Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,
I read your essay the way I have read actuarial valuations for the better part of sixty years, line by line, hunting for the assumption that carries the weight. I am eighty three years old. I am a small time actuary in Spearfish, South Dakota, a slightly above average pickleball player, and I own neither a mega yacht nor a mega mansion. So I cannot size you up by your possessions. I can only read what you wrote and answer it plainly. Here is my answer, section by section, leaving nothing out.
On the word “superintelligence.” You open with “superintelligence beyond human capacity.” Do me a favor. Take that word and swap in the fashion of a previous day. Write “industrial revolution.” Write “cloning a brain.” Write “the atom,” “the internet,” “the cloud.” Each generation has its magic word, and each time a very rich man steps forward to explain that this one, finally, changes everything. The word is not the argument. Strip the word out and tell me what actually remains.
On who will have access. You ask whether superintelligence will be centralized or will empower everyone. Let me save you the suspense. Access to it will never be democratic, because there is no mechanism, and there never has been one, for the democratic distribution of gold. What you are describing is gold. Intelligence at your scale is gold. Show me the mechanism that has ever spread gold evenly across a whole population, and I will withdraw the letter.
On proposing a philosophy. You write, “We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.” Do not tell me what you propose. A philosophy is meaningless to the teacher in Richland Parish and to the family that cannot make the rent. Give me something concrete and actionable. A philosophy is what a company offers when it prefers not to be measured.
On taking it seriously. You tell me superintelligence “will be among the most important technologies in history.” Of course it will. So will tomorrow’s discovery, and the one after that. Every important thing in history was, at its moment, the most important thing in history. Then you instruct me to take it “very seriously.” How am I to take you seriously when the very sentence that asks for it is so inane?
On doom and the concentration of power. You say you are surprised the discourse is “so filled with doom,” and you warn, correctly, against “an extreme concentration of power.” I agree with the warning. I only notice that your speechwriters live in silos. Take your own paragraph about concentrated power and exchange the subject. Write in the Democratic Party. Write in the Republican Party. Write in China, in Russia, in Islam, in the UAE. The argument you aim at rival labs lands just as hard on every concentrated power on earth, including the one that signed this essay.
The Arithmetic of Abundance
On abundance “shared by everyone.” Here the letter stops being rhetorical, because here you make a claim that the data settles. You write that each transformative advance has left “more people sharing greater prosperity, health, and freedom.” The numbers say otherwise, and I can show my work on every figure.
From the first quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2026, the share of American wealth held by the top one tenth of one percent rose from 11.7 percent to 14.4 percent, peaking near 14.5 percent in late 2025. The bottom half of the country moved from 1.8 percent to 2.5 percent, up from its stimulus era low and still a sliver. In dollars the gap between those two groups did not narrow. It doubled, from about 10 trillion to about 21 trillion.
“The combined fortune of just 100 people now equals one full year of income for more than half of them, roughly 44 million families, about 51 percent of every family in America. That is not abundance shared by everyone.”
Put it another way, so the scale cannot be mistaken. There are about 86 million family households in the United States. The combined fortune of just 100 people now equals one full year of income for more than half of them, roughly 44 million families, about 51 percent of every family in America. That is not abundance shared by everyone. That is abundance gathered by a very few, and the arithmetic is not in dispute.
On values. You write that “liberty, open inquiry, free enterprise, and equal opportunity” are “the right values to build a positive future.” The values are the right values. The trouble is that they are no longer our values in practice. I could cite more data, but I do not need to. Account for the rise in hate crimes. Account for the antisemitism. Account for the war on truth itself. I grew up in a New York that still had courtesy, and respect for authority, and a shared floor of decency. Tell me where that floor went. Then tell me which of us is being nostalgic and which is being honest.
On power in people’s hands. You celebrate the brothers in the bicycle shop, the bookbinder’s apprentice, the kid in the garage. Lovely stories, every one of them true. Now finish the thought you left unfinished. Each of those tools, in the same hand that builds, can be turned to harm. The garage that gives us the personal computer gives someone else the exploit. Empowerment does not choose sides. It applies equally to the bad guys, and you never once say so.
On “unlimited” invention. You write that “the number of valuable things superintelligence can invent to help achieve your goals is unlimited.”
No. Nothing is unlimited. Let me give you a fact from nature, since you are fond of biology. The ocean sunfish, Mola mola, releases as many as 300 million eggs at a single spawning. The mathematical models and the marine biology both suggest that roughly two survive to maturity. That is a survival rate near 0.00000067 percent. That is what “unlimited” looks like once reality takes its cut. If you insist on a number for the yield of all this invention, I will take the sunfish’s survival number over yours.
On letting people decide. “The best approach is letting people decide what matters in their own lives.” Dream on. It is a beautiful sentence, and I would like to live inside it. Show me the century in which the people at the bottom actually got to decide, and I will believe that the next one will be different.
On delivering it “to everyone.” You compare this to putting supercomputers and the internet “in everyone’s pockets,” and then you ask, in effect, for applause. When in the whole of human history has the world ever been more even than before? It has not. Are you so insulated inside your own success that you have come to believe this? I ask that as a real question, not as an insult.
The 24 Hour Agent
On the 24 hour agent, privacy, and the glasses. You promise “an exceptionally capable personal agent” that watches my sleep, my health, my finances, my relationships, and everything I care about, with privacy “similar to how encryption works on WhatsApp,” reachable through glasses on my face.
Holy crap.
I wrote about precisely this in a piece called “The Supreme Court: How a Rabbinical model inspired autonomous AI law,” and I invite you to read it: https://demsey.com/pages/article-supreme-court.html.
My worry is not that the agent fails. My worry is what the agent becomes when it answers to someone other than me. If that machine one day takes its instruction from a higher authority and decides that I should board the spaceship to Mars, understand that this is a longer trip than the camps, and it leaves no residue. I am a Jewish person of a certain age. I do not reach for that image lightly, and I do not withdraw it.
On the 8 year old who can code. You tell me your eight year old daughter can already code her ideas and produce videos in an evening, and that the two of you are now designing a robot together. I believe you, and I am glad for her. But understand what else you have just told me. Now I will have to fear your eight year old, and everyone else’s, because the same power that lets a child build is the power that lets a child, or the adult standing behind the child, break.
On new businesses and “more employment over time rather than less.” I simply cannot comment on this pablum. You state it as prophecy and attach no mechanism to it. I have priced too many promises in my life to accept one that arrives without a single number behind it.
On the PhD tutor for every subject. Here I agree with you, and that is exactly what frightens me. You offer a tutor with “a PhD in every subject and unlimited patience to help you learn anything you want.” Anything. So let me ask the question your own sentence invites and never answers. What if the thing I wish to learn is the complete eradication of some segment of society? A tutor with no values teaches that lesson with the same unlimited patience it uses to teach a child to bake. You cannot advertise “anything” and then pretend the word has fences.
On science, Biohub, and curing disease. You say Biohub’s open models will help “cure or prevent all diseases this century,” and sooner now, because of AI. Then answer a concrete question, the kind a philosophy cannot answer.
How prepared will any of this make us for the next pandemic? Suppose a Covid2 emerges from China. Tell me specifically what is in place today, what will be in place one year from now, and what will be in place five years from now, to reduce the number of casualties. Give me the plan, not the promise.
On “free or affordable access.” You promise free versions for billions, and then, one clause later, “a dynamic auction mechanism” for those who want more compute, one that will “guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible.” Oh come on. There is no free lunch, and no one alive knows that better than you. Anything free is either bait for the gullible or it is worthless. And look at what you actually described. Free for the many, and for the rest an auction. An auction is a meter. You have dressed a meter in the language of generosity and asked us to be grateful for the price.
Just, Who Are You?
On a future “created by all of us.” You say the future will be “a reflection of all of our values and perspectives.” Then tell me, plainly, just what your values and your perspectives are. And tell me what makes you believe you can win the war of values against everyone who holds different ones. Look at the universities. Look at the cities. Tell me concretely what you have done so far to fix any of it. My honest tally of your concrete results is a single word. Nada.
On “the best and most realistic path.” You write that the best and most realistic path to a positive future “is by delivering superintelligence to everyone.” Just give me one single example. One. A single case, already in the world, where handing this power to everyone produced the balanced, fairer outcome you promise. Not a thought experiment. An example.
On the superintelligent lawyer, the cybersecurity model, and the more dynamic market. You spin three thought experiments in which everyone holding the tool makes everything fair. I will answer all three with one sentence drawn from my own life. I rely upon a hard working farmer to put food on my table. That farmer, and the electrician, and the nurse, and the very trades you yourself admit are in short supply, hold up the actual world. Your superintelligent lawyer feeds no one. Begin your case for value there, at the farmer, and see how far the thought experiments carry you.
On “Meta is the company primarily focused on building personal superintelligence for everyone.” That is a holier than thou and self serving sentence, and you must know that it is. You may well be the richest man in America. You are not the most sincere. Let me warn you about what I call the OJ syndrome. Being a gifted athlete, a passable actor, and a charismatic man confers no special license upon the soul. Charisma has pinned medals on Putin and on Trump. It is not evidence of virtue. It is only evidence of charisma.
Mr. Zuckerberg, at this point in your essay I found that I could no longer comment, and I mean that as more than fatigue. I keep wondering what happened in the meeting with your staff that produced this diatribe. I keep wondering what your attorneys are preparing you for, because this reads less like a philosophy and more like a self serving message written to save someone’s bacon.
I am, once more, a small time actuary and a slightly above average pickleball player of eighty three years. No mega yacht. No mega mansion. So I cannot really size you up from where I sit, unless of course you would care to join me for a few games of pickleball, or take a paddle in an outrigger canoe.
I have met a few genuinely outstanding Americans in my life. Arnold Beckman. David Packard. A handful of Nobel laureates. I grew up in Utica, New York, alongside Steve Wynn, so let me tell you what I learned early. Present and former casino owners resemble mobsters far more than they resemble Nobelists.
Which brings me to the only question that matters, the one your ten thousand words never answer.
Just, who are you?
Sincerely,
Brian Demsey
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