Statements made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding future virtual relationships with artificial intelligence (AI) companions and AI therapists are currently a hot topic.<\/p>\n
First, his comments on Dwarkesh Patel\u2019s podcast drew attention. Zuckerberg was discussing the future of AI friends, therapists, and girlfriends.<\/p>\n
According to Meta\u2019s founder, while Americans, on average, have only three friends, they \u201cwanted fifteen friends.\u201d He then argued that although emotional bonds with AI bots are not currently socially accepted, society would eventually \u201cfind the words\u201d to understand that people using AI to fill the loneliness and void in their lives are \u201crational.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zuckerberg continued to touch upon this subject. The Meta CEO\u2019s less-noticed remarks, made a few days prior on Ben Thompson\u2019s \u201cStratechery\u201d podcast, further elaborate on his vision of how AI companionship might function.<\/p>\n
Many interpreted Zuckerberg\u2019s words to mean that you would have AI friends instead of real friends, and in fact, that\u2019s more or less what he meant:<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s an interesting sociological finding: the average American has fewer than three friends, and the average American wants to have more than three friends. So, ideally, you want to enable people to connect with the right people, and that\u2019s something we try to help people with. When they\u2019re not physically together, they can stay connected through our apps, keep in touch with people, meet new people. But going forward, I think there\u2019s going to be a dynamic where you\u2019re interacting with different people on different topics.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, there\u2019s something more significant (and ominous) that the tech billionaire implied between the lines: the fact that Meta has an AI strategy built on knowing much more about your friends and family.<\/p>\n
In his interview with Thompson, Zuckerberg stated:<\/p>\n
\u201cI think one of the things that I\u2019m most focused on is how AI can help you be a better friend to your friends. There are so many things that I don\u2019t remember about people I care about, that I could be more thoughtful. There are issues like, I\u2019m a \u2018plan at the last minute\u2019 kind of person, and then issues arise like, \u2018I don\u2019t know who\u2019s around, and I don\u2019t want to bother people.\u2019 An AI that has good context on what\u2019s going on with the people you care about can help you with that.<\/p>\n
Good personalized AI isn\u2019t just about having some basic information about your interests; a good assistant or good personalization is about having a theory of mind about how you think about things. So, this is what we do with all of our friends. It\u2019s not just like, \u2018Okay, this is my friend Bob, and he likes this thing.\u2019 You deeply understand what\u2019s going on in that person\u2019s life, what your friends are going through, what their challenges are, and what the interplay is between these different things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in the interview, Zuckerberg points out how interaction provided on Facebook has changed with tools like Instagram. \u201cIt used to be that you would interact with the people you were connected to in the feed,\u201d explains the Meta CEO, \u201cfor example, someone would share something, and you would comment, and that\u2019s how your interaction would happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, what\u2019s the situation now? Zuckerberg explains clearly:<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, we see Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and I guess now the Meta AI app, and many other things we do, as discovery engines. Most of the interaction doesn\u2019t happen in the feed. The app works like a discovery engine algorithm to show you interesting things, and then the real social interaction happens when you find something interesting and add it to a group chat with your friends or a one-on-one chat. So, there\u2019s a flywheel effect between messaging, where the real, deep, and nuanced social interaction happens, and the feed apps, which are increasingly just becoming discovery engines.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Meta CEO doesn\u2019t hide that they are designing this as a \u201cbusiness model.\u201d This model perhaps represents the pinnacle of subjecting both the worker and society as a whole to the \u201clogic of capital\u201d:<\/p>\n
\u201c[We] want to use AI to basically enable any business that wants to achieve a certain business outcome to come to us and get service without needing to produce any content or have any information about their customers. They should just be able to say, \u2018This is the business outcome I want, this is the fee I\u2019m willing to pay, I\u2019ll connect you to my bank account, I\u2019ll pay you for the business results you achieve\u2019\u2026 I think this is a redefinition of the advertising category. If you think about what percentage of GDP advertising is today, I would expect that percentage to increase.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a rather critical statement. Zuckerberg is essentially saying: Businesses will not have to produce any content or know anything about their customers. Meta, or rather Meta\u2019s AI bot, will take over the connection between businesses and customers and most decisions related to branding. It will have more data, a larger scale, more connections, and the world\u2019s largest black box. In the future, marketing and advertising for all companies will mean delegating commerce to an automated infrastructure controlled by a single person (or bot).<\/p>\n
What better \u201csocial engineering\u201d could there be?<\/p>\n
This \u201cbusiness model\u201d also points to a future that will eliminate the \u201cpublic-private distinction,\u201d one of the hallmarks of bourgeois civilization. Zuckerberg mentioned back in 2010 that he wasn’t hiding his vision of such a “humanity”:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end very quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity\u2026 It\u2019s a big challenge to get people to a point where they can be more open. But I think we\u2019ll get there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Let me remind you that Zuckerberg has taken quite a few steps in this regard. For example, in 2007, he launched Beacon, which automatically added your Facebook purchases to your feed. This application exposed users\u2019 HIV statuses and which engagement rings they bought.<\/p>\n
Moreover, recently, the Wall Street Journal published a story: Meta\u2019s chatbots were talking about fantasy sex with children.<\/p>\n
Meta allows \u201csynthetic personalities\u201d to offer full-scale social interaction, including bantering via text, sharing selfies, and even engaging in live voice chats with users.<\/p>\n
What is happening once again confirms one of Marx\u2019s analyses regarding the behavior of capital. In Capital<\/em>, Marx distinguishes between \u201cformal\u201d and \u201creal\u201d forms of subsumption. Initially, capital absorbs the existing labor process\u2014that is, the techniques, markets, means of production, and workers\u2014into itself. Marx calls this \u201cformal\u201d subsumption.<\/p>\n In this process, the entire labor process continues as before, but the capitalist, who monopolizes the means of production and thus the workers\u2019 means of subsistence, forces the worker to submit to wage labor and can accumulate capital using existing markets.<\/p>\n However, capitalism cannot develop on the limited foundations of existing productive forces. The preconditions for the actual capitalist labor process can only be created by capital itself. Thus, capital gradually transforms social relations and forms of labor until they are completely intertwined with the nature and requirements of capital, and the labor process becomes truly, really subsumed under capital.<\/p>\n Therefore, for capital to accumulate, to ensure that property owners do not become propertyless, it must develop models and labor processes that subject not only wage labor but all of society to itself.<\/p>\n Your relationships with friends, what you experience with your family, even information about your mental health, must therefore be laid out before capital:<\/p>\n \u201cPersonally, I believe everyone should have a therapist. A therapist is like someone they can talk to throughout the day, or if not throughout the day, about whatever they are worried about. For people who don\u2019t have a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI assistant.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Statements made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding future virtual relationships with artificial intelligence (AI) companions and AI therapists are currently a hot topic. First, his comments on Dwarkesh Patel\u2019s podcast drew attention. Zuckerberg was discussing the future of AI friends, therapists, and girlfriends. According to Meta\u2019s founder, while Americans, on average, have only three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":9444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[176],"tags":[1877,2122,2965,503,85,9803,4976,976,1816,9801,9802,9804],"class_list":["post-9443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-america","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-facebook","tag-headline","tag-instagram","tag-labor","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-marx","tag-meta","tag-therapist","tag-threads","tag-wage"],"yoast_head":"\n