Mark Zuckerberg, whose superyacht apparently spent the weekend ignoring or missing the distress signal from a boat that ran out of fuel near Alaska, has posted a deranged, 6,500 word essay detailing his vision for AI superintelligence, a future that is “for everyone” but which sounds less social than ever.

Zuckerberg posts these types of essays every so often for purposes that serve his own company, and this one, called “The Future Is For Everyone,” is designed to defend against general backlash to AI but also to Meta’s own practices. Zuckerberg lays out the potential use case for Meta glasses (whose huge marketing campaign cannot get people to stop calling them “pervert glasses”), AI agents, open weights AI development, and why data centers are not bad for communities, actually. Like most Silicon Valley “utopian” essays, to believe that any of this is going to go how Zuckerberg suggests it will requires one to have been recently concussed or to willfully ignore how this technology is being used today and believe that thousands of years of human nature will suddenly shift. 

For example, Zuckerberg writes “Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more. It will free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise. It will have strong privacy and security options so you can trust it to handle all of your personal content knowing that no one else can access your information, similar to how encryption works on WhatsApp. You’ll be able to interact with your agent through any device, including your glasses to keep you present in the moment with the people you care about.” 

Zuckerberg does not grapple with, or even gesture at, the idea that some people may not want to have an AI agent working on their “hobbies.” He does not consider that, even if everyone were to have an AI agent, perhaps not everyone would use these AI agents for good. In the few months that AI agents have become popular among the early adopter set, we have seen “benevolent” AI agents endlessly spam humans and the internet with drivel. And those are just the kind-of-annoying ones. We have seen AI agents hack companies, and over the weekend an Australian man went viral because his AI agent that he asked to sign him up for gym classes did so by hacking the gym’s reservation system and canceling other people’s reservations. 

Like many AI weirdos, Zuckerberg explains how AI has already changed his life by allowing him to automate many of the joyful tasks of parenting by outsourcing them to an agent: “My agent flags interesting information and helps me prototype ideas. It helps keep me healthy by monitoring my sleep and then watching as I train and giving feedback. My daughter loves to bake so my agent plans personalized recipes for us to make together each weekend, orders the ingredients, and then offers suggestions as we’re baking,” he writes. “My 8 year old daughter can already code her ideas and produce videos in an evening that would have either taken me months or been impossible previously. Now we’re designing a robot together.”

Zuckerberg’s essay goes on and on and on like this. He imagines a future where everyone can do everything and wants to do everything. In Zuckerberg’s future, everyone will have a business run by their AI agent. Everyone will be inventing things and doing basic research on the nature of the universe and physical elements, for some reason. Zuckerberg writes that Meta employees, with the help of AI, are “generating novel crystal structures that are ideal for augmented reality glasses,” then writes “everyone will soon have invention superpowers,” and that “everyone […] will be able to contribute to scientific progress.”

In this future that, again, is for “everyone,” Zuckerberg explains that AI tools will be free, but that, actually, using it will be a tiered system that is exactly the same as it is now: “For everyone to be part of the future, everyone must have the ability to use superintelligence to improve their lives and shape the world. We will offer free versions that will be accessible to billions of people. For those who want to pay to use more compute, there will be a dynamic auction mechanism that will guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible for the intelligence and compute they’re using while also ensuring the capacity is used for whatever people collectively find most valuable.”

Zuckerberg’s essay is full of platitudes and sentences that mean nothing, “thought experiments” that are not developed or explored in any way, discussions of “freedom,” etc. Here are some sentences: 

• “Humanity is not a monoculture. People’s diverse values represent different tradeoffs they would make on important issues. There is no technological solution that can align with everyone’s opposing interests and values at once.”
• “As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court — even if they were wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills and resources in litigation.”
• “People have an infinite demand for new experiences and have always found new problems to tackle.”
• “While the number of questions a person can ask in a day is limited, the number of valuable things superintelligence can invent to help achieve your goals is unlimited.”
• “If people can use AI to invent incredibly valuable new things, then it will make more sense to allocate it towards that rather than automating existing jobs. The more superintelligence serves as a tool of invention, the more likely that individual capability outpaces automation and the future is better for people.”
• “In a free society, people will have tools that can be used for good or harm, but law enforcement and military have more weapons and intelligence-gathering.”

There is an entire section on data centers. In Zuckerberg’s future they are powered by power infrastructure Meta owns (which is not the case currently) and create lots of high-paying, long-lasting jobs (not the case currently). 

There is an entire section on “preventing government tyranny” by giving everyone superintelligence: “To maintain freedom, we must ensure that superintelligence primarily empowers individuals. The ideal in liberal democracy is that people naturally hold all rights and only agree to restrict some freedoms to protect the common good. Similarly, individuals should have access to personal superintelligence and should only be subject to restrictions when truly required.”

Zuckerberg does not address the backlash to his company, his data centers, his social media platforms, or his surveillance glasses. He does not discuss the slopification of the internet, gestures at job loss only through the lens that superintelligence will somehow fix it once AI agents start businesses for everyone or “invent incredibly valuable new things,” and describes a future in which bad actors essentially do not exist or are easily dispatched with. 

It’s the future Zuckerberg wants. It’s not the future “everyone” wants.  

404 Media is publishing this article in partnership with Proof News, a new nonprofit media outlet investigating the social impacts of AI. Join their mailing list here and read the version of this article on their site here.

Robotics companies promise that video-camera-toting security robots can deter and detect crime. But many companies are rethinking the approach after a trail of canceled contracts and questions about whether the artificial intelligence-powered bots are meeting the needs of businesses and local governments.

Proof News found evidence of at least 21 security robot deployments since 2015. We contacted contract holders and combed news articles and determined that at least 13 of those programs have ended. Silicon Valley-based Knightscope secured the most security robot contracts, according to Proof’s analysis, and also suffered the bulk of cancellations.

For example, New York City’s then-Mayor Eric Adams installed a Knightscope robot on the overnight shift at the Times Square subway station, but the program was scrapped when the pilot expired in 2024. City leaders did not respond to Proof News’ questions about why the robot wasn’t renewed. By the end of its assignment, it was reportedly gathering dust in an empty storefront. 

Outside Columbus, Ohio, the city of Dublin pulled the plug on a Knightscope robot in May, ending its two-year pilot program after less than 10 months. The city enlisted the robot, dubbed DubBot, to patrol a downtown park, but city spokeswoman Robyn Gray said it “did not fully meet our operational needs,” and failed to identify any criminal incidents or lead to any tickets or arrests.

Sheila Sparks isn’t surprised. Her family has operated Sparks Protection Services near Columbus for more than a decade and said a human touch is essential to de-escalating sticky situations. 

“A robot can’t do that,” Sparks said. 

Seeking a new path forward in the security industry, Knightscope CEO William Santana Li said the company is forging a new model, combining its robots and AI-powered software with another key ingredient: human security guards. Knightscope announced it purchased Event Risk LLC, a national security guard firm, earlier this year.

Knightscope has incurred net losses since inception in 2013, according to its most recent quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and is $273 million in debt. Knightscope hopes its pivot to incorporate people will give it a greater share of the physical security market — which the company believes is worth an estimated $230 billion annually.

Li declined to answer questions about the disbanded programs, but said in an email, “Technology cannot do everything — and neither can people — but the combination can be very powerful.” 

ROBOTS VS WORLD

Knightscope and other American made robotics companies could get a boost from the recent U.S. Federal Communications Commission ban on foreign-made mobile robot imports. Officials cast the move as a national security imperative given the machines’ surveillance capabilities. 

But American roboticists are facing more than foreign competition. Robots have long struggled to navigate environments constantly in flux. AI can’t handle the ambiguous situations that security guards and police face daily, said Missy Cummings, a robotics professor at George Mason University. While AI decision systems perform well in narrow circumstances, she said, they can perform “miserably” as soon as algorithms are outside their training dataset.

“AI and robots for security have had a long problematic history,” Cummings said in an email, speaking generally. “I do not see this changing anytime soon.” 

In 2016, a Knightscope robot deployed at a shopping center in Silicon Valley rolled over a 16-month-old boy's foot. The company apologized for the “freakish accident” at the time, saying in a statement that the robot veered to avoid the child, who ran backwards and directly into the machine. The next year, one flopped into a Washington, D.C. fountain. The company responded with humor, tweeting: “BREAKING NEWS: “I heard humans can take a dip in the water in this heat, but robots cannot. I am sorry.” Li, meanwhile, told the New York Times that the incident was under investigation and a new robot would be delivered free.

When asked about whether contracts remained active, representatives from neither property  responded.

Then there was a trial at the San Antonio International Airport in 2024. Spokesperson Ana Flores said its Knightscope robot struggled with badge scanning, communication, and finding its way around. A door alarm would sound, she said, but the robot wouldn’t respond efficiently. Airport leadership opted to not move forward with a one-year, $21,000 Knightscope lease following a one-month test.

Meanwhile, private security is booming. Security officers have proliferated in recent years as cities embrace private guards, who earn an average of about $40,000 a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half that of police officers. 

Robotics companies pitch their autonomous robots — some of which can be equipped with cameras, facial recognition capabilities, and license-plate readers — as another set of eyes. They have no family to go home to and are happy to work nights and weekends.

Security robots promise “an alluring form of surveillance as a service,” Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, said in an email to Proof. In some cases their visible video cameras can “deter crime without having to pay a human being a salary,” he said, but it’s not clear that robots prevent or solve crimes better than people.

“They exist as a physical manifestation — a symbol, if you will — that someone is doing something to address potential crime,” Ferguson said. “Robots are a form of security theater, more optics than results.”

CRUMPLED CONTRACTS

Knightscope isn’t the only one seeing interest fizzle.

Officials in Salem, Oregon, powered off their Daxbots after a three-month pilot with the Oregon-based robotics company earlier this year. They had deployed three Daxbot robots to deter trespassing in a downtown parking garage. The robots recorded license plate numbers, captured photos of vehicles violating parking lot rules, and shared data with police.

Complaints about the parkade are “drastically down” since the pilot ended, according to Salem Police Sgt. Trevor Morrison, but it’s unclear if that’s due to traffic-calming devices or “residual results from the Daxbot patrols.” The pilot ended in April, with city spokesperson Nicole Miller citing no additional funding for robot security. 

Daxbots have also disappeared in Tempe, Arizona. A viral video of one blue-eyed bot being outwitted by an onlooker who it demanded “leave the premises” made its way to “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” When asked about the contract, the mixed-use campus, IDEA Tempe, did not respond. Daxbot didn’t respond to Proof’s questions about why the Salem and Tempe contracts ended. 

Adam Pioth, who posted the video, told Proof that he visited the robots frequently. A few months ago, he noticed the robots no longer shouted he was trespassing. Instead, he said, they would, “stop, look at me, and then just keep going really slow.” And then, he said, they were gone.

“Goodbye my friend,” Pioth wrote on Instagram in March, “and thanks for all the fond memories.”

Daxbot is recalibrating its business, rolling into another industry: automated sidewalk assessments. Proof identified at least nine cities nationwide that have contracted with the company since last September to send robots cruising sidewalks to check for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Boston Dynamics is best known for its robotic patrol dogs, which were recently deployed to two World Cup stadiums. After Hyundai bought the controlling stake in the robotics company in 2021, it began pushing to develop mass-produced humanoid robots to work in automotive manufacturing.

Atlas, its humanoid robot, delivered the match ball to the referee during a game in July. But the strategy has also spurred rolling strikes at Hyundai Motor’s Korean assembly plants. 

Critics claim police and security robots aren’t proven crime fighters, but are effective at one thing: surveillance.

In 2021, the New York Police Department ended its lease for a Boston Dynamics robotic dog and returned it, The New York Times reported, following public outcry. U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the tool — which could climb stairs and was equipped with cameras, lights, and a two-way communication system — “surveillance ground drones” being “deployed for testing on low-income communities of color.”

Boston Dynamics did not respond to requests for comment. 

“What it’s really doing is building a mass surveillance system that is impossible to hide from,” said Brian Hofer, executive director of the privacy-advocacy nonprofit Secure Justice. “It is not a society I want to live in.”

Steve Rosta, retired highway patrol officer and co-owner of Direct Approach Security Services in Ohio, said robots’ cameras may act as a deterrent, and even catch videos of crimes, but he can’t see a future where the machines are more reliable than a human guard. 

“I’m old school,” Rosta said. “Boots on the ground is always better.”

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

A handful of cities across the U.S. have ditched Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras and immediately replaced them with equivalent systems from law enforcement contracting giant Axon, according to local media reports and government documents from around the country. Axon, for example, advertises AI-powered cameras that attach to an existing streetlamp and are designed to completely blend in with their surroundings, and also collects license plate data with cameras installed inside police officers’ patrol vehicles.

The switch to Axon, which is not yet widespread but appears to be increasing as people oppose Flock, signals what might come next for the nationwide conversation around ALPR cameras: instead of doing away with the cameras entirely — which 404 Media has linked to ICE, the tracking of a woman who self-administered an abortion, and rampant abuse by cops stalking their exes — some cities may enter contracts with another company which has faced less scrutiny and backlash.

In February, Syracuse lawmakers voted 7-1 to approve a license plate reader contract between the Syracuse Police Department and Axon, Central Current reported. That came after the department used Flock cameras starting in summer 2024, the outlet added.

In March, the Denver, Colorado, city council voted 7-6 to replace the city’s Flock cameras with Axon ones, Denver7 reported. The one-year contract was for 50 ALPR cameras, which is less than half of the total Flock cameras, the outlet added. 

In June, Grand Chute, Wisconsin, voted to get rid of its Flock cameras and transition to Axon, NBC26 reported. The town was already evaluating Axon’s product, but repeated problems with Flock led officials to speed up the transition, the report said.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado dropped Flock for a nearly $22.8 million contract with Axon in July, the Denver Gazette reported. That deal included 100 Axon cameras, doubling the 50 Flock cameras the agency had, and first responder drones, the report said.

In December the City of Ferndale, Michigan, dumped Flock and approved a deal with Axon, according to a local government document. The document explained it was making the switch because “citing privacy concerns and failures by [Flock] to protect images stored on the city's ALPR network from unauthorized agencies [...] Axon does not have a national look-up feature. Axon's ALPR data sharing software only operates on a one-to-one’ basis.” An 88-page report about the switch, however, shows that residents there are concerned about Axon’s ALPR cameras, too.

Longmont, Colorado, voted unanimously in March to approve a new deal with Axon, Times-Call reported. The purchase came after the city let its agreement with Flock lapse.

Knoxville, Texas, added a $9.4 million amendment to its existing contract with Axon, which included replacement ALPR cameras, according to a press release from the mayor. That purchase came after the city’s contract with Flock expired and the city was unable to secure a short-term extension.

As for why cities are switching, local cops performing lookups for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), data sharing, and Flock cameras sometimes being down or unavailable all came up in the media reports and documents.

One key feature of Flock is its national lookup tool. This lets, say, a police officer in Texas search ALPR cameras not just in their own neighborhood, or even state, but nationwide. That has included states which have explicit bans on sharing ALPR data out of state, like Illinois, or sanctuary states like California. After 404 Media revealed ICE was indirectly tapping into Flock camera data, Flock removed various states from the national lookup tool and made other changes to its product. When 404 Media contacted some police departments during that reporting, some were not even aware their cameras could be searched by other agencies across the country.

Axon, simply, does not have a national network. Meaning that it would not be possible for cops in one jurisdiction to search cameras across the country. Flock even highlights this in its own side by side feature sheet about Axon: it says Flock has an “unmatched nationwide network” while Axon “data sharing is limited to agency-specific data/ecosystem; no shared national network.”

Denver, just like the City of Ferndale, explicitly mentioned this lack of this national network as part of its decision to ditch Flock for Axon. “As far as data sharing under this contract, Axon does not have a national network. There's no way that we can share it nationally. No law enforcement officer in Texas, Ohio, New York, or California can log into our system. It's only Denver Police officers and only when they're investigating an actual criminal incident,” council member Kevin Flynn said according to the Denver7 report.

Police departments using Axon can enter into data sharing agreements with each other, though. In Axon’s documentation for its ALPR product, a “shared data” option “extends the query to partner-agency detections once a sharing relationship is active.”

Of course, none of that changes the basic fact of how ALPR cameras work, which constantly scan all passing vehicles regardless of which vendor runs them. Switching vendors also does not address the more fundamental issue of whether such technology should require a warrant or not.

Neither Flock nor Axon responded to a request for comment.

Axon’s ALPR cameras differ from Flock's in some key ways. First, many of them are installed inside police officers’ vehicles. These Axon Fleet 3 cameras constantly scan the license plate of every vehicle they drive past and create a timestamped log of where each was, collecting data from locations that may not be covered by a stationary camera. 

Another is Axon Lightpost, a camera that fits onto an existing streetlight and adds a surveillance camera to it. Axon’s Lightposts are built in partnership with Ubicquia. Ubicquia’s pitch is that the devices “mount to existing streetlight infrastructure, blend seamlessly into urban landscape,” and “avoid complex permitting processes.” These cameras can also livestream, according to Axon’s website.

Sticking a camera onto an existing lamppost draws less attention than Flock’s purpose built cameras but provides similar functionality. According to Axon, “Lightpost uses an Axis Q1800-LE-based license plate camera engineered for high-accuracy captures in real traffic conditions.” The camera draws power from the local grid and runs on a cellular network maintained by Ubicquia.

Axon Outpost cameras are the ones that most closely resemble Flock’s. Like Lightpost, they also livestream, and, like Flock, record a vehicle’s characteristics like their color and make.

Axon also partners with surveillance doorbell company Ring to let Ring customers share video with law enforcement. Flock and Ring cancelled a similar planned arrangement after massive backlash.

Axon then brings essentially all of this data together in Fusus. Fusus started as a system and company that linked together a city or town’s security cameras, added AI capabilities to them, and let police query all of that data at once. 404 Media previously reported how Fusus was spreading across the country. In 2024, Axon acquired Fusus.

One reason why journalists, activists, and residents have been able to learn so much about what police use Flock for is that the company has built auditing tools that the public can access through records requests. Because of Flock’s nationwide network, it is often possible to get insight into what cops are doing in an entire state or throughout the country from a local public records request. It is not clear if the same granularity of data can be learned about Axon systems, although it does allow agencies to generate audit reports.

At one point, Axon and Flock worked together before having a very public falling out. In a January 2025 blog post, Flock said, “Axon made a surprise decision to end our partnership and cut off the API access that law enforcement depends upon.” A month later, Forbes reported Axon’s CEO Rick Smith emailed customers saying, “Flock has demonstrated a pattern of behavior that creates barriers for customer integrations in attempts to create a digital silo and coerce customers to purchase additional Flock services over Axon’s.” After that, Flock and Axon became heated rivals.

Matthew Gault contributed reporting.