Mark Zuckerberg owes the world an apology: Meta indirectly creates a lonely, devastating economy that lurks behind harmless AI friends

Mark Zuckerberg is invisibly creating a lonely economy!

In Mark Zuckerberg’s latest vision for the future, Facebook users will spend their free time chatting with generative AI. In an era where everyone spends more time alone than ever, the Meta CEO not only preaches the power of connecting people but also directs attention to new friends, in the form of technology.

In an interview last week with tech podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, Zuckerberg shared how AI can make social media interactive, including turning AI chatbots into confidants.

“Does this replace in-person or real-life connections? My default answer is probably no,” Zuckerberg said. “The reality is that people don’t have a lot of connection and they feel a lot of loneliness.”

Zuckerberg isn’t the only one pushing the future with his AI friends, but this is the CEO’s latest approach to the looming loneliness crisis. On social media, his comments have been widely criticized.

“A great example of the lonely economy. Technology makes people lonely, and then technology sells people a solution in the form of technology. The profitability is endless,” said Samantha Rose Hill, who is writing a book about loneliness.

Young people, forced to use Zoom during high school and college, want to meet and hang out in real life. In a 2023 survey of undergraduate and graduate students from Axios and Generation Lab, nearly 80% of respondents said they use the dating app less than once a month, if at all. Nearly half of teens in the Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey said social media sites primarily negatively impacted their age group, up from 32% in 2022.

Research has found that young people who participate in extracurricular activities such as clubs and sports tend to have higher performance, greater aspirations, and more positive attitudes about school. People are gradually abandoning dating apps and turning to book clubs. They are eager to interact and make eye contact with each other.

Thus, it seems that Zuckerberg’s idea does not really work. Previous internal research by Meta found that the company’s social media sites can exacerbate loneliness rather than alleviate it. Social media gives us a glimpse into the lives of thousands of people at once, but the connections only surface the surface. Even if an AI friend is always with you, it’s the kind of low-investment, repetitive interaction.

According to Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication research at the University of Kansas, social media platforms and efforts to incorporate next-generation AI into applications have missed the whole purpose of having a friend. Some big tech companies are bringing the online experience closer to bots — and of course, this makes physical social communication even worse.

The average person spends more time on screens than communicating directly with friends. Technology that promises to connect the world has pushed us into isolation. Useful applications give way to fanfare, hype commercialization.

For some, it seems very unnatural that AI becomes a connection intermediary. Meta launched an AI app last week based on the idea that AI-generated content should move from privacy limits to social feeds. Facebook’s original mission was to “empower people to share and make the world more open and connected,” but Meta’s current mission is to “build the future of connectivity and the technology that makes it possible.”

The chatbots that Meta built encountered a lot of problems. Many journalists have found that they can lie on Instagram, even chat about sensitive sex with users under the age of 18. In response, a Meta spokesperson said: “We have now taken additional measures.”

In the podcast interview, Zuckerberg stated that the average American has 3 friends or less. It’s not clear where he got the statistics, but the CEO rightly acknowledged that loneliness is an urgent problem. In a 2023 Pew survey, 38% of adults in the U.S. said they had 5 or more friends, but 8% said they had none.

In 2023, Vivek Murthy, then an American surgeon, called loneliness a pandemic. In a 2024 poll conducted by Morning Consult for the American Psychiatric Association, 30% of adults said they felt lonely once a week and 10% said they felt lonely every day.

Facebook does not create a loneliness crisis, but it invisibly creates poor quality social interactions. People spend a lot of time surfing the internet alone instead of going out and chatting.

Overall, Facebook hasn’t done much to develop or maintain deep connections on the platform. It’s just like a personal newspaper, a place to share updates with people, or follow your ex.

It’s true that a new generation of AI should be applied, but it certainly can’t be like a real friend. Hannah Kim, a professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, said: “AI characters are just like fictional characters. Will a fictional character be able to interact and communicate as a friend? Fictional characters can help us come up with ideas about society, but we can’t have a multidimensional relationship with them. Relying too much on a chatbot can further skew people’s expectations of real-life friends,” Kim said.