Mark Zuckerberg's Resolution Is To Talk About Tech's Place In Society (engadget.com)

In the past, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg challenged himself to create an AI assistant for his home and committed to learning Mandarin. This year he's planning to hold a number of public discussions about how technology plays a role in the future of society. Engadget reports: "I'm an engineer, and I used to just build out my ideas and hope they'd mostly speak for themselves," he wrote in a Facebook post. "But given the importance of what we do, that doesn't cut it anymore. So I'm going to put myself out there more than I've been comfortable with and engage more in some of these debates about the future, the tradeoffs we face, and where we want to go." Zuckerberg plans to hold talks with "leaders, experts, and people in our community from different fields" every few weeks. He'll make the discussions available on his Facebook and Instagram feeds or elsewhere. Engadget suggests Zuckerberg "might be best served to directly focus on restoring trust with Facebook's two billion users and fixing the vast array of problems with which his platform is struggling, including privacy screwups and a tanking stock."

Comments

Let the Right One In

[mentil]

The natural state of technology is to advance by becoming more efficient, effective, and to encompass and sometimes replace more of what we do.
We're near (perhaps already past) the point where we should ask ourselves: how much DO we want technology to take over our lives? Cyberpunk posits a possible future where technology has degraded the value of humanity, but we should ask ourselves what aspects of technology lead to such degradation, and how can we reap the benefits of technology while avoiding those aspects?

For an example, I'm reminded of a virtual reality conference in Las Vegas a few years ago, where a local brothel encouraged conference-goers to have sex in reality rather than in virtual reality. It's easy to snicker at that now, but imagine when the difference becomes blurrier, that might not be such a preposterous plea. If sex in virtual reality becomes more convenient, safe, and pleasurable than real-world sex; what kind of side-effects could that have to society, or to gender relations? Such VR sex (with NPCs) would arguably degrade the value of human sexual relationships.

I'm not saying society can (or should) stop technological development, just that people may want to go through 'technology planning' (a la family planning) at some point in their lives, to decide how much they want it to pervade their personal lives. Banning usage of degrading technology will become increasingly futile over time, as deployment becomes easier; it's more plausible that society will change to accept what they must and avoid what they can and want to.

Purpose of tech ...

[Alain Williams]

should be to make everyone's lives better (happier, easier, richer, less hassled, ...), not to make a few richer at the expense of everyone else.

Huh?

[Shotgun]

Does anyone consider Zuckerburg an authority on anything? The truth is that he got lucky. He used the money from some rich fellow students to clone another social media app at a time when the world was ready for social media apps. It had been quite a while since Citizen Band radio had declined, and most people had forgotten what a pointless clusterfuck of people with nothing to say that was. They were once again ready to parade their narcissism, and Zuck got lucky that they chose his from among several competitors, MySpace being the most well known. There wasn't a technical reason that FB was superior, it was initially because it was seen to be composed of a more exclusive club.

What exactly in that category qualifies this dufus to be an expert on anything other than getting lucky at the right time? I'm just as interested in hearing about the social impact of rehabilitating the buffalo population from lottery winners.

hyperbole across the board

[hdyoung]

So much hyperbole on facebook recently in so many directions.

Zuckerberg is not a saint or a devil, not a megalomaniac, not intent on ruling the world, not all that intent on changing it. He's very intelligent and hard working, but no more so than hundreds of thousands of other people. He's not a genius and has no particularly unique vision. He is neither evil nor especially good.

Zuckerberg is a guy who dropped out of college to develop a web app. There were (at least) thousands of other people doing exactly this in the late 90s and early 2000s. His app wasn't (and isn't) particularly original - lots of people had ideas for social networking apps. Through a bit of savvy business strategy and a lot of pure dumb luck, he wound up as one of the very few people who made it big from that wave of app developers.

Don't lose sight of the fact that ZUCKERBERG IS AN AD MAN. Companies pay him to display ads in places where lots of eyeballs will see them. That's his business. Period. End. Of. Story. His ad medium is an internet-based social networking service. Before that, ad men used cable TV. Before that, broadcast TV. Before that, magazines and newspapers. New medium, same business. One can make arguments that computing and the internet make it fundamentally different, but that's just hubris. "I must be unique from all the generations of human that came before me". Sorry, nope. The internet hasn't transformed us into anything substantially different.

You want to know what facebook is going to do or say in any situation? Ask yourself what would maintain or expand their ability to SELL ADS to other companies. That's what they'll do. That's their business. That's why they exist.