Speaking of stagnation, Andreessen's manifesto seems to be aimed at a specific group of people who are <i>not</i> the majority of Americans.<p><a href="https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/</a>
Man who made fortune off of tech industry wants people to keep shoveling money into the tech industry.<p>I'd be more surprised if he had literally any other stance.<p>I will add that veering into the military industrial complex under the banner of techno optimism is quite troubling.
This take is borderline absurd.<p>The risk of AI is in centralization of AI. In the same way the risk of the web was in centralization of the web.<p>Those very real risks manifested in very real ways on the web.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Social Media wasn't always Social Media. We weren't promised Social Media. We were promised Social Networking.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Social Networking companies didn't solve that problem. They failed and pivoted into Social Media.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This is the other other road ahead [2].<p>We will succeed or I will die trying.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.blankenship.io/essays/2023-09-24/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.blankenship.io/essays/2023-09-24/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://paulgraham.com/road.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://paulgraham.com/road.html</a>
The 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.<p>There are very real risks with AI.<p>- 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<p>AI has potential to become a massive force of good, but also has very serious risks if we are not careful.<p>AI in essence is the power to amplify human comprehension and control of the environment.<p>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.
just 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.<p>> Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.<p>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:<p>- minimum wage essentially flat over last 30 years (considering number of people at or close to min wage)<p>- 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.<p>- prices for already established drug like insulin or epipen over last 20 years or general hospital expenses<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>edit: formatting
Techno-optimism needs better defenders. This e/acc stuff reads like it was written by 15 year olds.<p>At least I don't see it anywhere but Xitter which might contain the damage.
It's not a great article but it's raising a real point.<p>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.<p>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.
I 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.<p>> 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.<p>Besides referencing that it's already a slippery slope argument this is completely unrelated to his complaints about.<p>> '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.'"<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andreessens-opposition-housing-project-nimby/671061/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...</a>
Setting 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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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, <i>helps</i> his cause. He's not trying to win a faculty election among the bien-pensant of narrative-control.
I 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.<p>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.'
<i>"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."</i><p>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.<p><i>"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', ..."</i><p><i>Control over nature</i> -- 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.<p>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.
More 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
Can 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?<p>Thanks.
Andreessen virtue-signalling to foreign investors to help a16z recover from being so badly run, such an honourable profession.<p>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!
I wrote a Twitter thread to critique Marc's post as well, re:<p>"As an Accelerationist, I've been watching e/acc gain traction interest.
With @pmarca post, it's time to address this philosophy's shortcomings.<p>Namely, that it is not broad or ambitious enough to truly fulfill the role we as tech leaders have to the future and society."<p><a href="https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1714088788237180947" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1714088788237180947</a>