Journalist Casey Newton criticizes Zuckerberg’s optimistic manifesto on superintelligence
Journalist Casey Newton (Platformer) criticizes Mark Zuckerberg’s essay on superintelligence for overlooking risks, including job automation. He compares superintelligence to a dragon – a visible but hard-to-imagine power.
In a commentary titled “Superintelligence is a dragon”, journalist Casey Newton responds to Mark Zuckerberg’s essay “The Future is for Everyone”, in which the head of Meta describes a path toward a “positive AI future”. Newton compares superintelligence to the dragons in the series House of the Dragon – the superweapon there is visible to everyone and clearly dangerous, whereas with artificial intelligence, he says, no one can imagine the end state, even though the industry is investing trillions of dollars in its development.
Newton writes that most of the company leaders he speaks with about the topic cannot imagine true superintelligence leading to a substantial loss of jobs, let alone greater harm. In his view, society focuses on the idea that AI will cure diseases and overlooks reports that scientists are using AI to design new viruses (without endangering humans in the case described, according to the article). Zuckerberg argues in the essay that “invention, not automation, will be the greatest benefit of superintelligence” – Newton responds that invention and automation go hand in hand in business, and the net impact on jobs remains uncertain.
Newton further notes that Zuckerberg enters the debate as a relative latecomer compared with the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, who spent years warning about the risks of superintelligence (in 2015, Altman called it “probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity”, and in January this year, Amodei published a text about scenarios involving a loss of control over AI) before writing their own optimistic essays about its benefits.
As an example of the positive potential of AI that gives him reason for optimism, Newton mentions that Anthropic published a post that same day stating that an unreleased model had made substantial progress on a problem related to the 167-year-old Riemann hypothesis – after an employee with no formal mathematics education asked the model to work on it and told it to “believe in itself”. You can find the details in the source article.
Why it matters
The commentary highlights a contradiction between earlier public warnings by AI company leaders about the risks of superintelligence and their current optimistic rhetoric, which, according to the author, downplays the impact on employment and the possibility of the technology being misused. For readers and companies alike, it is a prompt to avoid relying on the framing of the future of AI presented by companies with a commercial interest in its further development.
Two audiences, two different impacts
What this means
For individuals
The text points out that optimistic public statements by AI company leaders about superintelligence may not reflect the real risk of its impact on jobs, which, according to the author, the industry tends to downplay.
More practical updates →For a business
The commentary suggests that companies developing AI publicly emphasize the benefits (new discoveries, scientific progress) and speak less openly about the uncertain net impact of automation on employment, which is relevant to companies planning to deploy AI in their operations.
Risks and compliance More business impacts →Check the original
Event sources
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