Superpowers, Not Superintelligence | Bond

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←NewsMark Zuckerberg is right about the important parts in “The Future is for Everyone”. Right that the defining question is who gets access to superintelligence and what we point it at. Right that concentrating it in a few institutions would be a catastrophe. Right that there’s no objective answer to what a good life looks like, and people should decide that for themselves.<br>He’s also right about the mechanism. Power checks power. The safest arrangement is one where nobody accumulates enough of it to stop being checked. He applies the balance-of-power test to companies, to countries, to labs, to AI. He applies it to model access and to governance.<br>He never once applies it to data acquisition.<br>The incentives we set now are the ones we live with for the next 20 years. We wrote a contract like this before for the internet, pioneered by companies like Meta. Free products in exchange for data collection, surveillance, and ads. It looked like a good deal.<br>In the AI era, the power sits in the input layer. The input has to come from you and be owned by you.<br>I should declare my own interest. I’m building in this new direction. This essay is about a new path forward. Not why you shouldn’t trust anyone. What becomes possible when we put humans first ahead of machines.<br>Look at Meta’s Actions<br>Zuckerberg promises an agent that understands you, your goals, everything you care about. Look at how it learns. It monitors his sleep. It watches him train. It flags what it thinks he’ll find interesting. It plans his daughter’s recipes and orders the ingredients.<br>The agent acts in every sentence. He is the object of all of them. Now notice who’s missing. You.<br>This isn’t an accident of the examples. A year ago, in July 2025, he wrote what the input would be. Glasses that “see what we see, hear what we hear,” worn all day, becoming our primary computing device. A camera and a microphone on your face, understanding your context ambiently because it never stops recording it.<br>That is a design decision, made early and stated plainly. The intelligence has to watch you, because nobody ever tells it anything. It needs nothing but your presence. That is the asymmetry his own essay warns about, moved one level down. If concentrated power is the danger, then an agent who collects data silently and whose inputs you don’t choose concentrates power too. Not in a government. Not in a lab. Whoever owns the input layer.<br>Glasses that watch you all day feed the same profile to the same company. Distributing an open weights model while centralizing the capture isn’t a balance of power. It’s the same arrangement with better optics.<br>Zuckerberg promises a fully private mode where even Meta can’t see your information. His actions highlight this is likely just a mode, not the default. On December 16, 2025, Meta’s updated privacy policy took effect that signaled the opposite. Your private conversations with Meta AI now personalize the content you see and the ads you’re shown. ~$200 billion of advertising revenue is a powerful incentive after all. His actions speak louder than his words.

Meta’s private policy updates in December 2025Tools, Not Machines<br>Personal superintelligence. Read the noun. Superintelligence puts the intelligence in the machine. The machine is the focus and the one that’s smart. Not you. People want superpowers, not superintelligence. A superpower puts the power in the person. You become the one who can do something you couldn’t before.<br>That sounds like semantics. It isn’t. It decides where the information comes from and who owns it.<br>If the machine is the focus, its goal is to learn about everyone and act on its own. And the only way to learn about you without your participation is to observe you. Follow you around. Make inferences. Assemble a profile from the residue of a life. Then use that data to make itself better.<br>If you’re the focus, the machine has to be told. It asks. You answer. You’re the author and the owner of your own data. It’s the instrument. You get better.<br>Two architectures. One requires your participation to function and serves you. The other requires only your presence and serves itself.<br>Every significant tool we’ve ever called a superpower is the first kind.<br>With a phone, we can communicate across the world in seconds.<br>With cameras, we can preserve our experiences and knowledge.<br>With search engines, we can reach information from anywhere on earth.<br>With MRIs and microscopes, we can see inside our own bodies.<br>With telescopes, we can see past the limits of our eyes.<br>With GPS, we can extend our sense of where we are.<br>Every one of them allows you to control the input and own the output. An agent that captures data ambiently breaks that. It becomes a machine that you serve. Not a tool that serves you.<br>Facebook serves as a cautionary tale of this dichotomy. It was originally built to be a tool to connect people. It evolved into a machine that creates addiction,...