In an interview this week, Mark Zuckerberg said most Americans have only 3 friends, but they’d like 15. Never fear, he has a solution to how to get 5 times more friends. Meta will create AI friends for you. As it will own them, as befits the world’s second largest advertising company, their primary purpose will really be to sell you stuff.

Even in an episode of ‘Black Mirror’, this vision of the future would rank as one of the bleaker dystopian hellscapes. It says something about how out of touch Big Tech has become with the lives of ordinary people, it never even occurred to Mark Zuckerberg how appalling this sounds to most people.