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.