On ‘Personal Superintelligence’ And Accessibility
Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg published an essay about what he calls “Personal Superintelligence.” The 600-word post comes on the heels of Meta’s spending spree of late to staff up its Superintelligence Labs group, during which Meta has poached several Apple employees working on AI. The seemingly ever-growing list notably includes the person who purveyed Apple’s foundation models, Ruoming Pang.
Pang’s defection to Meta was first reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman last month.
But back to Zuckerberg and artificial intelligence.
“It seems clear that in the coming years, AI will improve all our existing systems and enable the creation and discovery of new things that aren’t imaginable today,” he wrote. “But it is an open question what we will direct superintelligence towards.”
Those who harbor more cynical inclinations towards Zuckerberg and Meta have, somewhat rightfully, labeled his latest manifesto as much ado about nothing. After all, Zuckerberg once was bullish on the so-called “metaverse” portending the future of technology—in with a bang, but out just as quickly with nary a whimper. Personally, I too thought the metaverse was nothing more than a big bunch of hooey. That said, I’m willing to acknowledge he does manage to plant a few kernels of truth in his piece.
The “nut graf” of Zuckerberg’s post concerns wearables—namely, glasses.
“The intersection of technology and how people live is Meta’s focus, and will only become more important in the future,” he said. “If trends continue, then you’d expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting. Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.”
Personal devices that know our context is a sentiment which resonates deeply with accessibility. As a devout Apple user, it’s not hard to look at something like Vision Pro and, despite how cool and cutting-edge the headset is, it isn’t hard to envision a shrinkage of its technology so as to fit normal-sized glasses. Apple knows this too, but you gotta start somewhere, so $3,500 buys you baby steps into the future. From a disability standpoint, the allure is obvious: Vision Pro’s mixed-reality makes it such that software can be layered in the real world, literally in front of one’s eyes. Even Apple’s Liquid Glass, it could be argued, was created partly with Apple’s accelerated roadmap in mind. It’s a design language that seems (to me, anyway) ideally suited for products like Vision Pro and more. The dividends are of limited utility right now beyond sheer novelty, but think of Zuckerberg’s aforementioned glasses. Imagine, for instance, a future version of visionOS running on a pair of glasses similar to Meta’s own Ray-Bans that show you turn-by-turn directions in Apple Maps, incoming texts in iMessage, or even a person’s contact card when they approach you. For someone who’s Blind or low vision, as is yours truly, it would be extremely accessible for Siri to say, “Josie is approaching, here’s her information” if it’s hard to make out a person’s face and/or physique from afar. Maybe some of this information is relayed through AirPods, but the salient point is simply that, for certain things, a pair of “Apple Vision Glasses” would be more useful—and more accessible—than using the iPhone in our pockets. Put another way, it’s why Apple Watch is such a capable satellite device today. To wit, beyond mere convenience, it can be far more accessible (and more convenient) for many disabled people to raise their wrist for notifications than reach for the phone in their pocket.
Maybe Zuckerberg is ultimately wrong in his prognosticating. Maybe the smartphone truly is the end-all, be-all form factor for mobile computing. I, for one, wouldn’t anoint him (and by extension, Meta) to lead the charge on the next technological revolution. But assuming he’s right, at least in certain respects, his blurb here about the evolution of personal computing vis-a-vis glasses may well prove remarkably prescient over the next decade or two. Whatever happens, one thing will remain crystal clear disability community is ripe with technologists, and any advancements in technology will be embraced with unbridled enthusiasm if they help us better access the world we live in.
