Marissa Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo and early engineer at Google, has received a lot of criticism for her use of AI. In an interview about his new app Dazzle, an AI assistant that learns from your camera roll, Mayer brought up what he believes is impressive flexibility for the product. It helped me come up with three bullet points about my 10-year-old daughter for a birthday presentation at school, describing her as “empathetic, creative, and an animal lover.”
This is a general horoscope-like vague description that could probably explain many 10-year-olds.
Some onlookers, like progressive activist Leah Greenberg, marveled: “The fact that Marissa Mayer would voluntarily reveal this to a reporter is a great illustration of how deeply Silicon Valley culture has diverged from the rest of humanity.”
Perhaps the reason Mr. Mayer has drawn so much backlash is because we have repeatedly seen sheltered billionaires suggest that they outsource parenting, one of life’s greatest tests of patience, humility, and kindness, to computers that cannot understand human emotion.
We are prepared for this frustration. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bored Ape owner and late-night show host Jimmy Fallon on national television, “I can’t imagine thinking about how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.” The public didn’t like the comments either, but Altman wasn’t fazed by the negative feedback. A few months ago, he said on X that a “cool use case” for ChatGPT Work was creating a podcast that “explains your child’s interests,” talking about your child’s upcoming birthday or soccer game. (He was brutally criticized with comments like “What happens if you talk to the kids?”)
After publication, Mayer defended himself in a lengthy X post. She claims she wasn’t relying on Dazzle to explain things to children, but was testing what her prototype could do. It resurfaces photos from “forgotten kindergarten projects” such as “Snake Slayer” and “Graning Cat Playground” that show the daughter’s creativity and care for animals.
fair enough. But Mayer said in the same interview that people could also use her AI to outsource the mental burden of “thinking about a theme for a child’s birthday party.” She says she used the app to plan playdates with her daughter, book family activities for the holidays, and decide what to do for Halloween. She even suggests allowing her AI assistant to coordinate plans with her husband’s AI assistant. When a reporter asked her if it was depressing to imagine this “frictionless future mapped out by AI,” Mayer replied, “I haven’t really thought about it.”
These leaders seem to belittle the naysayers as part of a small, angry fringe group. However, a Pew Research Center survey reports that 50% of U.S. adults believe that AI will reduce people’s ability to form meaningful relationships. Only 5% of respondents said AI would make it easier to make these connections.
But Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with his Silicon Valley brethren, envisions a world where social needs are met through AI.
“I think the average American has less than three friends and considers three people to be friends. The average person wants more friends than that in any meaningful sense. I think it’s about 15,” Zuckerberg said on a podcast last year. “The average person wants more connection, more connections than they have.”
Zuckerberg predicts that outsourcing our emotional needs to AI therapists and AI romantic partners will become more socially acceptable. “There are so many things that are better when you have a physical connection,” he added. “But the reality is that people (…) often feel more alone than they would like.”
Zuckerberg goes on to explain how the virtual reality of AI avatars is becoming more realistic. Meta seems intent on improving relationships with these approximate humans, rather than among the billions of actual humans who use its platform every day.
Perhaps part of this stems from the technology industry’s culture of efficiency. People are trying to biohack their bodies by using health trackers to optimize their sleep schedules or injecting them with unregulated “peptide stacks” to maximize productivity.
If you’re building an electric car or a computer chip, efficiency is certainly the obvious north star. But our relationships with others are not technology products whose challenge is to ship with as little money as possible. Relationships are inherently messy, but our connections to each other can give meaning to our lives. When we turn these interactions over to computers, we are giving up the difficult but fulfilling experience of being human.
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