For this year, Zuckerberg primarily wants to focus on the debate on the role of technology in society and in turn be a better engineer. Here is the full text of Zuckerberg’s New Year Resolution for 2019.
HIGHLIGHTS
1.Zuckerberg has come under fire, and there have been calls for his resignation from the post of CEO at Facebook.
2.The New Year Resolution from Zuckerberg is not something new as every year he sets a challenge for himself.
3.This year, he wants to focus on the debate on the role of technology in society and in turn be a better engineer.
Facebook is going through a rough patch. It has been accused of being an instrument that people with malicious intent have used to break democracy, and in a way society. Mark Zuckerberg has come under fire, and there have been calls for his resignation from the post of CEO at Facebook. So as he moves into 2019, he is setting up a challenge for himself: talk more about the future of technology and society, and learn more about how he as an engineer, who is only used to building new things, can also be an engineer who understands impact of what he is building.
The New Year Resolution from Zuckerberg is not something new. Every year he sets a challenge for himself. One year he decided that his new year challenge was to eat the meat that he has himself killed. Then another year, he challenged himself to learn Mandarin. Another year, he had decided that he would be running 365 miles.
For this year, Zuckerberg primarily wants to focus on the debate on the role of technology in society and in turn be a better engineer. Here is the full text of Zuckerberg’s New Year Resolution for 2019, the way he posted on Facebook.
Every year I take on a personal challenge to learn something new. I’ve built an AI for my home, run 365 miles, visited every US state, read 25 books, and learned Mandarin.
Last year, I focused almost all my time on addressing important issues around elections, speech, privacy, and well-being. Facebook is a different company now than it was a couple of years ago because of a much greater focus on these questions. These issues are complex and we will continue focusing on them for years to come.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 2019 challenge is to be a better engineer.
There are so many big questions about the world we want to live in and technology’s place in it. Do we want technology to keep giving more people a voice, or will traditional gatekeepers control what ideas can be expressed? Should we decentralize authority through encryption or other means to put more power in people’s hands? In a world where many physical communities are weakening, what role can the internet play in strengthening our social fabric? How do we build an internet that helps people come together to address the world’s biggest problems that require global-scale collaboration? How do we build technology that creates more jobs rather than just building AI to automate things people do? What form will this all take now that the smartphone is mature? And how do we keep up the pace of scientific and technological progress across fields?
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. 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.
This will be intellectually interesting, but there’s a personal challenge for me here too. I’m an engineer, and I used to just build out my ideas and hope they’d mostly speak for themselves. But given the importance of what we do, that doesn’t cut it anymore. So 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.
I’m looking forward to another year of learning and personal improvement, and to discussing a lot of important questions with all of you!
