Skip to main content

Mark Zuckerberg wants to fix tech in the new year

Mark Zuckerberg wants to fix tech in the new year

/

And you can watch it all on Facebook

Share this story

Mark Zuckerberg Addresses F8 Facebook Developer Conference
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Every year, Mark Zuckerberg announces his New Year’s resolution. In years past, he’s decided to tackle more inconspicuous tasks: learning Mandarin and traveling the entire country. But in 2019, he wants to be more ambitious by tackling big questions surrounding technology’s place in our world.

And he plans to ask those questions on his companies’ platforms for everyone to see, perhaps speaking alongside other Silicon Valley executives.

“My challenge for 2019 is to host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society — the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Every few weeks I’ll talk with leaders, experts, and people in our community from different fields and I’ll try different formats to keep it interesting. These will all be public, either on my Facebook or Instagram pages or on other media.”

In his post, Zuckerberg posed questions on AI, encryption, online communities, job creation, decentralization, and more — all hot-topic moral and socioeconomic questions that industry leaders have struggled with for years.

It’s unclear when and where these discussions will be held, but hearing from Zuckerberg on these weighted questions can’t be a bad thing. Transparency has been one of the most prominent requests that critics of the company have made of Zuckerberg throughout the past few years.

But last year’s anxieties surrounding election integrity and fake news didn’t just disappear after the ball in Times Square dropped. In his post, Zuckerberg said he expects to continue focusing on the scandals his company has been entrenched in following the Cambridge Analytica revelations and the 2016 election. “These issues are complex and we will continue focusing on them for years to come,” he wrote.

“I’m going to put myself out there more than I’ve been comfortable with and engage more in some of these debates about the future, the tradeoffs we face, and where we want to go,” he said.