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Marc Andreessen's AI manifesto hurts his own cause
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- tsunamifury 3y agoI suspect this is aimed more at the Saudis and his need to raise funds to compete with the big four in LLM tech, something he likely doesn't have the capital for right now. This reads as crazed rambling to many of us here, but to the ME capital scene it might be read as a 'strong vision of the future' and telling 'the little people to work harder.'
- atleastoptimal 3y agoAbsolutely. Regardless of the true virtue of Andreessen's idealism, his marketing aim is functional and mostly signaling. It's about congealing the buzz and hype over AI into a pithy thesis that is moth paper to the semi-moral bigwigs of global finance.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoyeah but he presumes they're undiscerning?
- tsunamifury 3y agoHave you seen NEOM?
- jjtheblunt 3y agoYep but the free spending heavily oil funded Saudi mega project doesn't necessarily go to Andreessen Horowitz.
- tsunamifury 3y agoHave you seen SoftBank? Also NEOM original vision was a free tech utopia... AH is deeply interested in that. And the associated spend.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoSoftbank is a curious company for sure!
- garba_dlm 3y agoso your take is that it's saying to increase pressure, exploit harder, and get more even more faster?
- tsunamifury 3y agoI think that is the not-so-hidden subtext yes.
- Der_Einzige 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if you're right. The ME seems to be investing very heavily in AI right now, and many of those nations have extremely deep pockets and favorable conditions for data center creation.
- fullshark 3y agoI've come across his twitter feed a few times, I suspect it's not some 4D chess move but a lot of things he sincerely believes, and an advertisement for his firm (as all blogposts are). There's a lot of twitter brained "tech thought leaders" out there and they finally try to write something coherent for normies and it comes out like that nonsense.
- tsunamifury 3y agoMultiple audiences is not 4D chess. Have you ever worked in marketing or PR? It’s bog standard stuff.
- dundarious 3y agoYes, his rants about the PMC a while ago were near inscrutable (not that I think PMC is an inscrutable/useless category), but after reading a lot of it, seemed to expose him as someone prone to self-serving delusions. I think there are interesting conversations to be had about elite cultural and academic production, as a side-channel to traditional control by capital. However, I don't think I'm being too uncharitable when I say that he was primarily frustrated at his own perception that he was being held back from his ubermensch pretensions.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoWhat's amazing to me is the explicit positive references to actual Fascist and/or "Dark Enlightenment" thinkers (Marinetti, Nick Land) as "Patron Saints." Either Andreesen actually has no idea what he's referring to and is just pretentious name-dropping stuff he thinks is "kinda cool", or he's explicitly endorsing anti-democratic authoritarianism. Either alternative is rather disturbing -- though maybe not surprising. In any case, it kinda explains some of the dreck they've funded.
- tsunamifury 3y agoI think they’ve made it pretty clear they believe in techno authoritarianism. Listen to Theil Altman or AH. Same stuff.
- mcguire 3y agoI don't know that Andreessen is going to compete in building AI technology; I suspect he is looking at applying it to the military and defense industry. Andeessen Horowitz has been noted as moving into the defense contracting arena over the last few years. https://a16z.com/announcement/anduril/ https://a16z.com/announcement/anduril/ https://a16z.com/building-american-dynamism/ https://a16z.com/building-american-dynamism/ https://a16z.com/how-the-u-s-can-rewire-the-pentagon-for-a-new-era/ https://a16z.com/how-the-u-s-can-rewire-the-pentagon-for-a-n... Anyone looking forward to our new LLM-powered Unmanned Combat Systems era?
- geodel 3y agoWell yeah, specially if endorsed by Andeessen! Who better than this selfless, always right, tech visionary. He is not about some shady hustle to make quick money.
- alephnerd 3y ago> he is looking at applying it to the military and defense industry The Investment Partners in the Enterprise and American Dynamism portions of A16Z are working with a significant amount of autonomy. I don't think he has much day-to-day involvement there. I think it's another Board Partner that manages that portion
- RandomLensman 3y agoAs a marketing pitch it is too poorly structured.
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- alephnerd 3y ago> I suspect this is aimed more at the Saudis A16Z is a solid fund, but they are definitely mimicking Softbank hype-train wise now. Their Enterprise and Gaming portfolios are solid, but that's largely devolved to some very competent partners. Tbh, idk how much day to day impact Andreessen has at A16Z anymore. I think he always wanted to go the thought leadership route, but also wanted to still be in the game.
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- api 3y agoTechno-optimism needs better defenders. This e/acc stuff reads like it was written by 15 year olds. At least I don't see it anywhere but Xitter which might contain the damage.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoI wonder what the virtual age of an LLM authored piece would be.
- some_furry 3y agoTechno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both weak positions. Technology is not apolitical or value-neutral. They don't inevitably make peoples' lives better (especially when it comes to systemic issues like income or wealth inequality). It can. It absolutely can do good things. But only if there's political will behind those decisions. It isn't automatic, and it isn't by default. And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc. PhilosophyTube recently covered Ethical AI as a broad topic, but a lot of her points also apply to tech outside of the large-scale computing sector. (Things like algorithmic bias, which doesn't require AI/ML to accidentally implement.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M
- specialist 3y agoGreat share. FWIW, chewing thru History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps has deepened my appreciation of PhilosophyTube. (My advice to young me would not skip the humanities.)
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago> And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc. Right but the problem with a lot of these positions is obstructionism. Take a look at the '70s environmental movement and the way its legacy, laws like NEPA and CEQA, are used to simply block development. Or look at the discourse around nuclear power. Of course: > Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both weak positions. Which I wholeheartedly agree with. It just turns out that tradeoffs are difficult and that the electorate doesn't really care about nuance. They just want to know whether Andreessen is Good (TM) or Bad (TM). Should you clap for him or boo him on stage, that is the question of our times.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoMan who made fortune off of tech industry wants people to keep shoveling money into the tech industry. I'd be more surprised if he had literally any other stance. I will add that veering into the military industrial complex under the banner of techno optimism is quite troubling.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThe technology of nukes and MAD has saved many lives.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoYet every year the US spends a trillion dollars on the military, which has killed half a million civilians since 9/11. Meanwhile our nuclear energy and space programs are total jokes.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoIt’s horrible. Around 50 million civilians were killed in just a few years prior to nukes though.
- nickpp 3y agoImagine how many civilians the purveyors of 9/11 would’ve killed if the USA wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars on the military.
- mcguire 3y agoSpeaking of stagnation, Andreessen's manifesto seems to be aimed at a specific group of people who are not the majority of Americans. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
- gojomo 3y agoWhen Andreesen calls back to earlier eras of greater tech optimism & growth, that's aimed at people who've lost out on the reduced dynamism in recent decades.
- mcguire 3y agoThose eras of greater tech optimism and growth led to the current concentration of wealth; it seems unlikely that he would be all that interested in greatly enlarging the club.
- gojomo 3y agoThat's a rather simplistic reading of the history, and those eras also delivered a greater share of income, & more living-standards advances, to everyone than our current "be slow and careful and deferent to so many political veto-points" era. Consider a model instead where sure, you can turn off the spigots of progress to try to punish the wealthy – but in practice, the wealthy can defend themselves, through some combo of either their accumulated power, or the same competencies that made & kept their wealth in the first place. So whatever lesser growth still happens, your (& the EPI's) bugaboos still get their share – a bit like 'liquidation preferences' in an investment, but springing not from contractual terms but the full structural arrangement of world – prior endowments, some merited some not, and the nature of human competition. But the new lower-growth era, no matter the dreams of its advocates, mostly deprives the needier masses. They wind up with a bigger 'haircut' than the wealthy. Of course, if you're totally in thrall of class resentment & ideology, you won't be discouraged by the many-decades of failure in 'slowdown' policies so far. "We must do even more of it," a comfortable tenured neo-marxist professor might argue. "Heighten the contradictions! Speed the revolution, where the growing suffering of the masses help them finally achieve class-consciousness & hand our enlightened vanguard the plenary power they need for great justice." Like pre-scientific medicine: "The blood-letting hasn't worked yet? More blood-letting!" If you've actually paid attention the last 175y, the political forces unleashed by stagnation, resentment, and demonization of tech & capital-allocation tend to instead empower the worst regimes, that then destroy both material abundance & political freedoms.
- bananapub 3y agoAndreessen virtue-signalling to foreign investors to help a16z recover from being so badly run, such an honourable profession. don't worry, though, pushing all those cryptocurrency scams that cost so many other people so much money doesn't seem to have hurt Andreessen's personal wealth!
- garba_dlm 3y agosafety first. at the expense of other's life's; but safety first
- mensetmanusman 3y agoOpinion wrong because of ftx? Doesn’t seem like sound reasoning.
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- nickpinkston 3y agoI wrote a Twitter thread to critique Marc's post as well, re: "As an Accelerationist, I've been watching e/acc gain traction interest. With @pmarca post, it's time to address this philosophy's shortcomings. Namely, that it is not broad or ambitious enough to truly fulfill the role we as tech leaders have to the future and society." https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1714088788237180947 https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1714088788237180947
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- johnwheeler 3y agoThe list of “references” at the end a bit self indulgent me thinks
- mcguire 3y agoI'm not entirely sure Bertrand Russell would like to be on that list.
- arthurjj 3y agoI clicked on this hoping it would be a deserved indictment of his personal NIMBY views [1] vs public statements. Instead it's basically 3 tweets worth of commentary, and illiterate commentary at that. > Right now, we're watching what happens when risk management and tech ethics are ignored for the sake of unlimited growth, ... Andreessen would bristle at the comparison — his VC firm famously didn't back FTX — but the philosophical slope nonetheless slips in that direction. Besides referencing that it's already a slippery slope argument this is completely unrelated to his complaints about. > 'existential risk', 'sustainability', 'ESG', 'Sustainable Development Goals', 'social responsibility', 'stakeholder capitalism', 'Precautionary Principle', 'trust and safety', 'tech ethics', 'risk management', 'de-growth', 'the limits of growth.'" Notice how fruad isn't listed there. Andreessen's combining 4 to 5 different things that slow down growth. Which isn't great if you think some of them might be net positives but the author's reading comprehension is comically bad. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andreessens-opposition-housing-project-nimby/671061/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...
- mcguire 3y agoTrust and safety, ethics, and risk management are direct responses to several forms of malfeasance, including fraud.
- arthurjj 3y agoI think I'm missing something? * Trust & Safety [1] seems to be about safeguarding PII and having a moderation * Tech Ethics - I can't find a general definition but I think about new ethical situations caused by tech. eg if you train an generative AI on artist X is it ethical to have the AI create images that look like artist X * risk management - I haven't follow the case closely, I think of the SBF case mainly being about fraud and less about their risk management. So even if we count those 3 the other 9 reasons, including the first 7 Andreessen lists, are unrelated [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_and_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_and_safety
- gojomo 3y agoSetting aside most of a 5,200-word piece to instead cast essentially tone- and mood- based objections against a 49-word aside is a good example of the reflexive negativity-bias & nit-picking that's inherent to the "mass demoralization campaign" Andreesen perceives. In the passage Primack criticizes, Andreesen names some of the euphemisms he associates with "bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die". These are abstractions, with lofty labels, that now provide overdue-for-reexamination rationalizations for the sort of stagnation, statism, bureaucracy, gerontocracy, corruption, & cartelization he decries. Those loyal to the particular activist-campaigns & shibboleths that Andreesen calls out were unlikely to be on-board with his level of optimism, anyway. So letting those people self-identify, & disassociate from his ambition, helps his cause. He's not trying to win a faculty election among the bien-pensant of narrative-control.
- rgbrenner 3y ago"We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets." And who's going to have these kids? Because it's become clear that 50B is never going to happen. Humans--really women--have no desire to procreate and spread across the galaxy in that way... at least not if you also support -- as andreessen says he does in the same manifesto -- human intelligence. "We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world." ... "Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like 'existential risk', 'sustainability', 'ESG', 'Sustainable Development Goals', ..." Control over nature -- big claim for a species living through one of the biggest mass extinction events in earth's history. Andreessen's clearly a gambling man... but this time he gambles with the existence of human beings.. telling us to ignore the very fears that drive us to solve the problems we face, betting even without the threat of death, technology will save us from ourselves. You think you're in control, right up until the hurricane comes and you run for your life, coming back only to see what it left for you to salvage.
- rglover 3y ago> And who's going to have these kids? They're going to grow them in artificial wombs. > _Control over nature_ The final frontier of the deluded soul.
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- youngtaff 3y agoI wish Musk, Thiel, Andreessen would just get on that spaceship and go start colonising other planets already
- roydivision 3y agoThat's a very polite way of saying it.
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- siliconc0w 3y agoMore like the VC manifesto where all the value capture will happen in private markets, productivity will go up but wages will continue to stagnant and healthcare or education will continue to be unaffordable
- mistrial9 3y agothe actual argument for that is "but now they have iPhones" to my eye, similar slippery-slope arguments for the value of labor, or the expectation of stability in a job, occur regularly here.
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- nemo44x 3y agoIf you want to blow your mind then read the AI Manifesto and then Ted Kaczynski‘s “Industrial Society and Its Future”.
- kossTKR 3y agoCan we all just stop listening to rich peoples various sinister ideological schemes to enslave us all so they can go live on yachts or on some space station while earth rots? Thanks.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoCan we all stop issuing random fatwas that expect everyone to agree with their braindead reasoning? Thanks.
- systemvoltage 3y agoUnpopular opinion: Wealthy individuals are inspiring and we should listen to what they have to say. They became wealthy by building stuff that millions if not billions of people value. May be you're forgetting this? Or is this just the normal cynicism that we must exhibit?
- harryVic 3y agoJust google what Marc Andreessen looks like and you'll understand why he is such a contrarian.
- objectivetruth 3y ago[dead]
- jjulius 3y agoThis feels like an absolute that isn't inherently true (maybe you didn't mean it as an absolute? I could be reading it wrong). Not every wealthy person "became wealthy by building stuff that millions if not billions of people value". Even for those that did, not everyone is right all the time - just because you sold a lot of a thing doesn't mean you're going to have great opinions on everything else. And, just because you're wealthy doesn't mean I owe your opinions my time. In the specific case of Andreesen here, I've disagreed with him so strongly over the years that I didn't bother giving his manifesto a chance, and from most of the comments I've seen, I don't think I've lost anything there. I don't care if he founded Netscape, or throws his cash around to new companies in an effort to generate more cash for himself, his opinions have missed the mark many, many times. Wealth != Great ideas
- slibhb 3y agoIt's not a great article but it's raising a real point. Andreessen's manifesto is bordering on the same error as free market fundamentalism (and other flavors of social darwinism) that views free markets as infallible. Markets are great at generating wealth but there's no reason to believe they can't lead us astray. FTX is an example of that. I think we should be 10-15% more optimistic about technology. And I agree that the source of a lot of environmentalism is unconscious anti-humanism. But there is such a thing as too much optimism, and it leads to stuff like "web3" and crypto nonsense.
- mistrial9 3y agoanti-humanism is a derogatory label pasted onto those speakers who argue for considering the entire ecosystem?
- slibhb 3y agoWhat I mean is that a substantial amount of environmentalism is just sublimated hatred of humanity. This leads to irrational beliefs and faulty predictions a la The Population Bomb or The Limits of Growth.
- walleeee 3y agoAny environmentalism worth its weight in words is consciously humanist, with the recognition that human life is not possible without nonhuman life. That is to say, humanist without the ideological blinders Andreessen wears. For humanism (for that matter, humankind) to remain viable in the long term it must outgrow adolescent notions of human self-sufficiency and supremacy
- slibhb 3y agoOkay -- so how do you respond to environmentalists who were completely and utterly wrong (e.g. Paul Erlich, The Club of Rome)? What I'm offering is a theory of why they were wrong: they have an unconscious hostility torward humanity which they channel into irrational, incorrect beliefs about the environment. There's a lot of this going around right now. Of course that doesn't mean that all environmentalism is similarly compromised. The desire to preserve ecosystems, to measure and limit the impact of industry on the environment is generally good.
- DesiLurker 3y agojust read through this manifesto. lot of high minded ideals but little actions to show for it if you start at the beginning of the internet era. > Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels. sounds good, how about Andreessen Horowitz start open sourcing the ip of their own failed startups. thats a good small step towards avoiding monopolies and democratizing IP, No, they wont because it hurts THEIR chances to be the dominant monopoly. thats the bottom line. a few more examples for select few capturing most of the gains of tech: - minimum wage essentially flat over last 30 years (considering number of people at or close to min wage) - best example of NIMBYism is lack of real estate development in silicon valley itself. look at RE prices & affordability in SV and you know all there is to know about what pure capitalism does to even the techno-optimists. - prices for already established drug like insulin or epipen over last 20 years or general hospital expenses - screw all that, even look at the realtor commission (about 6-7%) for doing almost nothing. why has that not been disrupted even though all info is essentially online. - pretty much all software wants to be tired subscription with value squeezed out over time. this is how they (VCs) evaluate exit potential of startups. Sure it all starts with providing an innovative product to customers but the underlying disruption essentially allows 'them' to squeeze additional value out of populace over time. bottom line, as citizens, are you and I working more or less compared to our parents? do we have more security (financial & otherwise) in life? are we more or less stressed? this will only get worse with AI by default. unless there is a dramatic shift business-as-usual. edit: formatting
- r3trohack3r 3y agoThis take is borderline absurd. The risk of AI is in centralization of AI. In the same way the risk of the web was in centralization of the web. Those very real risks manifested in very real ways on the web. I have young kids. I'm not exaggerating when I say I wake up every day and diligently build the future I was promised for them. I've got somewhere around 10 years, conservatively, until Instagram/TikTok/YouTube/Facebook/etc. try to get my daughter to kill herself. I've got around 10 years until she is a statistic, hopefully the statistic that survives. Social Media wasn't always Social Media. We weren't promised Social Media. We were promised Social Networking. Social Networks were supposed to connect us with our communities. Bring the world together in a way previously impossible. Allow the free exchange of information and ideas. That future is still possible. But it turns out expecting some dude in Palo Alto to pay to be the free Proxy and Archivist of the entire world's social communication is a hard problem to solve. It's a hard engineering problem. It's a hard financial problem. It's a hard legal problem. It's a hard ethics problem. Social Networking companies didn't solve that problem. They failed and pivoted into Social Media. Social Media divides us. Social Media isolates us. Social Media believes my friends, my family, and my community "aren't engaging enough" and litters my timeline with randos it's trying to hype to keep me engaged so they can monetize the experience. I go to my PTO meetings and parents talk about their kids being isolated and depressed. They talk about body image issues and lack of purpose. I go to my community gatherings, business networking groups, and gym. People talk about how lonely they feel. How angry they feel. How depressed and anxious they feel. Instead of the Social Networks we were promised, we have these Social Media monstrosities that take randos on the internet and try to make them famous in front of other randos on the internet in a variable rate reward slot machine. Social Networks on P2P technology have been viable for at least 5 years now, but the industry hasn't caught up. It's possible to join a p2p social network from your browser tab, pair it with your phone, have them both simultaneously be able to generate posts and sync over a gossip protocol without conflict. And it's possible for your social group to backup your content. All of this is still possible with the Application Service Provider architecture of having a "backup pinning server" that will make your data highly available. Identity is solvable in a way that allows for full control of your identity without relying exclusively on public/private key cryptography - and permits social recovery of your identity when your keys are lost or compromised [1]. End users don't need to understand private keys or public keys. They just know they have an account, and that their friends can send them a friend request. I'm going long on p2p applications. I think they aren't just viable, but that they can out compete the user experience that current generation Application Service Providers offer while simultaneously breaking the incentives that are destroying the societies my children will inherit. AI is no different. The call to arms about AI regulation and alignment often degrades to advocating for a world where my children do not get access to AI because it's "too dangerous" for them - while someone else's kids belong in the privileged AI class. The trajectory forming for AI strongly signals to me that it will be the single most profound means of production our species has produced. Any philosophy that advocates taking that away from my kids can go play in its own corner. I'm not taking back the web for my kids just to let them take away AI in return. If these things interest you, and you're interested in doing hardcore research on productionizing real, no bullshit, peer-to-peer networks both for end users and enterprises, my email is in my bio. I want to talk to you. We need more good people in this space, and we have budget for it. My team is building peer-to-peer networks for AI, but the solutions that break AI out of it's ivory walls aren't AI specific solutions. These peer-to-peer building blocks are general purpose and the next generation of the web is going to run on them. This is the other other road ahead [2]. We will succeed or I will die trying. [1] http://www.blankenship.io/essays/2023-09-24/ http://www.blankenship.io/essays/2023-09-24/ [2] http://paulgraham.com/road.html http://paulgraham.com/road.html
- locopati 3y ago[flagged]
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- nojvek 3y agoThe current reality of tech isn’t great. More than half a million jobs lost post 2021, yet the top tech companies are back to their top valuations with much smaller headcounts. There are very real risks with AI. - concentration of power and wealth - we already see this with AMAGF - echo chambers - the algorithms amplify the extremes - already see this. People can’t even agree on who won the election. - AI in military use killing 1000s - already happening, and will only go up. - Surveillance AI has potential to become a massive force of good, but also has very serious risks if we are not careful. AI in essence is the power to amplify human comprehension and control of the environment. It is unlikely we go to 50B humans, but very likely a few humans end up controlling billions of humans and building the utopia of distopia.