I spent my morning reading Mark Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word essay, The Future is for Everyone, not because it was a particularly good read or an interesting one in a literary sense, but because it is a concerning one.
Quite frankly, I’ve come to consider any major update—or even a mere prediction—about AI, what it can or cannot do, and how it will upend the world as a topic of great concern that demands my full attention.
So I approached the rather unnecessarily long essay with the same attention I would give to a book by Malcolm Gladwell.
His words, unsurprisingly, left me even more conflicted about the future of AI, its role in our world, and, quite frighteningly, our place in its world.
His picture of a world shaped by superintelligence leaves me with an equal measure of fear and excitement.
I’ll start with the excitement.
The seductive promise of an AI-powered paradise
“Every AI could answer questions and do routine 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.”
I recently watched Hunter Biden, the son of the immediate past President of the United States, describe his father’s suffering as cancer spread to his bones. According to him, the pain was excruciating to watch.
Also recently, the father of Messi, whom many consider the greatest footballer in history, passed away after a prolonged illness.
In 2024, I lost a dear friend to ovarian cancer. She suffered in a way you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Not only was a promising life cut short, but the intensity of the pain the disease inflicts on its victims feels unforgivable, even in death.
Religion and theologians have long sold eternal life as the only escape from the suffering that is inevitable here on earth. According to them, heaven or paradise is humanity’s ultimate consolation—a place where there will be no sorrow, no weeping, and no death.
It is a message that has earned countless converts, and one that has stretched the boundaries of hope for us mortals as we struggle to understand the meaning of life.
But what if AI is the thing—or the being—that could bring us the utopia that heaven promises? What if, here on earth, there were no cancer, no Alzheimer’s disease, no stroke? What if the power to create the kind of paradise so many people seek has been placed in our hands through AI superintelligence?
A tool—or a being, depending on what AI eventually becomes—that could predict that an infant would develop cancer and produce a tailored vaccine that eradicates that fate. Wouldn’t that be a desirable world? The heaven we all seek and strive for?
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While Zuckerberg also paints a picture of abundance—one in which an AI agent can, almost on a whim, make your dreams come to life—that vision appeals less to me. But I must nonetheless admit that placing such beings in the hands of a child who has been disadvantaged by the mere accident of being born into a poor family could fundamentally transform the lives of those whom nature dealt an unfortunate hand.
“Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more. It will free up time for things you enjoy and help accomplish more than you could otherwise,” he wrote.
How exciting.
Now to the doom.
The terrifying cost of AI beyond our control
Almost every technological advancement is marketed as a tool to advance the cause of humanity, particularly individual empowerment. Bill Gates wanted personal computers in every home. Steve Jobs wanted one in your pocket. Zuckerberg himself wanted us to connect with friends we never thought we needed.
Has the world become better and safer because of these inventions?
Through Bill’s vision, I am able to write this. Yet through that same vision, a lonely sexagenarian can be scammed of her retirement savings by a young man in Delta. She suffers a heart attack and dies.
Through Jobs’s vision, terrorists record the beheading of their victims and share it on Zuckerberg’s platform.
Technology comes with its costs, and I’m afraid Zuckerberg, in his deliberate—or perhaps blind—optimism, may be selling us the apocalypse.
If AI is the world’s greatest invention, and if superintelligence will become more intelligent than the collective intelligence of humanity, can we possibly imagine the danger such a tool—or such beings—would pose in the hands of evil people?
This raises a crucial question, not just at the individual level, but also among nations. Even in a multipolar world, where one or two nations become dominant powers within their geographic spheres, what happens to smaller nations when economically and technologically advanced countries are armed with superintelligence far more advanced than that of their counterparts? Won’t the very expression of sovereignty, no matter how flawed it is today, be wiped out entirely?
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With the non-autonomous technology we have today, Israel is levelling Gaza and wiping out an entire civilisation. Russia continues to bombard Ukraine. The war in Sudan rages on. Death and suffering greet us whichever way we turn.
What happens when these nations can send their robots, armed with superintelligence, and completely avoid the risk of sending human troops? Won’t that intensify the scale of killing and destruction?
Back at the individual level—or among small organisations—we have seen bad actors, from Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, use sophisticated weapons to carry out their atrocities and, for more than two decades, survive the government’s efforts to wipe them out.
Even the promise of disease eradication through the biological breakthroughs that AI could produce comes with a much bigger concern. If AI can develop a vaccine for cancer, won’t state actors use the same tool to create new biological weapons capable of unleashing even deadlier diseases?
“On biological and chemical risk, the concern is that the same capabilities that enable scientists to design new drugs could also enable bad actors to design harmful compounds. This frames the question as a tradeoff between the significant benefits of advancing science towards curing cancer and other diseases vs the risk of potential new issues,” Zuckerberg argues.
The magic wand Zuckerberg appears to propose to ward off the impending doom is giving everyone access to superintelligence.
“As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself or a small set of experts who control it should decide what is best for humanity,” he wrote.
“We disagree,” he continued. “The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters in their own lives.”
But the idea that everyone would have equal access to superintelligence, and to the most advanced models, is, in fact, wishful thinking. History shows that this has never been the case, and one child in Kogi would be grossly disadvantaged.
The biggest question that remains with me as I wrestle with this conflict is this: What makes us think that we, as a species, can handle and control a being much smarter than ourselves?
I want to believe that Zuckerberg is right—that AI is the earthly version of paradise.
But does history give us much reason for confidence?