Everyone seemed to write essays this summer. Tony Blair, Andy Burnham and, of course, Mark Zuckerberg. In “The Future is for Everyone”, Zuckerberg claimed that the world of superintelligence would not only consist of existential risk and threats to jobs and people alike, but, ultimately, opportunities for all to revel in the fruits of technology. The issue, as the title of his essay suggests, is that an emphasis on the future is not good enough — because it is not now.
Zuckerberg’s essay was not short of imagination or possibility, but it was short on dates. All his promises, once superintelligence arrives, remain in the future tense — the future is for everyone, eventually.
Even to someone more technologically optimistic than most, the gap between the present and that promised future feels less like a compelling vision than an admission that the medium term remains ill-thought-through. Those currently building the future are struggling to explain to those outside the tech bubble why they must wait for another LLM release for things to get materially better. Or even, that their technology will not kill off vast swathes of humanity within the next few years.