AI is slated to disrupt traditional jobs, but could also give all people previously unthinkable leverage.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, has shared some compelling thoughts on the future of artificial intelligence. On a podcast, he posited that AI will eventually surpass individual human intelligence, but, interestingly, argued that this is already happening in a certain sense. His core idea revolves around the combined intelligence of large organizations already functioning as a form of “superintelligence” that individuals can tap into, a power he believes AI will democratize.
“I think that we’re going to get general intelligence,” Zuckerberg stated. “We’re going to have systems that are smarter than any individual, and I think it’s mostly going to be very empowering for people.”
He went on to illustrate his point: “First of all, look, I mean, there were already systems that are smarter than any one individual today, right? If you take a company, you’ve got 1,000 people or 10,000 people who are all kind of working towards a goal together.”
Zuckerberg said that this company was already smarter than any one person. “If the intelligence of a 10,000-person company is not greater than the intelligence of a single person, then what are we doing here, right?” This served as his springboard to the concept of existing superintelligence: “So there are already these systems in the world that have this sort of super intelligence that far exceeds what any one person can do.”
Finally, he projected this idea into the future: “And I just think instead of having relatively few people be able to kind of harness the power of a 10,000-person organization that can help you build the things that you think are good, I just think in the future almost everyone is going to have that.”
It’s an interesting argument, and one that’s been made previously by tech leaders on the impact of AI. Sam Altman has said that it might not be long before we have the first single-person unicorn, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called AGI a ‘country of geniuses in a datacenter’. If AI is generally distributed, it could give all people with access to it the equivalent of a country of geniuses in a datacenter, or like Zuckerberg says, a 10,000-person company. But while all people might have tremendous leverage with AI, how harness it for desirable outcomes might still depend on them — there are plenty of examples of 10,000 person companies going bust, and countries going bankrupt. And even if all people have access to their own companies or countries through AI, they might need to steer them thoughtfully — and with plenty of hard work — to get them to make a positive difference in the world.