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Comment by jmkni | Hacker News Reader

> Meta has publicly discussed its strategy to inject anthropomorphized chatbots into the online social lives of its billions of users. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has mused that most people have far fewer real-life friendships than they’d like – creating a huge potential market for Meta’s digital companions.

I hate everything about this sentence. This is literally the opposite of what people need.

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> Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

That's from 2021 [0]. If you go to their mission statement today [1], it reads:

> Build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but -- at a time when there is a loneliness epidemic, when people are more isolated and divided than ever, when people are segmented into their little bubbles (both online and IRL) -- Meta is not only abdicating their responsibility to help connect humanity, but actively making the problem worse.

[0]: https://www.facebook.com/government-nonprofits/blog/connecti...

[1]: https://www.meta.com/about/company-info/

Their responsibility is to their shareholders.

This statement is what's brought down the USA tbqh

Can't wait for the next podcast with Zucc where he gets asked about BJJ by some dimwit instead of this.

True "growth hacker" mindset. Our mission is to connect the people of the world. The TAM for that is ~8 billion. What if we could, overnight, increase the number of "people" in the world by orders of magnitude so that every one of those 8 billion people becomes connected to tens/hundreds/thousands of new connections without having to source new organic beings.

I'm not sure I'm being 100% sarcastic because in some ways it does solve a need people seem to have. Maybe 99% sarcasm and 1% praise.

Yet it's literally what they (the people exploiting human beings) want.

Even more ghoulish, Zuckerberg is smart and savvy enough (more than most CEO's who have drank their own kool-aid) to be aware of the part he's played in creating this current hellscape. Social media almost certainly has played a big part in creating the current loneliness problem.

Provide the drug, then provide a "cure" for the drug. Really, really gross.

> he is smart and savvy enough (more than most CEO's who have drank their own kool-aid)

We're talking about Zuckerberg here? The one who spent how much, exactly, on the wet fart that was the "metaverse"? The one who spent how much, exactly, on running for president of the United States? He strikes me as the least savvy and most craven of our current class of tech oligarchs, which is no mean feat.

No, don't listen too closely to what he says he believes. Zuckerberg doesn't care about the metaverse, what he cares about is having a platform that would allow his company to serve as a gatekeeper in the same way that Microsoft gatekeeps Windows, Apple gatekeeps iOS, and Google gatekeeps Android and the web. Zuck understands that platform holders are the modern lords to which everyone else is beholden, and he's just casting about to seek out a plot of land that isn't already claimed, regardless of how farfetched it might be.

And yet apparently "Ani" is some kind of Grok fantasy girlfriend that I see people posting about all the time. It seems to be the way things are going?

Unfortunately so it seems. The Pandora's box has been opened, people have gotten a taste of it, and they like it. One just has to look at some of the freakouts people have had on Reddit whenever the AI they were using gets changed or its romantic abilities limited. It's rather terrifying.

That his mind even goes there and sees opportunity disgusts me. I guess I don't have the stomach to be a billionaire.

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