Mark Zuckerberg is right that our nation is beset by an epidemic of loneliness.
People of every age now too often find themselves isolated from family, with too few friends and little to keep them company but the screens in their hands, on their desks and on their walls. But to Meta’s chief executive, every problem in the world is a nail and more technology is the hammer.
Even by Zuckerberg’s standards, his recent comments about AI and loneliness were striking for their deep misunderstanding of what humanity really needs, which is genuine care, intimacy and love from other human beings.
Zuckerberg’s exact words on a podcast were these: “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends.”
That’s true. But where he took that thought was chilling. The idea was that artificial intelligence should or could fill the gap, and then people would have the sort of fulfillment that normally comes from having real connections with friends and family.
Zuckerberg has never really understood something vitally important about the contribution he and other social media magnates made to the internet. What had been an excellent tool for gathering and sorting information became the primary mode of individual entertainment and social interaction. We didn’t know what we were really getting.
The screen has become a barrier to actual human connection while giving the illusion that connections are happening.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services concluded that from 2003-2020, the amount of time people spent alone increased by a full day per month. The number of close friendships declined. And in 2021, about half of Americans reported having three or fewer friends.
What spiked during this time period? Interaction with faux social networks online. Facebook might have begun as a fun app to reconnect with high school classmates. But it and similar social media networks have metastasized into something different, an almost addictive machine for mindless and often poisonous scrolling that has left people less fulfilled than when they opened the screen.
Zuckerberg’s belief that a technological mimic of human interaction will be the solution strikes us as another mirage that will ultimately be unsatisfying. We are already seeing this in the stories coming out of people who become enchanted with AI boyfriends or girlfriends only to find that genuine satisfaction remains just out of reach even as their bot-friend consumes more and more of their lives.
Humans need other humans, and our focus should be on finding ways to make it easier for society to form and maintain deep connections. That includes everything from how we build our cities to the things we teach children are important.
If only our geniuses would devote their lives to those questions, we might be better off.
We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here.
If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com
