Two Hours with Mark Zuckerberg

“What torture is this?”, you ask, “And what did I do to deserve it?”

This is the first time I’ve heard Mark Zuckerberg in something like a conversation, as opposed to a congressional hearing or prepared speech. I’m not sure how, or precisely why, but he comes across as creepy. On the one hand, he speaks like any one of a multitude of nerds I know and count myself among, but the affect is very odd, and disturbing.

  • He doesn’t seem to be, or get, excited about anything: not the technologies he’s developing, the connected world he claims to be trying to build, or the potential for the future they will create.
  • He seems deeply bought in to what I call the “Cult of Design”—the belief that a few people, guided by “experts”, informed by “science”, and aided by “AI” (invoked as a kind of spell), can design, on a clean sheet of paper (or perhaps a greasy silicon valley napkin), the systems through which billions of people from thousands of cultures will interact for the foreseeable future, protected from “bullying”, “manipulation”, and “misinformation”. This strikes me as Xanadu-level hubris, compounded by the fact that the systems he’s building are not open, but rather top-down. Human interaction has been, and always will be, evolved organically from the bottom up, in a massively parallel exploration of possibilities, learning from experience. Top-down utopian design always ends in tragedy, and often in huge piles of skulls.
  • In the discussion of privacy and security, there is not a single mention of what is the entire business model of Facebook—assembling dossiers of intimately personal information on billions of people and their interconnections, and then peddling this database to advertisers and others who wish to manipulate and exploit them.
  • He believes that his “philanthropy” can eliminate or mitigate most human diseases by mid-century, but has deliberately avoided research on longevity.
  • His advice to young people seems to amount to “Surround yourself with the right people in college.” You’d think there would be a few more specific tips to impart based upon his experience.
  • He believes that real-time intertranslation among 300 languages based entirely upon machine learning from speech is a near-term achievable goal. How much training material exists, for example, for conversations between Finnish and Zulu, just to name two languages with millions of native speakers? How long will it take to train the model on 300^2=90000 language pairs? Can Zuckerberg square 300 in his head? Does he know what O(n^2) means?
  • He claims Facebook/Meta is neutral on matters of policy and politics, and cannot help to offend when it “takes a stand” on one side or another of an issue. There is no acknowledgement that essentially every “stand” it takes is on one side, that Facebook’s “fact checking” and other censorship puts a thumb on the scale of political discourse, or that he personally spent more than US$ 400 million to directly influence the 2020 election in the United States.

I’m used to slavers fitting a variety of templates almost all of which were exemplified by Ayn Rand villains (it is said, “Ayn Rand’s heroes are fake, but her villains are real”), but Zuckerberg is something I haven’t seen before, either in fiction or in real life—and it’s creepy.

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This has less of an uncanny valley effect than other Zuck appearances.

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Its hair is cut to an odd intermediate length that no actual humans have theirs cut.

The rims of its ears extend further down the lobe than do human ears. Most humans will have a relatively flat lobe.

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Zuckerberg clearly demonstrates he can chat for hours – and not say anything.

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I’m taking the advice offered in the first minute of this video. And, yes, Zuck is creepy but we already knew that.

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Zach Muckerburg needs to step up, he is running a billion dollar company and yet it seems like he has no clue what he is doing. The meta verse is an absurd concept that seems like it was only made to sell NFTS (an absurd idea in its own right). Let’s hope facebook will be able to come back from this slump.

I am getting depressed just from the first minutes watching the moderator. In my opinion is the format of the communication, which is just terrible. Why everyone in USA has to have podcast or stream? It´s really weird, why they can´t go back to normal face to face communication? Or just normal podium with audience.

Please, get back to that. I really starting to be worried to see so many people getting crazy and the reason for that it´s the technology, the online calls, zoom, twitter, facebook, the constant crazy stuff with bitcoin and computers, it influences people a lot and they getting psychopathic. Even the most smarter people are no exception. I really think, we need to take break from that and unplug the people. People are not computers, they are normal living beings and they should not be controlled by one single big system. If someone fears the nuclear weapon attack, I fear now more the suicidal people with access and control of technology, which can harm or torture so many people at once. That is very dangerous and there is no security control to that.

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Welcome Pooky

It is a woeful thing when the oddest/weirdest sevant’s design our society.

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