Being a contrarian is often an intellectually dishonest way to seek power. Goes all the way back to the serpent in Adam and Eve.
The article is super focused on the hardware side of things, and to a point, that makes sense. Your hardware has to be able to handle what you're simulating.
But it's not the hardware that's the difficult problem. We're nowhere close to hitting the limits of scaling hardware capability, and every time people declare that we are, they're proven wrong in just a few years, and sometimes even in just a few months.
It's the software. And we're so far away from being able to construct anything that could think like a human being that the beginning of it isn't even in sight.
LLMs are fantastic, but they're not a path to building something more intelligent than a human being, "Superintelligence". I would have a negative amount of surprise if LLMs are an evolutionary dead end as far as building superintelligence goes.
Is modeling neuron interactions the only way to achieve it? No idea. But even doing that for the number of neurons in a human brain is currently in fantasy land and most likely will be for at least a few decades, if not longer.
If I had to characterize the current state of things, we're like Leonardo Da Vinci and his aerial screw. We know what a helicopter could be and have ideas about how it could work, but the supporting things required to make it happen are a long, long way off.
But you will still need to sustain ex-workers if they can't get normal jobs, and those same people at the top will not tolerate the taxes required to sustain a basic level of living for much wider population. They already can't tolerate the idea of a much smaller population using food assistance or healthcare from the government.
That leads me to think this is not really a visionary statement, but just a signal that Mark isn't intentionally trying to bring about a new dystopia, and here's his proof. And if a dystopia happens to come about, you can't blame him because he had pure intentions; clearly it was everyone else who just didn't agree with him and it's their fault.
Maybe make Meta a not-for-profit and there might be some credibility here.
From Zuckerberg’s behavior, since the beginning, it’s clear what he wants is power, and if you have the kind of mental health disorder where you believe you know better than everyone and deserve power over others, then that’s not dystopian at all.
Everything he says is PR virtue signaling. Judge the man on his actions.