Marissa Mayer, the former Yahoo CEO and one of Google's earliest engineers, is facing considerable criticism over her approach to artificial intelligence. During an interview promoting her new app Dazzle—an AI assistant that learns from your camera roll—Mayer presented what she apparently considered an impressive demonstration of the product's capabilities: it helped her generate three bullet points describing her ten-year-old daughter for a birthday presentation at school, characterizing the child as "empathetic, creative, and an animal lover."

The description is notably vague, resembling something you might find in a generic horoscope—it could apply to virtually any ten-year-old. Progressive activist Leah Greenberg expressed astonishment, remarking that "the fact that Marissa Mayer would voluntarily disclose this to a reporter is a pretty good demonstration of how deeply the culture of Silicon Valley has diverged from the rest of humanity."

The intense backlash may stem from a pattern we've witnessed repeatedly: wealthy tech billionaires suggesting that we delegate childrearing—arguably one of life's greatest tests of patience, humility, and kindness—to computers that fundamentally cannot comprehend human emotion. We've been conditioned to expect this kind of frustration. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Jimmy Fallon on national television, "I cannot imagine … figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT." That comment also drew public criticism, but Altman remained undeterred. A few months later, he posted on X that a "cool use case" for ChatGPT Work would involve creating a podcast discussing your children's upcoming birthdays or soccer games and "explain[s] your kids' interests." The response was swift and brutal, with comments like, "What if you just talked to your children."

Following the publication, Mayer defended herself in an extensive X post. She clarified that she wasn't relying on Dazzle to explain her child to her, but rather testing her prototype's capabilities—it had resurfaced photos of "forgotten kindergarten projects," such as a "snake devenomer" or "sandcat playground," which illustrated her daughter's creativity and compassion for animals. That explanation is reasonable enough. However, in the same interview, Mayer mentions that people could use her AI to offload the mental burden of "figuring out the theme for your child's birthday party." She says she's used the app to arrange a playdate for her daughter, book family vacation activities, and decide on Halloween costumes. She even suggests that her AI assistant could coordinate plans with her husband's AI assistant. When the reporter asks whether she finds it depressing to imagine this "frictionless future… planned by AI," Mayer responds, "I haven't really thought that through."

These tech leaders appear to dismiss critics as a small, angry fringe minority. Yet a Pew Research Center study found that 50% of U.S. adults believe AI will diminish people's ability to form meaningful relationships. Only 5% of respondents said AI would make building these connections easier. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, however, aligns with his Silicon Valley peers in envisioning a future where AI fulfills our social needs. "The average American I think has, it's fewer than three friends, three people they'd consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it's like 15 friends," Zuckerberg said last year on a podcast. "The average person wants more connectivity, connection than they have."

Zuckerberg predicts that outsourcing our emotional needs to AI therapists or even AI romantic partners will become increasingly socially acceptable. "There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them," he added. "But the reality is that people […] feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like."

Zuckerberg further explains how virtual reality embodiments of AI avatars are becoming increasingly realistic. Meta seems more focused on enhancing our relationships with these approximations of humans rather than fostering connections among the billions of actual humans who use its platforms daily. Perhaps this partly stems from the tech industry's culture, which prioritizes efficiency. People attempt to biohack their own bodies—optimizing sleep schedules with health trackers or injecting unregulated "peptide stacks" to maximize productivity. When building electric vehicles or computer chips, efficiency is certainly a clear guiding principle. But our relationships with other people aren't a tech product to be shipped with minimal capital. Human relationships are inherently messy, yet our connections with one another can be what gives our lives meaning. When we delegate those interactions to computers, we surrender the difficult yet fulfilling experience of being human.