“We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives,” declares Marc Andreessen in his über-bombastic Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

The Washington Post reports:

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh has enlisted Marc Andreessen — the venture capitalist, adviser to President Donald Trump and one of Silicon Valley’s most aggressive promoters of artificial intelligence — to help shape how the central bank thinks about the technology’s economic impact.

Andreessen will co-lead a task force on productivity and jobs, one of five advisory panels the Fed announced Thursday as part of Warsh’s promised overhaul of how the institution conducts monetary policy. The group is charged with assessing how AI and other new technologies should inform the Fed’s policy judgments, a question with direct bearing on interest rates, since Warsh has argued AI will ultimately prove disinflationary through gains in productivity.

The choice puts a politically connected investor with billions riding on AI valuations inside the Fed’s advisory apparatus. [Continue reading…]

In a response to the release of Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto in 2023, Gary Marcus wrote:

I admire his unbridled optimism, his yearning for markets to be free, his longing for technologies that could be without restraint, his ability to unabashedly cite 56 of his allies and nobody who disagrees, and, Nixon-like, to confidently declare anyone who disagrees with him to be both immoral and an Enemy, and above all else his absolute certainty in his own ideas.

But not his lack of respect for data, for alternative perspectives, or for people less wealthy or dogmatic than himself. The very idea that the world might focus on sustainable development goals for the sake of the less fortunate puts him in absolute agony.

His statement of beliefs (which includes an assertion that he believes in the scientific method) is declaration, not science, nor reasoned, steel-manned argument.

His 11,000 word manifesto is as remarkable for what it doesn’t consider as for what it does. No mention of Cherynobyl, the threat of nuclear war, Thalidomide, or frequent mass casualties from automatic weapons, surveillance capitalism, global warming, or misinformation; no nuance about how, historically, technology sometimes has gone wrong, no acknowledgement that airworthiness regulation keeps airplanes unbelievably safe. Nuclear power is mentioned; the threat of nuclear war is never mentioned. Climate change is not. [Continue reading…]