The blind, dangerous enthusiasm of a ‘Techno-Optimist’

Billionaire investor Marc Andreessen has written a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto“. It summarizes a worldview that’s common among a certain class of people: wealthy, white, well-educated, neoliberal rationalists with careers in STEM—a demographic that overlaps with likely readers of OnlySky.

There are some things Andreessen gets right, and he builds on these to paint an optimistic future that many will find appealing. But some of his reasoning is dangerously faulty. It’s essential to point out these flaws to avoid uncritically accepting his utopian fantasy.

What the manifesto gets right

There are parts of it that I agree with. For one, Andreessen points out how technological change builds on itself. Over time, technology raises our material productivity, which creates the abundance we often take for granted. It’s because of technology that we don’t all have to be subsistence farmers, but live in an advanced society where the labor of a few can support everyone. This allows more of us to do scientific research and make art and enjoy leisure.

He’s also correct that people are the ultimate resource. With more brainpower unleashed by this expansion, we can think more, learn more, and invent more. This means that progress accelerates over time, as previous discoveries make new discoveries possible. There’s no obvious point where this positive feedback loop has to stop. If it’s allowed to continue, we can create a world where material scarcity and suffering are things of the past.

What the manifesto gets wrong

On the other hand, there are many places—especially when characterizing those he imagines as his opponents—where Andreessen isn’t just wrong, but flagrantly so. For example:

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.

Andreessen starts his critique with a whopping straw man. “Technology” doesn’t cause any of these evils, and no one is saying otherwise. Humans cause them, by seeking their own self-interest at the expense of other humans.

No one anywhere on the political spectrum is against innovation, science, or basic research. What we want is for the benefits to be shared, not concentrated among an elite few. Inventions that boost productivity could be used to keep the same number of workers at the same pay, but make their jobs easier and less time-consuming: a true win-win. Instead, they often serve as justification to fire some workers, making them poor and impoverished, while the rest work as hard as ever and the owners and investors reap bigger fortunes.

That’s the dynamic we object to. It’s not opposition to technology per se. Rather, it’s the historically justifiable suspicion that it will be deployed in a way that makes the rich richer and the rest of us worse off. What compounds the insult is when the rich and the privileged claim that to be against this dynamic is to be against progress itself.

The mindset of the cancer cell

We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.

This is the mindset of the cancer cell: “Growth at any cost, forever, and damn the consequences!”

Simple logic ought to conclude that it’s not possible to have infinite growth on a finite planet. Every species either reaches a steady state, or it exhausts its environment and goes extinct. There’s no reason why humans should be exempt from this law of nature. If we don’t find a way to live sustainably, we’ll expire in our own waste.

Simple logic ought to conclude that it’s not possible to have infinite growth on a finite planet.

And yes, people who hold to this mindset have a rejoinder: “But what about space colonies?!”

If a day comes when humans have self-sufficient habitats in space or on other planets, that will be the time to revisit this discussion. But at the moment, moving permanently off of Earth is nothing but a sci-fi dream. We don’t even have a self-sufficient outpost in Antarctica, and Antarctica is much more hospitable than Mars or the Moon.

It would be grotesque folly to assert that it doesn’t matter what we do to Earth, because, surely, someday, we’ll be able to colonize space and then it won’t matter. That’s the same reckless mindset as a man who lives beyond his means, going deeper and deeper into debt every month—because he’s sure it’s just a matter of time before he wins the lottery and turns his life around. You can’t bet your future on something that might never happen.

Why capitalism is amoral

There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology.

Andreessen says that population growth is trending down and natural resource utilization is running up against limits, and I’d agree. The problem is that capitalism can’t tell these things apart.

If you’re a shareholder in a chocolate company, and all you care about is profit, it makes no difference to you if cocoa farmers make technological improvements to make their farms more productive, or if they just go out and get more child slave laborers. There’s no column on a balance sheet that indicates where profits come from.

This amoral quality is the most potent objection to capitalism. In the insatiable pursuit of profit, it grinds up human lives and decimates the planet. There are some tentative efforts to reform the system, like ESG investing—but, as we’ll see, Andreessen sneeringly condemns these.

We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.

This is at best a half-truth, and at worst a symptom of blind faith.

Most of the problems afflicting the world right now don’t exist because our technology is inadequate. They exist because we’re not fairly distributing the surplus we already possess.

Because we’re moral beings, we can do better than evolution.

For example, the existence of poverty is a choice. The rich nations could cure it if they chose. We don’t need better technology to end poverty, just fairer taxation and more redistribution.

In cases like these, the cry of “more technology” is a smokescreen, designed to divert attention from the ultra-rich who are hoarding wealth and not doing their fair share.

We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence—an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.

“Evolutionary” is a fitting word. I’d agree with that comparison, although it says more than he thinks.

Free markets are like evolution. Both of them produce marvelously clever, intricate, even beautiful designs. And to do that, both of them require vast amounts of suffering, pain and death as their raw material. You can admire the sleek beauty of the praying mantis or the focused elegance of the great white shark, both honed by natural selection—but you wouldn’t want to be on the other end of those claws and teeth.

Later on, he says: “We believe in competition, because we believe in evolution.” But this is a fallacy! Just as believing in the periodic table doesn’t obligate you to build nuclear weapons, recognizing evolution as a truth of nature doesn’t force you to mimic its methods.

Because we’re moral beings, we can do better than evolution. We can craft new designs without immiserating or killing living beings. And the same goes for the market. Markets are a useful tool to solve certain kinds of coordination problems, but they need to be channeled and steered so they serve humans rather than vice versa. We can and should build a society where no one’s survival or well-being depends on the outcome of an economic competition.

Technology can do anything, except socialism

Unfortunately, Andreessen argues that this is impossible:

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.

There’s a gigantic self-contradiction at the heart of Andreessen’s philosophy that he doesn’t notice. Did you catch it?

On the one hand, he says free markets are a necessity for progress. Central planning can’t work because the problem is too complex; the people making the decisions can’t possibly obtain enough information to make the right ones. Our only hope is to stand back and let capitalism work itself out.

On the other hand, he says technology can solve any material problem whatsoever. Literally, he says it himself: “There is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.”

Why is economic planning, alone of all problems in the universe, exempt from this law of accelerating returns?

In particular, he has an almost religious faith in artificial intelligence. He describes it as a “universal problem solver” that will “expand our capabilities to unimagined heights.”

Why is economic planning, alone of all problems in the universe, exempt from this law of accelerating returns? Why is it that technology can do literally anything else, but it can’t solve the problem of finding the optimal way for goods to be produced and distributed?

This is a major clue about what’s really driving this essay. Andreessen presents it as self-evident principles derived from pure rationality. In reality, it’s an argument for a specific brand of libertarian, laissez-faire ideology. That’s not because it’s the only way to live, but because it’s the one he’s benefited from. And because he views his own success as proper, he treats this as a just and natural outcome, without ever questioning the cost of that success.

History doesn’t run on rails

We believe Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver. And we have a lot of problems to solve.

…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.

This is the point where Andreessen’s essay jumps the tracks and veers into a position that can only be described as religious faith.

He holds that the future isn’t just knowable, but certain. And because he can see that the future is an AI-guided utopia, anyone who doesn’t do what he says, and therefore delays that future from arriving, is guilty of all the suffering Andreessen could have prevented if he had unlimited power.

It’s irrational to make arguments based on a claimed perfect knowledge of what the future holds.

You could say, with every bit as much justification, that a worldwide communist revolution will end all injustice and suffering and usher in a glorious paradise. Therefore, we should all work to bring about full communism as rapidly as possible, and anyone who stands in the way of that is guilty of murder and a traitor to humanity.

That argument would be wrong for the same reason Andreessen is wrong: because history doesn’t run on rails. No one has a crystal ball that predicts what’s coming next. The future is a dizzying, nearly infinite multiplicity of possibilities. It’s a landscape of choices, where some of the worst outcomes are nestled up against some of the best ones, where many of the obvious paths go nowhere while utopias are secretly tucked away in places no one expected to find them.

It’s irrational to make arguments based on a claimed perfect knowledge of what the future holds. Every past era had its own breathless predictions, most of which fell flat. Instead, we should stay humble, stay skeptical (especially of AI boosterism!), and make the best choices we can based on the evidence available to us.

Move fast and break things

To finish off his essay, Andreessen makes his most chillingly irresponsible argument:

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades—against technology and against life—under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.

…Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire.

This is downright evil. It says that the only thing that matters is inventing as much new stuff as possible, as fast as possible, with no need to weigh the tradeoffs in the balance, imagine the downsides, or consider who might be hurt. For truth’s sake, he says that safety and ethics are just unnecessary red tape!

Again, I need to state the patently obvious: not all innovation is good. Every technology has a balance of risks and benefits, and sometimes the harm outweighs the beneficial aspects.

Leaded gasoline and lead paint both had useful qualities, but we now know they were a tragic mistake because of the mass poisoning and brain damage they caused. The same goes for asbestos insulation, radium watches, ozone-destroying CFCs, and a thousand other “innovations” that seemed like a good idea at the time, but now lie on the ash heap of history.

READ: The price of progress

Andreessen’s fixed forward-looking mentality is blind to the past—and even to the problems that technology is creating today. Ocean garbage patches, drug-resistant superbugs, megadroughts and desertification, deadly fires and heat waves, soil depletion, ecological collapse and more, are proof that technology isn’t an unalloyed good. But he believes, in defiance of logic, that the only people who ever counsel prudence, caution, restraint or regulation are enemies of humanity who hate happiness and life itself.

This isn’t a techno-optimist manifesto so much as a techno-libertarian manifesto. It’s woven throughout with the presumption that the rich investor class are our only saviors, and our only hope is to give them all the money and power they want. It’s Ayn Rand’s misanthropic great-man ideology updated with Silicon Valley jargon.

The truth about technology

Technology alone won’t save us, but it does give us more choices. Economic growth means we can produce more stuff, which saves us from having to make painful triage decisions when there isn’t enough to go around.

But growth alone doesn’t solve every problem. It wasn’t technology that ended absolute monarchy, it was citizens rebelling and going to the barricades. It wasn’t technology that ended slavery, it was people fighting and dying for their freedom and the freedom of others. It wasn’t technology that ended apartheid and Jim Crow, it was boycotts and protests and diplomatic pressure and civil rights laws. It wasn’t technology that gave women the vote, or that made free speech a protected right, or that ended the use of chemical and biological weapons, or that separated the church from the state. And if we ever end war or bigotry or oppression, it won’t be technology that does it.

Knowing when not to create something is at least as important as the opposite.

Technology only improves our lives if we have the moral understanding to use it well. Without that wisdom, technology only makes life worse.

Better technology can create deadlier weapons of war, to kill more people more efficiently. Better technology can create a dystopian surveillance state, with drones and facial-recognition algorithms and biometric ID chips tracking everyone’s every move. Better technology allows more comprehensive and targeted eugenics. Better technology allows us to scour the seas clean of fish, clear-cut rainforests, strip-mine mountains, and consume the Earth’s dwindling natural resources more rapidly and thoroughly. Better technology can create enough nuclear bombs to make the world a lifeless wasteland.

Knowing when not to create something is at least as important as the opposite. Anyone who idolizes achievement unchecked by ethics and untempered by wisdom is a truly dangerous individual. That mindset can, and often does, end up being twisted to serve evil purposes.