GoKawiilOn Thursday morning, Meta published an ad to its official Instagram account with the message that artificial intelligence will not “make us less connected” or “leave us behind.” It was set to the 1972 David Bowie track “Five Years,” which is about, among other things, the end of the world.
“Call us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever the hell you want — but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds,” the narrator says, as a toddler plays with a butterfly, two parents laugh with their infant, and Jalen Brunson waves at the Knicks Championship Parade. (The ad also takes special care to highlight use cases for its controversial smart glasses that are not, say, harassing women while surreptitiously recording them.)
The snippet of “Five Years” used in the ad includes the following lyrics:
I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare I had to cram so many things to store everything in there And all the fat, skinny people And all the tall, short people And all the nobody people And all the somebody people I never thought I'd need so many people
Perhaps understandably, it skips other parts of the song, including the opening:
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
When reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan said that he “would like to highlight what David Bowie himself said about ‘Five Years’ and its meaning: having optimism for the future.” Brennan sent along a 1972 quote about the song that he sourced to BowieBible.com.
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