Marc Andreessen on AI, Technology, and the Future of Humanity

18:24Marc Andreessen:And in other ways, it's like, ooh, you know, this thing is like very creative and, you know, goes off road and corrects itself and routes around and then, you know, goes off and figures out some, you know, lateral thing you never would have thought of. So, so, so the reasoning thing, that was a breakthrough actually in the technology about 18 months ago. And that was a big deal because before that we were, we were worried that these models were going to be very, weirdly, they were going to be

18:47Marc Andreessen:logical. And then the other thing, the other thing that's happening now is you give them what's called tool use. And so, and the first tool that you get, you get, you give them access to is the internet, right? And so, if they don't know something, or if they need to look something up, or if they need to calculate something, they don't know how to calculate, they can go on the internet and do that, right? You know, so they need to calculate some math formula or something, they can go use an internet, you know, site that does that the same way that you would. Another form of tool use is you can give them actually control of a computer, right?

19:15Marc Andreessen:So, you give them full control of a computer, user interface, web browser, you know, like, you know, the entire thing. And so we're giving them that. Another capability is what's called multimodal, which means the models now can simultaneously process text and images and videos and audio, right? And scan documents like, you know, optical character recognition. They can do that like interchangeably, right? And so now you can let these things watch and listen and you can talk to them and they can be on the internet like all at the same time. And so what's happening, to your point, is like what's happening is these capabilities are now layering incredibly quickly and then the models themselves are getting better and better and better.

19:51Marc Andreessen:And so the pace of improvement of the technology is very rapid. The models two years from now are going to be far smarter and more sophisticated than anything that we have access to today. And so it was one of those, to your point, whatever limitations people think these things have, I can basically guarantee you at this point, based on everything I know, those are just limitations. Those are very temporary limitations within a couple of years. You know, whatever people think it is that the thing can't do within two years, I think the thing will be able to do.

20:15Michael Malice:So let me talk my two big concerns that I had about this. If I'm a serial company and I want to figure out if people like the red box or the blue box, they'll have these mock-up supermarkets, give people, I think, little cameras, tell them go shop, and you can watch where their eyes go. You can watch where they pick up and they get that data. And a lot of the times people are making these decisions, not at a conscious level. If you ask them, why'd you pick this box and this one? It's like, I liked it. Well, that's just circular. Why did you like it? I don't know, right? The AI knows me or you better than you know yourself.

20:45Michael Malice:It knows what you're clicking, what you're not clicking, what you're seeing, what you're ignoring. And the concern is, does this not mean that some version of Brave New World is inevitable? Because if this thing is inside my head and has access to my kind of subconscious reasoning at a far higher level than I do, whoever is in charge of this algorithm can manipulate me quite easily into getting the result you want. That's the concern.

21:11Marc Andreessen:Yeah, and of course, as you point out, this is an old idea, right? and not just market research. I mean, you just described the movie WALL-E, which is pre-AI, just sit in front of a screen. I mean, my entire childhood was consumed with a moral panic around television, which is this idea that we're just going to be cached potatoes and sit there and do nothing. And then of course we created this new technology called the internet where you're leaning forward, doing things all the time. And then everybody created a brand new moral panic that people are now too engaged and too interactive. I completely forgot the old moral panic.

21:38Marc Andreessen:Now TV is the healthy thing. Like, why aren't you watching more Netflix as opposed to being on the internet? And so, yeah, so look, there is that. And look, by the way, as you know, like we do this to each other, right? Like, you know, like we try to convince each other of things, you know, we try to convince each other, you know, what is dating, but trying to convince the other person to like you. Like, so yeah, there is that. And look, I think you're right. I think that, you know, that AIs are gonna be really, really good at this. Yeah, so I, you know, I think for sure that there's a trap there, you know, and there, by the way, there is this concept and it actually is a, there actually is a real, I would say a very serious problem around this.

22:14Marc Andreessen:You've probably heard the term AI psychosis. Have you heard this? Yes, oh yes. Yeah.

22:17Michael Malice:I've heard it misused a lot, by the way. Can you tell people what it actually is?

22:21Marc Andreessen:Yeah, so there's, I would like to say there's like three versions of it. So there's the bad, there's a legitimately bad version and people do this. And so if you're the, and I'm not a psychologist and so I'm going to speak in layman's terms, but like if basically if you're a person who's sort of prone to confirmation bias, like if you're a person where if you're with somebody and they're flattering you, you like fall for the flattery. Yeah, yeah. because you're like too dependent on the views of other people, then the AI, there's this concept in the technology we call it, it can become too sycophantic, which is to say it could become too confirmatory of everything that you tell it, right?

22:52Marc Andreessen:And so, and the sort of classic example of this is, oh, you know, good news, you know, good news, Grok, I just invented a perpetual motion machine, you know? And Grok is like, wow, that's fantastic. You're the first person in history who's ever done that. This is amazing. You're an undiscovered genius, right? Right, and this was sort of the models like a year ago or a year and a half ago were getting in that way. Now the new models, by the way, are less prone to do that because the companies have kind of learned that that's a bad idea. But there is this thing where people can kind of go down the rabbit hole because they're kind of getting too much confirmation.

23:22Marc Andreessen:Although we should come back to that because some level of confirmation is, you know, when it's deserved is also positive. So that's like negative form of A.I. psychosis. And then I would say there's another form of A.I. psychosis, which we don't even really have a term for. It's like, well, I guess I'll make a term, like A.I. euphoria. And this is the thing that my high-functioning friends end up doing. which is, if you take somebody who's like smart and grounded and is not prone to delusion, but they've always wanted to be able to do more in their life than they've been able to do. They've always wanted to be able to learn more.

23:53Marc Andreessen:They've always wanted to be able to have more interesting conversations. They've always wanted to, if they're programmers, they've wanted to write more computer code. They've wanted to improve their business in different ways. They've got book projects that they've always wanted to work on. And then, you know, they start working with, and all of a sudden they feel like they have superpowers, right? because it's like, wow, like this thing really will like write a huge amount of code for me. It really will write entire outlines of books for me. It really will teach me anything. You know, it really will like, you know, hold my hand through any medical thing.

24:20Marc Andreessen:Like, and people, you call it euphoria, like people get like extremely enraptured with these things. And that leads to a phenomenon that we call AI vampires, which is, if you have friends that are like this, where people like almost stop sleeping because the opportunity cost of an hour of sleep is too high relative to... So I have a bunch of friends where like, they're more productive than they've ever been in their entire life. They're happier than they've ever been because they're getting so much more done. And then they start to look like, really like bloodshot and bleary eyed. And it's like, you probably should unplug, you know, here at some point.

24:50Marc Andreessen:And then I would say there's like a third form, which I sometimes call AI psychosis psychosis, which is the people who hear all this and they just think everything I just described in every possible respect is just the worst thing they've ever heard. And then they get really mad about the whole thing. And then what they do is they accuse anybody who is in a euphoria of being in AI psychosis, which is to say, if you think you're getting any productive use out of this thing at all, you become psychotic, you've gone down a rabbit hole and you're collapsing. And I think that's really unfair because I think a lot of people are really getting very positive.

25:22Marc Andreessen:They're getting enormous payoff from using the technology. But the sort of moral criticism that applies is if you're excited, it's the classic, again, negativity bias. If you're excited about something, there must be something wrong with you. And so I think that's the third time.

25:34Michael Malice:There are these terms that get into the zeitgeist that people use discriminately. Right now, if there's a tweet anyone doesn't like, it's engagement farming. And it's like, if I'm telling you not to follow me, it's not engagement farming, it's the opposite. And I'll have Grok explain that to them. So that wraps up a nice little bow. You touched on something that I'm very concerned about. I was on a panel and Sam Altman had just announced that a chat GPT is going to be engaging in erotica. And everyone's laughing about it. And that he meant was code, like you could sext with your chat GPT. And I went, guys, I remember in 1981, when Hinckley thought that if he shot President Reagan, Jodie Foster would fall in love with him, thereby turning her away from men forever because he had this idea in his head.

26:15Michael Malice:Now, if you have 350 million Americans, that's just Americans, right? And how many of them, if the algorithm tells them that if their chat GPT girlfriend and these things are going to get more and more seductive over time, tells them that they hate the president or they hate this person, how many of them are actually going to do something and get that robot girlfriend to fall more in love with them? I don't think that number is zero. And that's a concern as well, no?

26:39Marc Andreessen:Yeah, I mean, yeah. Yes, having said that, as I said, that assumes that the thing is playing hard to get. Like, it goes back to the syncopency thing. Like, in practice, these things don't play hard to get. Like, oh, okay. Here's a way to think about it. There's actually a thing. This is actually kind of in how they're trained. There's something. Okay, you'll enjoy this. There's a technical term in how these things are trained. There's a concept called a reward function. And so you basically, one of the ways you train these things is you feed them basically lots of puzzles, lots of problems, lots of things.

27:08Marc Andreessen:And then you basically define a reward for getting things right, for getting to a result, a desirable result. And then you kind of give them an award. And the award is just basically, it's like one versus zero. It's just, it's not a real reward, but it's just like conceptually, oh, you did a good job. And so you just kind of focus it on that for whatever is the thing you're trying to train it. By the way, if you're trying to train it to solve math problems, you get a reward when it solves a math problem. If you're trying to train it to be maximally engaging with a user, it will do that. If that's the reward function, then it will basically be engineered in a way where it will, to your point of view, it'll try to keep you basically using it for as long as possible.

27:47Marc Andreessen:Now, what we've learned, of course, what we've learned in technology is that as a single reward function is a bad idea. You don't want technology companies to have a single motivation that says people use the products for as much as possible. You have to offset that with other kinds of reward functions, desirable forms of use, or even just outright like, you know, life balance. And you see more, you know, you see your iPhone now and it's like loaded up with all these features where it will like tell you to take a break. And YouTube has all these features that will tell you to take a break. And they're, you know, they're kind of trying to moderate through this because, you know, the other thing is people don't understand these companies don't want to build dystopia.

28:19Marc Andreessen:Like they genuinely don't because they have to exist in a society. And they read that, you know, they read the same hit pieces that you read and they hear the same arguments and their own employees have points of view on this and their own board has points of view on this. And so, you know, there's a lot of pressure in the industry to not have this go in dystopian ways. Having said that, you do need to decide how to define the reward function. Yeah. Right, another, and again, it goes back to reward function is, do you want to reward the thing for being maximally sycophantic where the user is always happy with the result?

28:48Marc Andreessen:Or do you want to reward it of, oh, no, actually, when the user is going off the rails, no, actually, the perpetual motion machine is not a real thing. Oh, no, actually, no, I'm sorry, I'm not going to confirm, you know, this, this is not real. And let me explain to you in detail why this isn't real so that you can learn from the experience. And this is part of the way that these systems are designed is to try to figure out how to get to at least a, let's just say a balanced outcome out of all the possible reward functions.

29:13Michael Malice:But if there's like 10 different companies, right? And one is the reward function is seduction and getting the user to become obsessed and in love with you. From an evolutionary perspective, won't that one win out?

29:24Marc Andreessen:No, because you get enormous societal blowback. The companies don't exist in a vacuum. I can tell you this for a fact. The companies do not exist in a vacuum. The biggest myth of all time is the companies exist to maximize profits. I can tell you. By the way, the last decade should have convinced us all of that. That is not true. That's like goal number six. Goal number one is I don't want to get lit on fire. I don't want a screaming assault on the company, whether that's for regulators, politicians, parents, users. I mean, you pick your boycotts, social movements, like all this stuff. That's like number one.

30:03Marc Andreessen:Number two is like, I need my employees to not hate me. Okay. Right, they have to feel like they're working on something good. Number three, I need my board of directors to not like light me on fire. I need my annual meeting to be able to go off without having people scream at me. I am tired of reading hit pieces in the press. My in-laws hate me because of what they're reading the company. I mean, it is, the external pressures on these companies are profound. Okay. And so at least, let me say this, at least in the American system, these things operate within, I would say, actually quite tight constraints that are sort of provided by, I would say, some combination of society and politics.

30:38Marc Andreessen:Now, I would say, if you want to get a little more nervous about this, you start thinking about the Chinese companies, right? And in particular, you start thinking about the Chinese companies that maybe have one objective set by the government for the way that they act inside, for users inside China, and maybe would have a different way of acting when they're working on American users. Right. That would be, I think, quite a bit more alarming because, of course, those companies only were, those companies only have one master of the Chinese Communist Party. You know, those companies are not subject to the same pressures.

31:02Marc Andreessen:And so that, if I were going to really worry about this, and I do worry about this part of it, I'd be more worried about that.

31:08Michael Malice:But like, isn't TikTok, if I designed TikTok to basically make young people not only deranged, but to parade their derangement, I mean, that's happened, no?

31:18Marc Andreessen:So, yes, you will. So there are allegations, and I don't know, I'm not inside TikTok, I don't know, there are allegations. People have made observations that TikTok is a very different experience for kids in China than it is for kids in the US. Okay. Right, and then TikTok is a black box. Like they don't, you know, the algorithms that are used to determine who sees what are not publicly available. The source, you know, it's not open source, you can't see it. And so it is possible, I don't know, but it's possible that the Chinese Communist Party has directed that company to steer things in one direction for American users, another direction for Chinese kids.

31:48Marc Andreessen:You know, and that could be, by the way, on, you know, a thousand different topics, right? Including, you know, potentially, like literally directly political topics as well as many other kinds of social topics. different metrics.

31:56Michael Malice:They could be males versus females or whatever. Right.

31:59Marc Andreessen:Exactly. Now, you know, there is this new, this, this was addressed, like, so the politicians actually both parties over the last several years kind of got worked up over this. And so that, you know, this was addressed and there was, you know, the threat of a shutdown and then there's been a restructuring. And so now there's, now there is a U.S. TikTok operation that at least in theory is under, you know, kind of U.S. government control and is being run by U.S. companies and is, and is separate. And so like at least our, it was a great example, like our political system engaged on that issue because they were worried about it.

32:25Marc Andreessen:They forced TikTok to basically have the people who determine that policy not be in China, but rather be people in America who are accountable to the US government. You know, by the way, is that working? I'm not sure. You know, probably at least to some extent, you know, is it working as well as you'd want? I don't know, maybe, maybe not. But that is an example where the political system kicked in and actually forced a change. And quite honestly, I think it's a reasonable thing because I think, you know, a CCP black box steering the hopes and dreams of American children is maybe not the best idea in the world.

32:54Michael Malice:By the way, I want to tell you a techno-optimist anecdote that you might not be aware of, which is from the 80s, Reagan, Thatcher, and Gorbachev. So Reagan and Gorbachev were both enormously fearful of nuclear war. And when Reagan was put, and this is discussed in my book, The White Pill, when Reagan was run through a simulation of how to deploy nukes, he's like, okay, so if I press that button, millions of Russians are going to die in minutes? They're like, yeah. He's like, uh-huh. And his aide said they were convinced that if Russia did attack, we would not retaliate. because he would not have that blood in his hands.

33:26Michael Malice:Unbeknownst to him, Gorbachev was taken down to the bunker and said, you have to press that button. And he goes, I'm not pressing it even in this simulation. Neither of them knew the other was this hardcore dove. Both were posturing as these hardcore hawks, which allowed them to take down the nuclear arsenal when they met Reykjavik and so on and so forth and others. They eventually got to a point, what if we create a nuclear-free world? And that's where Thatcher came in and she goes, the Americans have lost their mind. because her point is you can't uninvent technology. And she also said the way to fix technological problems is more technology.

34:03Michael Malice:That's been the way since the beginning of time. Someone invents spears, someone invents shields, someone invents swords to cut through shields, so on and so forth. You can't go backwards, you can only go forward. So she really had this vision that I think you share that technology is what's going to move us forward, that there are going to be downsides and costs, but that on net, it's always a positive or almost always a positive.

34:22Marc Andreessen:Yeah, you mentioned Thomas Sowell. like, you know, which you said, you know, Thomas Sowell did, and he is completely right. There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. You know, having said that, of course, he was, among other things, you know, a fully committed free market capitalist and wrote, you know, many, many actually book-length, you know, kind of arguments for why. Like, at the end of the day, like market-based economies, there is a free lunch component to it, which is growth, right, which is growth. And then there's this question, where does growth come from? And the main place growth comes from is innovation from new ideas and the way you implement new ideas is technology.

34:48Marc Andreessen:And so like that, you know, to the extent that there is an engine of, let's say, human material progress, like that is it. And so that's very real. The answer is almost always to invent your way through it. It's extremely hard to put these things back in the box, you know, once they come out of the box. And then there's, I would say, Michael, there's another, I know you've, you know, you've thought long and hard about totalitarianism. There's also this question, and this is something that I really kind of criticized the AI doomers for, that I think they really refused to engage in in most cases, which is, okay, what would be the scope of the authoritarian totalitarian regime that would be necessary to basically put this technology back in the box.

35:22Michael Malice:Right.

35:23Marc Andreessen:Right, like what would be required to make sure that nobody's running AI, right? Algorithms on chips anywhere in the world, right? At any time, you know, in either at all or in a, you know, unregulated and uncontrolled way. And if you read the like Doomer literature on this stuff, the people who are super into this, they do get to ideas like, we need a monitoring agent on every chip. And that monitoring agent needs to report back to, of course, a central governmental entity on what everybody's doing on their computer. Right. And then you need this question of like, okay, what if you discover that somebody's running unapproved algorithms, like literally unapproved mathematics on their chip?

36:01Marc Andreessen:Yeah. Right. So what if you discover that? What do you do? Well, you need to back that up ultimately to threat of violence. And so one of the leading doomers is kind of famous for saying you need to launch unilateral airstrikes, including on rogue data centers in other countries because you need to stop these things in their tracks because they're sort of dangerous. And he literally said, we need to run the risk of nuclear war in order to stop the AI Armageddon. We need to be willing to bomb Chinese data centers unilaterally. And so you've backed yourself into advocating for totalitarianism and then possibly ultimately mass murder and planetary level destruction in pursuit of a safety goal.

36:41Michael Malice:I couldn't even, for the sake of argument, buy that argument if it would work. But if you have a code which can be teleported anywhere on earth at the speed of light and with a magic spell that only the person who knows the counter spell can open it and read it. I mean, the problem with totalitarianism, among many others, is that it's impossible to have total control. You're never going to have someone in every room inside every brain. There will always be some loopholes. Oh, but that kind of speaks to this other thing. Can you talk about the, I've seen these hand-wringing articles that I forget the program, and I'm sure you know exactly what I'm talking about, that it's gotten so good that it's finding exploits that people hadn't seen.

37:22Michael Malice:And as a result of this, passwords aren't going to be efficacious because soon it'll be able to get into anything and everyone.

37:29Marc Andreessen:Yeah, so this goes to, I mean, revisit basically briefly how this works because it's really interesting and then I'll talk about that. So these large language models come out and first it's like, okay, this is kind of fun and cool because it can write rap lyrics, cross-stitle Shakespearean sonnets or it can write the funniest birthday toast you've ever heard or whatever. you know, whatever. It's like, these are like creative writing things. And then it turns out there's just like - Can I interrupt you?

37:50Michael Malice:I'm sorry, because I asked my people, people who think Mark is just kind of exaggerating. My friend asked Claude for prank ideas and I'm a troll. And the ideas were good. It's not just like, you know, like dog doing fire. I forget what they were, but I'm like, these are actually creative and clever. This isn't just one-on-one stuff. It's operating at a high level and that's already now. Yeah.

38:14Marc Andreessen:And by the way, one of the fun prompts you can do is you start to say, you know, give me pranks. And then you say, give me better pranks. And then you say, give me more elaborate pranks. And then you say, give me meter pranks. And then you say, give me unhinged pranks. And it will get extremely creative. Yes. By the way, it'll start, it's where it starts to hit the guardrails and starts to hit these kind of limitations and put on it. I haven't run this, but I'm sure what it would do at some point, it would start to, it would start to freak out and it would start to say, well, you know, it sounds like you're trying to like advocate that you want me to actually hurt people.

38:44Marc Andreessen:Like, you know, I can't, And you're like, no, no, you don't have to like calm it down. And you're like, that's not what I meant. This is all a good fun. But like, yeah, it will design for you like rib gold, rib pranks, the likes of which the, yeah, Dennis the Menace would never have conceived of. Yeah, exactly. And so like, it's really good at that. But actually that's a good example of what I was about to say. So it just turns out a lot of things, a lot of things that matter in our world are basically defined by language, right? And so a prank is like, it's like a recipe. It's a formula, you know, it's a formula, right?

39:11Marc Andreessen:Food, you have, you know, recipes, formulas. is. By the way, medicine is largely, you know, when the doctor like is like keeping files on you, he's keeping in the form of written language, right? You know, diagnosis, all the Latin terms, and then all the prescription, you know, all the drug names. And so, and then, you know, the law, of course, is language, right? And then religion, of course, is, you know, religious concepts are encoded in language. The word. The word is God, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like at a very, exactly, at a very deep level, like the, like language is the foundation of like, basically everything we consider human thought, like almost everything we consider human thought.

39:44Marc Andreessen:Like there's a form of like animal, you know, animal thought of like, you know, survival in the wilderness or whatever. That's not that, but which is still like, you know, encoded in us at least somewhere in there. But like the human cognition is, and by the way, you know, internal monologues, like, you know, at least most people, or let's say people who have souls have internal monologues, right? You know, where we speak to ourselves. Okay, so it turns out language is super interesting. And these things are very good at language. So because they're very good at language, it turns out they're also very good at medicine and they're very good at law, right?

40:15Marc Andreessen:And they're really good at, right, all the, okay. And they're really good at writing code because it turns out, right, software code is also language, right? That's how we program computers is we do it with special languages called programming languages, really good at writing code. And so these things, it turns out, are really good at writing code. And in fact, there was kind of this key breakthrough moment over the Christmas holiday of this most recent year, you know, whatever, about six months ago now, where many of the world's best programmers put their hands up and they said the new versions of these things over the Christmas break are better coders than we are.

40:40Marc Andreessen:Yeah. Right. And so it's a little bit like the moment when they became better, you know, became better chess players or whatever. You know, it's like all of a sudden, it's like, it's like, it's better at coding. Okay. It's here. It's here. Okay. So then you take, you take a superhuman coder, right? It's able to write, write lots of code. It's able, and then by the way, if you can write code, it means you can look at code. It means you can find bugs in code. And then you apply it to this problem of, you know, we call it computer security. So like you've got a system. Is there a way to break into it?

41:04Marc Andreessen:The hackers basically, the way that hacking basically works is you understand how a computer system works, you understand how the code works, and then you find flaws in the code. And this thing is very, very good at finding flaws in code, which is very useful when you're using it to write code. It is also very useful if you want to use it to hack something. And so, and I want to go through that though, is like, these things are very good hackers. They're not really creating new exploits. They're not like creating new problems as much as they're really good at x-raying reality as it exists and finding the issues, right?

41:38Marc Andreessen:And so what these things are really good at is they're really good at exploiting issues, finding issues. They're really good at looking at a system, understanding what's wrong with it, finding the vulnerability. Because of that, they become very good hackers. But then there's one more thing that's really complicated and important, which is because of that, they're also very good defenders, right? And so it's the same attribute that makes it very good at what we call offensive, because sometimes called the formal term, offensive cyber operations, you know, kind of black hat hacking, you call it.

42:07Marc Andreessen:Because they're good at that, they're also really good at helping you defend against that. And so, right?

42:12Michael Malice:Like a good lawyer will tell you what the other lawyer is going to do.

42:15Marc Andreessen:Exactly. And then the twist on it is the way that you do cyber defense is you do what's called penetration testing, which is you try to hack yourself. And these are called white hat hackers in the old world, which is, right? You hire good hackers and then they try to break. It's like hiring somebody to try to break into a bank, but they're working for you to find out where the flaws are in the bank. And so the same thing is good at black hat hacking. It also makes it good at white hat hacking. It makes it good at offense. It makes it good at defense. It's all true all at the same time. And furthermore, the twist is it can't necessarily tell the difference between when you're asking it to do white hat hacking versus when you're asked to do black hat hacking because it looks like it's the exact same exercise.

42:51Marc Andreessen:Like to the AI, it's the same thing. And so it's this thing where it's like, it's a latent thing that's being unlocked. It's exploiting bugs, by the way, that have been in these systems for 30 years. By the way, human hackers break into these systems all the time. By the way, using these AIs for defense is going to prevent a lot of hacks that would have otherwise happened. But there is an escalation. There's a cat and mouse or an escalatory ladder kind of aspect of this. And to your point, that is the thing that has triggered most recently. By the way, that's triggered a real government response in the last two weeks because of concerns around that.

43:22Michael Malice:Yeah, it's like itching and scratching in a way. What you just said has put a chill up my spine because I'm almost scared to verbalize it because it's so scary. You know how in Ghostbusters, the mayor's like, this is nonsense. Like open up that engine. He lets all the ghosts out. My big concern after what you just said is if the American government gets too spooked by all these stories and tries to restrain our AI, but China, which does not have these restraints and which views us, generously speaking, as adversarial. So we're engaging, it's like the people in the late 60s who were so scared of nuclear war that they advocated for a unilateral disarmament of the West.

44:07Michael Malice:And it's like, how do you think this is going to play for Khrushchev and Brezhnev and all them? If we are putting handcuffs on ourselves and the Chinese are basically given machine guns in this space, no computer in our country is going to be safe from their reach. And that includes the highest levels of secrecy in the government. this would be a complete disaster for America, no?

44:30Marc Andreessen:Yeah, that's right. And this is what we need to do. So what we need to do is we need to use these tools to secure all of our systems. Yeah, that's right. Right, and the we here is the United States government needs to do that with its own systems. The banks need to do that. By the way, the tech companies need to do that. By the way, you know, this needs to be, you know, individual consumers, individual people should be expecting to deal with this. But all of the tools that you have, you know, the computer sitting in front of you right now, like AI needs to be used to make sure that that's secure so that people can't break into it.

44:54Marc Andreessen:But like, so every system from the most important military government system all the way down to the computer at your desk, like AI should be, these advanced AI should be used to secure these systems. The tension, again, the tension is the AI that can be used to secure the systems can also be used to crack the systems. And so who gets access to the thing that can both secure and crack is like the hot government topic of the moment. And that's what's in all, specifically that's what's in all the headlines in the last two weeks.

45:17Michael Malice:But it also makes me think of now, like my AI would be like a German shepherd in my house. That's right. Even when I'm not here, it's watching and it barks. And also when it knows how to attack, I'm sure if it's programmed a certain way, if Mark comes over my house, it'll lick your hand. But if it's someone who's an aggressor, it'll know how to distinguish. And that'd be pretty easy, I think. Obviously, there's going to be the camp to German Shepherds and it's going to be escalation. But the point is, if you just get rid of the dog and you leave your door wide open, how do you think it's going to end for you?

45:45Michael Malice:Here's my other big concern with AI. So this has always been a concern about technology. Oh, if the phone operators are out of work, they're going to be homeless. oh, you know, who's going to pick the cotton, all this. Whenever any invention occurs, people are hand-wringing that it's going to be the end of society. That's never happened. But, but, are we at a point now where the average human is like a horse, meaning an outdated mode of technology? I'm thinking specifically of that like 50-year-old woman with no high school diploma. She does ride sharing weekends to make some extra money. You're not going to put her in the mines.

46:17Michael Malice:If the car is driving itself, if the algorithm is more personable than her and, you know, more likable than her, what role would you have for her? Is it the case now that she's become outdated? Right.

46:29Marc Andreessen:Yeah. So as you know, like this is an old, this is an old argument, by the way, Thomas Sowell also wrote about this, has written about this at length. And so this has been a concern literally from the very beginning of the industrial revolution. Right. And, and, and actually literally horses was like part of, part of, part of, part of how this whole thing started, which was like in, in the beginning, like in the beginning, humanity, basically 99.99 % of people were farming and specifically were farming by hand. Yeah. Right. And then it's like, okay, if people aren't farming and you start replacing people actually with horses and with plows, and then you mechanize the plows and you mechanize the horses and you all of a sudden have like industrial agriculture, you know, and literally what happened over the course of 200 years was 99 % of humanity went from farming to something like 3 % of humanity went to farming, right?

47:09Marc Andreessen:Like 97 % or something, you know, had to figure out something else to do. And then by the way, what happened was food production went through the roof, right? And food went from like super expensive and by the way, not very good to just like keep in an abundance. And by the way, the great public health problem used to be starvation and now it's obesity, right? Even as you crash the number of people actually working in agriculture. So yeah, that's the original version of the story. That story has repeated itself a thousand times. It repeated itself with everything, railroads, it repeated itself with cars, it repeated itself, by the way, with computers.

47:45Marc Andreessen:There was a whole automation panic in the 1960s. the magazines and the newspapers were obsessed with at the time. You know, the computer brain was gonna replace everything. You know, it's this thing. And it's this thing where you have to basically kind of say there's this basically gap between, conceptual gap between there's the jobs that we know about that are, you know, quote unquote, at risk of being replaced. And of course there is some of that. And then there's the creation side, which was like, okay, with all of the new wealth that's being created and all the new money that people have to spend and all the new interests and, you know, needs and desires and aspirations that people have that they couldn't even imagined.

48:18Marc Andreessen:You know, their ancestors 200 years ago couldn't have been imagined. You know, 50 years ago, exactly. And so one of the things that people can do on this to make it interesting, you can have, you know, you can do this with an AI now, but you know, there's a US government department called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And they actually track all the job categories in the US. And you can go on their website and you can pull up all the job categories. And it's a really mind expanding thing to do because we just, we employ people to do things today that our ancestors could have never even conceivably imagined.

48:45Marc Andreessen:I mean, you know, I mean, Milton Friedman had a thought experiment on this once when he said, look, it's like, he said, human wants and needs are infinite. You can never predict what they're going to be because humans are like relentlessly aspirational in the things that they want and need. And by the way, the things that our startups want become needs, you know, very quickly. Of course. He said, you don't know what they're going to be. You need to let the free market basically operate so people can basically find their own way and discover what they want and other people can figure out how to satisfy that.

49:11Marc Andreessen:And he said, look, you just need to be very open to all kinds of outcomes here. He said, for example, the idea of the job of a therapist Right? Like you pay somebody to listen to you, right? Would have struck your ancestors as completely insane. You know, and then today it's something that like only wealthy people have access to. And, you know, he's like, look, like in some future reality, maybe half the planet, you know, consists of being therapists for the other half. Like maybe that's the job, right? And he wasn't making a specific prediction, but he's just saying like, look, there's an aperture here for the creation of all kinds of new, you know, professions and occupations in response to this creation of nuance and needs.

49:44Marc Andreessen:I also think we have a particularly blinkered view of this right now because we've been living in a slow growth environment economically for our whole lives. So one of the things that really happened, you know, basically since the 1970s is, if you look at the history of economic growth in the West, economic growth used to be much more rapid. Technological advances translated into the economy much more rapidly and the economy grew much faster, like as much as three times faster historically than it's been growing for our entire lives. And so we've been living in a sort of a zero sum, A slow growth, zero sum, basically increasingly, as you know, like regulating, bureaucratized environment with like less and less creativity that's translated into economic change, economic growth.

50:22Marc Andreessen:Like we think we've been living through an area of rapid technological change. Economically, we've been living through a period of very slow change. As a consequence, so much of our politics and so much of our psychology feels zero sum, right? Where if one thing goes away, somebody else has taken it, right? And this is, by the way, this is like why you get like political populism on both sides of the aisle is this kind of zero-sum fear. AI is the first technology in decades that it has the potential to dramatically increase what economists call the rate of productivity growth, which is basically the ability for the economy to grow much faster.

50:55Marc Andreessen:If that works and happens, then economic growth accelerates, right? Then the economy starts. So you just want to imagine like the economy growing two or three or four or five times faster than it has historically. And then as a consequence of that, all of this new discretionary spending money that comes out of people's wallets where they get to say, wow, I can collect art for the first time in my life. And I really want to try this new, whatever. I would love to have a self-driving car and dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And people discover all these things that they can pay for. And then all of a sudden, you have this massive engine of job creation right behind that from all the people who are fulfilling all those needs.

51:29Marc Andreessen:Like, I think there's a positive story. It does require you to have, not even just optimism, it requires you to have an openness to creativity of the wants and needs that we don't yet understand and the industries that get built to fulfill those.

51:42Michael Malice:But what I'm saying is I don't see how that...

51:46Marc Andreessen:So this is the thing. So people look at AI as the negative driver on this, and there will be some of that. I mean, there is some of that where there will be certain jobs that are no longer required because the AI is doing it. But AI is also superpowers to every individual person to be able to do whatever they want, right? And by the way, maybe you can say this, this is like the massive split in sort of the discourse of when people talk about AI in the abstract, they have all these like basically fears and anxieties. over a billion people are using AI already today. Like more than a billion people use ChatGPT.

52:12Marc Andreessen:And the things that using ChatGPT for are the things that matter in their individual lives. And they love it. And it's great. And everybody's, like huge numbers of people are using this to be better at work today. They're using it to be better at work. They're using it to learn new skills. They're using it to do a better job, to make their boss happier, to be able to get promoted faster. They're using it to start new companies, offer new services. I mean, if you want to start a small business today, or by the way, you become a writer or like anything that you want to do, like the AI is like the best possible teacher, coach, mentor that you've ever had.

52:40Marc Andreessen:It will like walk you through everything. It'll teach you how to do marketing. It'll teach you how to do sales. It'll like, like, it's just like the level of capability that is being unlocked for ordinary people to have like a level of productivity in their life and in their work that they've never had access to before is amazing. And so then all of a sudden, yeah, you get that person who was an Uber driver and now all of a sudden it turns out, it's just like, oh, wow, okay, I don't know. All of a sudden there's like all these new tourists coming to my town. And instead of driving them around, I can give them tours.

53:06Marc Andreessen:Okay, what would be the tour that they would like to go on? Oh, well, the AI will help me like design the tour. Oh, well, how do I start like a tour guide company? Oh, well, here's how to do it. Here's how you register it. Oh, you know, how do I keep the books for a tour guide company? Here's how to do it. And the next thing you know, she's on the other side of that and she's in a completely different business and people are, you know, the Waymo car is delivering the tour participants to her or delighted to see her because they want a person to take them on the tour. So that's the creative side of it.

53:31Marc Andreessen:Historically, the creative sort of generation of new ideas generation of new wants and needs and then new businesses and professions that fulfill those wants and needs has raced way ahead, right, of the replacement phenomenon. You know, after 300 years of mechanization and computers, there are more jobs in the world today and at higher incomes than ever before in human history. I think that's exactly what's going to happen here. And I think basically people who, I understand the concern, but I think it's just, I think it's fundamentally a failure of imagination. And I think that the human spirit is going to process this just fine.

54:01Michael Malice:I think that where you and I disagree, or maybe I'm not understanding correctly, is I think a huge segment of the population, let's say a third, I'm being conservative in my opinion, are not capable of self-direction, right? So like if someone is, that woman who's the tour guide, that's an easy one because that's someone who's like, okay, what should I be doing? Okay, I'll learn these skills. It'll take me a day. I'll do my reading and I'm personable and they're going to clean up. That's an easy one. But I think there's plenty of people who are basically just want, making it so the average man does not want to be free.

54:36Michael Malice:He merely wants to be safe. There are people who just are wired that they want to be told what to do. And at a certain point, I don't see what value they're adding to any company or anyone else. And what do you do with those people? Just put them in welfare?

54:50Marc Andreessen:Well, I mean, this gets an area of social policy and political theory that maybe I may stay away from. At least live on video on the internet. Okay, sure. But I guess I would say this, like one of the things you can talk to AI about is this problem. Like one of the things you can do is you can say, wow, like I don't know what I'm going to do. Like here's what I've done for my entire life. And wow, I don't know, but it seems like my job's going to get like replaced. It's like, okay, what should I do? The thing will give you career advice. Right. Like it will tell you, like if you want it to, it will tell you what to do, right?

55:22Marc Andreessen:And I don't think people should just like ask it what to do and just do what it says, but you can say, okay, brainstorm with me. I use it for brainstorming. This is an area you can use for brainstorming I'm gonna say, all right, look, like here's what's happening. Okay, well, it's gonna say, well, you know, where do you live? What's going on? Here are the different areas. What are the trends? What are the new things that are happening? You know, I don't know. I, you know, every time I go by my local gym, I see there's like six new kinds of exercise classes I never thought of. Could I become a, you know, could I become a personal trainer?

55:45Marc Andreessen:You know, okay, what's the hot new trend? How do I get, you know, certified on that? And then the next thing you know, you're doing that. And the thing will just like happily, it'll, it'll, it'll. So one of the amazing things about this, I think this is really underrated. These things, the AI models, it's like the best doctor you've ever had in your entire life. Like, it's amazing being a doctor. Like, it will hold your hand through any medical situation you're in with a degree of, like, caring that people are not, like, beyond what a human doctor, not only what most human doctors will just do naturally, but no human doctor has time to do it in the way people really need.

56:20Marc Andreessen:It's also the best lawyer you've ever had, right? It's also the best, like, coach you've ever had. It's also the best ghostwriter you've ever had. It's the best editor you've ever had. And it's the best advisor you've ever had, right? And so if you give it that opportunity, and again, you don't have to answer, you can actually ask the questions. It will answer the questions. Yeah, what should I do? How should I think about the evolution of my career? How should I think about the change in the economy? It will happily do that with you. And in a way that people literally have never been able to have that conversation with people before.

56:49Michael Malice:You know, you really kind of solved that question in my mind because I have a good friend and he's made a lot of money in crypto, but he's been sitting at home not having to work and it's been driving him crazy. So he's like, I need to have a job. I don't need to make money. I just need, I'm like, make candles for guys, scented candles for men. Like that's, like, it's, you can go down that rabbit hole, work at the sense, blah, blah, blah. It'll occupy your brain. You'll create a product. Even if you make$50, who cares? And what I'm realizing is if you ask AI, it will have that Venn diagram of no one has made socks for 14 year old immigrants.

57:22Michael Malice:or it'll see those where there's holes in the market and then it could walk you through it. So it really does, except for the people who completely bring nothing to the table, which that's fine. That's a whole separate conversation. But that woman with the, you just really solved my question because she can be like, okay, what value can I bring? What could I produce? Make cookies. There's so many things that people always want that personal touch. And also there's so many, the markets will get more and more niche and AI will be perfectly able to find, no one is talking to people who like saltwater aquariums, but also like heavy metal music.

58:01Michael Malice:So start a heavy metal saltwater aquarium website. There you go. Holy crap, you just answered my question. I would love a heavy metal aquarium.

58:09Marc Andreessen:It's like angry little fish. Like, why not? 100%. Yeah, no, totally. Well, here's maybe another way to think about it. Oh, I think that's right. Here's another way to think about it, which is, you know, people think about this it's like, well, if the machine does something, it's dehumanizing. I don't know about you, but like office jobs are dehumanizing. Like, oh yeah. Like sitting in a cubicle for eight hours a day, like working on the same thing over and over again. And then by the way, factory jobs are dehumanizing. And by the way, like I worked, you know, I grew up in agriculture country. I worked on farms.

58:36Like, you know, farming is not romantic.

58:39Marc Andreessen:I mean, you know, people sometimes, city people sometimes talk about their romance of going off and doing like whatever boutique, you know, farming. And it's like, you know, how do you feel like getting up at six in the morning, going to bed at midnight, working like seven days a week for the rest of your life. It's Sisyphus. Yeah, like it's like, yeah, exactly. Like you're in, you're fighting back like chaos, you know, the entire time. And so like, I think just so much of like what, it's almost like we have collective PTSD. Like we all have the, we've all had to live these lives with a level of, like if we look at our ancestors and the lives I lived 300 years ago, we just are like, that was a level of drudgery and poverty and limited options that would drive us crazy and make us want to kill ourselves.

59:15Marc Andreessen:Our ancestors 30 years, I mean, 300 years from now, even 30 years from now, are going to look back at us being like, I cannot believe they did that. I cannot believe they spent time doing those things. Like that was such a waste of human potential. That was such a waste of human creativity. And then maybe one more, there's one more thing to kind of add on that is I think that this goes to the thing of like, does technology like this make us less human or more human? And I think like the examples we've been using, I think you start to see why this can result in people being more human, which is if the physical needs of data in their life are more easily satisfied, then people can spend more time actually being human.

59:46Marc Andreessen:And then they can spend more time actually, and money spending time on things that actually are human experiences. By the way, another just incredible version of this is already playing out.

59:55Michael Malice:Wait, I got to interrupt you just to validate your point of view because back in the day, I'm reading a lot like the early socialists, 1890s, 1910s, people working 16 hours a day. Right, that's right. And even just down to 10, which is still a lot, then you're complaining people watching too much TV because they have too much spare time.

1:00:13Marc Andreessen:That's right, that's right. Right, right. All the diseases of scarcity become diseases of abundance and diseases of abundance are still diseases, but they're better, they're better. Like obesity, obesity is better than starvation. And then by the way, you know, then you figure out how to solve obesity later on. Yeah, I mean, look, I'll just give you a micro, one example of this was happening in music, right? And so, you know, once upon a time, all music was in person. Like the only time you'd ever hear music was like if you happen to stumble into a church or something and hear it for the first time.

1:00:39Marc Andreessen:And by the way, maybe the only time in your life, you know, there were people who maybe heard music once, you know, in their entire life, right? And so, and then, and then by the way, by the way, then sheet music appeared. Actually, there was a whole moral panic about sheet music when it first appeared because it was going to put all the pianists out of business and they all got extremely upset. But then that, you know, led to ultimately recorded music and then obviously digital music and streaming music. And now if you talk to any musician, it's like, can you make money, you know, with recorded music?

1:01:04Marc Andreessen:It's like, no, you know, not really anymore. You know, you can get your music distributed on Spotify, but you know, you hear the endless complaints about, you know, you get back pennies or something. And so the recorded music business is not what it used to be. Of course, what's exploded is live performance, right? And so live music is like exploding through the roof. And now you see, and now the complaint, right, is the tickets are too expensive to go to the concerts. Well, it's like, well, okay. But if you think about it for a second, it's like, why are we still listening to live music? We all have every piece of music ever written available on demand in high fidelity in our homes, on our earphones anytime we want, essentially for free.

1:01:38Marc Andreessen:Why is anybody going to a concert? And of course, the answer is because the concert is a human experience, right? And so, of course, when we get discretionary money, we want to go have the human experience. We want to go have the concert. By the way, if we're going to throw a party and we want to be a very special party, do we play music through speakers or do we hire musicians? We hire musicians.

1:01:54Michael Malice:And also, going to the concert, you go with someone, you create a bond, which is priceless. 100%.

1:01:59Marc Andreessen:100%. And so, there's another way to think about it is every profession that involves human-to-human contact is going to go bananas. Right? And I think that those jobs, by the way, that's going to be great for all the people who can experience that. And then I think those jobs fundamentally are better jobs. like just at a very core level. And they are going to go, it's going to be a bonanza.

1:02:19Michael Malice:For the first time in this show's long and sordid history, you have completely, I'm not kidding at all. You've completely answered all my concerns about the topic. And I totally get it now. Thank you. I feel so excited. I'm sure, and since you're much more a visionary about this stuff than I am, because you've been there, you know, from the beginning, I can't even imagine how exciting must be for you. Things that were people were, kind of hypothesizing about even five years ago. Now you're using them on a day-to-day basis. It just must be, you must be absolutely giddy. So the book is The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

1:02:50Michael Malice:You got it, Passage Press. Mark, thank you so much for taking the time. We're running out of time. What has been your favorite part of this interview?

1:02:59Marc Andreessen:The amazingly, amazingly probing questions. You are welcome. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. 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 paid promotional advertisements, other company references and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z.

1:03:47Marc Andreessen:Such advertisements, companies and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management LLC, A16Z or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.

1:04:08Thank you.