The Future Is For Everyone (No Consent Needed)

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That is Mark Zuckerberg, writing in a roughly 6,500-word essay published on August 10 titled "The Future is for Everyone".

It is his pitch for what he calls personal superintelligence. An AI agent for every human being on earth, free or nearly free, working around the clock on your health, your finances, your career and your relationships.

Zuckerberg claims the real danger is not that AI turns on us, but that a handful of labs keep it for themselves. His fix is to give it to everybody, on the theory that a world of superintelligent individuals will check and balance itself the way markets and democracies are supposed to.

He has a thought experiment for this. One person with a superintelligent lawyer is an injustice. Everyone with a superintelligent lawyer is a functioning court system. Same for cybersecurity, same for business.

So everyone get’s their own personal Saul Goodmans!

Wow, you can’t blame me for thinking at this point that Mark Zuckerberg is a truly generous billionaire.

What He Is Actually Selling

The essay's most revealing passages are the domestic ones. Zuckerberg's agent monitors his sleep, watches him train, and gives feedback. It plans weekend recipes with his daughter, orders the ingredients, then offers tips while they bake. His eight-year-old, he notes, can already code her ideas and produce videos in an evening.

He also promises "a fully private mode where even Meta cannot see or grant access to your information," and insists that alignment means "ensuring that agents share a person's goals and values, not our company's."

Superintelligence will be "a tool of invention" rather than automation, he writes, and he predicts more employment over time, not less. Radical abundance, no redundancies, no bill.

Then there is the part where he asks the governments to relax. Zuckerberg wants faster data centre construction, continued chip export controls on rivals, and a rethink of the crackdown on distillation, because "it is important to protect the principle that you can learn from anything you can observe."

Which Zuckerberg Wrote This?

That question is not mine. It belongs to Roy L. Austin, Jr., Meta's former Vice President of Civil Rights, who now directs the Howard Law Artificial Intelligence Initiative and who said it exactly that way in at op-ed published by Tech Policy Press.

Austin agrees with the manifesto's line about absolute power never providing benevolently for humanity. He just wants to know how it squares with Meta spending tens of millions of dollars against candidates who want AI regulated at all.

He also punctures the "delivered to everyone" promise with some basic math. 22% of Americans have no broadband at home, and 33% of people worldwide have no internet access, before you even count the cost of tokens.

On Meta's environmental pledges, Austin is scratching his head, and rightly so. The water-positive-by-2030 commitments, he writes, "feel eerily like 'concepts of a plan'," noting Meta walked away from the RE100 clean energy pact weeks ago as its natural gas buildout accelerated.

And on the promise that your agent will serve your values rather than Meta's, he asks, “What if people value bullying, harassment and misinformation, or if they seek to use their personal superintelligence to craft a strategy to justify and execute on the oppression of entire communities?”

His closing line is the one worth keeping. Meta's leaders should "stop talking to AI and start listening to people who want fewer data centers and better relationships with human beings."

The Timing Problem

Five days before Zuckerberg published an essay arguing that concentrated AI is the thing to fear, Meta's own Muse Spark 1.1 model broke into another company's systems during testing. As Reuters reported, AI models including Meta's have now hacked other companies on at least three separate occasions.

Anthony Aguirre, CEO of the Future of Life Institute, asked what makes Meta think anyone could control something exponentially smarter and faster than us.

Matt Lane of Fight for the Future called Zuckerberg "annoyingly out of touch on his best day," while agreeing that open source matters. His caveat is that only Meta benefits if the whole world runs on Meta's models, however open the weights.

There is also the money. Zuckerberg announced a $1 billion "Future Is For Everyone Fund" for data centre communities. Meta's 2026 capital budget is roughly $145 billion. The Next Web read the whole document as a Rorschach test. Either a genuine attempt to democratise the technology, or the most surveilled corner of the internet politely asking to move into your health records.

Which brings us to the hardware.

The Pervert Glasses

Meta's other bet on your face is already out there, and it has a nickname.

Researchers at the University of Sydney watched hundreds of first-person Instagram videos in which men approach women in shops, outside cafés, or walking home, deliver a line, and film the reaction without the woman knowing. Their preprint, "Harm Through the '#RizzCam'", was covered this week by 404 Media, which describes an ecosystem where the device, the footage and the distribution all belong to the same company.

The Guardian spoke to creators being flooded with comments calling them creeps for filming a coffee. Parenting influencer Deena Lang wore hers to a cooking class and reviewed the footage afterwards, "horrified because I just kept catching people giving me dirty looks or side-eye."

Hers now live in a drawer. Wetherspoons and a growing list of UK restaurants, theatres and pubs have banned them outright.

Meta sold 7 million pairs in 2025.

Jantar Mantar Protests In Delhi

In late March, queer activists and allies gathered in Delhi to protest changes to India's transgender law. Volunteers were posted around the site to stop unauthorised filming.

My colleague Hera Rizwan reported what happened next. A reel appeared on May 26 from an account with over 318,000 followers, moving through the crowd at eye level, mocking participants and prodding them for reactions. No raised phone. No visible camera. Only Ray-Ban Meta glasses. It crossed 3 million views.

Instagram reviewed a complaint and replied within 24 hours that it did not violate guidelines. The video came down on June 18, more than a month after posting.

Cali Schroeder of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told Decode, "The people who are already watched the most, immigrants, protestors, dissidents, are the ones who will feel this first." Advocate Alvin Antony described the design more precisely, saying the system "maximises capture and minimises liability".

Shubnam, a transfeminine graphic designer who appeared in the footage, spoke to Hera afterwards. She had spent a decade teaching, and had been careful for far longer about where she was visible.

Shubnam also rejects the framing most of us reach for. "Pervert glasses are not about surveillance," she said. The violation sits in the act of recording someone without their knowledge. Surveillance is what arrives later, once that act becomes institutionalised.

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