In a series of undercover recordings that were published by investigative reporting outlet Project Veritas, Facebook’s Global Planning Lead, Benny Thomas, said that Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, are too powerful, called for the government to intervene, and warned of dire future consequences if the government fails to take action against the tech giants.
“The government needs to step in and break up Google and Facebook,” told an undercover Project Veritas journalist in the video. “I’ll make less money but it’s a better thing for the world.”
He added that the government needs to intervene because “Facebook and Google are too powerful and they need to be made less powerful.” Specifically, he called for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Facebook’s virtual reality headset company Oculus, and WhatsApp to be made into separate companies.
Thomas also noted that tech companies such as Facebook are now so powerful that they’re more like countries than companies and compared Zuckerberg to a ruler who is more powerful than any of the world’s previous kings.
“No king in the history of the world has been the ruler of two billion people, but Mark Zuckerberg is,” Thomas said. “And he’s 36. That’s too much power for a 36 year old. Like you should not be, you should not have power over two billion people. I just think that’s wrong.”
Additionally, Thomas warned about the dire consequences of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and health technologies growing and becoming more powerful in the future.
“AI is essentially evolving to become like human intelligence,” he said. “And then, it’s going to go beyond human intelligence and at that point, humans are expendable.”
Thomas added that people should be terrified of Zuckerberg’s philanthropic organization the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) focusing on the gene editing technique CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats).
“It’s a fright,” Thomas said. “It’s eugenics. I don’t know any way to stop it. I think the genie’s out of the bottle.”
Thomas also touched on the concept of “the singularity,” which predicts humans are evolving to a point where computing ability and humans will merge in the future and create a “superior race,” and the ethical implications of this potential outcome.
“Are you just creating, again, two classes of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ but really extreme ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots?'” Thomas said. “This is what’s going to happen if CRISPR gets to.”
