In Meta’s version of the future, I’ll have my Muse call your Muse
By Saghir Hussain ·
Meta's AI Future Won't Fix Your Mortgage
Meta's latest vision isn't about connecting people — it's about replacing them, one automated agent at a time. While Zuckerberg plays billionaire tax games, ordinary Brits are being left to work out what an AI-managed world actually means for their pockets.
The Automation Squeeze
Let me cut through the tech fluff: Mark Zuckerberg wants a future where your AI agent negotiates with my AI agent, handles your shopping, books your holidays, and basically runs your life better than you can yourself. Lovely idea — if you're Mark Zuckerberg and worth £50 billion. Not so lovely if you're a call centre worker in Manchester watching your job disappear to a chatbot that never asks for a pay rise.
The automation revolution isn't coming — it's here, and it's hitting places like the Welsh valleys and former industrial towns harder than anywhere else. Retraining programmes? They move at glacial pace compared to how fast AI is eating jobs. You can't retrain a 45-year-old warehouse worker to be a data scientist overnight, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours.
While Zuckerberg threatens to quit America over a proposed wealth tax (a tax that doesn't even exist yet), real people are dealing with real consequences. Inflation's still biting, energy bills remain brutal, and now we're told AI agents will make everything better. Tell that to the single mother working two jobs because her administrative role got automated last month.
The Billionaire Tax Dodge
Here's the thing about Meta's £25 billion privacy fine in Brazil — it's pocket money to a company that made nearly $100 billion last year. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg's threatening to leave over a wealth tax that would affect exactly zero ordinary people. This isn't about policy disagreement — it's about protecting dynastic wealth while the rest of us adapt to a world where our livelihoods depend on algorithm whims.
The UK government's response? Fiddling while Rome burns. We've got ministers talking about AI regulation and digital services taxes, but the conversation feels abstract, removed from the high street closures and job losses happening daily. Rishi Sunak's successor is grappling with an economy where traditional employment models are crumbling, yet the policy response remains stuck in pre-digital thinking.
What Actually Helps People?
I'm not calling for Luddite destruction of technology. Far from it — I run a news website, I understand progress. But we need honesty, not utopian promises from tech billionaires who've never worried about making rent.
What Brits need isn't AI agents negotiating with each other — it's support for the transition. Proper retraining that matches real job opportunities, not pointless courses designed to make unemployment statistics look better. Investment in regions that've been left behind by globalisation and now face being doubly screwed by automation. Price controls that actually tackle the cost of living crisis that's destroying household budgets.
Zuckerberg can keep his agent-to-agent future. Most of us would settle for leaders who understand that when work disappears faster than new jobs appear, you don't solve it by having robots chat with robots.
So here's my question to policymakers: while billionaires play with AI utopias, can we please get some practical help for the rest of us who just want to pay our mortgages without losing our jobs to automation?