Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
Intro
—from Old English caru, cearu, meaning "sorrow, anxiety, grief"
—from Proto-Germanic *karō, meaning "lament"
—no known relation to Charybdis, whose etymological root is unknown.
This is a review that will focus on a cast of three figures: Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook, now Meta), Sheryl Sandberg (an inspirational figure to many, the author of the self-help book Lean In for women in the workplace), and Sarah Wynn-Williams, who was the Director of Global Public Policy at Facebook until let go in 2017. Last year she published Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, a tell-all about her time in the upper ranks of Facebook, detailing the alleged misdeeds and hypocrisies she witnessed there.
At its heart, Careless People is a story about betrayal. The author feels aggrieved by other people’s thoughtlessness, and I don’t blame her. There are those who would argue with how Wynn-Williams’s portrays Facebook, but as far as I can tell:
- Any inaccuracies are minor (which I presume is why she’s only being sued for violating her non-disparagement clause, and not for libel).
- The general thrust of her story is true, including personal anecdotes and incidents of harassment.
- Nothing in the way she describes Facebook is hard to believe. (As one Redditor put it: “not especially surprising, but definitely... illuminating”.)
But I think Wynn-Williams subtly misdiagnoses the moral of her own life’s story, in a way that’s hinted at by the memoir’s title.
This is a review of not only Careless People, but also “Careless People”, a noun phrase that uses a less-than-perfect choice of adjective, despite the powerful connotations it evokes with its reference.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
— The Great Gatsby
The comparison between Meta’s CEO and Fitzgerald’s characters is apt, yet falls short in a way that should cause concern.
This is a review, but also a warning. I won’t spoil what that warning is, but if salacious details don’t interest you, feel free to skip Sarah, Sheryl, and Mark to the final section, Taghairm.
(Disclaimer: Everything I relate about these real life figures is based on the alleged accounts written by Sarah, and are not my own claims. Don’t sue me.)
Sarah
— from the same Proto-Indo-European stem as care: *ǵeh₂r-
— e.g., “Age too, shines out, and garrulous recounts the feats of youth”, by James Thomson, 1730
— no relation to cāritās, the Latin root of charity
When describing the ordeals that she’s faced, Sarah Wynn-Williams is nothing if not an evocative writer.
Like when describes an incident she experienced when she was 13, notable enough to have made headwaves in New Zealand news at the time…
…a shark attack…
…which gets only more harrowing, and interest, after her rescue:
No one is in a hurry. No one asks me what happened. The doctor cleans the wound, pulls the skin around the jaw marks together, and stitches it up so there’s no longer a chunk missing. He gives me a tetanus shot and warns my parents that I might be a little dramatic that night because I might be in shock but I’d be fine. I obviously was a fighter. Everyone laughs.
We return to the campground. I’m allowed to stay in the camper rather than head under the attached awning with my three siblings because I’m in pain, which the doctor had told me and my parents to expect, some mild pain from the stitches. Very quickly I realize this pain is not mild. It’s searing. I start vomiting up blood and these thick, dark, sticky clots that look like coffee grounds, which I assume is stomach lining but I know nothing about the human body. I pull out a large red plastic cup to collect it so I don’t get the camper dirty.
Everyone else goes to bed but I can’t sleep. It keeps getting worse and worse. I feel like I’m on fire. I wait, quiet as possible so I don’t wake anyone. After a while, the red cup is full and I’m onto another. The pain is excruciating.
Eventually I wake my parents.
“I’m on fire. I’m burning up inside.”
“Go back to sleep. You’ll be fine.”
This continues throughout the night:I wake my parents, they tell me that the doctor said I’d be fine. We’ll all learn later what actually is happening. The shark had bitten through my bowel in several places, so it’s like I’ve been stabbed multiple times. The blood and the contents of my bowel are leaking into my gut, basically poisoning me. I have sepsis, acute peritonitis. Eventually there is so much of this toxic blood liquid that it floods through my body and flows into my lungs, making it increasingly difficult to breathe. Like I’m suffocating.
I wake my parents again.
“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t get the air in.”
My mother—tired of being woken—responds in an authoritative voice, “Mind over matter. Stop that hyperventilating.” This has become a family joke. Now anytime one of us mentions anything, a cold or a cut or appendicitis, we respond, “Mind over matter. Stop that hyperventilating.”
We later learn that my left lung has collapsed from a pulmonary edema. And my right lung is damaged.
The next morning, after her parents finally recognize the danger and take her back to the doctor, things take a turn for even darker:
Next thing I know, the doctor comes back. Gets out a very large blade like a mini ax and starts thwacking it down, carving into my left arm. Then my right arm. It’s like I’m a piece of meat being hacked open. No anesthesia. No warning. And I’m beyond the point where I have any control over my own body. I can’t move or speak. I can’t raise any alarm.
I’d thought the shark attack was more pain than a person can bear, the worst that could happen. I was wrong.
The doctor repositions himself near my ankle and brings the blade down with force, splitting the skin and plunging the blade to the bone. Why is the doctor hacking open my ankles? The only explanation I can muster is that he thinks I’m already dead. I’m experiencing my own autopsy.
…
I later learned it wasn’t an autopsy. They knew I was alive. I’d lost so much blood that the doctors believed if they didn’t get intravenous blood into me immediately, I would die. In severe trauma cases where it’s impossible to find a vein, because blood pressure is so low, it’s standard ER procedure to slice into the arms or ankles. That’s why I have one-inch scars on my arms and legs. (They’re positively delicate compared with the scars on my stomach from the jaw marks.) There wasn’t time to give me anesthetic or explain. I don’t think the doctors expected me to live. By the time they loaded me up into the helicopter, I don’t think anyone did. And later, after hours of surgery, the doctors at the hospital tell my parents I’m unlikely to make it. They started to plan my funeral.
There’s a bit of strange dissonance, reading this chapter.
On the one hand, it’s clear that Wynn-Williams introduces this story early on because it’s a visceral hook, and it’s entirely on theme: Neglectful doctors and parents certainly count as “careless”.
But on the other hand, Wynn-Williams never seems to fully reckon with it—at least not in ink. How does her relationship with her parents change? She never says. And I’m not the only one who found this odd.
“they frame the shark attack as an amusing story that ultimately showed how strong she is, and not a harrowing near-death encounter caused by parental neglect” says one Redditor
This is true, as Wynn-Williams writes:
My mother leans over me, looks into my eyes, and says, “Aren’t you lucky the doctors saved you?”
I can’t talk because I’m on life support and a ventilator is helping me breathe. So I gesture for a pen and paper. I make eye contact with her to be sure she’s watching, and write slowly and deliberately, drawing a thick black line under each word for emphasis:
I SAVED MYSELF
Good on her for claiming that agency. And maybe Wynn-Williams simply doesn’t want to speak public ill of her parents to any greater degree than she already is.
Or maybe she has a blind spot when it comes to her parents, similar to the blind spot she may or may not have regarding herself.
I said earlier that I believe the general thrust of her story, but exactly how reliable of an author is Wynn-Williams? Is she an exception or an exemplar of being “careless”?
From what I’ve seen, most responses to Careless People are quite positive, both commending the writing and condemning the villains of Facebook. (I realize I’ve yet to actually describe any of Facebook’s villainy. I assume most readers will be familiar with some of it, because, c’mon—it’s 2026, and it’s Facebook we’re talking about. But to give a sample of what this memoir covers: Facebook’s illegal operations in China; Mark Zuckerberg’s bluntly lying to the U.S. senate, without consequence; and Facebook’s refusal to deliver wi-fi to refugee camps, despite their promise to the U.N., when realizing there’d be no profit in it.) However, I’ve also observed a strong trend with comments such as these:
“Every story was basically like “if only they had listened to meeeeeee!” and ignored the fact that she was participating as much as anyone else. It was also just really hard to buy the naïveté that she didn’t see what was going on.”
“It’s a little shocking how she paints herself an innocent in all this, when she might have actually facilitated the pivot of Facebook to international relations. She isn’t innocent. They are all just horrible people.”
“Wynn-Williams is trying to atone for the sociopathic shit that she and her colleagues enabled. Either that or she knows public sentiment has fully turned against the social media giants so she's getting out in front of it by publishing a tell-all book.”
“I feel like the title of the book should be taken from one of her own lines and be called "Complicit and Enabling".”
Frankly, I don’t think these sorts of comments are charitable enough. I think they overestimate how much power Wynn-Williams wielded, at the head not of a profit center, but of a costly appendage that the CEO would rather do without it, basically alone in her convictions against the CEO and all his “friends”.
She was the head of Public Policy, likely the only department lower on the totem pole would be Content Moderation. In every story, Wynn-Williams was the messenger of bad news: This is illegal. That’s unethical. Yes, we should pay more taxes. Etc.
Some comments say that she should have quit sooner, but to what end? She’d have made less money for her family only to be replaced by a more smoothly oiled cog in the Facebook machine.
Plus:
“Good people get drawn to bad situations all the time and often end up doing shitty things themselves before they realise it’s too late.”
“Here is the thing about Meta employees: they suffer from what I like to call the “we’re all good people here” delusion. Bizarrely, everyone I work with there thinks they are a good person and that every other Meta employee is a paragon of virtue all while doing shady shit. Working there doesn’t make us bad people (though it can if we work there long enough), but the choices we have to make and actions we take make it so we’re all more or less responsible for the company’s negative impact.”
“Yeah, the people who are like "she could just go find another job!" do not understand these people. She might be able to find another job. Or her petty bosses might figure out a way to get her blacklisted.”
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Yet I don’t believe the more critical comments are coming out of nowhere. Some of the impulse surely comes from disbelief at the level of Wynn-Williams’s naivete. Some of it, though, I think comes from disbelief around anyone being so naive about Facebook’s intentions:
“I am always shocked/amazed finding out some people don't know that Facebook is an evil cesspool not just as an app but as a company - and haven't known it for a decade.” (source)
I’m afraid that comments like this one may be too cynical, yet simultaneously not cynical enough.
But let’s put a pin in that.
It’s time to talk about the villains.
Sheryl
— from the same Proto-Indo-European stem as care: *ǵeh₂r-, which became ghairm in Gaelic, then sluagh-ghairm, “battle cry”
— in the past spelled as slughon, which became slughorn, though it has no relation to slug or horn
Sheryl is charming, charismatic, whip-smart.
Watching her work is like a study in female success. How she comes to decisions, her relationships with men—both the ones she works for and the ones who work for her—what she wears, how she’s groomed, how she speaks. She can drop into a soft girlish voice, like you’re sharing an intimate secret with her, and yet still command a room. Sheryl’s amazing.
To many women, including my spouse, Sheryl Sandberg was an icon. The shock she went through reading the memoir, I can only relate with my own reactions to figures like Louis C.K. or Neil Gaiman.
The picture that Wynn-Williams paints of Sandberg is at times utterly expected from the stereotype of “rich, famous, and mean”: Hypocritical, rageful, mercurial.
A key part of the hypocrisy presented, and the persona that Sandberg performs, and the core theme of her book Lean In, is that of a woman who works hard enough to thrive in both work and home. Sandberg wants you to know that she’s all about women supporting women in the workplace. A rising tide to help all boats.
This attitude however translates into high expectations that can’t be realistically met by any but the wealthiest—
There are videos of women from Sheryl’s inner circle—all white, beautifully lit and shot—working out in their palatial home gyms, playing with their photogenic children, and relaxing with their mutely supportive husbands. All of these mothering fables are careful to edit out the role played by the phalanx of nannies and other help who usually do the bulk of the actual labor of raising children.
Mothering in form, not function.
—as well as expectations that shouldn’t be met by anyone, such as when Sandberg expects Wynn-Williams to work during maternity leave.
Sandberg doesn’t expect her employees to balance work and life, but to always prioritize the former over the latter.
Or rather to always prioritize her.
Which again, might be expected of the rich and powerful. But what I’d never expected was the following account:
We’re an hour out of Zurich when Sheryl emerges back into the cabin in her pajamas.
“What are you doing? I’m going to bed.” As if it isn’t obvious that we’re preparing all the emails that’ll go out under her name.
“Lots to do,” I say cheerily.
“But it’s better if you rest now so you can get back on California time,” she insists.
“I’m okay,” I respond. There is only one bed in the jet and Sheryl is obviously using it.
“Sarah, come to bed.” Her tone hardens.
I look around at the others to check if they heard what I did.
I shake my head and she repeats her instruction. “Sarah, come to bed.”
We’re at a stalemate. I look around desperately for support from the others but everyone’s looking away.
On the long drive from Davos to Zurich for the flight, Sheryl and Sadie had taken turns sleeping in each other’s laps, occasionally stroking each other’s hair, while I tried to make myself as small and invisible as possible, feeling uncomfortable with what I was seeing. I hoped my enormous bump made it clear that my lap was not available for my coworker or boss. Regardless of motivation, it was not a position I felt I (or anyone else working with Sheryl) should be put in. I make pleading eyes at Sadie hoping she might be up for another close moment with Sheryl. Sadie shakes her head.
Sheryl sees this silent exchange and snaps, “Sadie’s slept over lots of times and I’m not asking Sadie. I’m asking you.”
…
I know something has broken between us. I know consequences will follow, but I don’t know what they’ll be.
Sadie tries to console me, she tells me things will be fine, but there are unspoken rules with Sheryl about obedience and closeness. Those closest to Sheryl are rewarded. Marne and Sadie often appear in her unwanted designer clothes; both assumed plum seats on boards that Sheryl had been asked to serve on. There are courtside basketball tickets and introductions to celebrities. Sheryl lends them the keys to her vacation homes.
Sadie is very conscious of the benefits of being Sheryl’s “little doll,” as she calls it and having Sheryl tell her she loves her. She’s the one who explained to me the benefits of “being on the pedestal.” She’s acutely aware of others she shares that with. But she’s also very aware of the expectations that come with it. How carefully calibrated the rewards and demands are.
Sheryl recently instructed Sadie to buy lingerie for both of them with no budget, and Sadie obeyed, spending over $10,000 on lingerie for Sheryl and $3,000 on herself.
When Sadie tries another of the bras Sheryl purchased her for the first time, she emails her.
“This bra is INCREDIBLY beautiful and fits perfectly. So grateful. This is my breasts equivalent of flying privately for the first time.”
“Happy to treat your breasts as they should be treated,” Sheryl responds.
Sadie confides she’s never spent this much on single items of underwear in her life, messaging Sheryl that the experience is “a total Pretty Woman moment (the good one not the one where they kick her out). I feel like the fanciest twenty-six-year-old in the world.”
Sheryl responds by asking her twenty-six-year-old assistant to come to her house to try on the underwear and have dinner. Later the invite becomes one to stay over. Lean in and lie back.
This may be the most overt and most unsettling example of sexual harassment in the memoir, which had several instances (all the rest perpetrated by men).
Sheryl Sandberg is not someone I’d ever describe as “careless”.
She was the COO of freaking Facebook, one of the largest companies by market cap in the entire world. She doesn’t just work harder than the author of this review works—she probably consistently works harder than I’ve ever worked. This is a human being who cares a great deal.
The question is: What does she care about?
The most illuminating anecdote, in my opinion, was this one:
We all fly out the next morning—them on United to San Francisco, me on Asiana to New York—and spirits are low. As soon as I land in the US and switch on my phone, a bunch of messages pop up, checking to make sure I’m okay. Weird. Googling, I learn that an Asiana plane, one that departed a little earlier than mine, had crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport, killing three people and injuring over two hundred. I flip through the news and see reports that Sheryl, Debbie, and others on our team were supposed to be on that flight. They apparently got this from Sheryl, who (for a change) posted on Facebook that she and our colleagues “were originally going to take the Asiana flight that just crash-landed. We switched to United so we could use miles for my family’s tickets.” This of course unleashes a storm of concerned comments.
Immediately I stop scrolling and call Debbie.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m tired and my neck…”
“No,” I cut in. “I saw you guys were supposed to be on the Asiana flight. Did something change?”
“You mean Sheryl’s Facebook post about being booked on that flight? It’s totally weird.”
“You weren’t on that flight. I mean you guys were giving me shit for flying Asiana, calling it a budget airline.”
“I know, it’s so strange. Sheryl always flies United. That’s who she has status with. We never considered Asiana.”
It’s not truth or ethics that concerns Sandberg. It’s influence, in the social media sense. Control. Power for popularity, and popularity for power.
And she’s not the only one like that.
Mark
—from the Latin cūra, which means "care” and “concern", though it shares no relation to the *ǵeh₂r- of the English care
—despite the similar spelling, has no relation to the insult cur stemming from the Old Norse kurra, onomatopoeic of a growling dog
In the narrative structure of Careless People, Zuckerberg is like the highest paid actor on your show, who can't commit to appearing in every episode. Or the sort of fan-favorite villain who shows up every season finale. There are enough interactions to feel like you're getting a real glimpse of the man, but at the same time there's less of him on the page than Sandberg, or a few others like Joel Kaplan (former deputy Chief of Staff to Bush Jr. and man seemingly incapable of keeping inappropriate comments to himself).
In Zuckerberg’s case, though, his status of fan-favorite would arise not from any ounce of charisma, but from his unusual juxtaposition of both great power and easy ridicule. What he has to offer readers isn’t the manic flair and biting wit that Jesse Eisenberg imbues him with in The Social Network. What he offers is college dude-bro proclivities, like his choice of favorite president (Andrew Jackson, because he “got stuff done”) or anecdotes like this:
Debbie and I are trying to teach him the respectful bow one’s supposed to do when meeting the leader of South Korea… He crosses his arms like the Kangol-hat-era LL Cool J and rocks his body from side to side hip-hop-style, before moving to a series of fist bumps, high fives, and backward low fives.
It is with Zuckerberg that the memoir’s title strikes truest. This was a man who cannot take responsibility for the forgetting of his own passport, and who could not bother to get himself up before noon, even if it would mean arriving late to pivotal meetings with world leaders.
Of course, you could make anyone look bad by cherry-picking their worst moments. Except Wynn-Williams actually seems fond of him! I think her feelings about Zuckerberg generally align with her feelings about Facebook, which started with hope and trust, then shifted to disillusionment and betrayal.
The following excerpt is one that could be used to laugh at the low self-esteem of a man who has everything, but it’s also one that I find to be quite humanizing:
When later we tour the Hindu temple Prambanan—which the guys overwhelmingly prefer because it’s just like in Tomb Raider—Mark marches up to another group of tourists, clearly wanting to build out his man-of-the-people vibe. They don’t speak English, so he reaches for their phone to snap a photo. They rebuff him brusquely—like, What are you doing? Get away from us! Mark looks astounded and a little hurt. He’s so used to people walking up and asking for selfies and photos with him, which he allows reluctantly, that he doesn’t know how to handle this particular situation. His instant dejection is so comical that it’s hard not to laugh, and I fail and laugh, which does not go over well. I pivot to comforting him.
“If they ever realize, Mark, I’m sure they’ll be really sad,” I say. He definitely doesn’t see the funny side of it and tries to rationalize his way out of his embarrassment.
“Maybe they weren’t actually wanting a photo there.”
“Or maybe they thought you were trying to steal their phone?” I offer.
He looks crushed. He’s so utterly unprepared for rejection like this. And I never see him offer to take another photo.
But on the other hand.
It’s disconcerting to see such a powerful CEO need to be coddled by his closest advisors, as they conspire to lose at simple board games like Catan for his favor.
Or the following excerpt, which requires me to set the scene: After Facebook helped to sway the 2016 U.S. election in Donald Trump’s favor, Mark Zuckerberg denied that his social media had any part to play whatsoever—not just publicly, but even to himself. His advisors had to wear him down before he finally believed it, but once he did, his reaction contained no shame nor dismay. A responsible man would accept the mantle of responsibility for decreasing the misinformation spread by the platform he created. Zuckerberg’s thoughts instead went another direction…
“I know what my 2017 challenge is going to be,” he says firmly.“I’m going to visit as many states as possible. Get on the ground. Meet people. Understand what they’re looking for.”
My antenna goes up. Mark is not someone who particularly enjoys travel or, in fact, people. And I know he’s hoping to have another baby in 2017, so this doesn’t make any sense as a personal challenge.
“Are there any states in particular you want to go to?” I ask tentatively.
“Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania.”
He wanted to run for president.
This last excerpt I have to share, though, is my favorite. It’s an exchange that lives rent-free in my head, coming up now in my thoughts whenever I think about the rich and famous.
Traveling is when you really get to know someone, and this is the trip where I start to really get to know Mark. I think he feels the same because during this trip, he friends me on Facebook.
As we hang out at temples and the Tokyo fish market, karaoke, and ridiculous Michelin-star restaurants that specialize in fried food of course, we talk about all kinds of things. I’m fascinated about how you think about life when you’re one of the richest people in the world. What changes? What doesn’t?
…
Given the scale of Mark’s affluence, what actually matters to him? It’s unfathomable to me. This endless wealth. I try to explain that to him over dinner.
“I was actually talking about this with Masa the other day,” Mark responds. Masayoshi Son is CEO of SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate that invests heavily in technology companies, including many of the buzzy start-ups Mark’s interested in.
“And we both agree.”
“Agree on what?”
“The most important thing.”
“What is it?”
“Food,” he says, lifting a chopstick toward his mouth. A dangling piece of fried deliciousness hangs in the air near his lips.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. I mean, he’s even more serious about it than I am. Every day he has someone go to that fish market we went to this morning and buy the absolute best bluefin tuna in that market. He eats the best food in the world. He has the best chef in Japan.”
During my time working on environmental issues, one of the things I’d been involved in was trying to protect southern bluefin tuna, which are critically endangered. I know that a single fish can sell for millions of dollars. I also know that efforts to regulate and save the fishery are seriously failing, and the reason those fish command such high prices is because they are rare and at risk of extinction. It’s as if he’s saying the best thing about being rich is eating fresh, tender, endangered baby elephants or munching on little imperiled panda bears.
“I didn’t think you even liked tuna. You like McDonald’s and fried chicken,” I say, puzzled and also, if I’m honest, really hoping he’s not about to tell me he wants to eat endangered species himself.
“True. As soon as I knew there was a three-star Michelin fried-food restaurant in Japan, I knew we all had to try it.”
“Right—but that’s because you like fried food. You don’t need to be the richest guy in the world to have fried chicken and McDonald’s every day.”
“No, but if I want the best bluefin tuna…”
You might think: This is a man who truly doesn’t care about anything.
But actually that’s not true.
Zuckerberg’s answer about food reminds me of nothing more than this moment with Elon Musk, when he tries to answer the question of what makes Twitter important (only 72 seconds to watch):
https://youtu.be/p7ZG_xWYLzI?si=IsMW-VaPjWMw4phP&t=1617
It’s a careless, meaningless answer—but not because these are people without any cares nor well-defined goals. Their goals are just too beyond the pale to be admitted out loud, so when they answer questions such as these, they can only resort to bullshit.
It’s 2016 and Facebook’s Vice President for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, has just been arrested by Brazil for refusing to hand over WhatsApp data for use in a criminal investigation (Facebook protecting privacy? That won’t last long). Wynn-Williams is concerned about her colleague who’s in jail and what they can do to rescue him. Zuckerberg, however, isn’t phased in the slightest. All he cares about is writing the perfect Facebook post to capitalize the moment for publicity. Everyone who works for him tells him: No, this post will look bad. No, this will hurt Diego’s chance of getting released.
Yet it’s all he can think about.
Earlier, I said that all Sandberg cared about is influence. I’m not sure if that means influence for power’s sake, or the other way around. I don’t know if she cares more about legacy, say, or wealth. But no matter the case, she’s optimizing for the same thing Zuckerberg optimizes for. It’s the thing both him and Musk will work so extremely hard for and absolutely fight for.
Maximum engagement.
Taghairm
— from the same Proto-Indo-European stem as care: *ǵeh₂r-
— a form of divination practiced by post-Medieval Scottish Gaelics, sometimes by submerging a man within a river, sometimes by wrapping a man within “the warm smoking hide of a newly-slain ox or cow”, and sometimes by the sacrifice of cats.
— no relation to harm, which comes from the Old English hearm and whose PIE root is debated, but may be connected to other proto-languages’ word for shame
This review is secretly an essay about AI.
“Alignment” is the hard (or maybe even impossible) problem of trying to align increasingly intelligent AI to serve human goals, rather than other goals they may develop for any reason. This covers everything from “I want my ChatGPT to be less sycophantic” to “I want my new AI overlords to not replace all of humanity with more efficient robots, batteries, or Labubus”.
There are some who argue: AI progress is good, or at the very least unavoidable, because if good people don’t work on AI, then only the bad actors will remain to work on AI. Better to give the good guys a shot at winning the AI arms race.
But who are the “good guys”?
The word ghairm, which means “cry”, has no relation to the word cry, which comes by way of the Old French escrier. Yet both words have derivations that mean to look into the future: scrying and taghairm.
I can’t divine the future. I don’t know how fast AI will progress, or whether we’ll fail at alignment.
I also don’t believe Zuckerberg can see the future. If he could, he would never have renamed his company to “Meta”.
Yet every resource he once poured into V.R. and the metaverse he’s now redirected into AI. He’s placed a bet that may well pay off.
Who’s most likely to win the AI arms race?
OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek hold a lead over larger companies like Meta. Will that always be true? Must we hope that the likes of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei prove to be better stewards of AI?
It’s hard to judge anyone correctly, let alone celebrities. There are those who profess the cynical stance that you shouldn’t trust anyone who’s rich and famous—but then fall for the charms of politicians like Barack Obama or Donald Trump. They might claim to have low expectations (like the Redditor surprised that anyone should not already think of Meta as an “evil cesspool”), but then may be shocked at the depth of depravity from something like the Epstein files. This sort of error is very understandable! It’s easy to miscalibrate our expectations of CEOs and world leaders—just as easy as it is for CEOs to be misaligned with their employees, or for world leaders to be misaligned with their constituents.
I envision a possible future whereby a company like Meta, under a man like Zuckerberg, cracks alignment. But the alignment they optimize for is in service to the goal they’ve always optimized for: maximum engagement. A world dominated by “Face”, with eyeballs glued to screens in some manner befitting a Black Mirror episode. Maybe preferable to a world of robots, batteries, or Labubus, but hardly a utopia.
Though things could be worse.
“A very odd silver lining, for common folk consideration: As someone who has worked several decades as more or less a servant... I think one of the interesting side effects of 'AI glazing', is that more common folk are starting to realize that, essentially every wealthy and powerful person already does, and has existed in, a delusional/psychosis state - akin to A.I. psychosis we see so prevalent amongst common folk now- due to the cultivated, insulted, nature of their lives, the layers of servants (handlers, advisors, assistant, junior reports, pick your term) who lose their job if they give unpleasant information. The wealthy have long had a phrase and general awareness for this, 'the gilded cage,' but we are all now getting to see what it does to a person to have persistent, unchecked enthusiasm for every utterance, akin to the unspoken demand on any powerful person's subordinate. We realize Trump actually believes he is one of the worlds best golfers, Musk actually believes he is one of the world's best gamers, in the same way your uncle Larry actually believes he has solved string theory.”
- @michaeltholen7508 commenting on this video by Hank Green
Maybe it’s hard to sell people on the idea that “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”. The idea might sound too absurd, too sci-fi, to the average person. Easier, I think, to paint humans as villainous and CEOs as dangerous, and in need of regulation.
Tom and Daisy, if given power, would thoughtlessly and carelessly make decisions that might endanger humanity. But they wouldn’t work a tenth as hard as the likes of Sandberg and Zuckerberg to obtain that power and then misuse it.
“Careless People” is a great title. I just don’t think it’s scary enough.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
The big difference: When Mark makes a mess, there might not be anyone around with enough resources to clean it up.
Post Script
Do I recommend reading Careless People?
Yes! Though the last fourth of the book starts to drag, it’s still a well-written and entertaining story.
Other highlights:
- Sarah very nearly dying in a child-birthing experience even more harrowing than Sarah’s shark attack
- The sexual harassment from Joel Kaplan (who HR of course defended)
- Many lamentations about China policy
- The fight to setup “Internet.org” in Africa and India, and whether to relinquish its very presumptuous name
- Mark’s hypocritical flip-flops on Facebook’s Community Standards
- President Xi Jinping’s hilarious avoidance of Mark, including one maneuver whereby he surrounds himself with an entire contingent of security before an event for the sole purpose of shielding himself from having to directly interact with Mark, whom he despises