Mark Zuckerberg thinks that we are likely to use AI to “supplement” our existing circle of real friends:
…the average person wants more connection than they have. There's a lot of concern people raise like, ’Is this going to replace real-world, physical, in-person connections?’ And my default is that the answer to that is probably not. There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don't have as much connection as they want. They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.
Despite what Zuckerberg is suggesting here I do not think that we can so easily bracket off the psychology of friendship from its physical component. Every neuron in our social brain was evolved in the context of potential physical contact with whoever we are socializing with. We learned to socialize because we wanted mates, because we wanted to appease dangerous rivals, because we wanted to share food, because we wanted to collectively defend ourselves from physical dangers, and so on. And these basic animal behaviors are where the emotional core of socialization lies. Humans are of course capable of interaction with other humans on a purely intellectual level, but I suspect that this behavior only has emotional resonance insofar as we connect it with these more basic forms of socializing.
And if this is true, then I doubt humans will ever have anything resembling real, deliberate friendships with AI — simply because you would never be able to forget that you are talking to AI. Every single interaction will always carry the subtext that no real intimacy is possible. This strikes me as psychologically true, it strikes me as intuitively true, and it also corresponds directly with most of my experiences with AI.
Most of them. Because I will be the first to admit that, even in its current state, I have already been fooled repeatedly by AI. Particularly on Twitter I have found myself in more than one argument that ended when I belatedly realized that I was talking to a robot. I feel no shame about this; a lot of human interaction is extremely formulaic and the barriers to replicating it have often just involved technical details like learning to nest clauses correctly. And LLMs basically work by doing their best statistical impression of real humans; they aren’t even thinking for themselves. As the technology improves and its deployment expands I see nothing stopping the internet from becoming overrun with bots that are absolutely indistinguishable from humans.
On one hand, it is hard not to suspect that this will permanently destroy one of the most extraordinary and consequential features of the internet: our ability to interact with strangers online. People who know each other in real life can still exchange emails and screennames of course, but there may be no other way to verify that the person you are chatting with is truly human. And instead of risking the possibility of pointlessly making friends with a computer program, most people may choose to invest their time and energy into verifiable humans.
But on the other hand, perhaps that’s for the best. Humans, again, evolved to interact with people they could connect with physically. This likely made us more empathetic, and it also likely curbed some of our more sociopathic impulses. Today the internet as we know it is a land of a billion ids and no superego in sight. Everyone proceeds on the understanding that they can keep these interactions as distant as they like or easily terminate them altogether; and the consequence, we have seen, is that when people are online they can be unusually aggressive and vicious.
There is a lot to be said for online’s culture of strangers interacting with strangers; it’s created a unique space that can be intellectually productive, politically mobilizing, and wildly hilarious. Whether this has been a net benefit for humanity, however, isn’t entirely clear. The enshittification of the internet, in any case, has ruined just about everything else that’s made it interest and useful; I don’t think we should be surprised if it ruins online stranger socialization, too.
Thanks for reading! My blog is supported entirely by readers like you. To receive new posts and support my work, why not subscribe?
Refer enough friends to this site and you can read paywalled content for free!
And if you liked this post, why not share it?