Zuckerberg, AI, and Life as Nothing More than Acquisitions
In high school, I had a friend who collected stamps. She did not collect them to possess them in the sense that a video game character collects tokens to possess them for points or to win in some level. She, to my complete and utter bafflement, collected them because she thought they were beautiful. She obsessed over her favorites, and spent a fair amount of time trying to convince us, her friends, about the artistic merit of each and every one. The longest relationship she had in high school was with a boy who collected coins. They were the very definition of awkwardly adorable — living their best lives, in love not only with each other but with the dorky little slice of aesthetic pleasure largely visible only to themselves. Zuckerberg might be a dork, but he certainly has loved no love like that.
Zuckerberg recently penned a manifesto of sorts around the future of imitative AI and why we should not restrict open weight models (what open weight models are does not really matter here but they are imitative AI models whose rules for how they calculate the patterns that are the first step in their output are publicly available. What matters is that open weight models are under regulatory threat, and Facebook, behind in the imitative AI race, sees open weight as a way to catch up) and the glorious future that awaits all of us in his imitative AI paradise. Standard hype bullshit, in other words. But it does demonstrate to me something that has been latent in how our tech overlords see the world: Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand life as anything other than a collection of things.
Zuckerberg does not see accomplishments in terms of being meaningful because of the work. Rather, he seems to see them as merely things to collect. Take how he discusses his daughter:
My daughter loves to bake so my agent plans personalized recipes for us to make together each weekend, orders the ingredients, and then offers suggestions as we’re baking.
● Everyone will have incredible tools for creation to express your ideas. My 8 year old daughter can already code her ideas and produce videos in an evening that would have either taken me months or been impossible previously. Now we’re designing a robot together.
No, Zuckerberg’s daughter is not coding her ideas in any meaningful sense. She is not struggling with the process of trying, failing, and learning what does and does not work as she improves. She doesn’t understand anything she has done and has no idea how to do it differently or better. There is a reason we teach kids to multiply and what multiplication means before we hand them calculators. Zuckerberg’s daughter might have done something, but she has accomplished nothing.
That thread runs through his document. He talks about how people will have the tools to be more creative. These tools, of course, already exist. Pens, paper, typewriters, laptops, etc. have been around for approximately ever. People have always had the ability to be creative and always have been. My own writing has never been published, but it still brings me pleasure to write. I cannot draw, because I have never put any time into learning, but I still doodle. My origami is simplistic and basic and still a nice stress reliever. I create all the time, as do most people. But Zuckerberg doesn’t understand that as creativity — he only sees the output, not the process.
Zuckerberg has always been like this, and most tech leaders are as well. These firms and the people who run them see money as an end, rather than a means. Many people form businesses because they want to make money solving a problem or doing something they think is fun. Our tech overlords start businesses for the sake of collecting money, and that collection-as-end colors everything they say and do. They don’t see creativity as a process but as an output. They don’t see education as a journey but a destination, a list of credentials they can use to impress people into giving them more money. They don’t see people as people, with hopes and dreams and value in and of themselves. Their dream of imitative AI is just the dream of replacing all those pesky humans — the ones who refuse to be treated as merely things — with, well, things. Because, in the end, all they care about is collecting more things.