Not all of them are marketing. Some of them expose his belief system. After “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” it’s very hard for me to take him seriously again.
They were and remain big crypto investors and it's pretty weird that the essay doesn't acknowledge how much talent and money crypto sucked up. He asks where the supersonic aircraft are and - ignoring that they have awful externalities - there is actually a supersonic jet startup. A16Z hasn't invested in Boom, though, near as I can tell.
A16Z is a leading venture fund - if anyone's gonna build the future, they could use A16Z's money. So why is so much of what Andreesen wants from the future not what they've invested in?
A quick review of their website and some cursory googling reveals that while boom is not in their portfolio they have invested in a company developing a super sonic jet engine technology (Astro Mechanica) [1] as well as a company producing precision machine parts for aerospace (Hadrian) [1] and various other companies that intersect with the area. [3] Perhaps they wanted to invest in Boom but the deal wasn’t right or they are skeptical of that particular company or they simply never got the chance but clearly they are putting their money into this area and it’s worth researching before judging them.
1. https://www.notboring.co/p/astro-mechanica
3. https://a16z.com/portfolio/ (Look under American dynamism)
You still want to invest in a particular company or people who you believe will make you tons of money. Just because someone is active directionally in what you believe will be the future does not necessarily mean you should put your money with them.
I loved it. Something about a famous rich person putting that much effort into something so amateurish and clumsy, while apparently being so confident, in an eager-college-freshman sort of way… I dunno, call it endearing, maybe.
I mean it’s either that or it’s horrifying. I choose to pretend it’s endearing because there’s too much horrifying already.
This is basically what "longtermism" is. It's "we will amass huge amounts of capital to rule you now, because we know best, and we promise that as a result your (great-great-...)grandkids will have it better than if we hadn't".
It's just getting rich and playing with toys but with an ethical justification for it.
It reminds me of how back in the day there was all sorts of Creative Bible scholarship around it being "easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven". Like they were all "actually the 'eye of the needle's is the name of this big gate in Jerusalem. It's super easy to get a camel through it!"
EA has done some neat stuff in the here and now in terms of looking at charities et al. But anything claiming to benefit the unborn trillions of the far, far future is just someone making excuses for themselves.
- AI safety is an imminent threat and the best solution is to form an AI company and sell large amounts of stock to big tech
- I’m super smart so I need to be the one to work on this
- I need to earn loads of money so that I have the resources and focus to save humanity
0. 2nd century softening: https://www.academia.edu/40130012/Widening_the_Eye_of_the_Ne...
Do small players in the US economy have equal access to the market, or are they overshadowed by near oligarchies?
Are you always so bicameral?
as far as control of media, traditional media is becoming increasingly irrelevant and when free speech is allowed on social media the economy becomes more free.
and small players seem to disrupt all the time. openai being the most obvious recent example. twitch being another notable example before that.
i usually don't respond to distracting personal questions, but your use of bicameral confused me a little. did you mean to say binary?
It is extremely common for large private firms to have weighted control in an economy. Sometimes their control is bolstered by government and sometimes it is hindered by it. But in a completely unregulated market it would be common for monopolies to pop up which could then control large sections of the economy. There simply is no simple linear relationship between "free markets" and government intervention.
> when free speech is allowed on social media the economy becomes more free
Sadly the loudest "free speech proponents" who run social media firms are actually just interested in allowing the speech they want. They will still do everything they can to limit the speech of those they disagree with.
Let's go to the extreme with your logic. If you completely remove the government you end up with the mafia textbook. The easier way to win at the game is taking out the competition with lethal force. Once that's done there's no one to compete with you, no "free market", congratulations you won.
Why compete in bringing value when you can just use your money to takeout the competition.
> i usually don't respond to distracting personal questions
These were specific questions to tease out why you're presenting free market OR planned economies as the only choices- it smacked of certain type of central north american libertarianism that uses Heinlein's early teen reader simplifications.
OpenAi being described as a small player is laughable, small players don't appear with one billion US pledged in backing and sheperded by core established technocrats.
BTW, the question was: "Is the US as it operates today a free market?"
Do you have a clear answer there?
i think a more useful question is "what about the existing US economy is what makes it work/effective?" another useful question is "what about other economies make them less effective than the US economy?"
to answer the first question, the US economy works better when it's a freer market. magatte wade gives a convincing answer to the second question about africa when she points out it's generally very difficult to start a business in african countries.
i'm curious about what alternative you are interested in promoting and how. are you against free markets or do you have ideas on how to make markets more free?
I don't: that is a different question which isn't as useful as the one actually asked. Like the person you responded to without answering, I, too, am interested in hearing your direct and clear answer to the question, "Is the US as it operates today a free market?"
Would you mind answering that question, please?
While I don't think the existing economy is so binary (bicameral?), you are free to assume either a free market or not and make your arguments accordingly to explore the principles of free markets versus planned economies. I don't think a critique of the general principles of free market versus not relief on my specific answer. We are talking about ideals espoused in a self-proclaimed manifesto, so it's appropriate to speak about the ideals.
As a call back to how this started you yourself partitioned global(?) economies into
> you have free markets (which the manifesto supports) or planned economies
so you did in fact think that economies are this OR that.
For those of us in the real world many G20 and othe economies are hybrid with a mix of both features and "free market" is a loose term of idealogy that can mean one thing to readers of Adam Smith in his contemporous context and other things to various flavours of modern US libertarians.
That has been my observation, too: it is not a free market, but rather a composite.
Why do you think Americans chose to implement the "non-free" parts? What do you imagine they want out of government intervention, and why? Why do you think that Americans believe intervention is better than no intervention?
Those are the questions I think are worth discussing along the lines of the initial question, if the goal is to change what people want. You first must understand, empathize with, and internalize their motivation for what they currently want.
Very good in the feudalist’s worldview though!
Believe it or not, humanity's economic markets cannot be fully described by two simple categories.
i am arguing that the word was misapplied to the essay since the essay was promoting free markets and it's central planning that offers opportunity for totalitarian control.
In reality, you start with a state and then have increasing regulatory capture by large private entities who turn the state into a system that exists purely to enforce their property rights. As they do so they eliminate public purpose.
Whether you have planned totalitarianism or anarcho capitalist totalitarianism the result is the same. If you have 100% returns to either labour or capital, or you try to eliminate either public or private purpose, then you must have totalitarianism.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto imagines that you can have no state AND no regulatory capture, it's garbage. There are only 2 things in the economy: labour and capital. You have public purpose and private purpose. You balance those things, you have social democracy and innovation. You let it slip to any extreme and you're gonna have a bad time.
You could have a natural monopoly form in anarcho-capitalism but unless they also grabbed a monopoly on the use of force and barred competition (basically became the state) then if they did abuse their monopoly position they would inevitably have competition arise even if it was required to route around whatever their monopoly was.
That's absolutely inevitable.
That's why I call it feudalism. What you just described is like the middle ages with various independent scattered kingdoms, or like a collapsed state where rival warlords compete for control, with the occassional uprising.
So the obvious assumption is that Ben and the other leadership is supportive of it.
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
Like he's the author of the post, at the top of the page.
It’s funny how the better way is never “end aristocracy” and secure equality of condition
Just more feudalism with the rich never fighting just betting
and what is "equality of condition" and how do you achieve it?