When artificial intelligence (AGI) eventually appears, will it be our servant? Will it be our master? Or something else entirely, perhaps something supernatural?" As a routine precaution, I welcome any new AI creation in any form. But meta maestro Mark Zuckerberg believes that competitors in the AI industry may actually be suffering from what he calls the God Delusion.

In an interview with YouTube channel Kallaway (via Tech Crunch), Elle Zuck accused competitors of taking a too-messianic approach to AI development.

"When people in the tech industry talk about building this 'one true AI,' I take a pretty big offense. It's as if they are creating a god or something. That's not what we're doing, and I don't think it's going to unfold that way," Zuckerberg said.

He also criticized what he saw as a monopolistic approach to AI development. "Some people say there's going to be a real big AI that can do it all, but I don't think things tend to work that way; I know when you're in an AI lab, it's tempting to think what you're doing is super-important. [But realistically speaking, I don't think it's about how it works. There isn't one app on everyone's phone. No creator wants all the content people want, no app wants all the content, no business wants all the content people want to buy.

He says this without a sense of irony, but he has a point. After all, Meta gives the impression that it wants to own our digital lives as completely as possible.

Facebook began as an online directory for college students to check out how good-looking their classmates were. Now Facebook wants to know about your social activities, everything you sell, the messages you send, who you date, and much more. If Zuckerberg's Metaverse isn't an attempt to make Meta almost an all-encompassing universal app, I don't know what it is.

Indeed, a cynical person might say that the real driving force behind Zuckerberg's comments is fear that meta will be increasingly marginalized in the AI field. Apple, for example, recently adopted OpenAI as its AI technology for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Most of the rest of the interview spanned Zuckerberg's vision of the future, where smart glasses will gradually replace smartphones. Zuckerberg doesn't think that will happen anytime soon and believes that in 10 years, we will have phones in our pockets. But we will be reaching for it much less often.

Add to that heads-up displays and wristbands that intercept signals from the brain, and users will be able to do things like type with very little hand movement. It's a little creepy.

At any rate, it's a wide-ranging interview, and you don't have to be a fan of Zuckerberg or think much of what he says makes sense. For better or worse, he is certainly an extremely influential figure who holds a dominant position in social media and can spend billions of dollars pushing technology and its use in any direction he wants.