Resisting Zuckerberg's Superintelligent World

Reading Zuckerberg’s latest essay drove me a little crazy. It’s hard to describe. There are so many emotions that arise when an uber rich billionaire writes about how the future is ‘for everyone’, claims that he proposes ‘‘a philosophy based on individual empowerment’’ and talks about ‘superintelligence’ without once defining this term.

Zuckerberg’s essay reads — or, at the least, is supposed to read — as a nice uplifting story, thought it’s a story that only someone incredibly out of touch with reality, and with major financial stakes in the game, could write with the level of confidence and grandeur present in the essay. Let me be clear. I’m not here to attack Zuckerberg.

His essay is much more interestingly read as a piece of social commentary on the AI saturated age, because if Zuckerberg hadn’t written the essay, someone else would have. We are all living in this AI saturated fiasco, one that has been thrust upon us, with or without our express consent, enthusiasm, or desire for the technology.

It’s unhelpful and unrealistic to dream of going back to a world where AI does not exist. AI is here and it’s here to stay, whatever form that might take.

But as a philosopher (and human being) deeply invested in creative practice and expression, the existence or non-existence of AI is not what keeps me up at night.

What keeps me up at night, something I touched on last week, is the gradual erosion of creative human thought, novel ideas, poetic writing, and more broadly still, the very existence of real human expression.

Zuckerberg paints a picture of superintelligence as enabling, enriching and promoting human empowerment.

‘‘[superintelligence'] has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before’’

That’s a nice idea, but it is only that: an idea. The reality of the impact of AI on people’s lives and communities has been anything but empowering thus far. It’s been degrading, oppressive, and a source of deep existential anxiety and fear.

Let’s take one example to stress-test Zuckerberg’s thesis that individual and collective empowerment is what awaits us in an AI-super-intelligent-chat-bot ladened future.

Human empowerment requires autonomy and self-determination in individual and communal lives —autonomy and self-determination is the essence of empowerment.

According to Zuckerberg’s essay, this empowerment will come from each of us having individual super intelligent bots. He paints this reality as, amongst other things, democratising knowledge without ever detailing how exactly Meta will succeed at creating bots that in fact achieve this, for example, by creating a super intelligence that has PhD level knowledge on all subjects:

‘‘Everyone will have a personalized tutor and coach with a PhD in every subject and unlimited patience to help you learn anything you want. Students will have extra help in areas they need it that is currently only available to those whose parents can pay. Adults will have a superintelligent learning assistant that knows exactly how to teach you new job skills, new languages, new hobbies, or anything else you're interested in’’

If the super-intelligent assistants Zuckerberg is envisioning are versions of sophisticated LLMs, at best these bots can democratise information, which is by no means the same as democratising knowledge.

In fact, we already live in an information age. By and large, information is available to anyone who searches for it, and LLMs can already be individualised to a user’s needs.

LLMs can also do more or less all of the things Zuckerberg claims super intelligent bots will be able to do. We can turn to Claude, or whichever model we prefer, to learn new job skills, hobbies, and other such things.

And yet the current climate is not one of abundance, deep knowledge, and prosperity. It is the virtual opposite by almost any measure imaginable.

What we are witnessing in Zuckerberg’s vision then, is the continued pitch that AI-use in its current form be integrated and imposed on humanity in an even more aggressive form, though now peddled in the new marketing language of ‘super intelligent’ personalised assistants, rather than plain old LLMs or chat bots.

The real source of human empowerment however, lies somewhere quite different: it lies in us resisting the exaggerated stories of the AI-industry, the empty promises of human abundance, and the insulting visions of a world with infinitely less human suffering than already exists, in favour of the much more realistic and arduous -but fulfilling task- of exercising our unique human capacities everywhere that we can.

Our empowerment lies in resisting LLM-use where we know deep in our bones, it is de-skilling us, off-loading our critical thinking, and removing our creative agency.

It lies in talking to other humans wherever we can instead of talking to an LLM.

It lies in reading books, sitting in silence, and resisting the narrative that we must constantly ‘keep up’ with the latest AI technology, news story, or scandal.

In a word, the deepest source of our empowerment is coming back to ourselves.

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Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash