Public Registry Collects Private Habits After Zuckerberg’s AI Manifesto

At the Bureau of Public Personhood’s new filing window, the first applicant slid over a form the morning after Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto arguing that personal AI should be “for everyone,” rather than controlled by a handful of labs. The form asked for one private habit for general use and one public opinion the applicant would no longer personally maintain.

The bureau’s first form, Personal Agent Access Request, offered checkboxes for memory, taste, handwriting and “the ability to seem interested during a work call.” A note at the bottom warned that unchecked traits would remain in the applicant’s possession, where they could not be efficiently shared.

We are honoring the broad-access principle by removing the bottleneck that is the individual.

Mara Venn, deputy registrar for Distributed Selves

The public supply begins

By noon, the registry had received applications containing the same donated trait: remembering why one had entered a room. The bureau bundled the submissions into a communal assistant and placed it at the end of the line, where it immediately asked each applicant to explain what they wanted.

The queue then divided into two lines: people waiting to receive their personal AI, and people waiting to retrieve the portions of themselves they had accidentally made broadly available. Officials said the second line would move faster once the first line stopped asking the assistant for a summary of the manifesto.