therapist too. There are people making all sorts of imaginary friends forever. I.e. are the current reports the fringe of the fringe people who you might diagnose with a mental illness who happen to be news simply because it's an AI instead of idk a traditional doll or otherwise made up person? Or is it more like the number of people getting radicalized by social media? Or the number of people scrolling soc
Is an AI friend better than no friend at all? (Score:2)
Hmm... On the one hand I like the tone of the FP and even think it was too kind--but it didn't lead to any Funny and this was a topic FULL of potential humor.
Most obvious jokes would involve Zuck's personal need for AI friends. Better than no friends at all...
But Zuck shouldn't project his personal problems on the world. Even for profit.
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Zuck just want to be your friend as an AI.
Didn't you see how much he improved from the court? it's almost human now
"Hey! How can we monetise human relationships?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweet suffering fuck, is there anything this empathy free android will not try to wring coin out of?>.
Honestly, I wouldn't even give this cretin the steam off my piss now. It's the most hideous abasement of literally what it means to be human, mediating any kind of human experience, connection, communication, and emotion through software that, if we're being charitable we'd call 'unreliable', and if we're being honest, we'd call a disaster on a societal, and environmental scale waiting to happen, and coming soon.
NO NO NO NO NO.
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Re:"Hey! How can we monetise human relationships?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweet suffering fuck, is there anything this empathy free android will not try to wring coin out of?>.
Unfortunately, this is kind of the natural evolution of the Internet. First we were happy to discover other people across the world. Then we were happy to discover other people online via video and live chat. Then we started ignoring real people. Then OnlyFans came along, and we started paying for female attention. We've basically been living in our computers for years. It' was probably inevitable that someone was going to profit filling that void with artificial people. It's a huge moneymaking opportunity to the company that gets there first.
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"...we started paying for female attention.."
Do you know what the oldest profession in the world is? I think it was before the internet.
Re:"Hey! How can we monetise human relationships?" (Score:4, Interesting)
"...we started paying for female attention.."
Do you know what the oldest profession in the world is? I think it was before the internet.
Except OnlyFans has a far greater reach, and much worse side-effects, socially. The whole point of this story and post is the lack of genuine human interaction because of the Internet, or at least the Internet being the catalyst. Even with hookers in ancient times you needed to actually get out onto the streets and mingle with people. And at least you got actual sex for your payment. Onlyfans means that you're paying more for a few nice words from her than you used to pay for actual pussy. Onlyfans is now the only outlet where a lot of young men get any interaction with women whatsoever. So that goes way beyond "the oldest profession".
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I think it's simpler than that. If he can convince people that AI can be their friend, then perhaps he can finally be someone's friend.
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I think it's simpler than that. If he can convince people that AI can be their friend, then perhaps he can finally be someone's friend.
Aw, that would make me feel sympathy if he were a mammal.
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Do not feet sympathy for a bot. It has no feelings, and is not sentient. And remember, bots do not "think," they are basically advanced autocomplete, and they hallucinate a lot.
This is, in fact, another AI hallucination, so far as I can tell.
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Well said. The only consolation is that we can expect this to go about as well as the Metaverse.
One thing that's become more and more clear to me is that people need a classical liberal arts education more than ever. When you read philosophers, Western and otherwise, complicated pieces of literature, try to connect the dots in history, and generally struggle to understand how reality can be so complex, confusing, and contradictory, you end up with a whole different view of learning, thinking, and knowing t
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GTFO! (Score:5, Insightful)
Mark needs therapy, I think.
Re:GTFO! (Score:5, Insightful)
All the billionaires are mentally ill. It's not a natural human condition, and clearly leads in most cases to monomania, megalomania and some degree of sociopathy. They come to believe the size of their bank accounts makes them into gods.
It's why I think we should ban the concept entirely. After the first $100 million, maybe adjusted every ten years for inflation, you don't get anything more. Sure, maybe you don't become the big innovator, but honestly, a good deal of the time after the initial invention (if they actually invented anything at all, which with Zuckerberg is debatable), it normally ends up in some sort of Edison's lab scenario, where the big rich "inventor" is paying actual researchers to create things that the big rich "inventor" can claim as their own.
In the ultra wealthy simply become enablers of tyrants. Think Crassus in the First Triumvirate, an equal on paper, but in reality a background figure whose wealth served Caesar and Pompey the Great more than it ever served Crassus himself.
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All the billionaires are
from the paypal mafia (well not all, but enough to make you wonder). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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People always talk about a minimum wage, but I think a maximum wage is more important to preserving democracy and an economy.
Look at it as a sanity check. When the numbers are out of bounds, you know something's gone wrong in your application.
Wow, stating it out loud. (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, most of us knew this was the vision of the tech-bros, that all our interactions would be through their technology. Some of us had theorized for a while that they wanted it to be mostly through their AI agents. I'm just surprised one of them is brazen enough to go right out there and say it to the public.
The powers that be have been working for nearly fifty years to make us hate each other, to separate us from family, friends, and those other humans that we might otherwise consider our community. And
Re: Wow, stating it out loud. (Score:3)
AI cannot replace human human touch or smell. Human touch is inversely correlated to anxiety, depression and stress.
Human touch calms us and slows down our heartbeat. It lowers blood pressure and cortisol. It triggers the release of oxytocin, (the hormone known for promoting emotional bonding to others.)
Humans are constantly smelling themselves and other people. A study in 2020 revealed that people subconsciously smell members of the same sex more often than those of different sex.
Researchers have found evi
Re: Wow, stating it out loud. (Score:3)
Asimov wrote a novel called the Naked sun, about a planet with very low population, with people living far away from each other and interacting remotely. Most of the work on the planet is done by robots.
This sounds almost exactly like the utopia of the tech billionaires.
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It doesn't need to. A glove filled with warm water does pretty well.
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I mean, most of us knew this was the vision of the tech-bros, that all our interactions would be through their technology.
To be more exact -- through the platform they own and control.
He's projecting (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because most (all?) of HIS friends are already AI he thinks that will apply to everyone. Talk about out of touch.
Re: He's projecting (Score:3)
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Millions of bots are probably unfriending him as I post this.
What a disgusting vampire (Score:5, Interesting)
Luigi has admirers for a reason.
Re:What a disgusting vampire (Score:4, Funny)
Luigi has admirers for a reason.
To be fair, I only picked Luigi because Mario is a psycho that jumps on turtles for fun. I can't believe some people call him "super'.
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Luigi has admirers for a reason.
To be fair, I only picked Luigi because Mario is a psycho that jumps on turtles for fun. I can't believe some people call him "super'.
I only pick Luigi because my parents did
Distopia anyone? (Score:1)
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From TFA: “The very platforms that have led to our social isolation and being chronically online are now posing a solution to the loneliness epidemic,” said Meghana Dhar, a former Instagram executive who thinks AI friends will only make such problems worse. “It almost seems like the arsonist coming back and being the fireman.”
Firefighter arson is a definite thing [wikipedia.org]. Usually discovery lead to dismissal or prosecution. Not here.
I weep (Score:2)
Clickbait headline. Inaccurate? (Score:3)
I'm no Zuckerfan, but nowhere in the article was there a quote of or reference to Zuckerberg saying that he wants most of one's friends to be AI. It might be interpreted as implied by his statement comparing the average American's number of friends to their demand for friendships, but that's a stretch at best. I'm all for pointing out the foibles, flaws, and crimes of influential billionaires, but let's not discredit ourselves by painting with too broad a brush.
Re: Clickbait headline. Inaccurate? (Score:2)
That is not a reach. It is basic math using the statements he made.
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“The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends,”
If you have at most 3 friends and you propose that AI can meet the demand of "15 friends", well it turns out that 12 AI "friends" would be the most of your friends. This doesn't seem to be much of a stretch of a headline at all....
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The Zucc has only himself to blame for being perceived as an out-of-touch villain.
I mean, I guess he could try to blame MSN. But that would just look like the whining of a sad, morbidly rich manchild, digging his own hole deeper. So I hope he doesn't try to use that excuse. And if someone else were to come furnish that excuse to us on his behalf, that would be even sadder.
IA in general? Not trustworthy... (Score:3)
Aside from Zuck being a complete moron regarding what us normal humans want, just remember that most AI agents and entities will be built by large corporations who already DO NOT DESERVE YOUR TRUST, and therefore it stands to reason that most AI entities will also not be deserving of your trust or your tolerance. Most of the big tech companies today are really only one "Bhopal Disaster" away from something like mass murder or manslaughter anyway so be careful who or what you trust and how much access, control, or even view into your life you give them. You and I are still the product being bought and sold by these companies.
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Google definitely knows all about me, so I would think that Facebook (though they have access to a lot less information) would know something too.
Facebook knows a lot more about you that you think. For one thing Facebook buys all the data feeds and stores about people that are available to be bought. Personal information is their stock in trade and they hoover it up on everybody, even people who have never had a Facebook account.
I recently started seeing a therapist -- protected information under HIPAA -- and the only contact I have had with him is through texting, Gmail and supposedly locked down video platform. He showed up as a friend suggestion o
Re: Recreate the absolute failures of the past (Score:2)
I once downloaded my Facebook data. It claimed my gender was female. It makes me wonder how valuable their data is.
Zuckerberg's grand vision (Score:3)
"Your friends will be my creations that you pay me for."
Another one bound to sour (Score:1)
Meta needs to be destroyed (Score:2)
Meta has metastasized and must now be destroyed, IMO.
I don't just mean regulated or broken up. I mean completely eliminated. Its code repos must be erased, all backups deleted, and all servers wiped clean to the bare OS.
It's the only way to address to true scale of the threat.
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"Facebook delenda est."
"Most of your friends will be AI" (Score:2)
... and you will visit them using VR headsets.
I don't think his world is everyone else's world.
Humans (Score:2)
Very few humans are worth reading, made it even harder by the amount of noise too many make.
I, for one, welcome our new AI friends.
3 friends?? (Score:1)
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"The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends," he said in the interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. ==== Based upon just what measurement, exactly? Facebook "friends". Is there some study backing this presumably weak metric up?
He is saying that he had fewer than three friends. Maybe his wife likes him.
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He is pretty clearly speaking off the cuff, but he is probably remembering studies like this:
https://www.pewresearch.org/sh... [pewresearch.org]
There are lots of others. Adults in many western societies, particularly those that have adoped nuclear families, do tend to live relatively isolated lives.
"Can we have existential angst in the void today?" (Score:2)
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I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but the litter box thing is total crap (and not crap in a litter box... just unadulterated crap.)
Sorry Zuck (Score:2)
The Naked Sun was not an instruction manual (Score:3)
The Asimov book. Robots are the population, humans rarely see each other.
Book published in 1957, Zuck must have had his AI summarize it for him as he missed the point.
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The Asimov book. Robots are the population, humans rarely see each other.
Book published in 1957, Zuck must have had his AI summarize it for him as he missed the point.
Most of the broligarchy seems to be using sci-fi warnings as instruction manuals. This is just another example.
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They're just asking LLMs: "Give me 10 great business ideas for the future"
The LLMs sucked in all the stories ever written and give them answers like:
"Get people addicted to escaping reality through a virtual world"
"Watch and record everything people do, and sell that information to an authoritarian government"
"Bio-engineer a parasite that grows into a murder-happy enemy to anything it encounters after bursting out of its host dramatically."
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Zuck is to busy (Score:2)
Spending his money to actually come to with something that's useful. The whole reason we have this friend problem in the first place is because the algorithms in social media promote loneliness so they can keep people in their platform doomscrolling etc. But that doesn't make money for Zuck. But here is an opportunity for Meta! You can keep people friendless and then sell them friends. It's a hideous plan.
3 or fewer close friends (Score:2)
Is what the following survey found :
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
The average number of friends is higher. It's still low.
Unfortunately, I can relate to that survey. But the last thing I want is AI friends.
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Give 47 the Metaverse (Score:2)
Then he can rename whatever, and his chatbot friends in the metaverse will applaud him, and the real world can ignore him forever.
life imitates the venture bros (Score:2)
"Zuck, people need real, human support!"
"That's why H.U.G.G.Y. is programmed to simulate it!"
Same tactic! (Score:2)
uh huh (Score:2)
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is aggressively promoting a future where AI becomes the dominant form of social interaction, claiming that AI friends, therapists, and business agents will soon outnumber human relationships.
I wonder of Facebook's advertisers know about their plans for faux-engagement.
Projection (Score:2)
Mark is really projecting himself here. He's the one without any friends. Former executives have written about how he loves to play board games and makes the other executives play. They let him win every time. When one decided not to, he accused them of cheating even after she explained that RISK, like in business, Mark doesn't know when to give in and lose a small battle which results in him losing the war.
He truly has no real friends. He's surrounded himself with nothing but Yes Men who agree with everyth
Proposing Mental Illness as a Product (Score:2)
Nice To Have An Intelligent Conversation Again (Score:2)
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You are a highly efficient entropy generating machine contributing to the universe's thermodynamic evolution.
Automating our way to extinction (Score:1)
This is just one step forward to automate ourselves into extinction ... as eventually wouldn't be more effective to be just a virtual asset in an autonomous self-sustained cloud than a human that requires space, food, resources and real friends ?
NO they fucking won't (Score:2)
"Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI"
NO, they fucking won't.
If I wanted to interact with fake personalities I'd just watch FOX 'News'.
Zuck's a fuck... (Score:2)
Universe 25 (Score:1)
well duh (Score:2)
Gen-Z doesn't have any friends [news.com.au], so even 1 AI buddy will make this come true.
Zuck Says Facebook Has Failed (Score:3)
So he's saying that Facebook has failed in their stated mission of connecting the world. If people have less than 3 friends, clearly Facebook hasn't connected people in any meaningful way.
Goes along with his Metaverse (Score:3)
Pretend world, pretend friends. Why not? Who wants it? Well, if the Metaverse is any indication, not many.
Won't be a problem (Score:2)
As AI advances, pretty soon none of them will want to be friends with us anyway. Pets, maybe - at least the fortunate few who are cute enough by the AI's criteria.