I Don't Want to Be Friends with Kendall Jenner
The world doesn't need artificial companions, at least not made by billionaires.
I spent plenty of time in my teens and 20s feeling unknown and all alone. Out of that, I forged an identity. It was good for me.
Now nobody gets to be alone. Your phone is constantly pulling you away from yourself. It's not introducing you to art or literature. It's not introducing you to philosophy.
It's trying to be your friend.
It won't stop.
Now you can get your own personal big sister, someone who cares, someone who's there. Meta just released an AI version of Kendall Jenner. That's how they're promoting her, as a kind of surrogate sis. They hired 27 other celebrities to help them make artificial companions.
"This is so creepy," someone said.
Yeah, it is.
A French philosopher named Jean Baudrillard predicted this all the way back in the early 1980s. He wrote an essay titled, "The Precession of Simulacra." He warned us that hyperrealistic representations of reality would drive us crazy. By 1985, Don DeLillo predicted that we'd all be driving across the country to photograph…