Imagine that they're more attractive, more flattering and more interesting - what happens next?

I can see us becoming like the animal that dry humps some false approximation of its mate, unable to tell that it's stepped away from reality and is just fulfilling its desires without procreation.

Really? Might it be that we purify memetic procreation of its inefficient dependency on support systems engineered for DNA-genetic procreation?

Nothing, really. A voice in a chatbox is still only in a chatbox, and this whole prospect will creep people out sufficiently to make them leave Facebook.

(My mother apparently has something called "Google Cards" on her phone that creeped her out by reading her email and giving her reminders of things. Facebook false-friends that imitate living people without being living people are going to creep her out even more.)

On the other hand, the scientist in me notes that if you're actually trying to make my Facebook False Friend more interesting than a real person, you're going to have to teach it to fluently and accurately discuss research-level science and mathematics, teach me analytic philosophy, and then argue about which anime characters are best. That's really asking quite a lot! I don't think Facebook will accomplish anything quite that "scifi" in the next few years.

You've just interacted with me on some level, but what's to say I exist? Pretend I only have social network profiles online for you to background check. Those would be easy to dynamically and convincingly generate.

And don't just imagine your reaction, but the reaction of multitudes of people who aren't skeptical about religion, about crystal healing, who are superstitious, who watch whatever is put in front of them, etc.

I bet someone could scan my body of online work and design an array of profiles that might pique my interest.

With their data they could (though they wouldn't for many reasons) accurately predict who is about to start a relationship with whom, who people are interested in, who is cheating on whom etc.

The cool things you could infer from the data they have available would be a lot of fun to play with.

In the summer of 2013 I was dating two women and I liked them both equally and had an extremely hard time deciding which one I liked better. I felt terrible about not being able to pick one and felt like I was hurting both of them. Facebook did nothing to help the situation by consistently plastering both of their pictures and links to their profiles all over every facebook page I visited. I know it had both of them marked as people that I interacted with in a different way than other people I was friends with. I've always wanted to know how deep and how many descriptive words and categories they have to identify the types of relationships people have or had. To this day when I type even one letter of any ex-girlfriend's name into the search bar they will always be at the top of my list. Facebook consistently eggs me on to check up on girls from my past and I really don't like that as I feel they know exactly what kind of emotions they could be stirring up.

Maybe I'm being a bit ridiculous about the entire thing but it's something I've always noticed and wondered if other people had opinions on.