What the AI overlords get wrong about being alive

The Vergecast hosts a roundtable with Elizabeth Lopatto, David Imel, and Victoria Song to discuss Lopatto's response to Mark Zuckerberg's 6,500-word AI manifesto. They explore what it means to be alive when AI increasingly makes decisions for us, arguing that Zuckerberg's vision frames life as an optimization problem solvable by artificial intelligence. Lopatto contends that such a framing misses the messy, non-algorithmic aspects of human existence—joy, spontaneity, and meaning. The conversation touches on the danger of ceding agency to machines and how tech leaders' grand plans often overlook the value of struggle. While the episode also name-checks recent tech news, its heart is a freewheeling debate about the pitfalls of outsourcing living to algorithms.