Zuckerberg wrote a 6,500-word AI manifesto — and missed the point of living

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has published a 6,500-word manifesto attempting to define a positive future for artificial intelligence. The text, written by himself, his communications team, or possibly an AI, aims to defend a technology that has faced growing criticism lately. This looks like an ominous sign: a new technology claiming to change the world is now having to justify itself for the first time.

The reasons for concern have multiplied. People resent data center construction and rising electricity bills. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned the technology could cause "unusually painful" job losses across several industries. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's house was first attacked with a Molotov cocktail, then with gunfire. In the manifesto itself, Zuckerberg expresses surprise that the discourse around AI is so full of doom and says he does not understand why anyone who believes AI will eliminate most jobs would rush to build that future.

The columnist ties this manifesto to another story — about a climbing acquaintance who used AI to generate a motivational poster for his bedroom. The image showed a bear walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that read "Do cool shit." Nobody among his friends ever commented on the poster, and the author admits he himself does not know how to properly react to such things.

The problem is that no one made the AI image. Even a bad drawing by a human requires effort and time and expresses the artist's mind. Generating from a prompt is just typing text into a box, and there is nothing to react to. In the author's view, Zuckerberg is trying to become a "soothing tech guru," but his manifesto only highlights the emptiness of the sleek, streamlined relationships that AI promises to deliver.