Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg just dumped a lengthy manifesto on his utopian vision for an AI “superintelligence”-driven future. Called “The Future is for Everyone,” it’s so breathlessly optimistic about the technology that it ends up belying something that’s, instead, incredibly dystopian.
But among all the deranged things he shared in the 6,500 word document, it’s Zuckerberg’s promise about how AI will unlock so much personal freedom for its embracers that’s the most hypocritical.
According to Zuckerberg, in the future “everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more.”
Most importantly, “it will free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise,” he added.
Now contrast this to what Zuckerberg’s own lieutenant, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, is actually telling employees behind the scenes.
According to a new scoop from Business Insider, during a Q&A last month, Bosworth tore into an underling who dared to ask if all the amazing productivity gains AI brings would mean that employees would be able to take more time off.
It’s a fair question: isn’t the point of AI supercharging the workplace making workers’ lives easier, at least in the telling of Zuckerberg and his fellow tech CEOs?
But Bosworth couldn’t help but sneer in reply, clearly showing he thought the idea preposterous.
“I hope that what we do with our extra time is to do even more and cooler stuff for the users who use our products every day,” he told the employee.
“We got billions of people using our products every day,” Bosworth added. “I get an extra hour. You know what I do with it? I put it into that.”
Pulling no punches, Bosworth then sniped at the employee’s character.
“Go to your parents and ask them: hey, like every time I get a chance to talk to my boss, ask me if I can have more days off,” he said. “Ask your parents what they think of that as a career strategy.”
In reality, Bosworth was being more honest than Zuckerberg: the main role AI serves toward workers today is to intimidate them and push their noses ever closer to the grindstone.
It’s clearly a flawed approach. Heaps of research has already illustrated that forcing AI onto employees bogs down workflows and even intensifies work. Meta itself is going through a morale crisis as the company fired thousands of employees and forced the ones that remained to use AI as much as possible.
Tell that to Zuckerberg. Preaching either from the top of his ivory tower or deep under the sand where his head is buried, he’s nonetheless trying to sell us on the idea that AI will “begin a new era of personal empowerment,” placing it in a tradition of other technological advances that have “steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose.”
More on Meta: Meta Exec Rages Against Employees Asking for More Time Off Because AI Made Them More Efficient