In an era when people spend more time alone than ever before, Meta’s CEO is preaching not just about the power of his company to connect us to one another — but also about luring our attention to new, fake friends. In an interview last week with the tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Mark Zuckerberg spoke about ways AI could make social media more interactive, including turning AI chatbots into friends for people who have few and want more. “Is this going to replace in-person connections or real-life connections? My default is that the answer to that is probably no,” Zuckerberg says. “There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don’t have the connections, and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.” The past two decades show us that Zuckerberg’s ideas about friendship often leave something to be desired, BI’s Amanda Hoover writes. Tap the link in our bio to read more about how Big ...