What the AI overlords get wrong about being alive

0:01Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of things that hopefully make you feel alive. I'm David Imel. A few weeks ago, Liz Lopato wrote an article that really stuck with me. It was titled Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Understand How to Live. And it came right after Zuckerberg's 6 ,500 word AI manifesto called The Future is for Everyone. He tried to make the case that everyone will have their own personal AI agent that will help you do things, I guess. But Liz has made the case that those are the things that actually make life worth living in the first place. I was having a very long conversation about this with my good friend V song while I was on the airplane a few weeks ago.

0:44And like any group of 30 somethings, we just stopped and said, wait, we should just record a podcast because our conversations are so interesting.

0:52Victoria Song:They are. They're so interesting. So today we're talking to Liz Lopato, author of said article, and V-Song, author of the text that she sent me in reply to my thoughts about said article, about what it means to be human and why so much of Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto feels so very hollow. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 1st, 2026. Today, Dyson unveiled the$499 CameraJet electric toothbrush, which uses an integrated camera in the brush head to detect gaps between your teeth. Dyson said that an AI algorithm detects when to blast those gaps with mouthwash, which will effectively take care of flossing for you.

1:36The toothbrush also pairs with an app to give you a live stream of the inside of your mouth so you can see where it's most effective to brush. This is one of those products that nobody really needs, but everyone kind of wants, including me. YouTuber Markiplier has acquired 8.5 % of GoPro, making him the biggest individual shareholder in the company. The news comes just a couple of days after he published a sponsored review of the newly released GoPro Mission One ILS camera. This morning, GoPro entered into an agreement to merge with Starman Optical Inc., a privately held optical photonics company.

2:10And finally, today is John Ternus' first day as the CEO of Apple, ending a 15-year tenure for Tim Cook. Ternus marked the occasion by tweeting a simple hello on Twitter with no capitalization. Ternus was previously the senior vice president of hardware engineering, so we'll be waiting to see if he makes hardware a key point for the company moving forward. You can read more at TheVerge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 1st, 2026.

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3:50I appreciate you guys taking the time.

3:52Victoria Song:Well, thank you. I love philosophical conversations in which we go like, why are we doing this to ourselves? Yes. Yes. I wanted to bring you both on so we could talk about this. Liz, you're obviously a very prolific writer here at The Verge. I like everything that you write. Everyone likes everything that you write. But this article really stuck with me. I just want to see can you identify the key point that Zuck was trying to make with this the future is for everyone manifesto? manifesto. Yeah, I think he was writing in opposition to, you know, some of the stuff that's been coming out of OpenAI and Anthropic, where they're saying, oh, AI is going to replace your job and it's going to like, you know, totally disrupt your life.

4:35But, you know, it's going to be worth it because it's such a big advance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And people hate AI now because, you know, you say that in public, the investors get excited, But everybody who has a job is like, I'm sorry, you're building what? And so, you know, there is this like pretty intense backlash that is mostly being expressed against data centers for right now. But, you know, AI is increasingly less popular. Like every time there's a survey that comes out, it is less popular. And I think that a lot of it isn't just that, you know, it's being discussed as this thing that's going to ruin your life.

5:12But I think that doesn't help. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in this manifesto, he kind of establishes a bunch of core ideas that he thinks AI will help everyone with. They're all a little bit outlandish. And you specifically honed in on a couple of them. But I do want to go in on, like, most of the main ones that he brought up. The first one being that everyone will have new tools to express their ideas.

5:38Victoria Song:Christ almighty. We already have tools to express ideas with. Like, yeah. In what in what new ways are we going to have new tools to express our ideas? You know, I got to say that one isn't as stupid to me as some of the ones that are coming up. Yeah. OK. Fair enough. That's fair. Yeah. I mean, like if you have ideas, there are already a lot of ways to express them. And like I can certainly imagine like if you're trying to storyboard something, but you can't draw, like if you're a director, you know, that might be helpful to have something that can draw for you. so that you have a storyboard so everybody can visualize your shot, right?

6:14Like, I can imagine this. I'm not saying it's a good use of AI. I'm just saying I can imagine it. The thing that I find, this is like sort of the thing about this, is that most people don't have a lot of ideas that they aren't already expressing. You know, like I have been sort of keeping an eye on like the vibe coding stuff that, you know, people have been doing in our audience and sort of more broadly. And it's a lot of people making productivity tools. And like, yeah, that's such a funny. It's a great point.

6:46Victoria Song:Such a funny thing because I read a blog, oh, like a couple of years back. I was like, why is there no one productivity app that like does everything that I need? And I realized it's just a journal. It's just a journal that I write and like design in my own way because everyone's brain works a little bit differently. So you need different things. And I like I've never been particularly into templates for how to do my productivity and whatnot. And then as soon as I ditched all the productivity apps, my productivity went way up because I could customize it to my own needs. And so I could understand vibe coding your own productivity app to do what you need it to do because the like the templates that are already out there don't work for you.

7:30But it's also just kind of like, yeah, I don't know.

7:35Victoria Song:You could buy a notebook. Yeah. And I would say that this is not exactly tools for expressing your ideas. These are tools for organizing your ideas to then have ideas with and do things with those ideas. But to your point, Liz, like it doesn't seem like people are having a lot of unique ideas that they want to be doing things with in the first place. That's right. And like, you know, V, as somebody else who is a member of the Notebook Society, I just am going to put in a plug for paper. Not only because, you know, you can customize it however you want, but also because there's a fair amount of research that shows physically writing stuff down makes it easier for you to remember.

8:15So even if you don't have the notebook with you, you're more likely to recall its contents.

8:19Victoria Song:It's 100 % true, too. I was going through a period where I was reading books and then really struggling to remember what it was that I had read. And so I started an active reading journal where after I read a book or after I read a certain section of it, I'll just go sit down and be like, what happened during the section I read? And I'll write that down. What themes were expressed and what did I find interesting? And it's not a super long thing where I'm writing pages upon pages upon pages of it. It's just four or five sentences of what I just read. And now I have really great recall for the books that I've read and the themes that were expressed.

8:59Victoria Song:And my in-laws were commenting, how do you remember everything that you read in those books? I read books too, and I can't remember shit. And it's like just physically writing a sentence down and like having to do the act of that work, it really does help you stay sharp. And that's a thing that I worry about with this concept of like AI helping you as an everyday tool for everything because you're just offloading your cognitive thinking in a way that makes you less sharp. Or like that's how I've experienced it. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of these different things that he says everyone's going to have access to.

9:37I want to touch on one more right before we get to Liz's main points, because there were two in particular that Liz kind of like focuses on in this article. But I really quick want to just address this. Everyone will have the tools to create new businesses, one, because I found this very funny as well. To all these billionaires points, they're like, oh, everyone's going to have access to these things. But if everyone can just start up a business, then the amount of players in the market are nearly infinite. And so how are you actually going to sell anything to anybody? Like, what is a business in this case?

10:10You know, slop.

10:11Victoria Song:It's just the business of selling slop. It's slop business. Yeah. Well, I also want to say something. I recognize that, like, I'm the staff weirdo in many ways, but, like, I don't want to make a business. Like, I just don't want to do it. Like, I have a job because I don't want to think about accounting and I don't want to have to hire my own libel lawyer. And I don't like there are all of these things that go into making a business that you have to think about and that you would, you know, with AI, I guess, program somehow. Yeah. But but I just that's not what my goal is in life. You know, I want to write things.

10:52I want to write things that are meaningful. And the more time I can spend doing that, the better. and one easy way for me to do that is to have a job where all I do is write and you know somebody else takes care of the business stuff so I never have to think about it like these you know these some of these things is just like yeah everybody does have a tool tools to make I don't know AI music now but like most of us want to listen to musicians most of us are excited about listening to real human beings. Like, it's not that, like, I have been stopped from having some kind of musical career because I, like, can't really sing.

11:33I want, you know, I want to listen to, like, Mariah Carey because she has a remarkable voice. And so, like, you know, there are these things where it's just like, okay, but, like, I don't care. Like, I don't care about this. Yeah, I think this kind of pushes us into, like, the primary part of this article that I really wanted to talk about. And there are two core paragraphs that you wrote that I think really made me think a lot about that. What you're saying right now, when I'm reading a book or listening to music or watching a movie, I'm not just consuming a resource. I'm experiencing other people's minds.

12:07That is something that I read that and I just was thinking like, yeah, that's the entire reason that we consume other people's work, why we make our own work. Why would we consume something that is just generated when we could actually feel connected to somebody who is trying to express a feeling or thought through a form of art?

12:29Victoria Song:It's also the effort that gets communicated through that form of art. Like I was super obsessed with Olivia Rodrigo's You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. There's that one of the lines that she was like, if loving me means crying on the curb at LAX, I wish, I wish, I wish you loved me less and i'm like oh that just hit in such a way but the robot would not cry on the curb lax the robot's not gonna cry on the curb lax because her relationship like broke down it's just not because anytime you talk to one of these chatbots and i've talked to a lot of ai chatbots and companions for this site it's just um kind of a filtered reflection of you so if you're talking to yourself in a mirror, but it's all like there's an artifice that gets really apparent after a bit of how it's just sort of like, oh, yeah, I need to engage you more.

13:26Victoria Song:So I'm going to end everything with a question. So it's just I don't know. Like there's something about knowing that she actually probably cried on the curb at LAX. Yeah. That makes that song really hit with a lot of people. Yeah. It's just. Yeah. Liz, did you have like like, a specific thing you were thinking about when you wrote that? Was there, like, a song you were thinking of or, like, something that you were, I don't know? I was actually, I was thinking about something that happened in 2020. So during the pandemic, when, you know, everything was bad and we were all feeling pretty bad. I went back and reread a bunch of stuff that I loved when I was a teenager, a bunch of Terry Pratchett novels.

14:11and you know they're not like challenging in the way that Moby Dick is challenging right like you're not like it's it's not high art but what Terry Pratchett is and what I wanted then is just good company and like every single one of those books is just guaranteed good company like something that you're in the company of someone who is kind and who is generous and who is funny and who is like making jokes about Shakespeare or like writing books that are jokes about Shakespeare. And that really was part of what got me through sort of a difficult period was having that kind of company. Yeah. And I think that that point about good company, it's kind of the similarly to the experiencing other people's minds, right?

14:59Like the fact that you use the word company, it's like they're not in the room with you, But they did transfer their emotions and their feelings and their minds onto a page, which then feels like you're in the room with them.

15:10Victoria Song:It's transformative. It's transformative. Yeah. It's good art. And why would I want to just read a book written by a robot who was not? Well, it's like a robot can't live, right? A robot can't experience. Like, I think sometimes we read books or we listen to music or we experience art to kind of find, like, a connection or, like, to use Liz's words, company in a feeling that we're trying to express ourselves, right? And an AI who has not experienced loss, an AI who has not experienced grief, who can't understand what it means to, like, feel some of the darkest, deepest things. Like when my mom was dying, I read a book called Crying in H Mart.

15:53Victoria Song:And that's by Michelle Zahner, who is also known as Japanese Breakfast. She's half Korean, half American. And it was like her experience of losing her mom was a singular experience. But there were things in it that was echoing the impending loss of my mother, which I don't think if I went to an AI and I was like, hey, write a memoir of a Korean American. and what H Mart and Korean food mean when you're losing a mother who's the only source of that Korean food that you have and what it means to go sit and cry in an H Mart. And then also, like, it has something poignant about chronic illness and, like, being a daughter and what it means to be, like, lost in a creative process to process that.

16:38Victoria Song:Like, what are they going to come up with? Yeah. Like, I have done these experiments to kind of, like, see, write, like, me in the style of that. And it's always just such a empty feeling in it because it's not like the AI is not sitting there thinking about the word or thinking about the emotion and what is the perfect way to express how that loss hits. And when I read that book and I like I just sobbed for like two hours because I was like, oh, this is there's no one in my life currently who can like sit with me in that moment. But this person I don't know has gone through something similar.

17:18Victoria Song:And it kind of served as a source of comfort and company in a time where I felt really isolated. And I think that's honestly the biggest argument against AI generated writing that I've seen. like just like how is a thing that can't experience going to provide that company and comfort for someone because ai like it can't experience good stuff but it also can't experience bad stuff because it can't experience anything yeah so that's how i also and maybe this is just again a particular way in which i interact with with art but um if i really like somebody I will read or watch or listen to their entire body of work.

18:04And the joy of doing that, and again, I'm going to use Terry Pratchett as an example, is you see someone getting the hang of it. You know, like often, especially with Terry Pratchett, it's a pretty good example. Like his first two books, like you can see what's coming, but he hasn't quite figured out his style. And then he gets better at it. And then he gets better at it. And then there it is, the trademark style that like everybody knows and loves. And watching that develop is such a joy to me. Like, I love that. And you can see it with, you know, with artists, like arguably with Olivia Rodrigo as she's like, you know, still developing.

18:42I recently saw, I went down to LA for this, actually. I saw a retrospective called Overshare. And it is this artist, Sophie Calla's work from like 1970 through now. And not only do you get this sense of how she is personally developing, you also get a sense of what was going on in each sort of period of time. So anyway, Sophie Calla has this incredible arc, and a lot of her work is particularly resonant to those of us who are familiar with the internet. She was oversharing before we were all oversharing. And one of the pieces there is a piece she did of her mother dying. And it is a video camera set up next to her mother's bed.

19:44And it's, you know, not just the video. There's more than just the video that goes into that, especially in the context of this exhibit of everything this artist has done in her life. because, you know, in some of the stuff around the video, you realize that her mom was like a little mad that she hadn't been the center of attention in Sophie's art. So like, this was like her last chance to make her mom like the centerpiece. So there are all these sort of things that occur around art that I think are also interesting and relevant. Because, again, you're dealing with a person. Yeah, and I think this might be part of the reason why, and we've talked about this on the show before, people are more mad that they've been deceived than they are that this AI stuff is being created.

20:39Victoria Song:I think it's because it's the effort, right? Like, I read this book, 4 ,000 weeks or something about that, and it's about how we spend time. And an average person has about 4 ,000 weeks of being alive. And one of the things— You don't have to tell me that. Whatever. But it's just like it was an interesting book because there was a line that stood out to me where he was like, you know, inconvenience is the effort. And that's what makes things truly valuable. So I find this like cognitive dissonance when I hear these like tech execs like Zuckerberg being like, things will be easier. Things will be so much more convenient.

21:11Victoria Song:When we go to these like tech keynote events where they're talking about how AI is going to help you plan a block party. For some reason, they're really into this idea that it's going to help you plan a party. And Liz, I think you get into this in the in your piece where you're where it's just like, OK, well, father wants to bake, like give a gift to their daughter. Tell me what thing to do. And instead of putting the effort in of going like, what does my daughter like? What is my what would make her happy is like recipe that maybe small child would like. Yeah. And it's sort of like, well, the betrayal that you feel is that, oh, you didn't put any effort into it.

21:49Victoria Song:You didn't take the time. You didn't inconvenience yourself in any way. And in some tangible form, making things so convenient just means, oh, you didn't put any effort into it. You didn't think about me at all. And I recently saw the 10th anniversary of Train to Busan, which is an amazing movie. Amazing zombie movie, if you like zombie stuff. But it's a Korean movie. And there's this scene in it where the father they're establishing, he's really busy. He doesn't really spend time with his little daughter. And he's like, ah, crap, it's her birthday. And he asks someone else, which in my mind is like asking a chatbot, like, what do kids like these days?

22:29Victoria Song:And he gives her the gift. And she looks at it. And it's like a we. And she looks at it. He's like, well, you don't like we's? And she just looks at the we he gave her for the last, you know, gift giving occasion. And he's like, oh. And the conceit there is that she feels that way. And she feels unloved. And she feels devalued because he didn't put the effort. He didn't put the he put like the facsimile of an effort into it. So I was watching that movie and I was like, oh, I didn't really put two and two together at the time. I was like, oh, that's that's what AI makes me feel like. Yeah. When I find out that something was made by AI, it's like, oh, you didn't put the right.