Silicon Valley rushes to save the case for techno-optimism after Marc Andreessen’s hallucination of a manifesto

With new technologies, and specifically artificial general intelligence, humanity will be able to “solve all sorts of problems,” said Altman. In 10 years, he predicted, “people are going to say, ‘How can we say we didn’t want this?’”

This argument might sound familiar to those who braved through the 5,200-word manifesto published a day earlier by venture capitalist and billionaire Marc Andreessen (or Coins2Day’ s 700-word summary of it). The tract made a splash online, and not for its shiny view of the future. The writing—which paints a world in which technology solves all of humanity’s problems—has been criticized for lacking data, historical context, and alternative perspectives. And its combative tone seemed intended to strike a nerve. In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, columnist and former executive editor at Coins2Day Adam Lashinsky called it a “self-serving cry for help.” Coins2Day found some of Andreessen’s points extreme and implausible (previously covered in Data Sheet), while social media users called it culty, horrifying, and dangerously misguided. 

When Altman took the stage at the WSJ conference, about 24 hours after Andreessen hit “Publish,” the OpenAI CEO had to answer for contentious topics such as OpenAI’s safety features, the regulatory environment, and how his technology will change the job market. But Altman’s comments, though often not significantly different in substance from Andreessen’s, caused far less outcry.

Where Andreessen says universal basic income could “turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state,” Altman says more simply, it’s “not enough” to give people these kinds of regular government payments to drive innovation. They make the same point, but one is easier to digest. (Also, are zoo animals farmed, Marc?)

Andreessen says trust and safety measures are the “enemy,” whereas Altman says safety can’t be determined in a lab but must be influenced by public use. Both argue safety shouldn’t stand in the way of releasing new technologies, but Altman didn’t go out of his way to peeve the ESG crowd. The two also agreed humanity needs both abundant intelligence and energy to move forward, though Andreessen coupled it with the claim that slowing AI innovation will cost lives, and that “is a form of murder.”

Altman isn’t the only one in Silicon Valley rushing to defend tech optimism. At TED AI this week, Andrew Ng, who cofounded the Google Brain AI research team and teaches computer science at Stanford, acknowledged fears around AI but promised a remedy. The anxiety is misplaced, he said during his presentation. To the critics who want to stop AI, “You’re wrong; AI is not the problem but the solution,” Ng said. Compare that with Andreessen’s opening line to anyone with concerns about AI: “We are being lied to.”

It’s not just a matter of style. The kind of optimism espoused by Andreessen leaves no room for questions, doubts, or debate. It’s more like blind faith.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

“I am a techno-optimist, too,” said Gary Marcus, who founded AI companies Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, in a tweet on X, responding to Andreessen’s manifesto. “But being long-term optimistic about technology doesn’t mean you have to ignore the short-term (or long-term) risks of technology.

“It means working to recognize the risks, and working to address them, so that we can reach the positive outcomes that are promised, not casting those who recognize those risks as the enemy,” he writes.

Rachyl Jones

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Today’s edition was curated by David Meyer.

NEWSWORTHY

Apple clashes with Jon Stewart. Apple TV Plus is losing one of its biggest stars, Jon Stewart, after the former Daily Show host refused to talk about AI and China in ways that are “aligned” with Apple’s views on those subjects. According to the New York Times, taping of the third season of Stewart’s The Problem had been due to commence within a couple of weeks.

Net neutrality redux. Network neutrality—the principle that telecommunications network operators must treat traffic equally—is set to come back in the U.S. The FCC yesterday voted 3–2 to advance the reinstatement of the rules, which were brought in under Obama and scrapped under Trump. As Reuters reports, the final decision will come next year, after a public comment period.

Instagram’s Palestinian error. Instagram has apologized profusely for adding the word “terrorist” to the English auto-translation of user bios that contained the word “Palestinian” and the Arabic phrase “ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ,” which means “Praise be to God.” 404 Media first reported the humongous error. “We sincerely apologize that this happened,” an Instagram spokesperson told the Guardian, adding that the bug had been fixed earlier this week. Meanwhile, Meta also stands accused of suppressing Palestinian voices on its apps, TechCrunch reports.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

$3,970

—The price for a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics processing unit in some listings on China’s Taobao marketplace, following the imposition of U.S. AI-chip export controls on the powerful GPU. The RTX 4090 usually retails at $1,599. It may be a consumer gaming GPU, but it’s pretty good for deep learning too.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Amazon managers given the green light to fire employees who won’t work from the office 3 days a week, by Chloe Taylor

Netflix’s co-CEO discussed the road map to make the ‘very, very small’ mobile games business a growth engine with a ‘material impact’ on its $30 billion business, by Rachyl Jones

The founder of Web Summit infuriated key conference speakers with his tweets after Hamas’s attacks on Israel. Now he’s a case study for what not to do, by Alexandra Sternlicht

LinkedIn is going through a vibe shift as Twitter trolls and harassment get sprinkled in with workplace updates, by Paige Hagy

Tesla’s poor Q3 numbers show it’s not a tech juggernaut, but a struggling car company, by Shawn Tully

Convoy, a Bezos-backed trucking tech company valued at $3.8 billion last year, is shutting down: ‘Today is your last day at the company,’ by Bloomberg

How AI can help the shipping industry cut carbon emissions, by Megan Arnold

BEFORE YOU GO

Amazon stung in documentary. Oobah Butler—the guy who turned his garden shed into London’s top-rated restaurant according to Tripadvisor—has now pulled a series of new stunts for a documentary called The Great Amazon Heist. The grossest is definitely him getting Amazon to list for sale (in the “Bitter Lemon” category an “energy drink” that was in fact (according to Butler) the urine of Amazon drivers, tossed out of delivery vans in bottles. Important note: None of the pee made it to consumers who weren’t Butler’s friends, who were in on the joke.

Per a Wired report, Butler also gets a job at an Amazon fulfillment center to record conditions there, interviews drivers who testify to the peeing-in-bottles thing, and gets his 4- and 6-year-old nieces to order knives and rat poison via Alexa. The documentary aired yesterday on U.K.’s Channel 4. Amazon was not amused, with a spokesperson slamming this “heavily distorted picture of our processes and operations that do not reflect the realities of shopping with or working for Amazon.”