[24263] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Aug 18 10:39:42 2026
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2026 07:32:16 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
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This is the text of my national network radio report yesterday
regarding Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto regarding the future
of AI, along with my discussion of related issues. As always there may
have been minor variations from this script as I presented this report
live on air.
- - -
So yes, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta formerly Facebook, last week
released a rather long, about 6500 words "manifesto" laying out his
vision of an AI "future for everyone".
It's important to remember that Mark blew billions on his VR Metaverse
idea -- that was everyone would be living in virtual reality much of
the time -- he actually renamed the company to Meta for that one. Well
Metaverse is so much yesterday now so of course today for Mark like
the rest of Big Tech it's all about AI.
Literally every day there are new troubling AI announcements. Google
just announced that users could remove the visible watermarks from
their AI imagery. That's perfect for crooks wanting to spread
misinformation or conduct deepfake scams. Google knows that the
special tools that try to detect AI imagery aren't used by most people
and there's no reason to expect them to. So really this is Google just
giving another Big Tech AI finger to society once again.
Which takes us back to Mark. Because Mark's essay actually managed to
encapsulate pretty much most of the aspects of AI that most people
detest and have no interest in actually using. The AI firms aren't
satisfied with you getting sometimes dangerous misinformation from AI
Search Overviews or AI chatbots. A very big part now really is AI
agents. Big Tech really wants you to let their AI agents do lots of
stuff for you, running around websites, making appointments and
reservations, answering your email, buying products for you, basically
taking over your life. This of course would over time create
dependencies on these AI agents so that firms could upsell you to all
sorts of paid products just to get through your average day.
The fly in this Big Tech ointment however is that most people have
shown little interest in paying for AI at all. And they show even less
interest in AI agents, which people quite reasonably don't trust not
to mess up their lives massively, especially when the firms generally
take no responsibility for the actions their AI agents take on your
behalf. And Mark's view of a world of AI agents running your personal
life, your family life, your business life, and essentially all other
aspects of your life is the kind of nightmare that most people want
absolutely nothing to do with, no matter how much the firms who have
already lost so much trust try to force this on society.
And this kind of sick dream is not restricted to Zuckerberg. Various
Big Tech CEOs seem to routinely spout this kind of nonsense, and many
observers suspect that perhaps this flows from childhood infatuation
with sci-fi stories promoting fundamentally all powerful Big Tech
molding and controlling people's lives, what is usually called
"technocracy". In sci-fi stories this is just a plot concept -- it's
just fiction after all -- but when you have Big Tech billionaires who
really do control so many aspects of society talking about these ideas
as goals that they actually want to implement, that's another matter
entirely.
Some of these trends have been present for many years. But untold
billions, ultimately trillions -- of dollars are being pumped into
those widely hated AI data centers by Big Tech. They're desperate to
find ways to to make money back on those massive speculative
investments, and this combined with lax AI regulation, have created
the perfect storm where a lot can go seriously wrong very quickly. And
the prescriptions from Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Big Tech
billionaire technocrats are exactly what we DON'T need to improve this
situation, that's for sure.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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