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Technology Saves the World
- d--b 5y agoThis is Andreessen trolling to get traffic on their new publication website... Obviously technology is not saving the world. Sure we made a vaccine for a disease that was bad. But technology is mostly responsible for propagating it in the first place. And climate change, you know. EDIT: also on HN front page, fully autonomous killer drones are being mass-produced.
- xwowsersx 5y agohmm, I'm not sure I agree with all points made in this post, but surely two things can be true at once? In other words, yes technology introduces problems (possibly the pandemic, as you stated), but might it not also provide the remedy?
- osekkat 5y ago>> yes technology introduces problems (possibly the pandemic, as you stated), but might it not also provide the remedy? Sure, but even with the "remedy" we still had 600k deaths in the US and 3.8M globally. Not to mention the other problems caused by technology that are don't have a remedy yet, aka Climate crisis. I do agree with the comment above that we can't technology our way out of the climate crisis.
- sbarre 5y agoIf you want to get super pedantic about it.. "Technology" doesn't do anything. Humans do stuff, using technology. Some of it good, some of it is bad. So it's really up to us, humans, to save the world. Or destroy it.
- megabless123 5y agoExactly, humanity will not be able to "technology" itself out of the climate crisis. There's no better carbon removal technology than our most efficient trees.
- cma 5y agoEven were that true we'd be better off with fusion-powered stacked greenhouses of them.
- CityOfThrowaway 5y agoThis statement denies reason. There are plenty of ways in which we can technology our way out, even if we accept your premises (which, to be clear, I don’t but I’m willing to play ball). Indeed, our only option – save for some type of genocidal movement – is to technology ourselves out of the climate crisis. 1. Engineer trees that store more carbon in denser and long lasting root systems 2. Create drone systems to plant and maintain tons more trees 3. Improve energy capture technology to reduce our net new greenhouse gases 4. Create more efficient motors for the same reason as above 5. Create new recycling technologies so we can reuse more of the stuff we already have without mining more 6. Speaking of raw material acquisition, we can mine asteroids instead of our own planet 7. Transition more activities online to reduce the need for physical travel for more things 8. Hell, move more business to the internet to reduce the environmental footprint of office space Literally this list can go on and on. Technology is the only thing that fundamentally improves the trajectory of human society.
- swader999 5y agoIt would be very simple, fast, effective and not costly to use airliners with sulfur added to their fuel to increase earth's albedo. Problem solved. Of course we don't want to do this but it is an option.
- scatters 5y agoTrees use the C3 pathway. There are much faster-growing plant species (for example bamboo, switchgrass) that could be incorporated into a BECCS process.
- factsaresacred 5y agoA technology creates externalities. Another technology neutralizes those externalities. Given that we're unlikely (or unwilling) to put technological genies back in the bottle, what else can we hope for?
- mdorazio 5y agoMore responsible development & deployment of technology to avoid externalities in the first place?
- throwkeep 5y agoJon Stewart just made that point yesterday too: “I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science,” Stewart said. “Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science.” (1) I disagree with regard to climate change though because that externality has so far been a net positive for humanity and we can solve the downside. Yes, technology enabled us to dig up and burn buried carbon at scale sufficient to alter the climate, but that's what lifted billions out of poverty and eliminated starvation in much of the world. We'll solve the negative externality with renewable energy, clean nuclear energy, carbon capture, improved manufacturing efficiency and materials, etc. 1) https://news.yahoo.com/jon-stewart-endorses-lab-leak-130516274.html https://news.yahoo.com/jon-stewart-endorses-lab-leak-1305162...
- kordlessagain 5y agoEasing starvation enabled more people to have offspring and that fact likely cause a swing in population which increased demand and use of fossil fuels. The possible outcomes of a a runaway population living on a planet with a runaway climate are likely harder to predict than a simpler and smaller system. I certainly do hope we can solve our problems with technology, but it will take concerted effort and unified attention to do so.
- jonny_eh 5y ago> which was more than likely caused by science This is absolutely not true. There's zero evidence of a lab leak.
- mempko 5y ago>Moderna, a product of the American venture capital system Moderna got a government grant to do the mRNA work didn't they? Seems a product of public investment. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/years-of-research-laid-groundwork-for-speedy-covid-19-vaccines https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/years-of-research-laid-g... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/24/fact-check-donations-research-grants-helped-fund-moderna-vaccine/6398486002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/24/fac... https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-award-us-government-agency-barda-483-million https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
- simonsarris 5y agoNo, they got an enormous amount of VC money for years. They reached a $1 billion valuation in just two years after founding (2012), faster than Uber/Dropbox/Lyft etc did.
- mempko 5y agoOk, but ... https://seekingalpha.com/news/3609955-moderna-failed-to-disclose-government-grants-funded-development-of-patented-vaccines-advocacy https://seekingalpha.com/news/3609955-moderna-failed-to-disc... And Derrick Rossi's research was publicly funded which led to creation of Moderna... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Rossi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Rossi > Rossi based his developments on the results of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman on mRNA. He succeeded in finding investors for his plans to transfer these findings into new medications and vaccinations by founding Moderna This is a tale as old as time. Government funds labs which invent and discover. VCs then fund companies to exploit and make money off publicly discovered work.
- andrewmutz 5y agoIn the real world, both government grants and VC funding create great things. If your political views make you want to diminish the importance of either, then perhaps it's time to update those views.
- julbaxter 5y ago"Technology has become the idol of our society, but technological progress is—more often than not—aimed at solving problems caused by earlier technical inventions." "Interesting possibilities arise when you combine old technology with new knowledge and new materials, or when you apply old concepts and traditional knowledge to modern technology." Quotes from https://www.lowtechmagazine.com https://www.lowtechmagazine.com
- arvinsim 5y agoYou could say tech fosters a dependency on itself by people to sustain itself.
- mavhc 5y agoIsn't that the case for anything though? New problems only occur because of a previous change, and change usually only happens due to technology
- WalterBright 5y agoI opt for technology rather than leading a nasty, brutish and short life.
- _Microft 5y agoI do not read something like that out of that quote. Vaccines, emergency medicine, construction or farming equipment, all these things that make life easier, healthier and longer are not what GPs comment was about. It talked about technology that was needed to fix problems created by earlier technology (think: someone has to write an ad-blocker because someone else optimized distributing advertisements).
- WalterBright 5y agoUm, these technologies enable a larger human population, which then causes problems. Tractors enable ever larger tracts of the best land to be devoted to farming, to enable a larger population, to need more land to cultivate, etc.
- semiconduction 5y agoHumanity has starved, struggled and regularly died in mass for millenia. Now the population is 100 times larger than it was a few centuries ago, and more and more people are living in a post-scarcity society. And yes, thanks to all the pioneers, entrepeneurs and geniuses that took an idea or insight into a mass market product. They are who truly deserve the credit.
- bttrfl 5y agoWhat if all this is because we took a giant environmental credit that we won't be able to pay back? It's hard to argue that child mortality dropped, literacy increased and so on, but at the same time we are facing existential threats due to warming, lack of water, loss of biodiversity and so on. We are also enjoying a relatively peaceful period (despite what's happening in Syria and tens of other places) on a global scale, but history shows that every single global conflict gets more deadly. Will we survive WW3? Let's not prise the day too early.
- semiconduction 5y agoI don't fall for environmental sensationalism The world is in it's most "livable" state ever
- XorNot 5y agoNo, let's absolutely praise it. Because the existential threats only exist because of political malfeasance. This has never been a technological problem: even the potentially disastrous consequences of climate change only really manifest because of - again - politics. Because governments won't spend to protect their own citizens, because of corruption and greed. Little has changed on that front in thousands of years. Technology enabled almost everything we have now - even those improvements in governance we got (i.e. mass communications and the telegraph made coordinating large empires and alleviating local resource shortages via logistics possible).
- bttrfl 5y agoTechnology is neither source of good nor evil. Just like a hammer ain't to blame or prise. It's about its application and how tech is developed and applied is decided based on "politics" if you want. However, ever-evolving technology leads to globalisation and acceleration of processes. With shitty tech we can make lots of mistakes and pay small, local consequences. Shitty nails result in a shitty coffin. Shitty fridges result in an ozone hole. Our margin of error for doing the "politics" right is shrinking every day.
- belatw 5y agoTl;dr: billionaire wanks off over the merits of venture capitalism and half assed technological solutions to social problems; wants you to do the same.
- klelatti 5y ago> Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people. This doesn't seem consistent with what is happening in A16Z's own backyard. Either Marc knows something we don't or this is unwarranted hyperbole.
- jellicle 5y ago> > Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people. > This doesn't seem consistent with what is happening in A16Z's own backyard. Either Marc knows something we don't or this is unwarranted hyperbole. Well, let's run that through the VC->English converter: "We hope to lay off all the first world engineers living in Silicon Valley and hire exclusively the cheapest possible people living in the cheapest countries. We can hire twice as many bodies (double the good jobs, just not in the USA!) for one-tenth as much money, pocket all the profits, and if anyone complains (perhaps all the laid off engineers) we can talk about how we're raising people out of poverty, how dare they complain." My version is admittedly not as flowery as the original.
- klelatti 5y agoOr maybe: "Some of our partners want to move to Texas. All the money they will spend there will move 10s of people out of poverty in Austin."
- the_gipsy 5y agoDon’t conflate “cheaper” with “cheapest”. Ideally, it would be the same talent, in cheaper regions now. Cut out the landlord middleman. I know, the worker is getting less, the company is simply subsidising a cheaper home. But many workers, not all but significantly many, will prefer a better lifestyle outside of cities.
- handrous 5y agoWhen you fire 500,000 highly-paid workers, and distribute half their pay to dramatically raise the wages of 5,000,000 workers in very poor places and the other half to 50 extremely rich capitalists, you've "expand[ed] the number of good jobs in the world" and "dramatically improv[ed] the qualify of life for millions [...] of people". It's hard to even argue against, ethically—except that, conveniently, the people most vocally pushing it always seem to be in a "heads I win, tails you lose" position and are never the ones who will lose anything to make it happen. Usually quite the opposite.
- blackoil 5y agoAndreessen's posts are strongly biased towards what is beneficial for his position. I have read a lot of his posts since 2008 and before. They are intelligent and insightful, but in hindsight lot of them were not best advice for founders/readers but best for the VC.
- admissionsguy 5y agoSame goes for pg. And most other people, I suppose. It’s hard to forgo self-interest.
- Fordec 5y agoOne's measure of these VCs changes quite distinctly when you change from viewing them through the prism of leaders of the industry to viewing them as self-interested marketeers acting as gatekeepers of a subset of wealth with the express purpose of their working role as the endeavor of inflating their own wealth. They haven't gone hungry in quite some time, and it's really been showing more and more as time goes on and their memories of when they started out are fading.
- klik99 5y agoThe same is true for any VC blog, it’s marketing - to both investors and founders. But you can be both biased and insightful! I found this essay very inspirational, we truly are living during exceptional times If you don’t take into account bias and agendas when you read anything, you probably won’t be a great founder.
- wangii 5y agoindeed. I feel it's a lot more difficult to agree with the `SV elites` (az, pg, etc.) recently, wondering if I'm too old or they live in their own rdf.
- Swizec 5y agoThe world looks different from a throne. There was a great comment on reddit once that calculated a $50,000 car costs about the same to Jay-Z as a tank of gas does to a median person. That’s a huge difference in perspective. Someone like az, pg, etc probably sees higher daily variations in their stock portfolio than my annual salary. Imagine what life is like when $200k rounds down to “daily noise”? For me, after lots of saving, those fluctuations are in the $300 range and even that changed my perspective and way of thinking. Very different feel than when I was starting out and having $300 felt like unimaginable wealth. For comparison, a $500 unexpected expense would bankrupt 41% of americans.
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- notdarkyet 5y ago"Moderna, a product of the American venture capital system, created the first mRNA COVID vaccine within two days of receiving the genetic code for COVID by email." I love how the lab leak theory is now mainstream but everytime I brought that up along with where the sequencing came from I looked like a crackpot. That email and sequence came directly from China. Look at the Jan 11 note here: https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-against-covid-19 https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-ag...
- notdarkyet 5y agoPlease explain why anything said above is not factual rather than downvote?
- qq4 5y agoI believe you're being down voted because you haven't said anything of substance. You mentioned an anecdote and how the sequence reached Moderna. If you're implying something, maybe say that instead of baiting people to guess your position.
- mrfusion 5y agoHe seems to ignore Florida, Texas, etc who did just fine before the “technology” was ready. Edit sorry to offend but his false dichotomy of five years of lockdown without a vaccine just rubs me the wrong way.
- larsiusprime 5y agoI love me some technology, don't get me wrong. But if the lab-leak hypothesis turns out to be correct than technology is undoubtedly the very thing that put the world in peril in the first place, as far as COVID-19 is concerned, before you even consider increased air travel and globalization encouraging/increasing the instant spread of modern pathogens.
- onion2k 5y agoif the lab-leak hypothesis turns out to be correct than technology is undoubtedly the very thing that put the world in peril in the first place Whatever lessons we might learn if it were to turn out that COVID is a human-made experiment are lessons we should be taking heed of even if it isn't.
- larsiusprime 5y agoAbsolutely! Not to mention that we already have very strong evidence that dangerous pathogens have escaped from other labs in the past.
- hairytrog 5y agoMaybe this will play out like nuclear technologies. Incredible potential for good also means incredible potential for bad. For nuclear, the good was roughly limitless energy at very low environmental cost and low human labor. The bad was nuclear weapons material and nuclear accidents. After the accidents, the nuclear industry in advanced countries basically goes into sleep mode, maintaining existing assets, but unable to expand or grow. Perhaps the lab-leak will have the same result for biomed sciences. Accident leads to millions or tens of millions of deaths and industry must go into stasis. You might say the gain-of-function research is sufficiently differentiated from normal biomedical research that they don't get grouped together. But I doubt it. You can probably do gain-of-function in any old bio lab. The only thing stopping it is the good intentions of the users. The effort to cause massive societal disruption and destruction is so much easier for bio based weapons than for nuclear. In nuclear, you need so many things to line up if you're building a weapon from obtaining the requisite materials, enrichment, weapon design and electronics, delivery vehicles; and so many things to go wrong if you are going to have a consequential nuclear accident. In contrast, bio weapons can be developed in a dinky lab, deployed, and then self-propagate worldwide.
- kordlessagain 5y agoTechnology accelerates change at an accelerated rate. While this could be beneficial to society, the main driver of innovation or creation of technology remains capitalism. Guy Kawasaki has made some great points about how a business, founded in capitalism, should find purpose to make the world a better place. In many cases those changes brought on by a given technology isn't obvious until the technology has been adopted in a widespread way. Facebook may "help" people connect and discuss important matters, but it also created a conduit (deluge) of information which hijacks people's attention away from things that may serve them better in the long run. It's when technology like Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms push data to us that we give way, emotionally, to the influence. When emotions get involved, attention is diverted.
- csbartus 5y agoI didn’t read the post, just checked the comments. 23 out of 23 has negative tone. A tech magnate raises the bar. Goes from ‘better’ to ‘save’. Technology is heaven, himself is a god. Perhaps should be better, for all of the humanity, to tone down this voice a little bit. Otherwise it leads to idiocracy.
- thehappypm 5y agoI found this article to be excellent, unlike most commenters here, perhaps because I had not heard of the author before. Laying out how so many parts of the economy, health system, educational system, and entertainment industries used relatively new technology to keep on' running is a very interesting observation, and it is fascinating to see it all laid out in one concise piece like this.
- tigerBL00D 5y agoIn reality humans have a complicated relationship with technology. As much as it promises to save the world, technology is also what is increasingly over the last couple centuries threatening to destroy the world and our species. So technology may be saving the world, but largely from itself.
- WalterBright 5y agoDo you want a nasty, brutish, and short life living in cave instead? Because everything better than that came from technology. And even stone age man had sufficient technology to extinctify other species.
- handrous 5y agoYou've at least twice on this story borrowed from Hobbes to dismiss posts expressing what amounts to, "maybe our relationship with technology is a bit complex, and a mixed bag, and worth some examination and consideration", as if you were responding to posts advocating full-on anarcho-primitivism. Why?
- WalterBright 5y agoTechnology enabling unsustainable practices goes all the way back to the bow and arrow. Not just the last couple centuries.
- handrous 5y agoAh—you object to framing it as a new problem, then? That makes sense.
- streamofdigits 5y agoa man's got to do what a man's got to do. talk up his book. cheerlead the workforce towards the next big thing etc. the fact is an idiotic strand of rna has defeated us all. our collective intelligence crumbled. toilet papers and flour disappeared from shelves and that was just the start. the billions of "supercomputers in our pockets": defanged, untrusted, unusable as a tool in the fight against the most simplistic of spreading algorithms the billions of "platform" users: amplifiers of deep and justified distrust, preventing even the miracle of quick vaccines (which was by no means a given) to reach the masses to be sure the systemic failure we witnessed is by far not just a "tech" or even V/C failure. you can try put lipstick on a pig. but "tech" was measured and came up short. for any thinking techie out there (and there are many) a time to reflect, then act
- h2odragon 5y ago"we thought the world was gonna end, it didn't because we saved us!" ... or, possibly, the world wasn't going to end in the first place, and y'all selling fear caused much of the harm you're so proud to have mitigated now...
- the_gipsy 5y ago“Knowledge work simply kept going on” - or maybe it simply is irrelevant? We’re just shuffling papers, what really matters is on what car we spend our money on, or what chinese crap we buy off amazon.
- carapace 5y ago(With apologies to those that have heard it before) Bucky Fuller (an engineer) calculated that we would have by sometime in the 1970's all the technology necessary to create a kind of secular utopia if we applied our knowledge to solving our problems efficiently. We could each work for two years and then retire having paid for the rest of our lives during that two-year career. This happened more or less right on schedule (the technological advances, not the social/economic shift.) Ergo, our problems now are not physical, they are mental/emotional. The only thing holding us back is ourselves and our (regressive or at least complacent) attitudes and beliefs. - - - - As an aside, "But yet, one gets the sense that Pandora’s box has been opened." That's not the right metaphor. The box Pandora opened was filled with evil demons.
- WalterBright 5y agoThere are a lot more people alive today than in the 1970s.
- carapace 5y agoTrue. So we work for three years, eh? More seriously, you're correct that population pressure is one of the main problems that could derail a techno-utopian scenario. Fortunately, population seems to be leveling off. I like to joke that the Amish are the "meek" who will "inherit the earth", as they are fantastic farmers and still have large families. But there's an element of truth to the joke: if most folks stop increasing their own population, but a few (like the Amish) don't, then in the fullness of time they would eventually, uh, overrun the rest of us regardless of any particular technological change.
- handrous 5y agoAside from the usual hedonic treadmill explanation, a lot of our problems with ever-inflating costs are due to competition for limited goods—especially those conferring advantage to our kids. Houses in good school districts, private school slots, various expensive activities that make getting into top-tier colleges more likely, et c. Two-income households? Now you're richer? LOL no, just more money lost to zero-sum competition. Making retirement contributions voluntary? Oh great, now my competitors who choose not to save well can out-compete me for advantage for their children now, thanks a bunch. And so on.
- phtrivier 5y agoHalf joking take : what "saved the world" (the deal is hardly done, unfortunately) was a mix of technology, incredible dedication, and vast amount of printed money. Would medtechs have succeed if they were not sure governments would pay "whatever it costs" for vaccines ? Not sure. Would people have paid Disney+ without government help funds? Maybe less. 2020 was probably better handled than 2008 here. However, I'm conviced the healthcare workers would have made their insane efforts no matter what the policy ; and the governments might have failed them so far. We'll have to do better for them next time - they saved the day, in the end. So, now covid 19 is on the list of examples (like Manhattan, Apollo, etc...) where "printing unlimited amount of money to have dedicated people solve a problem" worked. When do we start doing that on climate change ?
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago3-6 months after it begins to affect the ultra wealthy would be my guess.
- aborsy 5y agoNot yet. Much of the world doesn’t yet have access to vaccine. Let’s remind ourselves that, these technologies are products of decades of scientific effort funded by public. Many of these projects never pan out (public pays for risk). VC and private sector join only when technology is sufficiently mature, and will pocket the lion share of the profit. Even within the private sector, gains and risks of technology are not widely shared. This is how it works, but let’s get the credit assignment right. Of course, technology also creates problems that are often passed to public (socialized risk, private profits), until the next iteration of the above process. Environmental damage is a case in point. So, yes, science and technology are wonderful, but let’s share the productivity gains widely, and let us all contribute to the effort (directly, and through fair taxation and policies).
- rickyci 5y ago"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" kudos to technology for making us stronger in the face of COVID-19
- analyte123 5y agoDon’t get me wrong, I love technology. But the other edge of the sword here is that the ability to text and Zoom and YouTube and DoorDash etc. is the only reason that lockdowns were even possible in most of the world. Without these tools, it would have unconscionable for policymakers to try to put millions of people on house arrest, especially if their class’ own livelihoods were liable to be as damaged as physical small business owners and workers. Andreessen is treating lockdowns as an inevitable natural force here rather than a policy decision with particular tradeoffs. In their own (unavoidable) way, these tools enabled lockdowns just as much as they helped people during them.
- wffurr 5y ago>> The best jobs have always been in the bigger cities, where quality of life is inevitably impaired by the practical constraints of colocation and density. This has also meant that governance of bigger cities can be truly terrible, since people have no choice but to live there if they want the good jobs. This reads as if it's written by someone whose idea of a "big city" is San Francisco. SF is uniquely terrible among large American cities. Even other American cities aren't great compared to their international counterparts. Density, even in those other not-that-great American cities, also affords a quality of life not possible in smaller areas. Easy access to cultural institutions, quality restaurants, music venues, events, public transit, and other things only possible with sufficient density. As a parent of a small child in the city, I'm accustomed to having many other parents and children nearby to meet at the many area parks and playgrounds. In every suburban or small town playground we've been to, I've been struck by the absence of others. I'd much rather share playgrounds and have plenty of other children for my child to interact with than be limited to day care and the back yard, which seems to be the case in less-dense areas. I also thoroughly enjoy and appreciate being able to walk and bicycle for errands and amenities, which is not possible in many less-dense areas. It's possible a sufficiently dense but small city or town could provide these same qualities of life, but these communities don't seem to exist in America. Smaller areas just by their nature spread out, and even some larger cities aren't dense enough and are still car-dependent.