AI and Accelerationism with Marc Andreessen

25:20of a certain way of organizing, you know, industrial society, you have a certain way of organizing, you know, political affairs. And they are the consequence of the technologies up to that point. And then you introduce a new technology, and the new technology basically threatens to upend that status hierarchy and the people who are in power, all of a sudden, aren't, and there are new people in power. And of course, you know, what is the thing that people will fight and will fight the hardest to maintain, you know, is their status in the hierarchy. And then he goes through example, after example of this, throughout history, including this incredible example of the development of the first naval gun that adjusted for the role of a battleship and battle, which increased the firing accuracy of naval guns by like 10X.

25:59It was one of the great decisive breakthroughs in modern weaponry. And it still took both the US and the UK, British Navy's 25 years to adopt it, because the entire command status hierarchy of how naval combat vessels were run and how gunnery systems worked and how tactics and strategy worked for naval battles. I had to be upended with the invention of this new gun. Anyway, and so like he would basically say, you know, essentially, duh, you know, you roll out this new technology. It, you know, it causes people who used to have power and no longer have power, push new people in power. You know, in modern terms, you know, the language that we would use to describe this as gatekeepers, right?

26:37Like, so, you know, why is the traditional journalism press? So, you know, it just absolutely furious about the internet, right? And it's because like the internet gives right regular people the opportunity to basically be on a On at least a peer relationship if not, you know in the case of somebody like Joe Rogan a superior relationship Right, and then and then it's it's an upending of the status hierarchy and kind of you know the same thing, you know through through through you Basically like one of the ways to interpret the story of our time from a social standpoint is all of the gatekeepers who were strong in the 60s and 70s are basically being torn down I'll give you another obvious example, political parties.

27:10Why are so many Western political parties in a state of some combination of freak out and meltdown right now? It's because in an era of radio and television, they were able to broadcast a top -down message and they were able to tell voters basically what to think. In the new model voters are deciding what they think based on what they read online and then they were selecting that back up and fighting their politicians wanting. So therefore, the re -rise of populism and the blowing out of both left -wing and right -wing ideologies, right? The sort of the center is not holding. Anyway, that would be another example in Morse's framework.

27:43And then I'll just close on this. Morse has this fast, he says there's as a consequence of the fact that technology changes social hierarchies, he says there's a predictable three -stage process to the reaction to any new technology by the status quo, by basically the people in power at that time. He says, step one is ignore. So just like pretend it doesn't exist. just by the way is actually a pretty good strategy because like most technologies don't up in social order. It's like most new technologies don't work at the time that they're first presented. So maybe ignore it's actually a rational strategy.

28:14Step two is what he calls rational counterargument. And so that's where you get like the laundry list of all the things that are wrong with the new technology, right? And then he says step three is when the name calling begins. This I mean I watched a couple of of your other interviews recently and this relates to I know you've been talking about Nietzsche's Master's slavery, morality recently, and this seems to tie to that in this notion of Nietzsche and Resortway, you know, it does a typical philosophical thing of taking a French word and drawing it out, but Resortum on right instead of, you know, just having a look at nuclear power and seeing where it would go and allowing that power to unfold within society.

28:54You try invert the morals, you say, well, actually the good thing to do is because these people don't have the world power, because they don't have the ability or the engineering skills I guess in your own case to utilize the thing, they invert the morals and say well actually the good thing is to do the inverse, is to not have it, like this is bad, and now that then immediately puts them in the good camp. But it seems like to be honest, it really feels especially with AI, and also now with nuclear power, now that especially in Germany, certain things have been tried, and now it's like, okay, this was a really bad mistake in terms of energy.

29:31Like the cats are the bag, and there's now this force of having to move. You were then talking about the second, the second and third stages there. It's almost like, look, with AI especially, the cats are at the bag, like we have to move. There's no choice of ignoring or reacting against it now. You have a deal with it or you don't. Yeah, so let's spend a little, one more moment of nuclear power, then they got AI. So nuclear power is so interesting, because nuclear power is the tail. I was like, I was looking for like the little signals that people don't really mean what they say or that they're not really like they're you know, they're they're they're they're sort of you know, moral system doesn't quite line up properly.

30:04And so nuclear power is just like amazing. It's this amazing thing. It's like literally it's like, okay, you build this thing it generates power. It basically generates a small amount of nuclear waste it generates steam. But it generates zero emissions, right, zero carbon. Right. And so you have this basically this amazing phenomenon where you have this and let's just take them completely as face value. I'm not going to, this is not me questioning. I'm not going to question carbon emissions or global war. I'm just going to, I'm going to assume that everything in environmentalists say about carbon emissions, climate change and all that stuff.

30:32Let's assume that that's all totally real. Like let's just grant them all that. It's like, okay, well, like, okay, so how can you solve the sort of climate crisis, the carbon emissions crisis? It's like, well, you have the silver bullet technology you could roll out in the form of nuclear fission today. You could generate limited power. Richard Nixon, by the way, the heavily condemned Richard Nixon in 1972 proposed something at the time he called Project Independence. Project Independence was going to be the United States building a thousand new civilian nuclear power plants by the year 1980 and cutting the entire U .S.

31:05energy grid including the transportation system, cars, everything, home heating everything over to nuclear power by 1980 going zero emission in the U .S. economy. And by the way, right, geopolitically removing us from the Middle East, right? So no, no Iraq, all this stuff, just completely unnecessary, right? And you'll note that like, project independence did not happen, right? We don't live in that world today. And so it's like, okay, you've got this crisis. You've got this like, silver bowl solution for it. And you very deliberately have chosen to not adopt that solution. And it's like, and it's actually very interesting, split environmental movement today.

31:43And it's really kind of, you know, I think kind of bizarre. It's like a 99 to one split. You have to like 99 % of environmental activists about nuclear power. They just sort of categorically dismiss it. It was of course that's not an option. You do have this kind of radical fringe with people like Stuart Brand, who are like basically now pointing out that it is a silver bullet answer. But most of them are saying, no, it's not an answer. And it's like, okay, well, why are they doing that? It's like, well, like what is it that they're saying that they want to do? And what they're saying they want to do is what they call, you know, degrowth, right?

32:12And so they want to decarbonize the economy, they want to de -energize the economy, they want to decrow the economy, and then when you get down to it, and you ask them a very specific question about the implications of this, basically what you find is the general model is they want to reduce the human population on the planet to about 500 million people. It's kind of the answer that they ultimately come down to. And so ultimately, the big agenda is to reduce the human, basically, the human herd, quite sharply. And they kind of dance around this a little bit, but when they really get down to it, this is what they talk about.

32:42And of course, Paul Erlich is kind of one of the kind of famous icons of this. He's been talking about this for decades. I think it was Jane Goodall who used the 500 million number recently in public. And so then you've got this kind of very interesting technological, philosophical, moral question, which is like, well, what is the goal here? Is the goal to solve climate change or is the goal to be populated? And to the extent that free unlimited power would interfere with, you know, it's the extent that that's a problem, the problem it would be as if the actual agenda is to do properly the planet.

33:17And like I would like this to not be the case. Like I, I, you know, again, taking everything else that they say at face value, you'd like to solve carbon emissions and climate change and everything else. But like, you know, like I think you, you know, you might also say you want to planet in which there are not only eight billion people, but maybe, you know, maybe people are good, right? Maybe you're, you actually should have 20 billion or 50 billion people. And we have the technology to do that and we're choosing not to do it. So, so, so, so, so this is the thing. Like this gets into these very deep questions, right, to your point of like, okay, very deep questions about morality.

33:48And like, how did we maneuver or, you know, like perniche, like, how did we reverse ourselves into a situation where we're actually arguing against human life? And, and of course, and this is, we'll get to it, but this, this of course, is then, you know, a big part of the origin of the idea of effective accelerationism, which is basically new, like, let's go sharply in the other direction. Oh, and then yeah, so AI is playing out much the same way. AI is already playing out the same way. And here you've got this just incredible phenomenon happening where it looks like we have a key breakthrough to basically increase the level of intelligence basically all throughout society and around the world through basically for the first time, directly applying new general intelligence to the world.

34:29And there is this incredibly basically aggressive movement that is actually having tangible impact today in the halls of power in Washington DC and in the EU and other places that are seeking to stop and reverse it as aggressively as they possibly can. And so we're going through, I would say, a suddenly accelerated and very sharp and aggressive version of exactly what happened in nuclear power happening today right now. I mean, this is the thing that can, well, there's two questions because on your blog, you, it's really refreshing to see. You're pretty to the point when you say, look, AI is code.

35:05It's code written by people, by human beings, on computers, developed by human beings. Like we're in control, you're not of this. I think there was, you know, musk signed a big thing where like, you know, thousand people signed this thing to say, like we need to hold this. The whole Rocco's Basilisk, AI is gonna be Terminator 2. Coming in and blowing us up with robots, etc, etc. It's gonna kill us all. or you're very much like, no, this is code, this is just an intelligence for us to use. Now that's one question, you know, I guess, why is an AI gonna kill us all? And I know you've spoken about that a lot so that answer can be brief.

35:38But secondly, this whole idea of trying to reverse it, to me it seems inherent within AI as a thing that it wants, it's the cats out of the back, you can't. Like once it's here, you outside of really draconian measures, is, you come because how do you hold an intelligence which is growing, right? Well, except, you know, they did stall out nuclear power, right? So, right? Like, so they did. Like it worked. So the, the, the, why did project independence not happen? Why do we not have like, you know, unlimited nuclear power today? You know, the reason is because it was, it was blocked by the political system, right?

36:15And so, so, you know, Richard Nixon, who I mentioned, you know, proposed this, he also created the environmental production agency in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. and the nuclear, it's actually been a big week. The first new nuclear power plant design, the first newly designed nuclear power plant in the last 50 years just went online in Georgia, right, $20 billion over budget. And it's got, it's a story of its own, but at least we got one online. It's the first new nuclear power plant design ever authorized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says Nixon created that commission, right? And so we put in place a regulatory regime around nuclear power in the 1970s that all but made it impossible.

36:53By the way, you alluded to the Germany thing earlier, let's touch on that for a second. So, you know, you've I'm sure you've heard of the idea of the precautionary principle, right? Which is this idea that basically scientists and technologists have a moral obligation to think through all the possible negative consequences of a new technology before it's rolled out. The precautionary principle, and we can talk about that, including whether scientists and technologists are actually qualified to do that. But this was also a central theme of Oppenheimer. But the Prokostia principle was invented by the German Greens in the 1970s, and it was prevented specifically to stop nuclear power.

37:29And it is just amazing. We're sitting here in 2023, and we effectively we in the last are effectively at this at war with Russia. And it's a proxy war right now that hopefully it doesn't turn into a real war. but who knows? The proxy wars have a disconcerting pattern of spilling over and becoming real wars. And a lot of this is a tale of energy. And basically, the Russian economy is like 70 % energy exports, oil and gas exports. The major buyer of that energy historically has been Europe and specifically Germany. Europe and Germany specifically essentially have funded the Russian state, the Putin state, and that funding is what basically built and sustains their military engine, which is what they've used to invade Ukraine.

38:21And so there's this counterfactual where the German Greens did not do what they did in the 1970s. Nuclear power was not blocked. Germany and France and the rest of Europe today is like fully energy and a pennant running a nuclear power. The Russia state would be greatly weakened because the value of their exports would be enormously diminished and they would not have the wherewithal to invade other countries or to threaten Europe. And so these decisions have like real consequences. And these people use the pejorative sense, they are so confident that they can step into these debates, kind of questions around new technologies and how they should be applied and what the consequences are.

39:01They can step in and they can use the political machine to basically throw sand in the gear or stop these things from happening. So like, AI, this is what's happening right now. So like, you know, in the sort of theoretical position where AI is kind of this, you know, potentially runaway thing, then, right, maybe it can be constrained. Like, in the real world, it very much can be constrained. And the reason it can be constrained in the real world is because it uses physical resources, right? It has a physical layer to it. And that layer is energy usage, and that layer is chips, and that layer is telecom bandwidth, with and that layer is data centers, physical data centers.

39:39And that layer is like, by the way, that layer also includes the actual technologists like working in the field and their ability to actually do what they do. And there are a very large number of control points and pressure points that the state can put on those layers to prevent them from being used for whatever it wants to prevent. And the EU is on the verge of the EU as this anti -AI bill that it looks like is going to pass that is extremely draconian and may result in Europe not even having an AI industry and may result in American AI companies not even operating in Europe. And then in the US we have a very similar push happening as the sort of what I would describe as the anti -AI zealots are, they are in the White House today arguing that this is bad, it should be stopped.

40:27And it's amazing as it's like how many times are we going to run through this loop? How many times are we going to repeat history here? How many times are we going to be kind of self -defeating like this? And apparently the impulse to be self -defeating, we have not worked that out of our system. You don't want to be self -defeating, though. Let's move into this peculiar four letters, which is found at the moment at the end of your Twitter name and the end floating around Twitter, mostly, e slash act or effective accelerationism. And this is just beautiful to me. It's like the acceleration is Renaissance.

41:01So, I've been said talking about it in that way. I don't want to keep it too much, but I wrote my master's thesis on accelerationism. Like, I love it. I love talking about it. You don't want any of this holding back. You don't want to hold anything back. You want to accelerate. So firstly, I mean, there's two questions there. What is it for you to accelerate? And what is effective accelerationism? Yeah, so let me just say where it came from. I'll reverse, I'll answer the second one first and then go to the broader topic. So it's a combination. there's, you know, kind of two words there, effective and accelerationism.

41:33So, you know, the acceleration, accelerationism part of it is obviously building on what you've talked about and what Nick Landon others have talked about for a long time. And of course, as you, as you've talked about, there's all these different versions of accelerationism. And so this is, this is, you know, proposing one that, you know, this one is like the closest to what you would call right, right accelerationism, although, you know, maybe without some of the political overtones. And so there is that component. There's also the effective part of it. And the effective part of it. It's sort of a half humorous reference, obviously, to effective altruism.

42:03And it's a little bit tongue -in -cheek, because it's like, of course, if you're going to have a philosophy, of course, you would like it to be effective. But, you know, but also look like, YAC is like very much like YAC's enemy, right? The oppositional force, the thing that YAC was sort of formed to fight is actually, you know, specifically effective altruism. Right? And so it's also like, you also sort of, use that term to the term effective to kind of make that point. Like this is in that world and this is opposed to that. And the reason why like this is happening now, like the reason why the concept of effective accelerationism has kind of come into being.

42:40And by the way, the people, this is not originally my formulation. This is, there's these ultra smart Twitter characters who I think are still mostly operating under assume names. but there's a BF Jesus and Bayes Lord are the two of them that I know. And these are like top and Silicon Valley engineers, scientists, technologists, but at least for now they're operating under cover of pseudonym. So the reason this is happening now is because of what I was describing earlier with AI, which is you have this other movement, you have this movement of what's sort of called sometimes is use different terms, AI risk, AI safety, AI alignment.

43:21Sometimes you'll hear the term X risk sometime. And then this is sort of directly attached. This is all part of the EA world, the effective altruism world. And then the central characters of this other world are Nick Bostrom, Elisir Yatowski, the open philanthropy organization, a bunch of these kind of, sort of the AI, what we call the AI tumors running around. like the AI Doomer movement is basically a part and parcel with the effective altruism movement. And AI existential risk has always been kind of the bogeyman of effective altruism, kind of going back over the 20 -year development of EA.

44:00And so anyway, that EA movement is the movement, by the way, with lavish funding by EA billionaires, which is part of the problem, by the way, who made all their money in tech, which is also amazing. But so you've got this It's funny complex. You've got this EA movement. You've got this attached AI risk safety movement. And now you've got like active lobbying, you know, and sort of anti -AI PR campaign. And so anyway, so effective, effective accelerationism is intended to be the polar opposite of that. It's intended to be the, you know, to head, head boldly and firmly and strongly and confidently into the, into the future.

44:38You know, it's like why, you know, why, why this form of positive accelerationism, there's a couple different layers of it. The founders of the concept of the VAC have a thermodynamic kind of thing, which we could talk about, but it's kind of one layer down from our app rate. The layer app rate is more at the level of a engineering and when I think about it, I think in terms of essentially fundamentally of material conditions. So human flourishing, quality of life, standard of living of human beings on earth, and back to that concept of productivity growth, with the application of technology to be able to cause the economy to be more productive and therefore cause more material wealth, higher levels of material welfare for people all over the world, by the way, also with reduced inputs.

45:20And so not just greater levels of development, greater levels of advance, but also greater levels of efficiency. And the nature of technology as a lever on the physical world is you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can get higher levels of output with lower levels of input and the result of that is so much higher standard of living. So I kind of adopt my my philosophical grounding is sort of you know, so I don't know what's been called like a positive materialism or something, you know, which is like I think the thing that we the thing that the technology industry does best is improve material quality of life.

45:50I think that we should accelerate as hard into that as we possibly can. I think the quote unquote risks around that are greatly exaggerated if not if not false. And you know, I think the forces against basically technological progress, you know, they're like the environmental movement I described, they're fundamentally, sort of at some deep level they're sort of anti -human. They've not fewer people and they want a lower quality living on Earth and like I just, I very much disagree with both of those. And what is this at the thermodynamic level? Is this the, we, ultimate enemy is entropy? So there's a, there's a thermodynamic part gets complicated and this is not my field.

46:29So there's other people that you should probably have on to talk about this. but the effective accelerationism version of the thermodynamic thing is based on the work of this physicist named Jeremy England, who is this very interesting character. He's actually trained by one of my partners and is now basically, he's an MIT physicist, biologist, and by the way, and also, by the way, interesting guy. I don't know him, but very interesting guy from the distance. He's also a trucker kind of rabbi. And so he's an interesting cat. And so he basically has this theory that basically, basically it's sort of life is the direct result.

47:06Life, like the phenomenon of life itself is a direct consequence of thermodynamics. And the way he describes it is basically, basically if you take basically the universe with the level of energy that's washing around and raw materials and you sort of apply kind of natural selection at a very deep level, even at the level of just the formation of materials like on a planet or something, you basically have this thing where basically a matter wants to organize itself into states where it's able to absorb energy and achieve higher levels of structure. And so you have the absorption of energy, you have achievement of higher levels of structure.

47:45In the case of organic life, that starts with RNA and then works this way up to full living systems. And then on the other side of that, as we talked about before, on the other side of that is the result of that is you're sort of you're dumping heat, which is to say entropy, you know, kind of out into the broader system. And so it's almost like saying the second lot of thermodynamics has it upside, right, which is basically, yes, entropy in the universe is increasing over time, but a lot of that increases the result of structures forming that are basically absorbing energy and then exporting entropy.

48:17And one form of that structure is actually life. And this is actually a thermodynamic, biomechanical, bioelectrical kind of explanation of actually how organic life works. This is what we are. We are machines for gathering energy, forming increasingly complicated biological machines, replicating those machines. And of course, he talks about natural selection. It's not surprising that natural selection is so oriented around replication, because replication is the easiest way to generate more structure. Right? Like replication is the way that a system that is basically in business to generate structure.

48:51It's the way that it can most efficiently generate more structure. And so, so anyway, basically, the universe wants us to basically be alive. The universe wants us to become more sophisticated. You know, the universe wants us to replicate. You know, the universe feeds us in a, you know, an essentially a limited amount of energy and raw materials with which to do that. Yes, we dump entropy out the other side, but we get structure and life to basically compensate for that. The universe is pro -nadelist and kind of need you in there as well. Yeah, exactly. 100%. So, anyway, that's the thermodynamic underpins of effective accelerationism.

49:33The people who have encountered effective acceleration, effective accelerationism, some of that get very deeply into that and there's a very deep kind of well there to draw from. This guy, Jeremy England has a book out. Actually, you'll appreciate this. This guy, Jeremy England has a book out. And the title of the book is something like every life is on fire. And it's actually funny because it's like if you read Heraclitus, you're like, oh my God, you know, he saw it. Right? Like, it's like there's something very, very deep going on here with this sort of intersection of energy life. But so he's got this book out, which apparently is quite good.

50:07And so some people in a fact of acceleration kind of go deep. there's a tongue -in -cheek reference to the so -called thermodynamic God, which is not a literal, religious sense, like a conscious God or ascension God, but more of this idea that the universe is sort of designed to express itself in the forms, in higher and higher forms of life. Yeah, to your point, there's an obviously direct niche in connection. So maybe he saw a lot of this too. And obviously, he was obviously writing and thinking at the same time to our one was figuring a lot of this out on the natural selection evolution side.

50:43Yeah, so there's that. But having said that, like I said, my take on it is more, you know, I find that stuff fascinating. I'm more naturally inclined as an engineer, more naturally inclined towards the material side. And so I just more naturally think in terms of the social systems and the technological development and the impact on material quality of life. And so I think you can also just take it at that level and not have to get all the way down into thermodynamics if you I don't want to. I mean, this is an odd, I mean, yeah, drawing it down to this level of engineering, well, not down to, but just to this level of engineering, there's this odd learned helplessness.

51:16And I mean, just to take the two examples we've given so far, and they work quite well, actually, nuclear energy on the atomic side and AI on the bit side of things, virtual, I guess, virtual reality and reality. You posted this really interesting essay on your blog about availability cascades, which is about basically insured if I'm getting this right, this idea of why are so many people interested in this thing or this view of whatever the opinion or the idea is that's floating around. And it seems on both of those, both nuclear, and GNI, we have that same opinion which is like mematically infected culture of a sort of learned helplessness.

51:56Like, oh no, we've already spoken about this a bit, but like, oh no, we need to get rid of this. We can't deal with this. But it seems, do you think on the engineering side of things, and I guess it overlaps also into the social in terms of how you engineer and how you promote these ideas socially as tools, as things that people use, is an attempt to invert that availability cascade and try to begin some amesis on the side of like, it's okay to want a better quality of living, It's okay to want to grow. It's okay to want energy. You don't have to be almost like submissive to whatever this strange self -defeating learned helplessness is that we have in terms of technology and our like weird allegiance to just this stagnant comfort that we've had for too long.

52:47Yeah, that's right, that's exactly right. I'm like, we talked about earlier, there's a natural human impulse deeply wired into the limbic system or something, which is basically fear over hope. What's most likely to come over the ridge, a saber -to -tiger to eat you or something warm and cuddly that wants to be your friend? I guess a quack or something like that. It's probably the tiger. There's a false positive, false negative, two ways of making mistakes. You definitely, from an evolutionary standpoint, want to err in the direction of being more... You want to overestimate the rate of saber -to -tigers.

53:22right to survive. So that impulsive deep. Yeah. But then what we have is we have sent chins. We have the, we're not just limbic systems anymore. We have a ability to control environment. The ability to build tools. We're not afraid to see if we're too tigers anymore. And so yeah, we have the ability to shape our world. We develop rationality and the enlightenment and science and technology and markets and everything else to be able to control the world to our benefit. And so we don't have to live cowering in fear anymore, as much as that might be grimly satisfying. We don't actually have to do that.

54:00And there's actually a very many, many good reasons over the last 300 years to believe that there's a much better way to live. Yeah, but somebody has to say, somebody has to actually say that. And then look, I think the other part is, I think there's a big divide. I think there's a big divide between, I'll pull up my, my burn on this a little bit is, is a big divide on this stuff between what you describe as the elites and the masses that has turned out to be pretty interesting. So the, the, I would say this problem, this problem of fear of technology or hatred of technology or desire to stop technology, I think it's primarily a thumb and on of the elites.

54:37I actually don't think it's particularly shared by the masses. And it just seems like, I'll just take AI as an obvious example. One of the amazing things about AI is it's like freely available for use by everybody in the world right now today, fully state of the art. Like the best AI in the world is on websites from OpenAI and Google and Microsoft. And you can go on there and you can use it for free today. And people, you know, 100 already, 100, 200 million people, something like that around the world are already doing this, right? And if you talk to anybody who's, you know, if you talk to any teacher, right?

55:10You know, you know, they'll already tell you they've got students using Shachy Pedita, right? Essays and so forth, right? And so you've got this amazing thing where, you know, like the internet before it and like the personal computer before it and like the smartphone before it, AI is, it's, it's like immediately democratized, right? It's immediately available in its full state of the art version. There's no more advanced version of GPD that I can buy for a million dollars than you can get for free or by paying 20 bucks for the upgraded version on the OpenAI website. The state of the art stuff is fully available for free.

55:45And so you have people all over the world, and this would be a source of optimism that the AI tumors are going to lose, almost by definition, is you have people all over the world who are just already using this. and they're getting great value out of it and they're in their daily lives. They love it. They're having a huge amount of fun with it. It's great. They're making new art and they're doing all kinds of asking all kinds of things and it's helping them in their jobs and in school and everything else and they love it. So I think there's this thing where I actually think that what we're actually talking about from a social standpoint is basically essentially a corrupt elite, a corrupt oligarchic elite that basically has been in a position of gatekeeping power for basically in its modern form for 60 years.

56:25And every new technology developed that comes along is a threat to that. And then back to the Morrison thing, like that's why they hate and fear new technology. They would very much like to control it. It's like social media, they're all just completely furious about social media. But like three billion people use social media every day and they love it. And so it's only the elites that are constantly kind of raging against it. The problem is the elites are actually in charge, right? from a formal government, like they actually have the ability to write laws. By the way, you also see this in polls.

56:56If you poll on, like, there's two very interesting phenomena, phenomena kind of unfolding if you do these broad -based polls on trust in institutions. And there's organizations Gallup in particular, and then there's another organization called Edelman that does these polls every year of basically essentially they pull regular people in the question It's like which institutions do you trust? And then institutions here includes everything from the military to religion, to schools, to government, to journalism, to big companies, big tech, and so forth, small business. And basically the two big themes you see in those polls is one is ordinary people trust in institutions, trust in any sort of centralized gatekeeping function is been in basically secular decline, basically since the 1970s, or responded to the period we've been talking about.

57:42And so generally people as a whole have kind of had it with the gatekeepers, which is very interesting. And by the way, that phenomenon actually, the beginning of that predates the internet and social media. And so that traces back to the early 70s. And so I think that which I think is not an accident. It was the circuits where the current regime basically essentially took control. And then the other thing is so striking is that, you know, although you can you can sit and read the news all day long, where they just hate on tech companies all day long. If you do the poll of basically businesses by category, tech polls by far at the top.

58:19And so again, ordinary people are just like, wow, my iPhone's pretty cool. I kind of like it. And this strategy PT thing seems really nifty. And so I do think there's this weird, like I do think there is this aspect of this where it's a cliche to say the elites throughout a touch. Of course, the elites throughout a touch, the elites are always out of touch. But it seems like the elites are particularly out of touch right now, including on this issue. And another way kind of through this not whole is, you know, they may just simply discredit themselves. Like the EU, you know, the EU is a great example.

58:47The EU may pass this anti -AI law and the population of Europe might just be like, what's the hell? Right. And so that that's that would be another another another another white pill against what otherwise looks like a deep kind of drive in our society for stagnation. It would also be really strange to try and find a way to like define AI in that sense because it's not like we haven't been and we haven't been using it in a minor form before all this for a while, right? So I don't know how they go about defining that in that way. Yes, so yes, so do you ban linear algebra? Right? Do you ban linear algebra?

59:21And it's actually really funny because I don't know if you know this. There actually is a push underway to quote, unquote ban algebra and it's literally in California. There's a big push underway to drive it out of the schools in California. So there's a big push. First, it started with a push to drive calculus out of the schools in California. And now it's extended to drive algebra out And of course, this is being done under the so -called Rubrik of Equity, right? Because it turns out, you know, test scores for advanced math, you know, very by, you know, very, very by a group. And so, you know, there's this weird thing where like in California, we're trying to push algebra out of the school in Washington.

59:52We're trying to push algebra out of tech. Like the whole thing is, this is where I get like really, you know, this is where I start to get emotional because it's like really like we spent, you know, 500 years climbing our way out of, you know, privitivism and getting to the point where we have like advanced science and math and we're literally gonna try to ban it. I was involved, I was involved, I don't know if you remember this. There was actually a similar push like this. There was a push in the 1990s to ban cryptography. To ban the idea of codes, cypher's, right? And as you probably know, like codes and cypher's are just math.

1:00:24Like all they are is math, right? And there was a move in the 1990s for people who thought that cryptography, obviously, there's all these anti -cropography arguments because like bad guys can use it to hide and so forth. And so there was this like concerted effort by the US government and other Western governments to bankruptcy in the 90s And it took us years to fight and defeat that and I was like, okay, that was so stupid That will certainly never happen again. Um, and like we're literally back out trying to ban math again Hmm. Well, that does lead me just to the final final question here Which is to do with the future.

1:00:54I mean Whether or not it's your optimistic pessimistic in relation to you know I guess it would draw in on what we've just been talking about there How do you envision the short term future, which I've put down here like 10 to 50 years, and then what do you foresee for the year, 3000 AD? Oh boy. So I should start by saying, I'm not a utopian. So you know, we talked a little bit early about kind of these impulses, the kind of dry people to these kind of extreme points of view. Like the way I think about it is like there's a natural drive. A lot of people have what Thomas Soul called the unconstrained vision so that they've got these kind of very broad -based kind of visions.

1:01:32And you know, those visions kind of then split into like a utopian vision. And that might be, you know, in, in, if for AI, that might be something like the singularity, right, or, or in the 1990s, these were called the extrappians, right, which is sort of this idea of kind of a, a material utopia as a consequence of like AI and, and, and let's say nanotechnology, on the one hand. And that's where that, by the way, the idea of the singularity came from, right, which it's recursive while in Verder -Venge, They were like at some point you get this kind of point of no return, which is like a utopian point of no return.

1:02:01But then of course the flip side of every utopia is apocalypse. And so then that's where the sort of AI, sort of the singleitarians 20 years ago have become that a lot of them have become the AI tumors of today. And they have the same utopian impulse. They've just slipped a bit and made it negative. So I should say like I'm not one of those. I'm probably more of a materialist and a little bit more of a, like I said, an engineer where things, for example, have constraints in the real world. So I don't think we tend to get the extreme, quite the extreme outcomes, but I do think we get, you know, we get changed.

1:02:36Like we get changed. We get changed in the margin and then, you know, change in the margin that compounds over time can become, you know, quite striking. So look over 10 to 50 years, you know, look sitting here today, like if we want it, you You can imagine the next 50 years to be characterized by the rise of AI. Looks like we kind of figured that out now. This superconductor thing, if it's real, that's a turning point moment. By the way, if it's not real, it may be that this result points us in the direction of something that becomes real in the next few years. You can imagine some combination of AI, superconductors, biotech, the all these new techniques for bio optimization, gene editing.

1:03:18and then nuclear, if we get our act together on nuclear efficient, by the way, there's a lot of really smart people working on nuclear fusion right now. Fusion is, would be even bigger, opportunity for unlimited clean energy. Now, my cynic, the cynic in me would say, if a fish in is illegal, then they're certainly going to make fusion illegal. But that's a choice. We all get to decide whether we want to live in a world where fusion is illegal. So we get nuclear fusion. And so sitting here 50 years from now, we basically are like, wow, we are like, we have, we are all much smarter than we were because we have these smart machines working with us and everything.

1:03:57We have solved whatever environmental problems we thought we had with we have a abundant energy in an increasingly clean environment. We're curing diseases at a rapid pace, and new babies are born that are immune to disease. And so, not quite a material utopia, but like a significant meaningful step -function of grades in human quality of life. Like I think that's all very over a 50 -year period for sure, like that's all very possible. Over a year, three thousand, over a thousand year period. I mean, look, you do get into these questions. You know, you do, if you're going to talk about a thousand years, like you do get into these questions of like, you know, for example, merger of man and machine, right?

1:04:37So you do have to, over that time frame, you have to start thinking about things like, you know, the neural link, like where Neuralink takes you. And over that period of time, you'll definitely have neural augmentation. So do you have shifting definitions of humanity? Where is the transhumanist movement actually taking us? It becomes a very interesting question over that time frame. Obviously, you have lots of questions over that time frame of space exploration, getting to other planets, either other life in the universe or not, other life in the universe, so the spread of our civilization more broadly.

1:05:10So there you truly get into science fiction scenarios. Always fun to talk about. I will admit I am much more focused on the next 50 years. Yeah, I mean, is there anything you'd like to add into the conversation that you feel is key that we have touchable? Yeah, no, I think that's the good. That was a good covered a lot of ground. Yeah, so for effective accelerationism, just if you google, There's a number of good already websites and substats talking about that. A lot of the conversations happening on Twitter. So, and I already dropped the names of the EAT guys. So, Beth Fizos and Bezlour, definitely follow those guys.

1:05:52You know, I'm not met Nick Land, but I would definitely give a shout out and say for anybody who hasn't encountered his work, they should definitely read up on it. He is, I think pretty clearly like the philosopher of our time. And not even because, you know, whether I agree or disagree with him on everything he said. And of course he's, he's changed his views and a lot of things over time. But just the framework that he operates, like, he is willingness to actually go deep and actually think through the consequences of the kinds of technologies that I deal with every day. You know, or just I think way beyond most other people in his field.

1:06:26And so it's, it's, and I know he took kind of a long road to get here. so it's fun to see. You know, it's fascinating to read that. Oh, I'll point to one other thing. So I already mentioned the German book. And I'll point to one of the book that people might find interesting. So a lot of land's work and a lot of acceleration of some writers based on these ideas of this field called cybernetics, which is kind of this, it's cybernetics is interesting because it's kind of this lost field of engineering. It was super hot as an engineering field from the 1940s to the 1960s. And it basically was sort of the original computer science.

1:07:01And then it was sort of, it was also sort of the original artificial intelligence. A lot of the AI people of that era kind of called themselves cybernetics or cybernetuses. But it really is an engineering field that kind of went away or got a lot more to date after the 60s. And but as I mentioned, like a lot of the ideas around AI and, you know, in world of machines and thermodynamics, a lot of those ideas were being explored as far back as the 30s and 40s. So the cybernetics people of that era thought a lot about a lot of these questions. Anyway, there's this great book. There's a lot of original source material on this.

1:07:32And the key character of that movement was Norbert Leener. And there's a bunch of books by him and about him. But there's also a great book came out recently called Rise of the Machines by an often named Thomas Red. And it sort of reconstructs the archaeology of cybernetics and sort of makes clear how relevant those ideas are today. And so if you read that in conjunction with like with with Nicklands work, I think you'll find it pretty interesting I'll be sure to put the link for your Twitter and your blog in the description below as well But yeah, I think that's a good place to finish up Mark Andreessen.

1:08:02Thanks very much. Good James a pleasure. Thank you Thanks for listening to the a16z podcast if you enjoyed the episode Let us know by leaving a review at rate this podcast .com slash a16z We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. This information is for educational purposes only, and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include pay promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not indoors by A .H.

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