Have You Considered Not Polluting the Water?

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.”