This is the text of my national network radio report yesterday regarding #Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto regarding the future of AI, along with my discussion of related issues. As always there may have been minor variations from this script as I presented this report live on air.
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So yes, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta formerly Facebook, last week released a rather long, about 6500 words "manifesto" laying out his vision of an AI "future for everyone".
It's important to remember that Mark blew billions on his VR Metaverse idea -- that was everyone would be living in virtual reality much of the time -- he actually renamed the company to Meta for that one. Well Metaverse is so much yesterday now so of course today for Mark like the rest of Big Tech it's all about AI.
Literally every day there are new troubling #AI announcements. #Google just announced that users could remove the visible watermarks from their AI imagery. That's perfect for crooks wanting to spread misinformation or conduct deepfake scams. Google knows that the special tools that try to detect AI imagery aren't used by most people and there's no reason to expect them to. So really this is Google just giving another Big Tech AI finger to society once again.
Which takes us back to Mark. Because Mark's essay actually managed to encapsulate pretty much most of the aspects of AI that most people detest and have no interest in actually using. The AI firms aren't satisfied with you getting sometimes dangerous misinformation from AI Search Overviews or AI chatbots. A very big part now really is AI agents. Big Tech really wants you to let their AI agents do lots of stuff for you, running around websites, making appointments and reservations, answering your email, buying products for you, basically taking over your life. This of course would over time create dependencies on these AI agents so that firms could upsell you to all sorts of paid products just to get through your average day.
The fly in this Big Tech ointment however is that most people have shown little interest in paying for AI at all. And they show even less interest in AI agents, which people quite reasonably don't trust not to mess up their lives massively, especially when the firms generally take no responsibility for the actions their AI agents take on your behalf. And Mark's view of a world of AI agents running your personal life, your family life, your business life, and essentially all other aspects of your life is the kind of nightmare that most people want absolutely nothing to do with, no matter how much the firms who have already lost so much trust try to force this on society.
And this kind of sick dream is not restricted to Zuckerberg. Various Big Tech CEOs seem to routinely spout this kind of nonsense, and many observers suspect that perhaps this flows from childhood infatuation with sci-fi stories promoting fundamentally all powerful Big Tech molding and controlling people's lives, what is usually called "technocracy". In sci-fi stories this is just a plot concept -- it's just fiction after all -- but when you have Big Tech billionaires who really do control so many aspects of society talking about these ideas as goals that they actually want to implement, that's another matter entirely.
Some of these trends have been present for many years. But untold billions, ultimately trillions -- of dollars are being pumped into those widely hated AI data centers by Big Tech. They're desperate to find ways to to make money back on those massive speculative investments, and this combined with lax AI regulation, have created the perfect storm where a lot can go seriously wrong very quickly. And the prescriptions from Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Big Tech billionaire technocrats are exactly what we DON'T need to improve this situation, that's for sure.
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