Two Kinds of Techno-Optimism
garymarcus.substack.com
garymarcus.substack.com
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/thoughts-on-techno-optimism
They are in a 2x2 matrix per him:
* active-positive: There are plenty of technologies left to discover, if we adopt the right policies.
* active-normative: Technology will improve the world, if we adopt the right policies.
* passive-positive: Technological innovation is just going to keep happening no matter what we do.
* passive-normative: New technology will improve the world no matter what policies we enact.
He generally leans towards:
> Personally, I subscribe to both positive and normative techno-optimism, but with reservations in both cases. I think there are plenty of new important discoveries out there to be made, but I do think it’s likely that they’ve become more expensive to find. I also think technology usually ends up making life better for most people, but that this isn’t always the case.
> In both cases, though, I’m more of an active than a passive optimist. Whether it comes to sustaining the rate of innovation or making sure that innovations benefit humankind, I think that choosing the right policies is very important.
He thinks government is an important part of the equation in technological progress, but that bureaucracy can be a hindrance at times, as well as monopolies.
The tell tale sign in my book that we ought to focus on other areas in society, is the fact we are very far behind legislatively on how to handle tech.
The recent "Senator, we run ads"[1] moment made this point excruciatingly clear. Congress is totally out of touch and outmatched by tech, and seemingly incapable of even grasping it, let alone regulating it. They are no more savvy than they were with Series Of Tubes[2] almost twenty years ago.
Technological Pragmatism is an ethos I can probably get behind [1]. It ties in well with the book [2] that's had the most impact on me, which basically says that the best path to increasing self-esteem is to honestly appreciate your good side and honestly reckon with your bad side. I also like this approach because it acknowledges that good / bad / ugly all contain information. Andreesen, with his refusal to look at bad / ugly, is basically blocking himself off from two sources of information. The same goes for toxic positivity people who block out painful emotions. My best chance of success in general is to stay open to all the info available to me.
[1] If there was a way to also work in the idea that I believe I'm better off leaning optimist rather than pessimist then it would be perfect for me. But that's probably too complicated / nuanced.
[2] The Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem. I'm aware the author has some dubious historical connections himself (he was "Ayn Rand's lover", his own words) but nonetheless I still stand firm in saying that this book had the most positive impact on my life of any book I've read.
Yglesias focused on attacking blind optimism, which makes sense.
Karpf is engaging in character attacks. It’s okay to not like Andreeson, not trying to say otherwise. But this essay reads more like a class warfare piece than a good argument for why techno optimism is bad. Hollowing out of the American middle class isn’t Google’s fault.
My read, anyway.
First off, the thing I really connected to with Karpf's piece was how this techno-optimist manifesto might have made sense in the mid 90s, but it seems baffling to write this with 30 years of hindsight. And as someone who was a techno-optimist in the mid 90s, I don't just see how you couldn't be at least moderately disillusioned with the promise of tech.
But to your point specifically, "Hollowing out of the American middle class isn’t Google’s fault" - yeah, it kinda is, at least partially. Tech isn't the only reason for the decline of the middle class, but the Internet specifically has made markets huge and is directly responsible for "winner take all" dynamics in these larger markets. There used to be "regional winners" in lots of different retail categories, for example, and thus there were many smaller and midsized cities with vibrant main streets where the money went back to local proprietors. Now most of that goes to Amazon (or Walmart before that, but Walmart is still tech).
But, for one specific example, Google vacuumed up a huge amount of advertising dollars that used to support local journalism and advertising jobs. The death of local journalism has been written about many, many times, so no need to rehash that. I'm also not saying Google is "evil" for being a better advertising platform than local classifieds, but I'm just saying a natural consequence of this tech change is more concentration of wealth (small number of high paid Google employees but way less middle class newspaper and support jobs).
Equating global companies with tech a reduction that dilutes it to meaninglessness. That’s like saying standard oil was a tech company.
With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about. Walmart famously invested a ton in their logistics management software, which was widely considered to have given them a huge edge over competitors. Here's one recent article I found that gives a good overview of the topic, https://www.elkner.net/static/UoPeople/LogisticsAndPlanning_.... One quote from that article (among many good ones): "In 1987 it completed the largest private satellite communication system in the United States at the time, linking all of the company's operating units with two-way voice, data and one-way video communication."
> What makes Andreesen’s 90’s retread so odd is the way he frames it as a challenge to the status quo. Technological optimism has been the dominant paradigm throughout my adult life.
> The most powerful people in the world (people like Andreessen!) are optimists. And therein lies the problem: Look around. Their optimism has not helped matters much.
> The Internet isn’t just the realm of the future anymore. It is also our present and has a substantial past. It is worth examining how the past promises of those 90s techno-optimists worked out.
> What do you get for the tech billionaire who has literally everything? The cherished startup vibes of his youth. It’s literally the only thing he doesn’t have anymore.
(That may be too speculative/personal but I think it's a really interesting point: the tech elite are approaching mid-life crisis age)
> that “manifesto of a different time and place” is the Futurist Manifesto, written in 1909 by Italian poet F.T. Marinetti. A decade later, Marinetti would be a principal author of the Fascist Manifesto.
> Andreessen spends 4,000+ words warning about the plague of pessimism that is sweeping the land, and then he finally lists the villains who are responsible and… a lot of them are tech workers, employed by Silicon Valley, but focused on the type of hard practical questions that bum him out.
> You can't claim the mantle of Bayesian rationalism without learning a single thing from the failures of your own dominant philosophy over the past 30 years.
All these direct quotes are pretty focused on the Techno-Optimist Manifesto itself and raise some legitimate doubts IMO
But he's certainly not saying "disregard what he's saying, it's a midlife crisis", he gives countless other reasons why Andreeson should be disregarded... not least because he's already profited enormously off of the techno-optimism of the past and doesn't give any reasons why trusting him with future techno-optimism will turn out any different.
IMHO Karpf is saying we had lots of techno-optimism starting in the 1990s (cf. Wired), but in the 2020s we now the advertiser-monitoring complex: so why is Andreeson surprised that there's push-back against tech? Why is Andreeson surprised that folks are expressing concern at possible negative side-effects of tech?
I think this paragraph is a good summary of Karpf:
> Economic inequality does not solve itself. Markets are not perfect, self-correcting mechanisms. At one point, Andreessen writes “The market naturally disciplines (…) Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.” I take this as evidence that he doesn’t read any actual economists. One could make an argument that the 90s techno-optimists did not yet know any better (we were just trying global capitalism for the first time, maybe it’d work great!). But, for a Silicon Valley set that likes to pretend at being hardcore Bayesian rationalists, there is something downright comical about how they have managed, across the past thirty years, not to update a single one of their priors.
"Optimists" may just be inevitable. But we need a few generations of intentional stewards. We need to engineer resilience and sustainability in our systems. Else we would have to rely on "Apollo missions" in the future (government setting the specific moonshot goals and creating highways to achieve those); rather than on "optimists" inside the macroeconomic structures to achieve those.
Because you might form your own thoughts and realize all of the people spilling ink over a billionaire’s pro capitalist position are mainly overblown to generate clicks and “contrarian thought lead” from the side lines?
totally unrelated but still, heard this recently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The main problem with the "techno-optimism" manifesto is the "free market" section. That's faith-based economics. The big problems we face today as a society come from the fact that we have no clue how to run either the economic system or the political system well.
Because technology has made the world significantly better place in the long term. But that doesn't mean it will continue to do so. Moreover, despite the fact that average QOL today is generally regarded as much better than anytime sans maybe the last 10 years, it's still much lower than it can and should be, and partly so due to processes which technology and free market have enabled.
Can you expand on any part of your comment? You have 4 distinct things, supposedly everyone else in the world is supposed to get what you mean when you introduce these things, one after the other, and then engage your comment. You're asking for the impossible.
I think an alternative to regulation is flexible pricing of externalities. So if you pollute, someone could evaluate exactly the impact of your pollution, and you would pay a tax to mitigate its impact or clean it up (or cleanup yourself and most avoid the tax).
I think this should work well in many cases actually![1] (I think perhaps including some soft issues like impacts of products and advertisement on our well being?) But I think simple regulation is the ideal mechanism for many kinds of activities. Here are some examples.
(1) Very large disasters and large risks. The pricing mechanism breaks down at large risks, because a company owing much more than it's valued will go insolvent, and never be able to pay the equivalent to the damage caused. At the limit entire environments can collapse in a way that just couldn't be easily restored or paid back to health. Think burning a book, no amount of money will bring it back from smoke -- don't burn the book :)
(2) Practicality of monitoring. Some kinds of activities are hard to monitor, and tracking usages and risks is probably more trouble than its worth, compared to regulating or banning certain products or practices. I leaded gasoline may be a good example. You probably wouldn't want leaded gasoline to be sold freely and then have regulators or entities going over every car and checking emissions, and carefully pricing its impact on people's health. There's little upside to using leaded gasoline (esp. compared to alternatives like adding ethanol), measuring it and evaluating it is difficult, and it impacts everyone.
(3) Simplicity. Many claim that regulations make life more complex, but I think traditional regulations and laws can make life simpler! Pricing the impact of lead, spontaneous mechanisms for pricing pollution (say trying to convince everyone to boycott leaded fuels) or something else are much more complicated than simply: ban leaded fuels, period. If absolutely necessary (as was the case with aviation gasoline I believe, for a time!), you can make special provisions for laws too. I think managing cognitive complexity should be a significant element in legislation and regulation.
I think anyone that defends free markets should staunchly defend their regulation. Because the only way we can live sustainably in a complex world with complex risks brought by activities and technologies in a market economy is introducing pricing and regulation mechanisms on top. In other words, free markets are a mechanism for pricing between two entities (usually individuals, or an individual and a company). Fundamentally, we also need mechanisms for pricing between one entity and society (generally parties outside the two-party negotiation).
[1] I think this mechanism (tracking impact and directly pricing impact) is very underutilized (I think it could become a major component of society really![2]). Also regulations can very literal (say banning a compound or dictating materials and specifications), or they can be flexible: performance and results oriented. If you're fighting say noise pollution, you could dictate a certain amount of insulator of a certain material in a house or car. However, you can also simply dictate a minimum amount of attenuation between sounds emitted inside and captured outside, and this isn't too difficult to measure (my father, a civil engineer, used to sing the praises of this kind of regulation all the time).
[2] See this link for more, and related ideas on improving society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043752
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The other major important missing element is that large organizations and even governments are generally oriented toward maximizing economic resources (i.e. profit, GDP, etc.), and not maximizing (human) meaning, or the effect of those resources in creating good lives for everyone (quality of life, quality of experience, etc.). We should also reorient as many structures as possible toward that goal: effective meaning. We should have metrics that try to measure it imperfectly, and make more decisions in that direction[3].
I do also think we should maintain freedom of self-determination as well, because for many decisions each person is best equipped to know what's best for himself.
An ideal society balances collective wisdom helping individuals, and individual wisdom going contrary to collective wisdom when he/she knows what's best in a certain situation. This wisdom (which perhaps could be defined as knowing what matters, and knowing how to get there) of course comes from science, philosophy, art, culture, and is a major part on things working at all :)
That's a fundamental progress too imo: progress in wisdom, not just technology. Are we wise enough to know the importance of wisdom?
[3] More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/175ig4l/wha...
The question of 'Are we wise enough?' is meant as a wake up question: we should, we have to be wise enough to survive. We deserve wisdom and we deserve survival; we deserve good lives. I think in reality most people can wake up to appreciate that, and then other realizations come as a consequence.
In the days when everything was bespoke, you might not be able to afford as much, and lots of things didn't exist yet, but the things you could afford would be tailored to your preferences from the get-go.
The first is dismissive of individual influence ("no matter what I do, things will get better over time").
The second is self-aware ("I can make a difference when ...").
In technology, the "hope for the best" (_future_ tech will solve ...) is rather common.
It scares me a little, because of the implied waiving of individual responsibility.
The retrospective look, learning from mistakes, or even investigating how to apply tech to fix bad results or damage from applying tech in the past, would do us well, ethically. It's very comforting, society-wise, if someone admits to, and makes amends over, mistakes they made that hurt others. It's at least better than that person pointing out no amends needed because future-here-tech-there will do fix it anyway.
As far as I can tell, at least in information technology, what we've lost to enshitification has mostly matched or exceeded what we've gained in the last ten to twenty years.
Due to SEO and Google dumbing down search, discoverability on the web is mostly dead. Wikipedia's insular obsession with being "encyclopedic" has destroyed much of what made it special and useful. We've mostly fallen back to "AOL Instant Messenger 2.0" in the form of Discord as the best we can do for social media. Reddit has become virtually the one place left where an average person can find information that isn't just SEO spam; however, Reddit's owners seem dead set on destroying it's usability as quickly as possible.
All of these things have costs, but I can't deny that if you want to get things done in the world, subject to certain parameters, the wheels are greased compared to the past.
So trying to draw correlation between potential for success and opinion seems prone to give incorrect results. Likewise the characterisation also seems more like a safety blanket against criticism then a sensible way to consider the world.
I don't know what is brewing in VC land, probably something totally inane like assuming eternal zero interest rates, but I kinda like its impact.
If the supposed pinnacle of that clan is reduced to incoherent rants and a long list of cliche discredited slogans that make no sense and are devoid of any empathy for the human condition that can only be a good thing.
But it is indeed a call to every decent soul out there to replace that anti-humanist manifesto with true techno-optimism.
For it is obvious that what past and current technology have broken can only be fixed by using at least some technology. And that alternate future technologies are needed to get us to safe and enjoyable places. And that these technologies, adapted to serve rather than abuse humanity, need not be boring but can get the blood of any true technologist going.
Technologies, btw, like wikipedia, which the other sociopath du-jour has declared a dickipedia.
We need to reclaim everything that is important in technology from the minority of these odious people that equate their ego with our collective destiny.
But that task cannot happen without reclaiming first social technologies. Things like accounting and money and corporate structures and securities markets and contracts and regulations and incentives.
We need to make these tools sociopath-proof. Society's rewards should not accrue to the most cynical and exploitative of human weakness.
1. Andreessen is literally unwell - it reminded me of the paranoid tendencies that reared their head in 2 of my grandparents in the early/mid stages of dementia.
2. Being a billionaire can actually be so isolating, and you constantly have people blowing sunshine up your ass, that you actually start to believe that all your ideas are infallible and that anyone not in agreement with you is a worthless peon.
I mean, even if you agreed with Andreessen's point of view, presumably he wrote and posted that manifesto to persuade, as a call-to-action. Yet I don't see how anyone could read that (or write that) and not see how the blowback would be intense, and it's had the exact opposite effect of the (presumed) intent.
Of course, Andreessen could just be a collosal "rules for thee but not for me" asshole. He was crowing about free markets and "liberating" people, and about how "it's time to build", but he and his wife turned out to be the ultimate NIMBYs when it was actually their backyard: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...
This episode is all you need to know about Andreesen. Disruption is only good for others.
I don't agree with a lot of his manifesto. But I wish more people would write manifestos and try to fully explain their worldview instead of spending a lifetime reacting to other people's opinions. It's sad that we think they're inherently pretentious.
> 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.
In other words, the very first subtitle is "Lies", like it's some evil shadowy cabal that is keeping us from the Truth of techno-utopia (and this isn't just my interpretation - he goes on to specifically name his enemies hit list later). His article felt like it would be way more at home on some rando's "IllumiNaTI!!!" YouTube channel, where the cliche of starting out with an "enemies list" is central to any juicy conspiracy theory.
But most importantly, my reaction comes from my experience. I most definitely was a techno-optimist for all my life until about 2012-2015 or so. I believed the initial promises about how the Internet would bring us all closer, and how social media would let me better connect with friends and strangers, about how smart phones would make our lives so much better. So I am just totally baffled that anyone could have lived through that time and not be at least somewhat reflective about "hey, maybe there are some downsides to tech, and maybe this tech disillusionment that so many techies (to say nothing of non-techies) feel is based in something real" unless they are just a completely selfish asshole or totally oblivious to the real, documented harms of tech.
This is the state of any discourse today though. Leftists are just as convinced that corporations and billionaires are lying to them as well.
I've seen plenty of articles in response to Andreessen's manifesto that are still relatively "pro tech", but which honestly assess that not all is roses and there are real harms to consider.
His whole schtick about people looking down on tech now is really lost imo. People still absolutely admire technology, but now its plainly obvious how the major techbros/CEOs/etc arent the smartest people on the planet, and dont deserve god-like status. Plus people see rich tech workers come into their neighborhood and can understandably be put off by that.
Kinda like “momento mori” without the incentive to go and invent tech to make them immortal.
A billionaire becoming a paraplegic would invest so much money in solving nerve and limb repair.
A billionaire going blind would get the brain mapped at a resolution we can only dream of.
I'm committing right now to putting my money to work in these areas if I ever make it.
War and existential threats can do so even faster.
Publicly funded research does a great job of finding the slopes that would ordinarily be overlooked.
Most research projects are competitively funded by grant money on short timelines, and researchers are employed on fixed-term contracts. University professors with tenure are the exception rather than the rule. Research projects regularly get canned because priorities change or the work just isn’t sexy enough.
That is putting aside that the public and private sector fund research differently with different priorities which results in both discoveries one would make that the other wouldn't and in flaws and anti-patterns observed. Private funding would be more likely to have arbitrary favoritism based on personal biases vs the public sector playing politics in a "lets play pin the jobs on the congressional districts" way.
While the idea of cost-benefit analysis in philanthropy has gotten a bad reputation after going down some very weird rabbit holes recently, the idea behind it isn’t completely crazy.
Building toilets may not be as sexy as reattaching nerves but the cost-benefit ratios are pretty attractive.
I find the 'ethics' of everything complicated, lately. But, simple non-flashy action to just try to relieve some suffering is about as ... therapeutic as it gets - for everyone, I think.
It reminds me of that great folk tune, "Simple Gifts" (famously set by Copeland [in his style]). There's quite a bit to be said for the ideas of groups like the 'Shakers' (though strict celibacy for all does tend to be quite a headwind for perpetuation).
There is something very significant in the idea framed, for example, in the Christian Bible as "private prayer"** - the effects this has on the function and other characteristics of a person AND their community (which ideally is the world).
The mindset of as substantial a 'selflessness' as is possible for humans seems to make the world much more livable, simple, etc. (for anyone who practices towards it). It doesn't seem so common among people who become billionaires, though - this is not a dig at them at all, nor do I wish to end this comment on the subject in general. But, what's truly absurd and sad, to me, is that what everyone actually wants tends to get further away the more you cling to anything ... simply accumulate anything, including money.
* (John Turturro voice, always hear in my head, omit details as much as I can 'help myself' tho...)
** Matthew 6:5, for example - this is ending up rather 'Christianity-heavy', but the key messages are quite 'agnostic' IMO. I find them more-or-less in the 'useful' "spiritual systems" from all regions ...
Realistically speaking, no human institution will remain true to its original purpose for very long after the death or departure of its founder. Institutions drift, whether towards maximizing shareholder value (if a publicly traded, i.e. de-facto ownerless, corporation) or towards pushing a political agenda (if a non-profit foundation). The only way to have a chance of avoiding this drift is for the founder to pass on true ownership of the institution to somebody whom he believes shares his vision. Even then, that doesn't exactly work out perfectly because eventually the owner is going to make a poor choice for his successor and the successor will either run the institution into the ground or sell the institution because he doesn't actually want it.
According to [1], the current minimum value of a bored ape is the equivalent of about $48,000 USD.
I’d be surprised if the price ever goes to zero unless the trading infrastructure completely collapses (which isn’t exactly beyond the realms of probability). I imagine that there would be a demand if the price went down enough (and I’m talking to something in the tens of US dollars) from crypto critics who’d enjoy purchasing them from the crypto bulls for the schadenfreude.
"It's time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow 'trickling down' to everyone else," said Bucher. "Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn't lift all ships—just the superyachts." https://www.commondreams.org/news/billionaires-policy-failur...
I think most arguments for/against the existence of people with such wealth are basically capitalists saying they deserve it for creating value or that we need to incentivize wealth creation, and socialists arguing past them saying that it's just wrong for anyone to have so much more than anyone else.
This is the first time I've heard anyone making a good argument that actually, even IF you are a staunch capitalist, and you only consider people who made their money without leaning on government to bend the rules in their favor, maybe billionaires don't deserve all their wealth.
It’s not just cash that accumulated and could be better used somewhere else. It’s a FMV applied to a much larger portion of what the liquid market can support. Nobody gave Bezos $200 billion instead of giving it to charity. He just has ownership of multiple companies with share prices that when multiplied times his stake land at that value.
So it’s not surplus at all and it’s just instead, “here appears to be a valuable company, let’s seize and liquidate 10% to fund some socialist endeavors”. It makes no difference if it’s one owner or 10 at that point. It’s illogical because it’s not about wealth at all.
The author of that article based the entire premise on Jeff taking in $200 billion in profit himself, which is so uninformed the whole thing can be more or less dismissed outright.
>Warren Buffett has donated another $4.64 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock to five charities, boosting his total giving since 2006 to more than $51 billion.
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/warren-buffett-donat...
So which one is it? They can't have cash because it's all in stock, so they shouldn't be able to donate. But they can donate stock, because then it suddenly behaves like cash.
> A billionaire going blind would get the brain mapped at a resolution we can only dream of.
I am wondering, being blind myself, what is it exactly that you are hinting at? I am assuming something in the direction of neuralink?
I am asking because I really can not relate to your optimism. Tech is great for assistive technologies like talking phones or image to text LLMs and so on. But when people start to suggest all I need is the right implant to "compensate" for my disability, I frankly start to freak out and realize whatever they are thinking is not resonating with me in any way. Is your techno-optimism, in 2023, really that great that you'd want some tech to fuck with your brain?
Also, what many people don't realize is that people with sensory disabilities literally grow used to their "new" way of perceiving the world. Most of the interventions people seem to hold in high esteem kind of assume the disability hasn't been going on for a while. For instance, me being blind for 35 years also means that even if I would gain a visual sense through some tech, I'd still have to invest years to make some basic use of it. Imagine, I'd have to learn to read, basically like a preschooler.
Its not that easy to "gift" sight to the blind, not even with the most fancy optimistic tech we have in a forseeable future.