My fiancé works at Anthropic.
asserted
fiancé → work → Anthropic
On Sunday night, HBO aired the third-season finale of House of the Dragon, the stuffy and unrelentingly bleak prequel to Game of Thrones.
asserted
HBO → air → Thrones
The show takes place in a world where one great house holds a near-monopoly on a superweapon — dragons — and thus rules the world.
asserted
house → take → world
House of the Dragon begins when the ruling dynasty splits and both sides retain access to their dragons, upending the balance of power in Westeros for the first time in generations.
asserted
sides → begin → generations
In this world, when only one global power had access to a superweapon, the result was a brutally enforced peace.
asserted
result → have → superweapon
And when two global powers gain access to the superweapon, the result is a ruinous civil war.
asserted
result → gain → superweapon
In Westeros, no one is confused about what a dragon is; in all likelihood one has been responsible for the death of someone they know.
asserted
they → confuse → someone
But here in our world, where the technology industry is investing trillions of dollars into building and serving ever-more powerful artificial intelligence models, we struggle to imagine the end state.
asserted
we → invest → state
This is not entirely our fault: while we are in the midst of a rapid improvement in model capabilities, day-to-day life feels more or less the same.
asserted
life → feel → day
The CEOs I speak with on the subject mostly cannot even imagine that a true superintelligence will result in significant job loss, much less greater harm.
asserted
superintelligence → speak → loss
We fixate on the idea that AI will cure all disease, and mostly ignore headlines about scientists using AI to engineer new viruses.
asserted
scientists → fixate → viruses
(Fortunately, these ones pose no threat to humans.)
asserted
ones → pose → humans
For all the travails of the Westerosi, at least there, a dragon always looks like a dragon.
asserted
dragon → look → dragon
I thought about all this Monday morning while reading “The Future is for Everyone,” Mark Zuckerberg’s facile, self-serving manifesto about “the path to a positive AI future.”
asserted
Future → think → future
Over 6,500 words, Zuckerberg attempts to rally people around the flag of artificial intelligence, based on its power to give people new creative, business, and personal assistance, and aid with medical and scientific research.
asserted
Zuckerberg → attempt → research
“Invention, not automation, will be the greatest contribution of superintelligence,” Zuckerberg writes.
asserted
Zuckerberg → write → superintelligence
“Early AI could answer questions and do routine work.
uncertain
AI → answer → work
Soon it will increasingly help discover new knowledge — ranging from discovering new drugs to cure a family member's disease to finding new ways to improve your business.”
For businesses, invention and automation go hand in hand, and it remains uncertain what net effect this will have on jobs.
asserted
this → help → jobs
AI will give people incredible new creative tools, and help them organize their lives, and drive academic disciplines forward.
asserted
them → give → disciplines
(Today Anthropic published a blog post claiming that an unreleased model made substantial progress on a problem related to the 167-year-old Riemann hypothesis after an employee with no formal mathematical training asked it to and told it to believe in itself.)
asserted
employee → publish → itself
To the extent I feel optimism about AI, it is because of these things.
asserted
it → feel → things
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote about AI’s potential for positive social change in a 2021 essay called “Moore’s Law for Everything”; he followed it up in 2024 with “The Intelligence Age.”
asserted
he → write → Age
Weeks later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published “Machines of Loving Grace,” his own account of how AI could change the world for the better.
uncertain
AI → publish → better
Altman and Amodei’s essays were notable because both men had spent years warning about AI’s potential to be destructive.
asserted
men → spend → potential
In 2015 Altman called superintelligence “probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”
asserted
Altman → call → humanity
And in January of this year, after sounding similar warnings for years, Amodei published “The Adolescence of Technology,” laying out in detail various nightmare scenarios in which we either lose control of AI or power over it is seized by an autocrat.
asserted
we → sound → autocrat
It is against this grim backdrop that Zuckerberg seeks to define himself and Meta.
asserted
Zuckerberg → seek → himself
“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” he writes.
asserted
he → develop → doom
“I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future.”
asserted
AI → understand → future
What follows is a series of policy proposals that map neatly to Meta’s commercial interests.
asserted
that → follow → interests
He writes that we should accelerate the process for building data centers, which may help the company build its nascent neocloud business.
uncertain
company → write → business
We should maintain export controls on advanced chips, which advantage Meta’s open-weights models over its Chinese rivals.
asserted
which → maintain → rivals
We should reduce “training data restrictions,” which will help Meta fight ongoing lawsuits from the creatives whose works were used in creating its models.
asserted
works → reduce → models
And we should create legal protections for distillation, which lets Meta draft off the innovations of the frontier labs by training its models on their work.
asserted
Meta → create → work
All of this is to be expected; every tech CEO’s foremost obligation in an essay like this is to talk their book.
asserted
obligation → expect → book
But Zuckerberg’s version is notable for the way that it celebrates individual voices and democracy at the same time that Meta is working to warp the democratic process through secretive data center deals, aggressive lobbying against state-level AI regulations, and payments to Trump interests.
asserted
Meta → celebrate → interests
Even worse — and not for the first time — he seems to misunderstand the technology he is building.
asserted
he → seem → technology
Zuckerberg’s essay mentions Meta’s $50 billion data center project in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which will one day cover about six square miles and is projected to use seven times as much energy as the entire city of New Orleans.
asserted
which → mention → Orleans
Zuckerberg presents it as a model for creating “community compacts” with municipalities where it builds; he says Meta’s investment supported $50,000 bonuses for teachers in the area this year.
asserted
investment → present → area
But last month, the New York Times’ Eli Tan and Maureen Farrell laid out how the project came together: with dozens of non-disclosure agreements, up to $10 billion in sales-tax breaks, a rushed timeline, and not a single public meeting before state officials unveiled the deal.
asserted
officials → lay → deal
…and 52 more, not listed.
The Aporia
