By Frank Landymore
What a Noble Vision
Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the massive venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — which has its fingers in pretty much every pie in tech — has revealed an eyebrow-raising detail in his “techno-optimist” vision of the future.
In a recent tweet, the American billionaire investor casually proclaimed that AI must “crash” everyone’s wages before it can deliver us an economic utopia — one that’ll definitely happen, and certainly not create a permanent underclass of have-nots.
“A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero,” Andreessen wrote. “Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.”
So fret not, lowly laborer: you may be destined for financial ruin, but paradise is right around the corner. Pinky promise.
Suck It Up
Andreessen’s tweet is a revealing example of the ruthless economic logic that underlies tech moguls’ utopic visions of the future, in which progress is a foregone conclusion, rendering everyone’s economic suffering in the interim merely a means to an end. Like overzealous fitness instructors, they always choose to emphasize the need for pain to achieve anything.
The author of “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andreessen also embodies how these brutal economic paradigm shifts are dressed up in benign rhetoric. AI-induced wage collapse is a consequence that happens “logically” and “necessarily,” according to the billionaire.
Somehow, none of these AI evangelists’ “optimistic” visions involve immediately improving people’s lives in a meaningful way, or foreground measures to mitigate the tech’s massively disruptive potential to the job market, except perhaps with broad gestures to a universal basic income — an idea that Andreessen, ever the unapologetic capitalist, happens to hate. (Per his manifesto, it would turn us all into “zoo animals.”)
Bow Down
Above all, many of these ultra-rich tech types like Andreessen can’t help publicly fantasizing about punishing the poor.
Larry Ellison for instance, cofounder of the software outfit Oracle, drooled about how AI would supercharge the surveillance state, ensuring that “citizens will be on their best behavior.”
When asked in an interview about AI killing creative jobs, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati glibly suggested that those jobs “shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
Andreessen seems to justify his disdain towards workers by claiming that many of them are “America-hating communists” who are infiltrating his companies and destroying them from the inside out.
With such seething contempt towards their employees, it makes sense why all the richest people in the world are suddenly throwing ungodly amounts of money at technology to automate the jobs of the rank and file.
