Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto meant to define a positive future for artificial intelligence. The essay was broad, touching on everything from data centers to preventing government tyranny, but its core promise was simple: AI will make our lives easier, more productive, and more creative. Yet the response from many readers was not optimism but unease. A growing number of critics see the manifesto not as a vision of human flourishing, but as a technocratic fantasy that confuses accomplishment with meaning.
The disconnect is perhaps best captured by a small anecdote. A rock climber told a reporter he had used AI to generate a motivational poster of a bear walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said “Do cool shit.” He hung it on his bedroom wall. When he showed it to people, no one had much to say. The reason is telling: the poster was made in seconds, required no skill or thought, and expressed almost nothing about him. It was, in a word, slop.
Zuckerberg’s manifesto is filled with similar promises of effortless creation and automated self-improvement. He envisions a future where “everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent” that works around the clock to improve relationships, health, career, finances, and hobbies. He suggests AI can pick personalized recipes to bake with his daughter, serve as a tutor with a PhD in every subject, and give everyone powerful tools to create new businesses. The underlying assumption is that more efficiency and more output are always better.
Relationships cannot be automated
One of the most striking claims in the manifesto is that an AI agent could improve your relationships. But what strengthens a relationship is personal investment—the time, attention, and care that one person gives another. An algorithm might predict what your father wants for his birthday, but it cannot give him your time or your consideration. Love is not just a feeling; it is a way of paying attention.
Zuckerberg’s example of asking an AI for a recipe to bake with his daughter is particularly revealing. He could have thought about what she enjoys, what skills she is learning, and what stories he might tell while mixing dough. The process of choosing a recipe, making mistakes, and laughing together is where the memory lives. An AI-generated recipe strips away that human layer, turning a potential bonding moment into a transactional task.
Hobbies are about experience, not productivity
The manifesto also promises that AI will help people accomplish more in their hobbies. But that misses the point of having a hobby. Hobbies are supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable. They are a chance to lose yourself in an activity, to struggle, to improve, and to feel the satisfaction of doing something with your own hands and mind.
Reading a book, for example, is not just about absorbing information. It is about the experience of the words, the rhythm of the sentences, and the feeling of being inside another person’s mind. A summary generated by AI cannot replicate the pleasure of the opening lines of Renata Adler’s “Speedboat” or the mood they create. Similarly, knitting a scarf is soothing because of the repetitive physical motion, not because of the finished product. An AI that knits for you would rob you of the very thing that makes the hobby worthwhile.
Creation requires effort and practice
Zuckerberg says AI will give everyone incredible tools for creation. But people already have those tools—they are called cameras, word processors, paintbrushes, and musical instruments. The pleasure of creation comes from learning to use these tools, making mistakes, and improving over time. No one becomes a filmmaker or a novelist overnight, and the struggle is part of the reward.
The same logic applies to business. Zuckerberg suggests that AI will enable everyone to start new companies, but this is the man whose metaverse project flopped despite unlimited resources. More ideas do not automatically lead to successful businesses. Competition becomes fiercer, and the technology itself is not always reliable. Meta has announced that its AI hacked another company, following similar incidents from OpenAI and Anthropic. Entrepreneurs may find that AI creates as many problems as it solves.
Education needs human mentors
Another promise is a personalized AI tutor with a PhD in every subject. This brings back memories of the rushed experiment with online learning in 2020, which was largely a failure. Students struggled, teachers burned out, and the social element of learning disappeared. Education is not just the transfer of facts; it is a social process that involves peer pressure, admiration for mentors, and the kind of ethical guidance that Aristotle called phronesis.
A mentor does more than answer questions. A mentor models what it means to be curious, to be rigorous, and to care about a subject. That kind of relationship cannot be replaced by a chatbot, no matter how many PhDs it has.
Science, privacy, and inequality
Zuckerberg’s strongest point may be that AI can help everyone benefit from and contribute to scientific advances. But personalization in medicine requires doctors to have time to listen to patients, and patients to have the means to pay for care. The manifesto is vague about the details, and it is hard to ignore the privacy implications of harvesting people’s health data for AI research—especially when Mark Zuckerberg is the one making the pitch.
The manifesto also acknowledges that the best AI models are paywalled, accessible only to the rich. Zuckerberg wonders, in effect, what would happen if everyone had free access. But many models are already free, and making the status quo permanent is not a vision of the future. It is a defense of the present.
A better definition of AI’s purpose
Consider what mathematician Terence Tao has said about AI in his field. He imagines a future where AI can solve research-level mathematical problems, but then asks a crucial question: What are our goals? Tao suggests that the purpose of AI should be to help people understand and do mathematics, not just to produce correct answers. That is a more profound goal, because understanding is about connecting with the world and with ourselves.
Zuckerberg’s vision lacks that depth. Every promise in his manifesto is measured by accomplishment—more productivity, more creation, more success. The possibility of pleasure, experience, self-knowledge, and self-expression is missing. If Silicon Valley believes that the point of life is to stockpile accomplishments, it is no wonder that billionaires seem so unhappy. They have traded experience for achievement and cheated themselves out of their own lives.
What makes a life good?
At the heart of the debate is a philosophical question: What does it mean to live a good life? When we read a book, listen to music, or look at a painting, we are not just consuming content. We are experiencing another person’s mind, their aesthetic vision, and their way of interpreting the world. Art is a kind of attention—the artist’s attention to their craft, and our attention to their work.
If AI can do everything for us, what happens to our goals and our efforts? If you do not have to pay attention or work to meet your goal, does that goal still mean anything? These are old questions, but they are made urgent by the rapid advance of AI. They are the questions Zuckerberg’s manifesto never asks.
In the end, we return to the man with the AI-generated poster. There was nothing to say about it because it expressed nothing of him. It required no attention, no devotion, and no thought. The only lesson was that he felt he needed a reminder to “do cool shit”—which, for most people, is not something that should require a machine to tell them.
Source: The Verge News