Mark Zuckerberg wants to talk about A.I. You should, too.

If they did, they might start to grapple with the dark truth of what Facebook has created

During his testimony before Congress Tuesday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned artificial intelligence 10 times. It first came up when Senator John Thune asked Zuckerberg about “the line between legitimate political discourse and hate speech,” wondering what steps Facebook takes when deciding “what is and what is not hate speech?”

Artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg replied, before noting its current limitations. Hate speech, he said, is more difficult for A.I. to find and manage than, say, terrorist content, which has more easily identifiable markers. For an A.I. program to crack down on hate speech, Zuckerberg said, it would need to understand “what is a slur and… whether something is hateful not just in English, but the majority of people on Facebook use it in languages that are different across the world,” Zuckerberg said.

But, “over a five- to 10-year period, we will have A.I. tools that can get into some of the nuances — the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging things for our systems,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg’s desire to point us toward the next phase of Facebook’s development is notable. Because Facebook isn’t just hoping to use artificial intelligence. Facebook is a leading developer of artificial intelligence. And while Zuckerberg espoused the possibilities of powerful A.I. that recognizes the difference between hate speech and civil debate, he neglected to mention how Facebook is creating it: with more of our personal data.

Facebook saves every word, photo, and video we upload to its platform — even, apparently, the stuff that we think we’ve deleted. Using this massive trove of images and words, Facebook has set about developing computer programs that will recognize one thing from another without human intervention. Artificial intelligence can do great things, like stop impending suicides, but it can also help in other, less altruistic, areas — like advertising. Powerful A.I. that understands images as well as language might, for instance, one day make targeting ads or messages possible based on what…