The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

0:01Today on the AI Breakdown, we are reading the just published Techno-optimism manifesto by Marc Andreessen, and explaining why it represents a ratcheting up of the narrative warfare around artificial intelligence. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to breakdown.network for more information about our Discord, our YouTube channel, and our newsletter. Welcome back to the AI Breakdown. Today we are doing something a little bit different. It is a Monday, and normally that would mean that we have our traditional format, a set of stories that represent the brief, followed by a main episode.

0:37But interestingly, today was a relatively quiet news day, and in fact, what I had been planning on doing was giving an update on the AI safety conversation. There has recently been a more concerted effort to effectively call out and track which organizations are most involved in the AI safety discussion in Washington, particularly those who are telling the story of existential risk. There was a big Politico article about this the other day, and a set of medium posts that tracks the narrative and linguistic evolution of the AI safety space has also been getting a lot of traction. Now, perhaps that is all part and parcel of the timing of today's post from Mark Andreessen on the Andreessen Horowitz blog, which again is called the Techno-Optimism Manifesto.

1:18If you've been paying attention to this conversation at all, you'll know that Mark Andreessen has been one of the loudest voices, pushing back against that AI safety concern and trying to articulate a different vision for the world. Now, let's talk about the spirit in which this is presented. I think that this debate with X-Risk on the one end of the spectrum and accelerationism on the other is going to shape a huge amount of how the future actually looks. It's going to find its way into policy, and more broadly, it's going to shape how a lot of people view the development of the AI space in general.

1:46I think Andreessen dropping an extensive self-named manifesto like this is destined to shape that conversation, and so I think it's valuable for you to have it in its entirety. It is presented then as yet another piece of evidence, another artifact for you to explore to help you decide and understand where you personally fall. The only thing that I know for sure is that the more people who can inhale the techno-optimism manifesto, as well as take seriously the most concerned arguments of the AI safety folks and ex-riskers, the better we're going to be at navigating a very complex future. I think you'll also be interested to see how the choice was made to write this specifically.

2:23It is very clearly about artificial intelligence. and about the conversation that we're having about artificial intelligence in society. But it's also clear that Andreessen has made an assessment that the fights that artificial intelligence are having are the culmination of a much larger and longer set of fights that go back a much longer way. He is choosing to frame this in very kind of fundamentalist terms in some ways, that the way that we have as a society been recently taught to be skeptical of and even afraid of technology is, in his estimation, wrong. And not just wrong, but damaging. The choice of the word manifesto is not an accident, and it is certainly warranted.

3:00This is not just a defense of artificial intelligence. It's a defense of a totally different way of looking at the world that isn't just angry at big tech, and that sees opportunity, not fear, when it comes to new technology. Now, in the days and weeks to come, people are going to absolutely pick this apart. There are going to be tweet threads, response essays, podcasts about why it's wrong, And of course, anything that pitches itself as something as grandiose as the Techno-Optimism Manifesto is likely to provoke a lot of disagreement and debate. But I do think it's a reflection of how significant the conversation is.

3:33But here now, just after this quick sponsor message, is the Techno-Optimism Manifesto. I will also say before we get into the sponsor message, just for the record, A16Z's crypto show sponsoring the AI Breakdown has nothing to do with my choice to read this post. I think the fact that I've read things from the Andreessen Horowitz blog before, as well as their counterpoints, probably should make that clear. But it's worth saying we do live in a sometimes compromised world. But anyway, let's listen to that sponsor message and then we will read the Techno Optimism Manifesto. Are you interested in how two top of mind trends, AI and crypto, can work together?

4:09If so, I have the perfect podcast recommendation for you. Web 3 with A16Z Crypto, the chart-topping show brought to you by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Web 3 with A16Z Crypto is your definitive resource for the future of the internet, whether you're already building in these spaces or simply curious about what's next. If you need a place to start, they recently released an excellent episode with Stanford cryptography professor Dan Bonet and former Google Xer Ali Yahya in conversation with host Donald Choksi about the intersection of AI and crypto. From fighting deepfakes and proving humanity to large language models like ChatGPT, they cover it all.

4:44I highly recommend checking it out, especially if you'd like to learn more about how AI and crypto will impact our everyday lives. Beyond Crypto and AI, this show is for creators seeking more ways to truly own their work, for business leaders trying to prepare for the future today, and for innovators exploring trending tech topics. So go ahead, listen to Web3 with A16Z Crypto wherever you get your podcasts. All right, friends, the Techno-Optimism Manifesto by Marc Andreessen begins with a set of quotes. The first is from Walker Percy and reads, You live in a deranged age. More deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

5:25The second quote is from Marion Tuppy and reads, Our species is 300 ,000 years old. For the first 290 ,000 years, we were foragers, subsisting in a way that's still observable among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands. Even after Homo sapiens embraced agriculture, progress was painfully slow. A person born in Sumer in 4000 BC would find the resources, work, and technology available in England at the time of the Norman Conquest, or in the Aztec Empire at the time of Columbus quite familiar. Then, beginning in the 18th century, many people's standard of living skyrocketed.

5:57What brought about this dramatic improvement, and why? Third and final quote to kick this off comes from Thomas Edison, there's a way to do it better. Find it. The main piece then begins, lies. We are being lied to. We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything. We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology. We are told to be pessimistic. The myth of Prometheus in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator haunts our nightmares.

6:34We are told to denounce our birthright, our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world. We are told to be miserable about the future. Truth. Our civilization was built on technology. Our civilization is built on technology. Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential. For hundreds of years, we've properly glorified this until recently. I am here to bring the good news. We can advance to a far superior way of living and of being. We have the tools, the systems, the ideas. We have the will.

7:05It is time once again to raise the technology flag. It is time to be techno-optimists. Technology. Techno-optimists believe that societies like sharks grow or die. We believe growth is progress, leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well-being. We agree with Paul Collier when he says, Economic growth is not a cure-all, but a lack of growth is a kill-all. We believe everything good is downstream of growth. We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately, death. There are only three sources of growth.

7:38Population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology. Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures. The total human population may already be shrinking. Natural resource utilization has sharp limits, both real and political. And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology. In fact, technology, new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne, has always been the main source of growth and perhaps the only cause of growth. As technology made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible, we believe technology is a lever on the world.

8:11The way to make more with less. Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth. How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs. As people and capital are continuously free to do more important, valuable things than in the past. Productivity growth causes prices to fall, supply to rise, and demand to expand, improving the material well-being of the entire population. We believe this is the story of the material development of our civilization.

8:42This is why we are not still living in mud huts, eking out a meager survival and waiting for nature to kill us. We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars. We believe that there is no material problem, whether created by nature or by technology, that cannot be solved with more technology. We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution. We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting. We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating. We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning. We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the internet.

9:10We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines. We had a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance. Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it. Markets. We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. Willing buyers meet willing sellers, a price is struck, both sides benefit from the exchange, or it doesn't happen. Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand. Prices encode information about supply and demand. Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down.

9:43We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence, an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system. We believe Hayek's knowledge problem overwhelms any centralized economic system. All actual information is on the edges, in the hands of the people closest to the buyer. The center, abstracted away from both the buyer and the seller, knows nothing. Centralized planning is doomed to fail. The system of production and consumption is too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone. Centralization will starve you to death. We believe in market discipline.

10:12The market naturally disciplines, the seller either learns or changes when the buyer fails to show or exits the market. The market naturally disciplines. The seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show or exits the market. When market discipline is absent, there is no limit to how crazy things can get. The motto of every monopoly and cartel, every centralized institution not subject to market discipline, we don't care because we don't have to. Markets prevent monopolies and cartels. We believe markets lift people out of poverty. In fact, markets are by far the most effective way to lift vast numbers of people out of poverty and always have been.

10:45Even in totalitarian regimes, an incremental lifting of the repressive boot off the throat of the people and their ability to produce and trade leads to rapidly rising incomes and standards of living. Lift the boot a little more, even better. Take the boot off entirely. Who knows how rich everyone can get? We believe markets are an inherently individualistic way to achieve superior collective outcomes. We believe markets do not require people to be perfect or even well-intentioned, which is good because, have you met people? Adam Smith said,

11:24David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons, love, money, or force. Love doesn't scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Love doesn't scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let's stick with money. We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits. We believe markets, to quote Nicholas Stern, are how we take care of people we don't know.

11:53We believe markets are the way to generate societal wealth for everything else we want to pay for, including basic research, social welfare programs, and national defense. We believe there is no conflict between capitalist profits and a social welfare system that protects the vulnerable. In fact, they are aligned. The production of markets creates the economic wealth that pays for everything else we want as a society. We believe central economic planning elevates the worst of us and drags everyone down. Markets exploit the best of us to benefit all of us. We believe central planning is a doom loop.

12:20Markets are an upward spiral. The economist William Nordhaus has shown that creators of technology are only able to capture about 2 % of the economic value created by that technology. The other 98 % flows through to society in the form of what economists call social surplus.

12:47We believe in David Ricardo's concept of comparative advantage. As distinct from competitive advantage, comparative advantage holds that even someone who is the best in the world at doing everything will buy most things from other people due to opportunity cost. Comparative advantage in the context of a properly free market guarantees high employment regardless of the level of technology. We believe a market sets wages as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker. Therefore, technology which raises productivity drives wages up, not down. This is perhaps the most counterintuitive idea in all of economics, but it's true, and we have 300 years of history that prove it.

13:20We believe in Milton Friedman's observation that human wants and needs are infinite. We believe markets also increase societal well-being by generating work in which people can productively engage. We believe a universal basic income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed. Man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud. We believe technological change, far from reducing the need for human work, increases it by broadening the scope of what humans can productively do. We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever.

13:49We believe that markets are generative, not exploitative. Positive sum, not zero sum. Participants in markets build on one another's work and output. James Carsey describes finite games and infinite games. Finite games have an end when one person wins and another loses. Infinite games never end as players collaborate to discover what's possible in the game. Markets are the ultimate infinite game. Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance. We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.

14:23Comparative advantage increases specialization and trade. Prices fall, freeing up purchasing power, creating demand. Falling prices benefits everyone who buys goods and services, which is to say everyone. Human wants and needs are endless, and entrepreneurs continuously create new goods and services to satisfy those wants and needs, deploying unlimited numbers of people and machines in the process. This upward spiral has been running for hundreds of years, despite continuous howling from communists and Luddites. Indeed, as of 2019, before the temporary COVID disruption, the result was the largest number of jobs at the highest wages and the highest levels of material living standards in the history of the planet.

14:55The techno-capital machine makes natural selection work for us in the realm of ideas. The best and most productive ideas win and are combined and generate even better ideas. Those ideas materialize in the real world as technology-enabled goods and services that never would have emerged de novo. Ray Kurzweil defines his laws of accelerating returns. Technological advances tend to feed on themselves, increasing the rate of further advance. We believe in accelerationism, the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development, to ensure the fulfillment of the law of accelerating returns, to ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.

15:28We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human. In fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us. We believe the cornerstone resources of the techno-capital upward spiral are intelligence and energy, ideas, and the power to make them real. Intelligence. We believe intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure. Intelligence is the birthright of humanity. We should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can.

16:02We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral. First, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the techno-capital machine. Second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks. Third, as artificial intelligence ramps up to the capabilities of our machines and ourselves. We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights. We believe artificial intelligence is our alchemy, our philosopher's stone. We are literally making sand think. We believe artificial intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver.

16:34And we have a lot of problems to solve. We believe artificial intelligence can save lives if we let it. Medicine, among many other fields, is in the Stone Age compared to what we can achieve with joint human and machine intelligence working on new cures. There are scores of common causes of death that can be fixed with AI, from car crashes to pandemics to wartime-friendly fire. We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder. We believe in augmented intelligence just as much as we believe in artificial intelligence.

17:05Intelligent machines augment intelligent humans, driving a geometric expansion of what humans can do. We believe augmented intelligence drives marginal productivity, which drives wage growth, which drives demand, which drives the creation of new supply with no upper bound. Energy. Energy is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we have darkness, starvation, and pain. With it, we have light, safety, and warmth. We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundation engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone's lives can be.

17:34We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1000x, then raise everyone else's energy 1000x as well. The current gap in per capita energy use between the smaller developed world and larger developing world is enormous. That gap will close, either by massively expanding energy production, making everyone better off, or by massively reducing energy production, making everyone worse off. We believe energy need not expand to the detriment of the natural environment. We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited zero emissions energy today, nuclear fission.

18:04In 1973, President Richard Nixon called for Project Independence, the construction of 1 ,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000, to achieve complete U.S. energy independence. Nixon was right. We didn't build the plants then, but we can now, anytime we decide we want to. Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray said in 1953, For years, the splitting atom, packaged in weapons, has been our main shield against the barbarians. Now, in addition, it is a God-given instrument to do the constructive work of mankind. Murray was right, too. We believe a second energy silver bullet is coming, nuclear fusion.

18:35We should build that as well. The same bad ideas that effectively outlawed fission are going to try to outlaw fusion. We should not let them. We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment. Per capita U.S. carbon emissions are lower now than they were 100 years ago, even without nuclear power. We believe technology is the solution to environmental degradation and crisis. A technologically advanced society improves the natural environment. A technologically stagnant society ruins it. If you want to see environmental devastation, visit a former communist country.

19:04The socialist USSR was far worse for the natural environment than the capitalist US. We believe a technologically stagnant society has limited energy at the cost of environmental ruin. A technologically advanced society has unlimited clean energy for everyone. Abundance. We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop and drive them both to infinity. We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to make everything we want and need abundant. We believe the measure of abundance is falling prices. Every time a price falls, the universe of people who buy it get a raise in buying power, which is the same as a rise in income.

19:35If a lot of goods and services drop in price, the result is an upward expansion of buying power, real income, and quality of life. We believe that if we make both intelligence and energy, quote, too cheap to meter, the ultimate result will be that all physical goods become as cheap as pencils. Pencils are actually quite technologically complex and difficult to manufacture, and yet nobody gets mad if you borrow a pencil and fail to return it. We should make the same true of all physical goods. We believe we should push to drop prices across the economy through the appreciation of technology until as many prices are effectively zero as possible, driving income levels and quality of life into the stratosphere.

20:08We believe Andy Warhol was right when he said, What's great about this country is America started the tradition, where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same, and all the Cokes are good. Same for the browser, the smartphone, the chatbot. We believe that technology ultimately drives the world to what Buckminster Fuller called ephemeralization, what economists call dematerialization.

20:38Fuller said, Technology lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing. We believe technological progress therefore leads to material abundance for everyone. We believe the ultimate payoff from technological abundance can be a massive expansion in what Julian Simon called the ultimate resource, people. We believe, as Simon did, that people are the ultimate resource. With more people come more creativity, more new ideas, and more technological progress. We believe material abundance therefore ultimately means more people, a lot more people, which in turn leads to more abundance.

21:09We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods. We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets. We believe that out of all of these people will come scientists, technologists, artists, and visionaries beyond our wildest dreams. We believe the ultimate mission of technology is to advance life both on Earth and in the stars. However, we are not utopians. We are adherents to what Thomas Sowell calls the constrained vision.