Zuckerberg DESTROYS AI Fear Mongers, DEFENDS AI

So today, Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500word artificial intelligence manifesto titled The Future is for Everyone. And so I thought we'd talk a little bit about that because it's it's kind of unique. It's it's unique as compared to what other AI companies have put out there. And uh I think it's worth uh talking about. The future is for everyone. So, you know, unlike most statements coming out of the AI industry in Silicon Valley today, it's not an apology for the technology. It's not a doomsday scenario. It's not a, you know, let's dedicate this for the common interest and the and the public good or whatever. and and uh so I it's it's different and you know it's it's certainly not and this is a big difference between it and what's coming out of anthropic and open AI it's not a demand for government to save us and the from from the people building the AI who are asking the government save us from us save the world from us if you leave us alone if we just go out there and do our stuff we will cause the end of the world. So, the government has to step in to stop us. The Zakote says some things that I think are wrong about government and about regulations. Uh, but he's not demanding the government save us from him. So, it's, you know, it's it's mixed. It's got a lot of bad stuff, but as compared to anything else coming out of these guys, it's it's really cool. It it's not an exercise in doom. It's not an exercise in guilt. It's not an exercise in slow down. Let's slow down and be very very careful. None of that is in the manifesto. So I I congratulate him. Zuckered actually does talk about liberty. He talks about free enterprise which is the safe word for you know that they use if they want to talk about free markets and capitalism. He talks about open inquiry abundance. abundance invention and individual empowerment, a major American CEO has in in the tech industry has an optimistic positive vision about the future. And I know a lot of you don't like Mike Zuckerberg and there's many reasons maybe not to like him, but God is comparison in comparison to the CEOs of OpenAI anthropic. this guy is relatively speaking a a a breath of fresh air and rationality. I mean the central idea in the manifesto is basically right. The greatest promise of artificial intelligence is not that a handful of institutions or the government are going to manage society. That's a dystopia and that's not what's going to happen if we unless we force it on ourselves. You know, the the the greatest promise of artificial intelligence is that individuals are going to use it to become more capable to learn, create, discover, build businesses, improve their health, and pursue their own goals. Now, this is the right orientation, even if some of the details he's getting wrong. AI shouldn't be conceived primarily as a mechanism for replacing people, replacing jobs. It should be conceived as a tool that expands what an individual can do. It's a productivity enhancer, a mind enhancer, an intelligence enhancer, not a replacer. Zuckerberg imagines every person having an extraordinary capable personal agent, AI agent, a tutor, a research assistant, a business advisor, a health coach, a creative partner. I love that vision for AI. It's exactly how I see AI developing. I mean, I use it in a way as a tutor. Teaches me stuff, as a research assistant. It helps me put these new shows together. And, you know, I haven't yet used it as a business advisor, but I might start taking some marketing advice from it. It, you know, it can't do worse than the marketers I've hired over the years to advise you on bookshelf. So, I'm going to try it. Zuckerberg. Imagines individuals starting companies without raising enormous amounts of capital or assembling large organizations because they don't need to because AI will do a lot of the work and AI is cheap much cheaper than what you would need if you hired a bunch of people and installed a bunch of equipment. He imagines scientists using AI to discover drugs, entrepreneurs designing new products, small businesses operating on a scale that previously was only possible for large businesses. This is what technological progress does. It amplifies human ability. Again, it doesn't replace human beings. It amplifies our productivity. It amplifies our abilities. The steam engine amplified physical power. The computer amplified calculation. The internet amplified access to knowledge and communication. AI amplifies certain aspects of cognition. The ability to analyze enormous amounts of data, identify patterns, generate alternatives, and automate intellectual routines. None of this diminishes the individual human being. It gives the individual human mind more leverage to reshape reality. It gives us leverage. And Zuckerberg makes makes another important point. The principal value of AI will not be automation. It will be invention. Now that distinction matters. Most of the public discussion assumes that the amount of useful work in the world is fixed. No, it's not. AI will perform that work. People will become unnecessary, we are told. And therefore, government must find some way to support all these economically obsolete human beings. That is a major economic and conceptual fallacy which Zucker does not fall prey to. The fact is human wants human wants and therefore human needs human values are not fixed. The number of discoveries still be made is not fixed. The number of diseases to be cured, products to be created, experiences to be designed, that's going to be interesting. And problems to be solved is not fixed. There's no fixed economic pie there. No fixed e, you know, human wants. There is certainly no fixed quantity of human achievement or of human flourishing. Agricultural machinery eliminated most agricultural jobs. It did not eliminate work. It liberated human beings from substance farming, subsistence farming and made possible an explosion of industry, medicine, science, art, entertainment, travel and technology. AI will eliminate particular tasks. It will eliminate some jobs. Good. Eliminated unnecessary labor is one of the purposes of every technology. The standard shouldn't be how do we preserve every existing job. The standard should be does this technology allow us to produce more value, live better, and pursue possibilities that didn't exist before. On that standard, AI represents an astonishing opportunity. It's an astonishing It's an amazing technology. And Zuckerberg is right to reject the idea that AI must be controlled by one supposedly benevolent institution. Again, he's arguing against his colleagues in the AI world. He recognizes the danger of concentrating this technology in a government, a government appointed committee or tiny group of experts claiming to speak for humanity. And this is kind of the nonprofit model mode, you know, mode of open AI and the what what is it? Public benefits corporation mode of of uh of anthropic. I it's not about profit. It's not about business. They the the the smart elite should control AI for the benefit of all of us. There's no committee qualified to decide the goals of individuals and by extension of mankind. Individuals must be free to decide their own goals. Use AI in pursuit of their own values. That means competition. Competition between AI companies. It means open models according to Zuckerberg. Right? So Zuckerberg, one of the things he's promoting in this manifesto is open source models. is models that are not controlled from ab above but that users and intermediaries can change and can adapt. So he wants more competition open models and it means strong privacy protections which Zuckerberg is advocating for. It means the ability to choose an AI that serves your purpose. Not one programmed to lecture you about the political values of its creators, which is a real risk today with um Anthropic and Open AI and and and Grock. You know, Zuckerberg even criticizes models that impose a centralized dogma on users. He argues that alignment should mean helping the user pursue his goals within legitimate legal boundaries, of course, rather than forcing every user to conform to the ideology of the AI company and its chief philosophy officer. And this is all basically good stuff. Again, not perfect, but it's all good stuff coming out of B out of Zucker. Sadly, it then he then, you know, gets confused, right? I mean, he like like most of these people can't think in principle and they don't understand a lot of the a lot of the concepts that they're really dealing with. So, you know, he he describes freedom in the in the manifesto primarily as kind of a balance of power. You want to give AI to everyone he argues. So the different people, companies, institutions and governments are going to check each other. The freedom is not about a balance of power. Although political freedom requires a balance of power and checks and balances to constrain the power the political power the political entities have. But AI is primarily an economic power issue. Freedom at the end of the day is the protection of individual rights and somehow some in in the context of political power. It needs checks and balances. But a market is not a battlefield in which competing power centers hold one another in check. A market is a system of voluntary exchange. A business has economic power only in a sense it has created something people want to buy. Government has political power, the power to compel, the power to prohibit, fine, imprison and ultimately use physical force. So yes, political power and economic power are very different. One is coercion, one is and force, the other is voluntary exchange, mutually beneficial exchange. So they're not the same. If one AI company becomes dominant because it produces the best model at the best price, that does not make it a dictatorship. Consumers remain free to use it, reject it, or finance a competitor. But if government controls AI, if it licenses models, dictates acceptable answers, restricts access, or demands private user information, that is coercion. The central distinction is not concentrated power versus distributed power. It is voluntary production versus coercive control. And Zuckerberg undermines his own argument when he proposes extremely close collaboration between AI companies and government. He wants Frontier Labs to give government early access to developing models, intermediate training checkpoints, and technical personnel. Think about the contradiction. We're told that concentrated AI power is dangerous, and they're told the government should receive the most powerful models before the rest of us do. Now, if you're worried about surveillance, censorship, centralized control, giving me government privilege, privileged access to frontier AI is not the solution. Government is the one institution with the legal power to force matter, to act, to demand information, and to punish users, citizens. Now, there may be legitimate national and they are legitimate national security reasons to work with government on specific threats, cyber attacks, hostile regimes, biological weapons, and maybe lots of others that need to be thought through and need to be analyzed and and and thought about. But that corporation has to be narrowly defined and constrained by objective laws. It cannot become an informal partnership between big tech and Washington in which government gains access, influence and capabilities unavailable to ordinary citizens. I mean, but this is exactly what people like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump or many people within Trump administration are demanding and what open AI and anthropic are urging AI companies to engage in. And now unfortunately Zuckerberg is too. We've already seen what happens when government officials pressure social media companies to uh suppress speech, right? Remember that co I mean Meta of all companies should understand that danger. The protection against government tyranny is not a vague balance of power. It should be a government constitutionally limited to protect individual rights. It is encryption, property rights, warrants based on evidence, due process, and objective laws against actual threats and actual use of force. Now, there's another troubling note in the manifesto. Zakov says there's no objective answer to what constitutes the best life. Now this is not true. Now not in the of course because not in the details that each individuals must choose for himself but in the principles absolutely there is I mean it's true in a that that you know what Zuckerber is suggesting the government should not impose a particular life upon us but the reason is not that every conception of life is equally valid. The reason is that individual must use must use his own rational judgment to discover and pursue the values his life requires. There is an objective difference between creation and destruction, knowledge and ignorance, independence and obedience, productiveness and being a parasite. The whole optimistic vision of the manifesto depends upon these kind of distinctions. Why celebrate invention if invention is not objectively better than stagnation? Why praise prosperity if prosperity is merely one arbitrary preference among many? Why defend individual empowerment if liberty is not objectively superior to dictatorship? Zuckerberg best arguments depend upon values that his own philosophical relativism can't defend. Finally, I'm uneasy with the repeated insistence in this manifesto. The data centers have to prove that they benefit quote the community. Meta is now promising jobs, teacher bonuses, infrastructure spending, cheap energy, and a billion dollar community fund for all the communities in the vicinity of data centers that it built. Now there's nothing wrong with a company voluntarily making these kind of investments. They may this might be smart business but we should reject the premise that a producer must purchase permission from the community to exist. A data data center already exists. Data center already benefits. People by producing a valuable service, buying land, paying employees, purchasing electricity, contracting with suppliers, and paying taxes to the extent the taxes are used productively. It should not have to prove that every pressure group receives a special benefit. The proper question is simple. Is matter respecting the rights of its neighbors? If it is, it should be free to build. If it causes demonstrable harm to someone's property, it should be held responsible under objective law. Still, you know, taking as a whole, the manifesto, I think, is a positive at a moment where so many people are terrified of progress. When politicians want permission slips for innovation, and intellectuals tell us that human beings are about to become useless or dead. One of the world's most important technology companies is declaring that AI should serve individual aspiration, invention, entrepreneurship, privacy, and abundance. Now, that's worth applauding. But manner must follow its best insight all the way. AI should not belong to everyone in some collectivist collectivized sense. It should belong to the individuals and companies who create it and it should be available to others through voluntary exchange. People do not need an equal aotment of intelligence or compute. They need freedom. The freedom to build, buy, experiment, compete, fail and succeed. The future will not be created by humanity as one collective consciousness. There is no such thing. It'll be created by particular individuals, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, inventors, investors, and millions of ambitious people. Millions, billions. Why millions? Billions of ambitious people using these new tools to pursue their own visions to an extent unimaginable in the past. That is what AI makes possible. dreaming unimaginable dreams, making them a reality, and doing so anybody, the ability to do so now exists for anybody anywhere at a pretty low cost. So, you know, I I I anybody who's excited by AI gets a thumbs up from me. The great promise of AI is not that a super intelligence is going to take care of us or that we get UBI finally. It's that free human beings armed with unprecedented tools will be able to treat achieve more than they've ever achieved before. That is a future worth fighting for. And it would be great if we had some of these tech guys on our side. And maybe this is a small step for Zuckerberg to take in the right direction and maybe others would follow. Maybe he will get better. But yeah, we need more positive views about the potential the possibilities of AI and um good for Zuckerbuk. You know, I it's not often we have reason to compliment Mike Mark Zuckerberg, but uh good for him uh good for him for taking a stand here uh on um on the a on AI. I encourage you to read the AI manifesto.