AI: Marc Andreessen’s 'Techno-Optimist Manifesto'

...timely 'OTSOG' antidote for the tech fears of our time

Tech luminary, inventor, entrepreneur, investor and uber-reader Marc Andreessen published another long piece on technology “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, that is well worth reading. It’s timely and well worth it even if skimmed.

Marc is someone I had the pleasure of meeting when he first came to Silicon Valley in his twenties, as he was just about to deliver the world its ‘Netscape Moment’. It’s in a long line of previous (Apple II, IBM PC, Lotus 123 et al) and subsequent ‘moments’ (iPod, iPhone et al), and of course now the ‘ten-month’ old ‘ChatGPT moment’ by Sam Altman and OpenAI, that is shaking up the world with AI technology for the masses. 

I then had the opportunity of working with him and his teams while at my former Firm Goldman Sachs, as he went on to other ventures like Ning, LoudCloud/Opsware, and of course his current a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) VC firm, with the also uniquely talented  Ben Horowitz. I recount all this less in the context of ‘name-dropping’, and more to underline that I’ve had a chance to see Marc evolve from his twenties to today.

I started this substack newsletter AI: Reset to Zero earlier this year with the following briefest of introductions:

“AI is coming. Ready or not. This explores the glass half full. By a seasoned Tech Explorer”. 

Reading Marc's' ‘Techno-Optimist’ Manifesto, so obviously a heart-felt set of ideas spanning over five thousand words, makes an impression because it lists pithily the many reasons the glass is far more than half full. Its optimism pierces through the current mood of doom and gloom around the current wave of technology, driven by AI with all its early ills and faults. 

Already, critics like AI luminary Gary Marcus review the piece as more rhetoric than argument, with a lesser focus on the downsides of technologies. I believe Marc’s arguments are encased within the ‘rhetoric’, when one considers the net learnings from the many sources cited.

Other media assessments of Marc’s piece are rolling in, and we’re likely to see a spectrum of responses and reactions. But it’s important to look at the kernel of the wheat rather than the chaff.

As I’ve written before, technology is but a tool, and can be used for both bad and good. Indeed we need to worry about nuclear war when considering the benefits of nuclear power. But not let our fears preempt us from better futures that might have been.

I do wonder ‘what if’ we’d managed to harness the fission nuclear power plants in our Navy vehicles pioneered perfected and operated safely since the 1950s, to power our towns and cities. Despite our fears from Three Mile Island to Fukushima to everything in between. While we await the promise of safer and cleaner fusion nuclear power.

Same goes for the fears of CRISPR and related medical technologies that can potentially yield pandemics by bad actors, and yet yield timely vaccines for those pandemics by good actors at large.

Marc’s core point is not to neglect or understate the ills and risks of technology in my view. Just that those fears should not freeze society from figuring out the net good for us all. And yes, it generally takes a long time, and yes, there will be societal ills along the way. Mistakes can be made as society tries to figure out all new tech, unintended consequences and all. But just humanity’s progress to eight billion souls from less than a billion in the last two centuries illustrates the possible net good from technology.

Marc has written other pieces similarly well-timed, as I’ve outlined in these pages. Especially with his recent optimistic take “Why AI will save the World”, and the seminal 2011 piece on how “Software Eats the World”.

It was the basis of my recent piece on how AI was eating software eating the world, an idea expounded in 2017 by that other tech luminary and pioneer, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of trillion dollar company Nvidia. Yes, the Nvidia that is currently the primary provider of all the GPU chips, hardware and software that currently is making LLM and Generative AI go ‘Vroom, Vroom’.

There is much to take away from Marc’s latest Technology Manifesto, beyond its optimism and of course his takes on the aforementioned AI Tech Wave. At first blush, it may come across as rhetoric over arguments. But look deeper, especially in the wide and deep collection of works by an illustrious group of people, and he builds a narrative of technological optimism on the previous works of giants, go-getters and grunts. Truly on ‘the Shoulders of Giants’, (OTSOG), as Isaac Newton said so memorably a few hundred years ago (1675). 

Indeed, in my view, it’s ironically appropriate that today’s LLM AI and Generative AI does its current ‘magic’ with ‘reinforcement loops’, flywheels, and all on the Shoulders of all the counted and uncounted Giants, Go-getters and Grunts that have toiled to date, and the digital data of their toils now being extracted for the benefit to augment humans exponentially going forward. It should indeed be called ‘Augmented Intelligence’ and not ‘Artificial Intelligence’, given these OTSOG 2.0 capabilities.

For those of you with less time, here is a summary of the piece with relevant and pithy quotes, in less than four hundred words.  Of the over five thousand in a piece well worth reading in full.

Marc has accomplished an OTSOGian summary of sorts in telling this technology tale, given the sources he’s processed for his Manifesto. Here goes:

“Lies

- We are being told lies that technology is bad and to be pessimistic about the future. 

Truth  

- Technology has improved our lives and civilization. We should be optimistic about the future potential of technology.

Technology

- "Technology is the lever on the world – the way to make more with less."

- "There is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology."

Markets

- "Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down." (Hayek)

- "The market naturally disciplines." (Friedman) 

- "Markets divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits."

The Techno-Capital Machine

- "Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic, by a 50:1 ratio." (Nordhaus)

- "The techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward." (Land)

Intelligence 

- "Intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better."

- "We believe in Augmented Intelligence."

- "Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think."

Energy

- "Energy is life."

- "We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited zero-emissions energy today – nuclear fission." (Nixon)

Abundance

- "The measure of abundance is falling prices." (Fuller) 

- "Ultimately technological progress leads to material abundance for everyone." (Simon)

Not Utopia, But Close Enough

- "We believe in not Utopia, but also not Apocalypse."

- "While not Utopian, we believe in what Brad DeLong terms 'slouching toward Utopia' – doing the best fallen humanity can do, making things better as we go."

Becoming Technological Supermen

- "We believe that advancing technology is one of the most virtuous things that we can do."

- "We believe in the romance of technology, of industry."

Technological Values

- Freedom, merit, achievement, risk-taking, competence, truth.

The Meaning of Life

- "Technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human." 

The Enemy

- "Our enemy is stagnation."

- "Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle."

- "Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation."

The Future

- "We have a duty to be optimistic. Because the future is open, not predetermined and therefore cannot just be accepted: we are all responsible for what it holds. Thus it is our duty to fight for a better world." (Deutsch)

Other Key quotes:

Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, William Nordhaus, Nick Land, Thomas Sowell, Brad DeLong, David Deutsch.”

And the piece includes one of my all-time favorites, Richard Feynman, who also makes a cameo in Marc’s Manifesto.

There is much on near-term optimism on AI despite the dystopian fears stoked by media and the top AI practitioners of the day. It’s a refreshingly optimistic take on humanity’s future driven by technology Marc. Indeed, what many of us have believed since growing up with Star Trek in 1966, ‘warm speed ahead’ and all.

My bottom line summary of Marc’s timely ‘Techno-optimist Manifesto’ would be paraphrasing JFK:

“Fear not what Technology will do to you, Fear what you can’t do without Technology.”

In my humble long-term optimism, Abundance abounds ahead. And AI has a big role to play, both with downsides and net upsides. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here).