A place for real friends
Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the matter of Facebook's continued expeditions into the realm of artificial intelligence with the over-the-top assertion that Facebook chatbots can supplement the "demand" for more friendships -- an excess demand he believes is quantified in the claim that the average American has three friends (which is almost certainly a poor regurgitation of a factoid reported in a 9-year-old survey from the UK).
■ His tone of voice in saying such things may be flat, but his words are the rantings of a loon. Zuckerberg cannot possibly hold in his mind the simultaneous beliefs that (a) the average American actually has just three friends, (b) the typical Facebook user needs to be connected to a few hundred "friends", and (c) chatbots have any socially useful purpose in supplementing the interpersonal lives of Facebook users. These are fundamentally inconsistent with one another.
■ Chatbots may have socially useful applications. It might, for instance, be helpful under carefully managed conditions for some people to use chatbots for therapeutic purposes -- perhaps for recording a daily journal from which the bot may recognize certain patterns worthy of further attention from a therapist or a psychologist.
■ One can also make an affirmative case for the limited use of content repurposed from the known archives of real people: It might be useful to ask a well-structured data set "What might Winston Churchill recommend in a situation like this?", if it can plumb his 8 million written words instantly and report them faithfully.
■ But the conditions Zuckerberg describes are different altogether. Real human friendships are the result of bonding, which takes place overwhelmingly through shared experiences. One cannot truly share a bonding experience with a chatbot, and it's nothing beyond pure mysticism to believe that we ever will.
■ A belief in something so fantastical wouldn't be much more than a strange personality quirk if it weren't for the matter that Zuckerberg is effectively the absolute monarch of Facebook, and he purports to be acting with the express intent of affecting the human behavior of his platform's users. He can say it's for something like the common good, but the internal contradictions among his claimed assumptions are so great that they reveal either intentional disregard for the truth or an alarming failure of judgment.
