- Billionaire VC Marc Andreessen wrote a manifesto plugging “techno-optimism.”
- It’s an old Silicon Valley philosophy packaged anew: Growth without guardrails.
- The idea is to paint regulators, ethicists, and anyone questioning the benefits of tech as an enemy.
Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen would like you to shut up about AI taking your job.
Andreessen, the eponymous cofounder of Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, is known for firing off lengthy memos in defense of technology, the sector that has enriched him.
His latest is a 5,000-word manifesto about past, present, and future civilization being built on innovation.
“We believe in the romance of technology, of industry,” he writes, via digressions on the artist Andy Warhol, economist Milton Friedman, and the myth of Prometheus. “The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.”
These developments were unarguably good for humanity, he writes, improving wealth, happiness and ensuring security.
Where he gets to with this argument is a little startling.
Anyone, he says, who stands in the way of unrestrained progress of AI and other frontier technologies is an “enemy.”
“We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives,” he continues.
“Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”
There is a lot to unpack in Andreessen’s manifesto — which has drawn criticism for its attacks on social responsibility — but an important code word here is “deceleration.”
Silicon Valley enters the age of e/acc
Andreessen and other prominent Silicon Valley figures such as Y Combinator president Garry Tan have quietly added the term e/acc to their social media profiles.
The tag refers to “effective accelerationism,” the idea that technology should be developed to its fullest potential as fast as possible and with minimal or zero guardrails. In his manifesto, Andreessen calls it “techno-optimism.”
This is Silicon Valley’s current religion, and Andreessen its lead preacher. His mission has been fired up by the arrival of ChatGPT and other practical applications of artificial intelligence. To some extent, it’s a repackaging of what Silicon Valley has always peddled — let us build, grow, and make money without limitations.
“Techno-optimists believe growth is progress,” Andreessen argues, adding that growth is driven by the progress of technology without hindrance.
Like the best preachers, Andreessen needs enemies to rail against — the pesky ethicists, lawmakers, and regular humans who worry that AI will replace jobs, hurt the climate, or influence elections and might slow it down.
In his manifesto, he directs warning shots towards regulatory capture, bureaucracy, central planning, and stagnation. Our present society, he claims, has been “subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades” under different guises: existential risk, sustainability, stakeholder capitalism, risk management, tech ethics.
Andreessen’s take will be of little surprise to anyone who knows his background. The investor had a hand in shaping the development of web browsers in the 1990s with Netscape, and through went on to make canny, profitable investments on household tech brands like Instagram.
Andreessen Horowitz is also an investor in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
Is this philosophy likely to spread?
There’s some truth to what Andreessen says, according to Carl-Benedikt Frey, professor of AI and work at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Frey told Insider that restricting AI developments through regulation could hurt progress in areas that really could benefit humans, such as drug discovery, or the deployment of safer autonomous vehicles. And progress has generally been good for humanity.
But letting AI rip unfettered, he added, would have “societal costs.”
“It’s always been the case that people who stand to benefit from a new technology and progress are most likely to support the development of those technologies,” he added. “The people who are likely to lose out from a new technology are more likely to resist it. We saw that with the first industrial revolution, and we saw that with the Luddites.”
Andreessen can perhaps take comfort: “The Luddites were unsuccessful.”
Read the full article here