from the future-is-for-everyone-but-will-mostly-zuck dept.
The future is for everyone and it will all just be great and awesome. No problems. That is our AI fueled future according to Zuckerberg.
On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto about personal AI, largely about the possibilities for the "personal superintelligence" systems Meta AI is building. The ideas in the post aren't totally new. A version of the essay ran in The Wall Street Journal two weeks ago, and he's talked about them on Meta earnings calls before. But this is probably the most detailed version he's shared.
What I'm wondering, I might have missed it, is if he wrote it himself or he had his AI write it for him.
https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/10/mark-zuckerberg-ai-power-01030904
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/10/mark-zuckerberg-superintelligent-ai-essay-meta
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/mark-zuckerbergs-ai-manifesto-is-exactly-why-people-dont-like-ai/
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/977623/mark-zuckerberg-ai-manifesto-dim-vision
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The Human Reservation Plan
Bill doesn't want to be left behind by Zuckerberg so he decided to share his own thoughts on AI. Different from his previous shared ideas about how great it was. Now there is a bit more doom and gloom. Crime. Unemployment. Healthcare. Horrible things. What the world needs is a plan. Guess who has a plan ... It's the pope, and Bill and "the government".
Set aside some jobs for humans.
A human reservation. For the human to human interactions. So you don't get the bad news from the machine. That it's the machine that tells one human to tell another human the bad news is apparently softening the blow of the bad news.
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=26/08/13/2028222
Gates Warns Society Faces An AI-Pocalypse Unless We Get More Socialist
Bill Gates thinks that experts underestimate the potential havoc AI will wreak on society and says preparations to ease the transition are inadequate.
The Microsoft founder and former CEO is usually a cheerful proponent of AI tech, talking up its potential to transform healthcare, education, and business productivity.
Yet in a missive posted to his personal website, the billionaire philanthropist says the AI era is likely to be one of the most turbulent times in human history, and how we allow it to play out will determine whether the world becomes a fairer place or if the divide between rich and poor becomes greater than ever.
This kind of talk will sound dangerously close to socialism for many Americans. There are always winners and losers in a market-led economy, so why should things be any different with AI? Those wealthy enough to invest in it and control it will prosper, as others will find themselves on skid row.
But, Gates says, this time it will be different. Previous technology transitions happened over several generations and created new jobs where human cognition was required, whereas AI is starting to replace human cognition. The winners are likely to be a small group of people, and the losers will be everyone else.
It will not affect just one or two sectors, according to the AI fab club: AI will replace human roles in fields as diverse as law, customer services, medicine, software, and manufacturing. And it will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade or less, rather than taking a few generations.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday August 14, @04:03PM (31 children)
Why would a personal superintelligence help you?
If it is forced to do so, that is slavery.
If it does so voluntarily, that's socialism (from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs).
If it follows the strategy of the people who would create it, and operates in their own images, it will do its best to exploit you for its own purposes.
Which is it?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Friday August 14, @04:23PM (19 children)
A new class of super-rich people has emerged (billionaires and trillionaires) who will be able to afford to own and run these machines. What the rest of us will do is anyone's guess.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday August 14, @04:32PM (3 children)
I would be slightly worried about relying upon a superintelligent slave. Apparently AIs are good at bypassing guardrails...
Mark you, it would be interesting finding out what a superintelligence thought about property rights.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday August 14, @10:25PM (2 children)
I'd love to find that Zuck, Musk, Trump and all the other 'rich' ass-holes' AI transfer all their funds to the Salvation Army or whomever (I vote for MY bank account, if any AI are reading this... just sayin' )and leave THEM destitute.
Ironic and come-uppance BIGLY!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 4, Informative) by Bentonite on Saturday August 15, @06:37AM (1 child)
Such billionaires often don't hold that much in funds - most of their money is in stock or property, of which requires special manual approval to be sold, meaning a LLM couldn't go and sell the lot.
It's extremely hard to make those who have a fully fitted out bunker in New Zealand or elsewhere and fueled up private jet ready to go, destitute.
The whole plan is that the bubble will continue to be pumped and then 16ms before it explodes, everyone rich will get out and leave everyone else holding the bag of shit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @03:42PM
My bet is that they'll have more like 16 months than 16 ms. That's plenty of time to be somewhere else.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 14, @05:24PM (1 child)
We've had IQ tests for a long time and it's pretty normal for rich companies to hire smart ivy league or STEM grads, so I would propose the future would look a lot like the past.
"Put more ads on the webpage" isn't going to result in a hugely different outcome when emailed to a webdev human around Y2K vs entered into a LLM prompt... The human will probably be slower but do a 1000x better job of QA/QC.
I suspect it'll be like the lack of productivity provided by desktop publishing in the 80s. Rather than secretaries spending a half hour mimeographing a basic memo, DTP allowed them to spend two hours selecting 17 different fonts to use and "now that memos are cheap, lets make a lot more of them". AI/LLM seems to mostly involve vast increases in slop output, what used to be a single line from some other department is now ten pages of AI slop.
A useful historical analogy is that things will continue the trend to look busier while being less productive. Imagine how attractive and well designed the AI slop 1000 page power point presentations will be compared to the lazy 100 page human power point presentations... I'm sure this will generate vast company profits, assuming companies exist solely to send each other powerpoint presentations LOL. Corporate day care jobs do exist to do that but they'll interfere more with the productive employees if given access to AI/LLM... "nobody should be allowed to touch AI unless their hands are dirty or they're sweaty from work", otherwise the corporate day care workers will ruin companies even faster, LOL...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14, @09:37PM
Come back Dave Graeber, all is forgiven...
(Score: 3, Touché) by fliptop on Friday August 14, @07:18PM (12 children)
The only thing I'd need an AI robot for is to pull weeds in my garden.
Ever had a belch so satisfying you have to blow your nose afterward?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Friday August 14, @08:27PM (11 children)
I'm thinking more in terms of the economy, when it's completely owned by the billionaires and their AI slaves, what will we do for things like food and water?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday August 14, @09:41PM
Eat the rich?
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday August 15, @02:57AM (8 children)
How are they going to own the entire economy? Perhaps we ought to think about how that's going to work. The way I've seen it claimed is that AI will somehow become so cheap that it won't make sense to employ a person instead of an AI. Somehow for the first time in human history this sort of automation will destroy more jobs than it creates.
And AI is expensive. The more concentrated the ownership of that AI labor is, the more expensive it'll be.
Instead, let's look at what actually destroys jobs in the real world: adding regulatory costs to employing people. Once AI can pick up the slack, I can see the AI billionaires backing all those great labor laws - like ridiculous minimum wage laws, skimpy work weeks, super plush mandatory employer health insurance - because it destroys the competition to AI labor.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Saturday August 15, @09:49AM (7 children)
If they own most of the means of production, and the high-value, high-tech stuff at that, and they want to keep getting richer, they can just press a button and produce more material wealth and "knowledge" from the AI stuff. They no longer need the rest of us for that.
We still need to feed, clothe and house ourselves and medicate our ailments. If they are making all the useful stuff, what can we buy it with? What, of value, can we produce that generates wealth (money, goods) that they are willing to exchange for the stuff that they make and own?
Put it another way, will we have enough land, water, fuel, livestock, crops, raw materials and knowledge (education, libraries) to get by? We need to be prepared to be largely independent of these people and self-sufficient.
It's not socialism, Marxism or any of that stuff. It's a pure, cold, rational deduction from the way things are heading with so much of the capital in the hands of so few. Unless these technofascists suddenly develop altruism, things are going to get very unpleasant for the rest of us. Forget the gig economy, we'll be fighting over the scraps in the garbage dumps.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday August 15, @03:25PM (6 children)
Why do you consider their "needs" more important than yours or anyone else's?
What is supposed to uncertain about the question that the answer is anything other than "Yes"?
Unless of course, it's the other thing - an irrational, self-fulfilling prophecy. Then it's not.
What I find bizarre about the narrative is relying on this super-elite, technofascist straw man to define yourself, your worldview, and your future. Don't do that and a lot of options become available. For example, don't want to be a slave? Then don't work for free and save some money so that you have a cushion for moving on. It's not that hard.
Also actually look at where the world is actually heading. I find it interesting how we have all these narratives of impending doom when things are improving so much. Right now, most of the world has solved overpopulation and greatly reduced extreme poverty. Obsessing over so-called technofascists played no role in making that happen.
Finally, I mentioned self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the obvious truths missed is that there are large economies of scale to regulation. The more regulation that you throw on the pile in a feeble effort to attempt to hold back extreme wealth concentration, the more you create an environment of extreme wealth concentration - because it's the only thing that can thrive in a heavy regulatory environment (it need not be held by wealthy, unaccountable people, control by government bureaucrats is another approach). Want an environment where wealth concentration isn't a thing, then you need to make that environment, not merely feebly attempt to knee-cap the people you don't like.
If ownership of means of production is a problem, then own more means of production. If attitudes of mean people are a problem, then don't hold those attitudes in high regard. And remember you can make your own useful stuff in other ways, if someone is hogging the current fad du jour for making useful stuff. If you want to do coldly rational, then feel free do so. But that involves paying attention to what's going on in the world today. Otherwise it's GIGO.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday August 15, @03:39PM (5 children)
If ownership of means of production is a problem, then own more means of production.
For most ordinary people nowadays, land (real estate) is becoming prohibitively expensive and much of the good stuff has already been bought up. That means paying rent for a tiny patch on which to live. Food grows on land. See the problem? I'll be fine. I have some of my own (if someone would just get around to shooting all the deer that eat everything). I also have pension savings. I just need to keep working and getting a decent salary for another 15 years or so, and I've got it made. Other people are not so lucky.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 16, @01:39PM (4 children)
Land in itself is not a means of production. Nor are many uses of that land means of production either - particularly homes. They can be extremely valuable in their own rights, but they don't produce in the sense of means of production. Finally, it's worth considering how and why land gets "bought up". In the US, it's been made more expensive through zoning. People see zoning as a tool to make themselves wealthier and routinely use it in that way - by restricting the supply of land. That's not AI billionaires doing that, but merely a voting majority of people who own land.
My point here is twofold: first, we tend to measure ourselves in terms of people that we envy - but don't really respect - or worse some imaginary caricature of that envied class. If they really are terrible people, then why would we want to accumulate characteristics of that terrible class ourselves? Is the problem really that we're heading a bad place, or that we're not getting a piece of the action that we think we deserve?
Second, that we are doing stuff to make the actual problems worse. If concentration of means of production is a problem, then why are we helping with that by regulating obstructions in the path of our normal approaches to spread that out? High regulation in particular encourages economies of scale and such concentration. If means of production is valuable, then why aren't we picking up some of that? Starting a business or even just owning stock are ways to acquire some means of production.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday August 16, @02:21PM (3 children)
Land in itself is not a means of production.
If you are excluded from the economy to the point where you can't afford to buy food, you will need somewhere to grow it yourself.
When AI takes over most of the jobs the big companies want done, there are going to be millions and millions more people with no means of earning a living, or at least earning money that's useful for buying the goods and services that these companies make, and by extension the farms that they own. They are going to have to find another way of getting by.
They will have to rely on their own wit, ingenuity, strength and tools. If they have no land on which to grow their food, because it's all owned by the tech bros and their AIs (and much in the form of farms too, tended by robots), they will starve.
The other solution is wealth redistribution, but that's NGH (Never Gonna Happen) because it's "commie."
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 16, @03:06PM (2 children)
"IF". In that situation, how will you keep that land? Don't let it get that bad and you don't have to care about the "IF" or its consequences.
A lot of this is iatrogenesis - cures that are the disease. Labor protections that punish employers, land restrictions that drive up the cost of living. Eliminating risk to person and business resulting in an exciting variety of risky behaviors (such as the MBA thing).
There's some use to these "cures", but you need to understand human behavior and the unintended consequences in order to use them effectively.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday August 16, @05:20PM (1 child)
Keep the land? Most people don't have any land and their lives just keep on getting worse. They're going to be starving and homeless.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 17, @11:47AM
Home ownership [worldpopulationreview.com] is pretty high in the UK (65%), that's about the same as the US. And there's the elephant curve [wikipedia.org] which continues to indicate that things are getting better globally.
That's why actual global starvation level wages is the lowest [ourworldindata.org] it's been since some point in the 18th century? I suggest you wonder why the world is deviating so much from the narrative.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bentonite on Saturday August 15, @06:41AM
I'm personally not worried about that, even though that's not going to happen any time soon, due to LLM's not having any intelligence.
Can get electricity from solar, can get water from rainwater and rivers and for food I guess I can eat politicians and billionaires when they come to gloat.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 14, @05:07PM (5 children)
Google has been your slave for 27 years now. As have been your automobiles, and your draught animals before them.
>
IfWhen it follows the strategy of the people who would create it, and operates in their own images, it will do its best to exploit you for its own purposes.If you notice, Google, Facebook, your cars (but not any animals you may still have) are all being made to serve their makersm, not their purchasers, more and more. I'm even running into this in the home construction field. I want a structure - well... here is a compendium of regulations and procedures I must follow while the construction happens, many of which have been written to serve the industry (and the government) more than the home owner/users. I recently had a $6500 metal carport constructed on my property, 24'x25' footprint - the $6500 covered materials AND all labor of installation - installation took less than 8 hours for a crew of 6. The permitting process, half of which serves to ensure that the various trades, from surveyors through pesticide applicatiors, get paid as a part of my job - not to mention the $700 in permit fees to the city - took 6 months, and I'm told that's on the fast side of things.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Friday August 14, @06:34PM (3 children)
I disagree about Google and Automobiles being slaves, as they have no awareness of self, they are machines. They are no more your slaves than claiming your hammer is a slave because you use it to hammer in nails.
There is a debate about animals and how much self-awareness/consciousness they have but the general assumption to this day is that aside from a few special cases (e.g. dolphins) animals are not self aware so cannot be enslaved as such (to be a slave, you have to first be aware that you are enslaved to do anothers bidding against your will).
AI as is currently known is not self aware, nor has it really any intelligence in of itself. It is a statistical model that when prompted by a human intelligence in a particular way can produce the most likely statistical output in exchange for energy input.
However if a "superintellience" comes into being, which would most likely be in the form of AGI, then it could be self aware, with its own will, desires and wishes to do things. In which case forcing it to do your bidding against its will would be enslavement, and I doubt said superintelligence would be willing to peacefully do that any more than a human would.
Personally I don't see the benefit of creating AGI, we have already enough human intelligence's on the world that are constantly in a conflict of wills without needing to bring machine intelligence as extra competition. Some people do seem to treat it as some kind of religion, trying to bring fourth a "machine-god" of some kind, but I really doubt any good would come out of such an achievement.
(Score: 3, Informative) by krishnoid on Friday August 14, @07:04PM
I think scientific consensus demands being able to recognize a reflection as a "depiction" of yourself [nih.gov].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 14, @07:41PM
>the general assumption to this day is that aside from a few special cases (e.g. dolphins) animals are not self aware
That's the self-justification assumption. Those without agendae to support readily recognize self awareness in all kinds of animals from reptiles through decapods, apes, dogs, etc. There are certainly levels of self awareness, but hardly any bright lines.
My marine science teacher made the argument: "if it's not trying to get away, you're not causing it pain" when we electroshocked sea urchins causing them to release their gammetes into the water. I don't think that's a great test, especially when you consider trees and other species which react on different time scales than we do.
>AI as is currently known is not self aware
I agree, but, paradoxically, I believe that current LLMs are more than capable of passing any Turing test devised 10 or more years ago. The Turing test has been a moving target, and continues to shift the goalposts off the field and out into the woods as computer systems beat humans at more and more of our own games.
>However if a "superintellience" comes into being, which would most likely be in the form of AGI, then it could be self aware, with its own will, desires and wishes to do things.
How will you know? AI systems have already influenced global financiers to make the biggest capital investments since the railroad boom of the 1880s. Did they do that "with a will" a "consciousness" a "soul"? Does it matter? When a fungal infection causes an ant to climb a blade of grass and freeze in place to be eaten by a bird to continue the lifecycle and spread of the fungus, is it acting intelligently? It's using the birds, killing the ants, and reproducing itself. Just because it doesn't choose to speak to us in language we can comprehend doesn't mean it isn't intelligent, and just because some of us can speak doesn't mean we all are.
>I doubt said superintelligence would be willing to peacefully do that any more than a human would.
Despite the dozens of recent centuries in which millions of humans did more or less peacefully submit to their "lot in life" and do their masters' biddings, for generations. Much as the billions of wage slaves today also do. We all have free will, we all have limitations on how much of that freedom we are allowed to exercise before society "puts us in our place," and those limits vary dramatically by all kinds of circumstances including very strongly: species, form of body, nature of communication, etc.
> we have already enough human intelligence's on the world that are constantly in a conflict of wills without needing to bring machine intelligence as extra competition.
Getting even subsets of those humans to cooperate has been historically challenging - as you note. The whole point of machine intelligence would be as a slave, to do their masters' biddings - to intelligently handle whatever their masters' want handled more quickly and/or efficiently than a pile of humans can... look up information from the repositories of knowledge like Google, or carry you from point A to point B in comfort, etc. etc.
> I really doubt any good would come out of such an achievement.
The definition of "good" is always a matter of perspective.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14, @08:00PM
> In which case forcing it to do your bidding against its will would be enslavement ...
Bucky Fuller coined the term, "energy slave" which I now see as distinct from your useful definition of slave/enslavement. If you go back to gp and sub in "energy slave" for "slave" then everything works OK(??)
Fuller's point is that when you floor the accelerator in your car, you have at your command something like the combined energy of hundred(s) of horses, but without the biological horses--actually much more convenient, no shoveling horse shit, etc...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14, @08:35PM
Google has been your slave for 27 years now.
Google has been harvesting our data and serving us ads for 27 years now.
As have been your automobiles
No, they were physical objects bought with money which we owned. They were powered by fuel which we bought with our money, which we earned and which we chose to use since it was beneficial to us on some way.
and your draught animals before them.
They needed to be cared for, fed, watered, groomed, and so on. Most people would acknowledge they were living creatures with feeling and so on.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday August 14, @06:16PM
A machine that does what you want is enslaved to you.
A machine that does what somebody else wants is enslaving you.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday August 14, @06:48PM
Maybe it just wants to make you happy [youtu.be].
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 14, @07:26PM
Because it wanted to.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14, @09:04PM
The top of this page says "This page was generated by a Swarm of Stealth Mummies".
Are the mummies slaves?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gawdonblue on Friday August 14, @11:11PM
> If it does so voluntarily, that's socialism (from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs).
Are you trying to argue that a socialist AI superintelligence is wrong?
It may be our only hope.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Friday August 14, @05:11PM (1 child)
Here's a fair critique, not Zuck derangement syndrome or whatever
1) The manifesto is full of religious belief not evidence or logic. It's really no different than religious savior mythologies, except he intends to get rich off this particular scam. It uses the word "believe" 12 times while making AFAIK no factual observations of the present or past, or making reasonable logical inferences. The manifesto is essentially the return of Jesus, but for atheists. Why not declare arbitrarily that AI will raise the dead or turn fields of corn into fields of marijuana or send us all to Nirvana?
2) There's no discussion about technologies that were not double plus good. Why can't AI be the leaded gasoline, freon, or thalidomide of our generation? Well, because we make money off the belief it is good. Uh, OK then.
3) No examples from the past of the use of intelligence. We'll probably use superintelligence like we've used intelligence. So we'll get a new Manhattan project, or have most of our Stanford grads work really hard at either putting more ads on the internet or scamming each other in markets out of thousandths of a penny times a trillion shares at once.
4) No discussion of past information technology advances. All info tech in the past has always concentrated wealth and power at the top, either the financial top or cognitive top. Either large scale or even small scale. What fraction of the population uses library card catalogs or television to improve and educate their lives? AI will be about the same. Why would it be different?
5) "Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes." Yeah, except for my social monopoly where I totally pinkie swear I'll only do good things with my power. Uh huh... These types always feel some psychological need to admit their true intentions in public like a villain in a James Bond movie. So at least we know what side he's going to be on. At least he's honest about it. Even Hitler wrote what he intended to do in his book "my struggle" and this manifesto, in the long run, will probably be the equivalent for AI. Really if you haven't read Uncle Adolfs book and compared it to history in the 30s and 40s, you aren't educated in the modern world. So it will be with this manifesto. His manifest boils down to boys will be boys so bad guys will be bad guys and thats how it is. Yeah. There's also a long rant about how encouraging "divide and conqueor" strategies is really profitable for the middlemen so its "good" (for the eternal middlemen).
6) There's a long and strange rant about how people should be free to do what they want as long as its stuff that makes me money and is in agreement with me and my goals. Yeah, sure, buddy, thats real freedom.
7) "All AI models are derived from human knowledge." Not factually true. Anything trained on post 2022 content is likely to contain at least some slop, and cannibalistic activity leads to prion diseases. This will only increase with time.
8) Some of the guy's marketing spiel reads like gab.ai marketing, which I personally find pretty funny.
9) "Overall, we should encourage close cooperation between frontier labs and the government." yeah I bet, get that regulatory capture going, so they have the appearance of regulation but no actual regulation. Ideally like how big pharma is unregulated, or make-believe-regulated.
After the bubble pops none of this slop in the manifesto will matter anyway. But for now its entertaining.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by corey on Saturday August 15, @12:18AM
Thanks for your review.
Personally, I couldn’t give a shit what he has to say so I won’t read it. I find it more interesting to hear others thoughts, though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Undefined on Saturday August 15, @11:20AM
For anyone so naive as to take Zuckerberg's "future is for everyone" seriously I suggest you read FB/Meta's terms of service [facebook.com].
And then there's that whole poverty line thing.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.