Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz
a16z.com/2023/06/06/ai-will-save-the-world
What Jamie wrote
Andreessen's view here is more overlapping with my own, at least in the outcomes. Many of the reasons he discounts a number of AI risks are similar to mine, and overall I agree that the positive potential of AI is huge, if only to make computers more humane to protect our own humanity!
What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.
He does address employment as well, which I've thought about again with AI.
To summarize, technology empowers people to be more productive. This causes the prices for existing goods and services to fall, and for wages to rise. This in turn causes economic growth and job growth, while motivating the creation of new jobs and new industries. If a market economy is allowed to function normally and if technology is allowed to be introduced freely, this is a perpetual upward cycle that never ends. For, as Milton Friedman observed, “Human wants and needs are endless” – we always want more than we have. A technology-infused market economy is the way we get closer to delivering everything everyone could conceivably want, but never all the way there. And that is why technology doesn’t destroy jobs and never will.
His argument is good, and I think represents our experiences thus far. I added the bolding at the end, because I think "past performance isn't a guarantee of future performance". Certainly there are types and amounts of technology innovation that does just as he describes. But ultimately you're playing to Limit Theory games — infinite need and desire, infinite technology leverage. Are they both infinite? Are they both guaranteed to be dependent and timed together? One has external needs like energy and atoms, the other is originated in our minds. 🤔
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