I Read Mark Zuckerberg's Deranged Brain Spew So You Don't Have to
I don’t know if Mark Zuckerberg tried another “recreational” coffee and went one shot of espresso too hard, but whatever he was on over the last weekend, he let his brain run wild with a screed about the future of AI.
Of course, it’s titled The Future is for Everyone.
That coming from the guy worth over $200 billion, who sails his super yacht (worth $300 million) to his private 2,300 acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai (the land secretly bought for over $187 million) just to check out how the interior design is going in his 5,000 square foot doomsday bunker (rumoured to cost over $100 million). One could be forgiven for thinking his proposed future isn’t for everyone, and actually only for those rich enough to move underground or onto Mars.
No, this is actually his vision for a future that would really work out well for the future of his company. And in it, we get more glimpses into just how detached from reality our billionaire overlords are, and how they have no concept of what the average human wants or needs, or any understanding of their hopes, their aspirations or their dreams.
Firstly, the whole piece is dripping with assumption. One of the early lines reads:
“Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about.
And this idea of ‘everyone’ appears throughout. “Everyone will have incredible tools for creation,” “Everyone will have powerful tools to create new businesses…,” “Everyone will have a personalized tutor and coach…,” “Everyone will have free or affordable access…”
He goes on to say that
In practice, people will not adopt agents if they do not trust them with sensitive details and tasks, and they won’t trust them if the agents act against people’s interests because they’re aligned with a company’s divergent values instead.
Notice that it’s not a question of if people want them. It’s a question of trust, and Zuckerberg holds a simple, yet misguided belief that once trust is solved (you know tech bros love to solve things), it turns on the infinite money glitch. But there’s a whole host of reasons people may not want to use an agent. It could be indifference, philosophical opposition, environmental concerns, privacy concerns, or simply wanting to have some agency in their life.
Take the novel concept of having a hobby. Something that acts as an outlet, as a channel for energy and passion, something that delivers a sense of achievement and accomplishment, something that, with time, effort and graft, can lead to wonderful opportunities and fulfilment.
According to Zuckerberg, don’t bother! There’s an AI agent just for that.
“Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more. It will free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise.”
Mr Zuckerberg, it’s the goddamn hobbies that we enjoy! One can only assume you put your hobbies, like working on your multi-million dollar ranch, on a higher plane than ours. I can’t imagine you’ll be letting your agent look after your cattle, though it wouldn't surprise me if it was in an AI model that gave you the idea to feed them macadamia nuts and beer.
Also, look at that list again.
Relationships
Health
Career
Finances
Home
Hobbies
That’s your entire personal existence. The very fabric of your life and who you are as a person. In his screed, Zuckerberg describes this as “individual empowerment,” and, so, connecting the dots, his vision of maximising individual autonomy is to require billions of people to hand an extraordinarily intimate representation of themselves to an artificial agent produced by one of the world's largest technology companies.
Again, the future is for Meta everyone.
Speaking of relationships, Zuckerberg thinks these should be agenticified as well. (Did I make up a new word?)
“My daughter loves to bake so my agent plans personalized recipes for us to make together each weekend, orders the ingredients, and then offers suggestions as we’re baking.”
The guy can’t even open a recipe book or look on his own damn social media platform for inspiration to find something to bake with his own daughter. He may as well have said “I’m on a miss to turn my life into a workflow.”
AI chooses recipe → AI procures ingredients → Father and daughter bake → AI supervises activity.
How to suck the fun out of everything, and be less present in something that should be cherished. Speaking of being present, I love this line
“You’ll be able to interact with your agent through any device, including your glasses to keep you present in the moment with the people you care about.”
Maybe he is a good writer, because that is such beautifully crafted irony on display there. Yes, being glasses, and therefore containing lenses made of glass, you can certainly see what’s going on in front of you. But lets not kid ourselves that adding another layer of Meta technology — infamously designed to be invasive and capture as much of your attention as possible — will help you be more present in the moment.
Speaking on the dangers of AI, and how, surely people wouldn’t be building something that they new could be net-negative to society, because, well, just surely they wouldn’t?, he drops this nugget
“…hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.”
Could there be a more fitting description for him and his company?
Elsewhere in the post, Zuckerberg tackles the idea that AI could replace jobs. He isn’t worried — and why would he be when he’s basically un-fireable — and he goes on to say that people have “an infinite demand for new experiences.” Fear not, if you are replaced by AI, you can then use it to create a new future for yourself. Some of suggestions include
In the near future, there will be new jobs that aren’t common today, like one-person product studios designing custom toys, furniture, or clothes; world builders and experience designers creating games, stories, and adventures; personal biologists using super intelligence to formulate personalized treatments; and much more that we can’t yet conceive.
It’s very reassuring that he managed to come up with three options. But what if the possibility of massive labour-market disruption doesn't float everyone’s boat? There’s not a single consideration of the person who doesn’t want to found a company, isn’t entrepreneurial, doesn’t want to continuously retrain, wants predictable employment, likes their current profession, or just wants to earn a decent wage and spend time with their family? What low-life aspirations you have there.
There are plenty more assumptions throughout, most notably the assumption that AI works, well, all the time. We already know this to be untrue, and I kind of admire how it’s brushed over. Sure, he points the usual blame, bad actors, misuse etc, but ignores the continued issues of hallucinations, factual unreliability, fabricated information, incorrect advice and the need to verify an agent’s output. Which makes his little though experiment interesting to say the least.
… imagine only one person had a super intelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court — even if they were wrong on the merits.That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a super intelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills and resources in litigation.
Ignoring everything else required in a legal case, we’ve already seen what happens when we turn to AI for legal advice…
It also raises one of the central themes of Mark Zuckerberg’s thesis, that the only problem with AI is if it’s put into the hands of the few. If we give everyone the same powerful AI, then power imbalance solved.
But equal tools don’t produce equal power. He touches on this idea with cybersecurity, and how the more people equipped with tools, the more safe everything is, but that’s nothing more than a gamble. If everyone receives enhanced offensive and defensive capabilities, it’s not self-evident that defence wins. We don’t need an AI use case to tell us that distributing power does not automatically create a stable balance of power.
What I enjoy most about the ramblings of the billionaire mind is how Zuckerberg continually presents Meta as the antidote to concentrated power.
“Meta’s mission since our founding has focused on putting power in people’s hands. If our beliefs and principles lead, then the balance of power will favor individuals and a better future for everyone.”
A truly remarkable line from one of the world's most powerful billionaires, who controls one of the largest technology companies, arguing that the way to prevent technological power becoming concentrated is for his company to build the technology used by billions of people. Never mind that his company has unfathomable riches, political influence and monopolistic control. He’s one of the good guys! Look, he even let his hair grow out a bit, and he wears oversized t-shirts now! We’re in safe hands folks.
“…if the power of superintelligence is held by a small number of individuals, businesses, governments, or AI itself, then that will naturally lead to outcomes that are less favorable for everyone else.”
Isn’t Meta quite literally one of the “businesses” accumulating the power of super intelligence? Not according to Zuckerberg.
“I do not think it is in my, Meta’s, or the world’s best interests for me or anyone else to be a sole decision-maker on how super intelligence is deployed.”
Well, until he almost immediately writes
“While Meta is a founder-controlled company…”
Never mind.
Something to note is that Meta isn’t even delivering the vision shared here, not truly. As Gary Marcus notes, the company is releasing ‘open weight’ models, and that’s a very important caveat. As he writes,
“Open-weight piggybacks onto all the great press that open-source has but offers few of the advantages. Open-weight models are NOT fully customizable, and not transparent.”
Again, the future is for Meta everyone.
At the end of the day, we can disregard most of this screed as nonsense.
After all, it comes from a guy who is surrounded by yes-men, and who renamed his company — and pivoted the entire business — only to produce a nearly 100 billion-dollar failure, before pivoting again like nothing happened. Mark Zuckerberg is telling you the future is agentic AI, just like he did with the Metaverse, because right now that is hot shit, and his company survives by chasing the latest shiny object.
If AI doesn’t pan out the way he claims, or it isn’t in fact for everyone, I can’t wait to see the next 6,000+ word prophecy he produces when he pivots from the pivot, from the pivot(?).