Your new best friend might be a bot
How Zuckerberg is making "Her" everyone's reality
Whoever said there’s no boring day on the internet got it absolutely right.
I was scrolling on Twitter on my metro commute (as one does) when I came across Marc Zuckerberg suggesting we could soon have AI friends.
We have seen this play out before. Spike Jonze’s Her, once a melancholic sci-fi exploration of connection, now feels like a product roadmap.The idea that we might one day form meaningful bonds with technology isn’t fiction anymore
Let’s talk about Her
This is not how I thought I would review one of my favourite films, but here it goes.
Her (2013) is a sci-fi movie that imagines a near future where AI becomes deeply personal. In this world, technology facilitates all of your work, talks with you, adapts itself according to your personality, and offers real companionship (imagine Jarvis from Iron Man).
The film asks us a powerful question:
If something understands us, listens to us, grows with us, does it need to be human to matter?
Companionship As a Service?
I do think people are going to use AI for a lot of these social tasks. Already, one of the main things we see people using Meta AI for is talking through difficult conversations they need to have with people in their lives. "I'm having this issue with my girlfriend. Help me have this conversation.” Or, "I need to have a hard conversation with my boss at work. How do I have that conversation?" That's pretty helpful. As the personalization loop kicks in and the AI starts to get to know you better and better, that will just be really compelling.
Zuckerberg’s Vision isn’t far off from the reality we’re already in.
All AI companies are building agents that are more than helpful.
They’re humanlike; emotionally responsive, they know your mood, recall old conversations in less than a second and act as a digital confidante.
We’ve all experienced these agents by now, and the question I ask myself is that if this distant future is the present reality, where does it go from here? And to what end?
I personally don’t see it taking that long till people start defending their companionship with their preferred agents.
What about Human friendships?
Here’s what AI can’t replicate (yet):
Disappointment. Friction. Unfiltered Honesty. The warmth of talking with a friend.
Human friendships are messy, difficult and often unpredictable. And that’s what makes them real. They’re built on emotional labour and shared vulnerability, not just accessibility starting at 20$ a month.
In his book Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes philia as a bond based on mutual respect, and he also describes the 3 types of friendship:
The friendship of utility
The friendship of pleasure
The friendship of virtue
This friendship of virtue is what human friendships offer.
They’re built on character, on mutual admiration for one another’s ideas, and most importantly, they’re bi-directional.
They demand risk, conflict and growth. They’re hard work. But they’re real.
The trade-off
AI friendships would offer safety and stability.
In a world filled with judgment, where everyone needs to know everything all the time, they offer a highly favourable solution. They also offer the illusion of perfect understanding. So the question in front of us is not if AI can befriend us (we know it to be true to some extent already). It is what do we give up when we let it?
Her always seemed to me like a dystopian future that would never happen. Now that it is the reality, we are all facing a philosophical choice.
Do we want a connection that’s frictionless, optimised, emotionally engineered, and unilateral?
Or are we willing to wrestle with the discomfort that human closeness demands?
In the end, AI companions wouldn’t represent who we are.
They would reveal what we’re willing to settle for.
Touch Grass
Funnily, tech bros gave us the solution to navigate this treacherous landscape: Touch Grass!
So, before the algorithm learns your love language, and you fall madly in love, before your AI friend starts sending you Good Morning messages, let’s all go see a friend. Not a chatbot version with personality plugins, a real one. The kind who cancels plans last minute, but shows up when it matters.
Sit across from someone who’s not optimised to your tastes and liking. Let them challenge your beliefs, have a walk with you, talk nonsense and most importantly, touch grass.
One day, the simulation may be flawless. And maybe we do all end up getting AI friends after all. But today, the mess is real. And I’d like to think that it’s worth choosing.