Is AI the answer to all our prayers?

One of the tech industry's brightest starts believes the upsides of AI will outweigh the downsides

Photo by Robynne Hu on Unsplash

[APOLOGIES - It appears there was a mix-up with yesterday morning’s mail out and most subscribers didn’t receive this, so I’m resending it.]

Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.
Ray Kurzweil, (Silicon Valley’s Delphic oracle)

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
Centre for AI Safety statement signed by the likes of Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Lex Fridman, Sam Harris and Ray Kurzweil

I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. I mean with artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon.
Elon Musk

Whatever else it may be, the AI menace, like every other supposed extinction-level threat man has faced in the past century or so, will prove a wonderful opportunity for the big-bureaucracy, global-government, all-knowing-regulator crowd to demand more authority over our freedoms, to transfer more sovereignty from individuals and nations to supranational experts and technocrats.
Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal columnist

Since ChatGPT ‘dropped’, as the young people say, late last year, there’s been a lot of attention paid to its potential negative consequences. But it’s just possible that AI – much like the printing press or cotton gin – could create a lot of human misery in the short term but a great deal of human progress in the longer term. Indeed, it’s just possible that AI could facilitate significant improvements in living standards in the shorter term (i.e. the next 5-10 years) and lay the groundwork for humanity to make great technological leaps forward in the medium term (i.e. between now and 2050).

Granted, that’s a best-case scenario. But I’m a little less likely to dismiss it out of hand after reading

Marc Andreessen

’s latest Substack newsletter – ‘Why AI Will Save The World’. (If you’ve got 20 minutes free, I’d strongly recommend you check it out.)

A feel-good story
Unlike some of his peers, Andreessen doesn’t chase after the limelight, so you may not know who he is if you’re not interested in tech or business. But take it from me, he’s a big deal.

Despite the Nordic name, Andreessen is an American who had a humble Midwestern upbringing before getting a computer science degree from an unprestigious university.

Along with Eric Bina, Andressen created the Mosiac web browser. This made it much easier for non-nerds to use the Internet, allowing it to start crossing into the mainstream from 1993 onwards. He co-founded Netscape in 1994 and sold it to AOL five years later for US$4.3 billion. He started another tech company (Opsware) that helped pioneer Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing and which was eventually sold to Hewlett-Packard for US$1.6 billion. These days he is best known as the co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which invested early on in some companies you may have heard of, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

So, if Marc Andreessen pontificates about the likely impact of a new(ish) technology, you’d be wise to take his arguments seriously. Regardless of how Pollyannish they may seem at first glance.   

What does Andreessen have to say about generative AI? Here are some choice quotes.

Human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years. What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here… The opportunities are profound. AI is quite possibly the most important – and best – thing our civilization has ever created, certainly on par with electricity and microchips, and probably beyond those. The development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should fear – is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our future.

OK, but what about the decades of misery and/or bloodshed that followed other world-changing technological breakthroughs? Sure, the fears about Skynet becoming self-aware might be overblown. But if AI is half as magical as Andreessen claims, doesn’t it logically follow that we’ll see widespread job loss and the move to a society structured around an enormous UBI-dependent underclass and a tiny number of tech-company-owning overlords?

Andreessen insists this is also an irrational fear. As we will get to shortly, I’m not entirely convinced by his argument, but it is as follows:  

When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs. But the good news doesn’t stop there. We also get higher wages… A worker in a technology-infused business will be more productive than a worker in a traditional business. The employer will either pay that worker more money as he is now more productive, or another employer will, purely out of self interest. The result is that technology introduced into an industry generally not only increases the number of jobs in the industry but also raises wages…

But this time is different, you’re thinking. This time, with AI, we have the technology that can replace ALL human labor. But, using the principles I described above, think of what it would mean for literally all existing human labor to be replaced by machines.

It would mean a takeoff rate of economic productivity growth that would be absolutely stratospheric, far beyond any historical precedent. Prices of existing goods and services would drop across the board to virtually zero. Consumer welfare would skyrocket. Consumer spending power would skyrocket. New demand in the economy would explode. Entrepreneurs would create dizzying arrays of new industries, products, and services, and employ as many people and AI as they could as fast as possible to meet all the new demand.

Suppose AI once again replaces that labor? The cycle would repeat, driving consumer welfare, economic growth, and job and wage growth even higher. It would be a straight spiral up to a material utopia that neither Adam Smith or Karl Marx ever dared dream of. 

We should be so lucky.

Even though many economists, especially the plutocrat-worshipping neoliberal kind, have consistently nominated “technology and globalisation” as the reasons for worsening inequality in recent decades, Andreessen says AI is the best hope nations such as the US have of avoiding a continuing slide into South American levels of income inequality:

This is not to say that inequality is not an issue in our society. It is, it’s just not being driven by technology, it’s being driven by the reverse, by the sectors of the economy that are the most resistant to new technology, that have the most government intervention to prevent the adoption of new technology like AI – specifically housing, education, and health care. The actual risk of AI and inequality is not that AI will cause more inequality but rather that we will not allow AI to be used to reduce inequality.

Hmmm.

Final thoughts    
Andreessen’s piece is a valuable corrective to the tsunami of ‘AI robots are going kill us/take our jobs/derange our society’ doomerist hot takes published since ChatGPT was launched seven months ago. As noted, Andreessen is a brilliant individual and I’m sure many of the arguments he makes are broadly correct.

But I fear he is being a tad Panglossian in insisting that AI will be all upside, both in the long and short term.

I’ll end by detailing my experience with technological disruption over the last couple of decades.

The Internet was indubitably a boon to journalists. It augmented journalists’ intelligence and made tasks such as sourcing information and fact-checking stories far easier. It created new jobs, allowing people to become bloggers, data journalists, social media reporters and influencers.

But if you’re going to take the 30,000-foot view, it’s difficult to argue that, overall, the Internet was a good thing for either individual journalists or the journalism industry as a whole. There has been a lot of misery and (metaphorical) bloodshed over the last two decades as the media industry has been disrupted. Among other things, that means there’s now much less investigative journalism being done and very few local/community papers still extant. If they are still around, legacy media outfits typically employ less staff and pay them even more modest salaries than was the case before the Internet achieved mass penetration.  

Many, though certainly not all, erstwhile journalists went on to better-paid jobs producing content of one sort or another for private and public sector organisations. (The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away.) But if my experience over the last six months is anything to go by, organisations are increasingly questioning why they should be spending money on having a human create content when generative AI can already churn out ‘good enough’ content for free, and may soon be able to generate incredible content at little or no cost. Possibly the unfolding AI revolution will throw up plenty of interesting, highly paid jobs for erstwhile journalists/content creators. But let’s just say I’m not counselling any of my increasingly nervous colleagues to bank on that occurring.

Anyway, if you’ve got any thoughts about the likely future impact of AI – or the actual impact of ChatGPT and its competitors on your business or job in 2023 – please leave your thoughts in the comments section.