⌥ Annotating Mark Zuckerberg’s Latest Thought Leadership Essay

Mark Zuckerberg, in a (much) longer version of an essay originally published last month in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal: The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone? We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety. The themes of this essay are reminiscent of those in the “Personal Superintelligence” one Zuckerberg published a year ago. It has the same aspirational messaging about empowering individuals with decentralized superintelligence, the same acknowledgement of the new risks of this technology, and the same total reluctance to define “superintelligence” in any meaningful sense. The term appears 55 times in his latest essay, not one of which explains…