Silicon Valley wants to make you new friends—or at least program them. “The average American has fewer than three friends,” Mark Zuckerberg said on a podcast in April. “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.” Artificial intelligence, the Meta CEO suggested, could help solve this problem, even if it can’t replace physical contact. He went further at a conference a few days later: “I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do.”
This summer, one company took Zuckerberg’s vision to its logical conclusion and began shipping a device called “Friend” to the public. An AI-powered pendant, Friend eavesdrops on its wearer’s activities and comments on them via text messages. A trailer features users speaking aloud to their disembodied confidante during meals, hikes, and gaming sessions, as though it were as real as the people around them, whom they are largely ignoring. “How’s the falafel?” the Friend messages a young woman, as she dines alone.
The company has spent aggressively to push the product—its founder said he paid $1.8 million just for the domain Friend.com. But no matter how many devices are sold, virtual technologies that supplant shared spaces and conversations will not succeed in solving America’s loneliness epidemic, because they are the same technologies fueling it in the first place.
Slowly but surely over the past two decades, in-person interactions have been swapped for poor digital simulacra of them, replacing thick social ties with thin ones. Addictive social-media platforms have become substitutes for phone calls and face-to-face exchanges. Streaming entertainment has decreased demand for movie theaters. To-go dining apps have gradually replaced restaurant and bar table service with takeout. Many people now lack friends and wish they had the skills and opportunity to make them.
Rather than help people forge these human connections, AI companions are another attempt to replace them. “I’ll binge the entire series with you,” declares one representative New York City subway ad for Friend. In this sense, Silicon Valley is trying to sell a cure to a disease that it causes—the equivalent of a cigarette company hawking cutting-edge cancer treatments. Presented with a malaise of its own making, the industry’s answer is more of the same.
This tech tendency didn’t start with the AI craze. Many flagship apps are designed to accommodate people to their isolation: Fitness services such as Peloton can be a boon for individuals without access to a gym, but for many others, they have simply replaced those spaces and communities with at-home exercise, and personal trainers with parasocial influencers. Meditation and focus apps installed on the very phones that are causing distraction and distress purport to somehow ameliorate those conditions.
Services such as Nextdoor attempt to provide a virtual substitute for the robust neighborhood interactions that the internet has steadily eroded. Elder-care apps offer AI conversations for seniors in place of the receding engagement of family and friends. Algorithmic social-media platforms such as X structurally privilege inflammatory and conspiratorial content to hold attention and provoke reactions—then roll out crowdsourced fact-checking initiatives, much like a band of arsonists distributing garden hoses to their victims.
Perhaps the best embodiment of Silicon Valley’s inability to reckon with what it has wrought is a rather adorable recent innovation: a new toy called “Grem.” Marketed as a playful “screen-free” alternative for children, the product looks like any other cuddly stuffy. But inside, it has an AI-powered voice box that allows it to engage in “endless conversations” with its young charges. In other words, Grem is a “Friend,” but for your toddler.
Many parents rightly wish to avoid entrusting their children to a smartphone or an iPad. But contrary to Grem’s marketing, the problem with those devices isn’t their screens—it’s what the tech on the other side of those screens is socializing us to be: siloed narcissists who come to expect every interaction to effortlessly reflect our own preferences. Human playmates are imperfect, sometimes annoying, even rough on the ego. Replacing them with seamless, self-flattering, simulated pals will not produce well-adjusted adolescents capable of forming real relationships, but rather more alienated ones who lack the skills to do so.
Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley know that we face a pervasive social sickness, to judge by the Facebook founder’s comments about American loneliness, and by the development of devices such as Friend. But for Zuckerberg and others in his industry to effectively address the problem would mean acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: that without malicious intent, many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs nonetheless built their fortunes on what turned out to be predatory products with net-negative effects on society. This is a bitter realization, but it also offers the only way out of our current vise. The solution to tech-fueled isolation is not more isolation-fueling tech: Instead of selling water purifiers, it’s time to consider not polluting the water in the first place.
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