No, Zuckerberg did not set out consciously trying to "fracture society". He started out trying to provide a way to rate women at Harvard by how attractive they were, then by just trying to optimize revenue without any consideration for unintended consequences. Then kept going.
Not understanding the failure mode is going to just lead to repeating the same mistakes at even grander scales, like what's happening now with AI. Nerds obsessed with creating "AGI" without the capability or willingness to think through the potential consequences.
This is like the oil companies that hid the internal climate change studies for as long as they could. Zuck knew what he was doing long before everyone else did. Acting like he was just dumb and uninformed is wrong. When they started he might not have realized how bad optimizing for engagement was but it doesn't take a genius to realize what was happening with the data they have. He's not some starry eyed kid who accidentally made a monster, he found out he could become one of the richest men in the world if he made his monster vicious enough. This is a guy that started buying the land for his survival bunker 10 years ago.
No, Zuckerberg did not set out consciously trying to "fracture society". He started out trying to provide a way to rate women at Harvard by how attractive they were, then by just trying to optimize revenue without any consideration for unintended consequences. Then kept going.
Not understanding the failure mode is going to just lead to repeating the same mistakes at even grander scales, like what's happening now with AI. Nerds obsessed with creating "AGI" without the capability or willingness to think through the potential consequences.