Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn’t think of himself as an evil villain. Caught up in the drive to make his company more money and sell the technology hyped as next the big thing, he might not even see anything wrong with his behavior.
But read it here, read it twice: Zuckerberg is a genuine danger to our society.
Under his control, Meta is putting Facebook’s and Instagram’s vast resources toward getting more of us to use their artificial intelligence chatbots, consequences be damned. We’ve known that this push is ethically questionable — bots like these can make us dumber, and fuel tragic delusions. Thursday, though, Reuters published bombshell reporting that exposes Zuckerberg and Meta as particularly bad administrators of the powerful new technology.
The stories are horrific, and we’ll get to them in a moment. But it’s important first to understand Zuckerberg’s approach. He mused on a podcast in April that most people have far fewer friends than they want, so we’ll probably move past the “stigma” around having AI friends and find them “valuable,” especially as they become more humanlike. “You’ll be able to basically have like an always-on video chat” with an AI, he said.
His point that people need more friends gels with recent research into the ill-health effects of isolation. But Zuckerberg’s idea of patching over loneliness with algorithmic avatars is an ugly vision of the world: a purposeful unraveling of the social fabric that gives us community, culture, accountability and love. We need to refuse this vision. The solution to not having enough friends is — needs to be — making more friends. More care and responsibility for our neighbors, not bubbles of solitude.
Evil SOB.
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