Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the massive venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — which has its fingers in pretty much every pie in tech — has revealed an eyebrow-raising detail in his “techno-optimist” vision of the future. (View Highlight)
In a recent tweet, the American billionaire investor casually proclaimed that AI must “crash” everyone’s wages before it can deliver us an economic utopia — one that’ll definitely happen, and certainly not create a permanent underclass of have-nots. (View Highlight)
“A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero,” Andreessen wrote. “Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.” (View Highlight)
Andreessen’s tweet is a revealing example of the ruthless economic logic that underlies tech moguls’ utopic visions of the future, in which progress is a foregone conclusion, rendering everyone’s economic suffering in the interim merely a means to an end. Like overzealous fitness instructors, they always choose to emphasize the need for pain to achieve anything. (View Highlight)
The author of “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andreessen also embodies how these brutal economic paradigm shifts are dressed up in benign rhetoric. AI-induced wage collapse is a consequence that happens “logically” and “necessarily,” according to the billionaire. (View Highlight)
Somehow, none of these AI evangelists’ “optimistic” visions involve immediately improving people’s lives in a meaningful way, or foreground measures to mitigate the tech’s massively disruptive potential to the job market, except perhaps with broad gestures to a universal basic income — an idea that Andreessen, ever the unapologetic capitalist, happens to hate. (Per his manifesto, it would turn us all into “zoo animals.“) (View Highlight)
When asked in an interview about AI killing creative jobs, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati glibly suggested that those jobs “shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” (View Highlight)
