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Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg to solve your loneliness with an ‘AI friend’? No, me neither
He’d like to persuade us that chatting to a bot is like having a real pal. Of course that’s nonsense. Still, it’s more money for him, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes
I know; listening to Zuck on friendship is a bit like taking business advice from Bernie Madoff or lessons in sportsmanship from Tonya Harding. But at recent tech conferences and on podcasts, Zuck has been saying he has seen the future and it’s one in which the world’s “loneliness epidemic” is alleviated by people finding friendship with “a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do”. The sheer wrongness of this argument is so stark that it puts anyone who gives it more than a moment’s thought in the weird position of having to define units of reality as basic as “person”.
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