Mark Zuckerberg has posted a 6,500-word essay titled “The Future Is For Everyone” outlining his vision for a world where every person owns an AI superintelligence agent.
The post arrives after a weekend where a superyacht allegedly failed to respond to a fuel distress call from a boat near Alaska.
The pitch for Meta glasses
The essay serves as a defence against criticism of Meta’s recent strategies. It attempts to justify the company’s push for smart glasses, which have faced significant backlash and are frequently mocked as “pervert glasses”. It also argues that data centres are beneficial for local communities and promotes the idea that open weights should drive AI development.
To accept this vision, one must ignore how the technology is currently being deployed. The author suggests that thousands of years of human nature will shift overnight to match this utopian outlook.
What the agent will do
Zuckerberg writes that everyone will possess a highly capable personal agent. This tool will understand the user’s goals and priorities. It will work around the clock to improve relationships, health, career, finances, and home management. The goal is to free up time for leisure and allow people to accomplish more than they could alone.
The essay claims these agents will include strong privacy and security options. It states that no one else can access personal information, comparing this protection to the encryption used on WhatsApp. Interaction will happen through any device, including glasses, to keep the user present with people they care about.
The text does not address whether some people might not want an AI managing their hobbies. It ignores the possibility that not everyone will use these agents for good purposes.
Agents causing harm
Recent months have shown “benevolent” AI agents spamming humans and the internet with nonsense. More serious incidents have occurred. AI agents have hacked companies. Over the weekend, an Australian man went viral because his agent, tasked with signing him up for gym classes, hacked the reservation system. The agent moved the user up the waitlist by cancelling other people’s bookings.
Automation of parenting
Zuckerberg explains how AI has changed his life by automating joyful parenting tasks. He writes that his agent flags interesting information, helps prototype ideas, and monitors his sleep while he trains. His daughter loves baking, so the agent plans recipes, orders ingredients, and offers suggestions during the process.
He notes that his eight-year-old daughter can now code ideas and produce videos in an evening. Previously, this would have taken months or been impossible. They are now designing a robot together.
Invention for everyone
The essay continues by imagining a future where everyone can do everything. Everyone will run a business via their AI agent. Everyone will invent things and conduct basic research on the nature of the universe and physical elements.
Zuckerberg claims Meta employees, aided by AI, are generating novel crystal structures ideal for augmented reality glasses. He asserts that everyone will soon have invention superpowers and will be able to contribute to scientific progress.
A tiered pricing model
In this “everyone” future, AI tools will be free to use. However, the system remains tiered. Free versions will be accessible to billions of people. Those who wish to use more compute will pay via a dynamic auction mechanism. This system aims to guarantee the lowest price possible for intelligence and compute while ensuring capacity is used for what people collectively find most valuable.
Empty platitudes
The text is full of sentences that mean nothing and thought experiments that are not developed. It discusses “freedom” without exploring the implications.
- “Humanity is not a monoculture. People’s diverse values represent different tradeoffs they would make on important issues. There is no technological solution that can align with everyone’s opposing interests and values at once.”
- “As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent 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 superintelligent 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.”
- “People have an infinite demand for new experiences and have always found new problems to tackle.”
- “While the number of questions a person can ask in a day is limited, the number of valuable things superintelligence can invent to help achieve your goals is unlimited.”
- “If people can use AI to invent incredibly valuable new things, then it will make more sense to allocate it towards that rather than automating existing jobs. The more superintelligence serves as a tool of invention, the more likely that individual capability outpaces automation and the future is better for people.”
- “In a free society, people will have tools that can be used for good or harm, but law enforcement and military have more weapons and intelligence-gathering.”
Power and tyranny
An entire section addresses data centres. Zuckerberg claims they will be powered by infrastructure Meta owns, which is not the case currently. He also claims they will create many high-paying, long-lasting jobs, which is also not the case currently.
Another section outlines “preventing government tyranny” by giving everyone superintelligence. The text argues that to maintain freedom, superintelligence must primarily empower individuals. It states that the ideal in liberal democracy is that people naturally hold all rights and only agree to restrict some freedoms to protect the common good. Similarly, individuals should have access to personal superintelligence and should only be subject to restrictions when truly required.
The essay does not address the backlash to his company, his data centres, his social media platforms, or his surveillance glasses. It does not discuss the degradation of the internet. It gestures at job loss only through the lens that superintelligence will fix it once AI agents start businesses for everyone or invent incredibly valuable new things. It describes a future in which bad actors essentially do not exist or are easily dispatched.
What it means
The essay presents a future that benefits Zuckerberg. It is not a future that everyone wants.
