Should we be upbeat about techno-optimism?
A Silicon Valley billionaire is insisting that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Not everybody is convinced his motives are pure
We are being lied to. We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything… The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares. We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world. We are told to be miserable about the future.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Marc Andreessen (posted 16/10/23)
The basic thrust of “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is that technology is the key to human thriving, and that certain malign elements in society--Andreessen names “experts,” “bureaucracy,” “sustainability” and “social responsibility” as “enemies”– have convinced us otherwise. These “enemies,” who “are suffering from ressentiment” must be escorted “out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain,” for the good of humanity, and convinced of the error of their ways. Once their path is cleared, techno-optimists can make “everyone rich, everything cheap, and everything abundant.”
Max Read,
Marc Andreessen published his techno-optimist pamphlet an eternity ago in Media Time (i.e. around three weeks ago). By now, every ‘content creator’ with the slightest connection to the tech industry has already praised or damned it.
But, you know, I’m something of an armchair futurologist myself. So I believe, probably mistakenly, that I’m duty-bound to weigh in.
Can tech fix all our problems?
As our American friends say, I should ‘check my priors’ before proceeding further. I’ve written a lot about technology in recent years. Given that experience, I like to believe I have some understanding of how technologies are (or aren’t) embraced and how that impacts societies.
As regular readers will not be shocked to learn, I also believe the world is heading towards a tipping point. After it supposedly ground to a halt in the early 1990s, it appears History is starting up again and we’re about to head into a turbulent period marked by much more (internal) class and/or (external) geopolitical conflict. It’s not unthinkable that some generational conflict also gets thrown into the mix. Particularly if working-age taxpayers tire of subsidising the lifestyles of long-lived, relatively affluent Boomers who are utterly convinced the world should continue to revolve around them forever.
Alternatively, we could be on the cusp of some significant technological breakthroughs that will allow most of humanity to lead peaceful, leisurely, comfortable, healthy, prolonged and rich (in both senses of the word) lives.
It's not a perfect analogy, but the trajectory of many nations might soon resemble that of Ireland after the Irish decided to stop butchering each other. (About half a century after Protestant-Catholic sectarian conflict had died out everywhere else in the secularised West.)
After the Irish got their house in order, they enjoyed an “economic miracle”.
This economic miracle has had its ups and downs and partly came about due to Ireland becoming a tax haven for multinationals looking to avoid high European taxes. But let’s leave that to one side for the purposes of this analogy.
Imagine that a cheap and inexhaustible source of energy was discovered tomorrow. It would change the world profoundly almost overnight. Those changes wouldn’t affect everybody positively; no significant change ever does. But it would have overwhelmingly positive effects for the great bulk of humanity.
Unfortunately, the prospect of cheap and abundant energy forever remains “10 years away”.
But as you may have heard, generative AI is no longer a sci-fi fantasy. New technologies are invariably overhyped in the short term and underestimated over the longer term. But ChatGPT and its burgeoning collection of imitators appear to be the exception that proves the rule. It was a technology that achieved something close to mass penetration almost overnight. It should also be noted that it was a technology that employers – disorientated, frustrated and increasingly angered by the first shift in labour-market power away from Capital and to Labour in nearly half a century – fell upon with glee.
(Around the start of this year, I had one soon-to-be-former client spend five minutes raving to me about how impressed she was with Chat GPT and all the content she hoped to generate with it soon. Judging by the comments in the online content-creator groups I’m part of, my experience of ‘technological unemployment’ in the first half of 2023 wasn’t unusual.)
The good news for members of my tribe is that the current iteration of generative AI is, as has been widely publicised, imperfect. That means there should still be some need for human content creators for a bit longer.
The bad news is that the current iteration of generative AI is equivalent to the first iPhone. The terrible news is that generative AI won’t take a decade and a half to evolve to the point the iPhone 15 has. At that point, there may still be a need for a small number of content creators to oversee the machines churning out vast quantities of deeply researched, thoroughly fact-checked and exquisitely written content. But it’s more likely that human content creators will be automated out of existence entirely.
Do you love your work enough to do it for free?
Would it necessarily be a bad thing if a lot of work, creative and otherwise, got outsourced to machines? Artists, philosophers, conservatives and religious leaders would probably argue that it’s most certainly a bad thing. But I suspect the general public (and even a handful of exhausted content creators of a certain age) would feel otherwise.
Most work is tedious and unpleasant. This is, of course, why employers must pay people to do it.
Most people view work as an interruption to their “real life”. However, those who live to work (rather than working to live) disproportionately end up in influential positions and (a) mistakenly assume that everybody else finds their work as meaningful and rewarding as they do and (b) arrange their societies around their workaholic preferences.
Andreessen himself is almost certainly an incurable workaholic. He simply couldn’t have achieved what he’s accomplished while maintaining a ‘healthy work-life’ balance. But he’s now promising the toiling masses much more affluent and leisurely existences.
So long as Silicon Valley billionaires, and future generations of aspiring Silicon Valley billionaires, aren’t excessively regulated by Nervous Nelly governments. And there’s no backsliding in terms of the Anglosphere maintaining a childlike faith in the power and benevolence of free markets.
A techno-optimism reading list
A lot of laypeople are probably unfamiliar with techno-optimism and mistakenly believe it’s something that emerged a month ago. In fact, there is a long history of people believing the positives of new technologies almost always outweigh the negatives. There are lots of techno-optimists on the Right, especially the Libertarian Right. But there are also some on the Left, who hope that “fully automated luxury communism” might be feasible.
I’ll throw in my five cents shortly. But let me sketch out the contours of the debate first.
Andreessen was disturbed by the tsunami of doomerist hot takes around ChatGPT after it was released. In June, he published an article – Why AI Will Save the World – on his Substack (
).His latest “manifesto” makes much the same points that his initial screed did. To wit:
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. AI augmentation of human intelligence has already started – AI is already around us in the form of computer control systems of many kinds, is now rapidly escalating with AI Large Language Models like ChatGPT, and will accelerate very quickly from here – if we let it.
After Andreessen published his manifesto, every pundit who had ever so much as turned on a light switch immediately burst into print to explain why he was (1) Completely Right, (2) Completely Wrong, (3) Somewhat Right and Somewhat Wrong.
As I’ve explained previously, Andreessen is a brilliant and ridiculously successful guy, so it’s just possible that he is Completely Right. For the reasons mentioned above, I hope he is. If you want to know more about techno-optimism, I’d recommend the following:
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
However, predicting the future is a tricky business. History may judge Andreessen to have been self-interested and Pollyannish. If you’d like to hear more about the ‘techno-pessimist’ side of the argument, and why Average Joes should be suspicious of tech bros bearing gifts, you may like to check out the following:
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/we-are-conquerors-why-silicon-valley-s-latest-fad-is-its-deadliest-20231027-p5efho.html
Full disclosure: I’m a Camp Three man, myself. In 5-10 years, I suspect that we will look back at Andreessen’s 2023 predictions and conclude he was directionally correct but failed to foresee several significant developments. If you want more nuanced takes on Andreessen’s “effective accelerationism”, I’d recommend the following:
https://davidjdeal.medium.com/techno-optimism-or-techno-blinders-e17c9ff9b7fe
Predicting the future
While I’m a middle-of-the-road Camp Threer, I recognise that Camps One and Two make some powerful points.
So, for what it’s worth, here’s what I reckon.
The tech industry will be regulated more rather than less going forward. In all likelihood, the neoliberal era that so richly rewarded the members of Andreessen’s class is drawing to a close.
New industries typically enjoy a low-regulation honeymoon until it becomes apparent that they can’t be trusted to self-regulate. The tech industry enjoyed a longer honeymoon than most. And for an unfeasibly long time, ruthless and egomaniacal Silicon Valley billionaires were bizarrely held up as culture heroes.
But the honeymoon is very much over. I don’t see the general public trusting the tech industry to not be evil ever again. The industry now has few friends – and none it hasn’t bought – on either the Right or Left of politics. So, if Andreessen believes his cri de coeur will cool the ardour of increasingly emboldened regulators, he’s likely to be disappointed.I suspect it’s a similar story with unfettered markets. Surprisingly enough, returning to pre-New Deal economic (and immigration) arrangements has resulted in a pre-New Deal distribution of wealth.
It’s not impossible, especially in the US, that Andreessen and his plutocratic peers will be able to convince the common folk that enormous abundance is just around the corner if they don’t make the rookie mistake of expecting billionaires or the companies they’ve founded to pay any tax. (Taxation revenue that will inevitably just be pissed up against the wall bankrolling featherbedded and inefficient bureaucracies like DARPA.)
I’ve long thought the next significant political realignment will see a swing back to the economic left and cultural right. Masters of the Universe who are, like Andreessen, socially liberal and fiscally conservative may soon be having to navigate a world that’s far less obsessed with maximising individual autonomy and far more favourably inclined towards Keynesian ‘tax and spend’ economic policies. (Hang in there, fellas. In about four decades the political pendulum might just swing back your way again.)
All that noted, Andreessen isn’t wrong about technology's incredible – and largely positive (so far) – impacts. Those increasingly embattled neoliberals who argue the benefits of technologies such as smartphones should be considered before passing judgment on the incipient neo-feudalism of the last four decades have a point.
How much is it worth for almost every adult, and most children, to be able to near-frictionlessly access the sum total of human knowledge? Even the biggest technophobes and the sternest socialists would have to concede it’s worth a great deal. But does it compensate for the widening wealth inequality and accompanying political instability in the US, and an increasing number of other nations?
As always, I’ve gone on too long, so that’s a question that will have to wait for a future Musing.