\n<\/p>\n
Meta\u2019s newest advertisement<\/a> begins with a black-and-white shot of an eye, showing us what someone sees as they read countless panicked headlines about how AI is going to take our jobs, isolate us, and spark a global crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cSome people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it\u2019s going to leave us behind,\u201d a voiceover says. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t disagree more.\u201d<\/p>\n Suddenly, the video shifts to color, and shows a cycle of different people opening their eyes and smiling. Then, we see a couple dancing on a rooftop, pointing at a rainbow; a group of teens swimming in a lake; a child frolicking in a field; friends embracing after time apart.<\/p>\n \u201cCall us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want. But we\u2019re betting on people, and we like those odds,\u201d the voiceover says. \u201cThe future is for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s a nice sentiment \u2014 as well as pretty convenient for a company betting hundreds of billions of dollars that AI will revolutionize humanity. But the strangest part of the advertisement is not that we\u2019re watching these happy moments play out via Instagram posts. It\u2019s that the soundtrack to the ad is the David Bowie song \u201cFive Years.\u201d<\/p>\n If you are not familiar with this song, I urge you to give it a listen<\/a>, read the lyrics<\/a>, and think about what it is trying to say. It seems clear to me, but I studied poetry in college, so as a control for this experiment, I asked my brother \u2014 a blockchain analyst who loves Claude Code and does not read for fun \u2014 if he could tell me what the song is about.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought climate change at first, then zombie apocalypse, then an asteroid hitting the earth,\u201d he told me. He is correct. It is a song about the human race panicking after learning they will die in a mass-extinction event in five years.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re not familiar with Bowie\u2019s music, this track might sound happy and inspiring, matching the ad\u2019s upbeat tone. The part of the song that is used for the advertisement was probably chosen because it uses the word \u201cpeople\u201d over and over again, and without the context of the song, it\u2019s not clear what it\u2019s about.<\/p>\n But if we look at the lines directly preceding this section:<\/p>\n News had just come over We \u201chad five years left to cry in\u201d and the \u201cearth was really dying.\u201d It\u2019s pretty bleak.<\/p>\n It is not reassuring to convince people that AI is going to make the world better while playing a song about the end of the world, and yet, this contradictory musical choice seems to have sailed right past everyone at Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n \u201cMeta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want,\u201d he wrote<\/a> alongside the video. \u201cAs we enter this next wave with AI, we continue to believe the future is for everyone. We\u2019re focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Then again, tech leaders are not known for their literary analysis skills. Meta\u2019s Oculus used to give new hires copies of the science fiction novel \u201cReady Player One<\/a>,\u201d which is set in a dystopia in which a tech company making virtual reality products becomes overly powerful and evil. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has directly cited<\/a> inspiration from the movie \u201cHer,\u201d which warns us about what can go wrong when we use AI for emotional support<\/a>. Palantir, a company that builds AI surveillance systems for the government, is named after Palantir, a seeing stone from the \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d franchise that the Dark Lord uses to spy on his enemies. Elon Musk is currently throwing a fit<\/a> about the \u201caccuracy\u201d of Christopher Nolan\u2019s blockbuster adaptation of \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d a story with such realistic elements as sea monsters, magic, and divine intervention. These guys make a great argument for the value of studying the humanities.<\/p>\n\n
We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n