Save The World My Ass
Stove Top #5: Marc Andreessen: AI propagandist, the arc of politics bends left, cringiness is a superpower
Welcome back to the Stove Top weekly newsletter. As usual, each edition has a few brief stories and finishes with a mix of interesting links, hot takes, and good reads.
Tech
AI Isn’t Going To Save The World
Marc Andreessen is a very successful dude. He has founded numerous successful companies. His venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is one of the premier tech VCs in the world. He is constantly on the cutting edge of innovation.
Thus, it’s no surprise that Andreessen loves AI enough to write a 7,000-word manifesto not just defending the technology, but proclaiming it will “save the world”.
In this AI utopia, every child will have the perfect AI tutor, productivity and creativity will reach never before seen heights, all diseases will be cured, and interstellar travel will be commonplace. It’ll be an idyllic world, and it’s all thanks to AI.
The doomers trying to crap on this vision are just irrational cultists with ulterior motives. All of their concerns are silly:
AI isn’t going to kill us all, because it’s just a machine built to serve humanity.
AI isn’t going to ruin our society through hate speech and misinformation, because the only people who worry about stuff like this are the thought police coastal elite.
AI isn’t going to take everybody’s job, because technology never takes anybody’s jobs. In reality, AI will lead to an economic boom that makes everybody rich
AI isn’t going to drive income inequality, because our benevolent AI overlords will ensure their products are affordable.
AI does make it easier for bad people to do bad things, but it will also make it easier for good people to defend against bad things1.
Finally, if America doesn’t develop AI, then China will. And if they develop it first, the world will enter a dark dark period.
For an AI bro, Andreessen’s article is like crack. But for those of us who are more skeptical, the article isn’t really convincing. That’s because Andreessen has no substantive arguments in his ~7,000 words. It’s just his opinion on what is going to happen. In this regard, he’s no better than the doomers he derides as cult nutjobs.
I don’t necessarily believe that AI will kill us all, but how can Andreessen so definitively say that extinction via AI is impossible? Even if it doesn’t develop a taste for human blood, how do we know that a superintelligent AI in the wrong hands wouldn’t lead to mass destruction? Sure, it’s “unscientific”, but it’s not any more unscientific than saying AI will cure all diseases and enable interstellar travel.
I am no friend of the thought police. Nor do I necessarily believe that AI hate speech or misinformation will lead to extreme damage. I’m actually like Andreessen here and more afraid of AI censorship than I am AI hate speech. But, I don’t believe you can just write it off as a coastal elite non-issue. This is the same attitude that led to our current state of the left dominating basically every institution in the country, which the conservatives now bitch about as being unfair. If you don’t want it to happen, do something to make it not happen.
Andreessen takes the tech party line position of technology always producing more jobs in the long run. This might or might not be true in the case of AI, but what about the short run? AI is already taking jobs and turning people into dog walkers. Even those who didn’t “lose” their job has had AI make their jobs worse. Andreessen doesn’t discuss any of this, instead pointing to economic theory to make his case that AI won’t take jobs, despite what is already happening right before our eyes.
Likewise, Andreessen’s argument that AI will not drive inequality completely misses the point. Inequality doesn’t mean rich people have cool technology and poor people don’t. Inequality means rich people are much richer than poor people, and that is something that technological automation has definitely driven. If he wants to make the argument that AI (and technology more generally) increases everyone’s baseline quality of life, he can do that. But to argue that a tool that can do the job of hundreds of people won’t increase inequality is just silly.
Finally, Scott Alexander does a better job than I ever could of explaining why viewing technology as a race doesn’t make sense.
Overall, my problem with this article is the same as my problem with all AI optimists. They want us to believe that this technology is unlike any other that’s come before it and simultaneously will affect society the same way as all previous technologies. But you can’t have it both ways. Either this is a revolutionary technology with consequences we can’t currently imagine2, or this is a cool but not revolutionary technology with predictable results. It can’t be a revolutionary technology with predictable results. That’s by definition a contradiction.
But it’s also easy to see why Andreessen holds this position. In much the same way that he argues AI doomers have financial incentives to be the way they are, he has financial incentives to say the things he says. He’s a venture capitalist. If AI succeeds, he gets (even more) rich.
Politics
Conservatism Has No Moat
I’ve talked with some conservatives who believe that conservatism is the default state of things, and progressivism is the disease that has to be periodically treated. That’s really not the case. In actuality, progressivism is the default human condition, and conservatism is the disease that comes around once in a while.
If you’re a conservative who disagrees, can you think of one issue in American politics that has grown more conservative over time? The government is larger. We now have Obamacare. Gun laws are increasingly restrictive. There are now civil rights. Abortion (regardless of the recent Supreme Court decision) is far more accepted today than in the past. Same-sex marriage is now a thing. I can smoke a J on 5th Avenue.
And I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Younger generations are almost disgustingly liberal, and even self-proclaimed young Republicans support non-conservative positions such as tough gun laws.
Considering that the Republicans are in the business of winning elections, they have two options:
Stay conservative and never win again.
Gradually liberalize and maybe win again.
Obviously, they are going to choose door #2. But, in this case, if being a conservative means adopting liberal positions a little bit later than the liberals, what is the point of conservatism? Is being a conservative simply synonymous with being a temporary hurdle for the progressives?
Well, yeah. It is. Which is why I think the Republicans should ditch the whole conservative schtick and instead pitch a vision for the country beyond “opposite of what the Democrats want”. I’ve pitched an idea for this vision before, but it doesn’t really matter as long as it’s proactive, not reactionary.
Right now, no Republican candidate has any vision. It might not hurt them this time because they are running against a dude who literally needs a Life Alert, but it will bite them in the ass in the future.
Culture
Be Cool Being Cringe
For the first 10 months of my writing career, I wrote anonymously. It was a great 10 months that honestly I didn’t take full advantage of.
That’s because I now realize that being cringe is an absolute superpower when it comes to growing an audience online. The less you care about what people think about you, the better. And it’s a lot easier to not give a shit when people don’t know who you are3.
The most “successful”4 creators literally just don’t give a fuck. Like, look at this thread. I could never write some shit like that. But that cringy fake ass thread logged 7.8M views and Greg Isenberg is a multi-millionare, so why would he stop?
Or take Nikocado Avocado. I can’t watch him for more than 5 seconds without feeling intense second-hand embarrassment. But damn is that motherfucker famous.
I don’t really wanna get fat, but it might be time to start writing some cringy threads. God damnit.
Extras
UBI is being tested in England. Excited to see these results.
An AI firm won multi-million government contracts to monitor social media posts.
It turns out the CIA is really good at busting encrypted messages.
Charlie Light nails it on remote work for creative people. But, at the same time, I do agree that startups are better served with in-person work. Like most issues, it’s complicated.
De-dollarization has begun, and it’s not going to stop.
Climate change is making some areas of America uninsurable.
There’s no way that PGA-LIV merger goes through.
China has so many issues man. It makes it hard for me to really view them as much of a threat, and honestly, if they were to attack Taiwan, I wouldn’t be surprised if it went the same way as Ukraine-Russia.
Israel isn’t going to be happy about Iran’s new hypersonic ballistic missile.
Something has to be done about North Korean hacking.
The Twitter Files might not be as spicy as previously believed.
Biden just apparently doesn’t care about naming a national cyber director.
The commercial real estate problem is nearing crisis territory.
Kia and Hyundai are being sued over the “Kia Boys”. Instead of suing the companies, why doesn’t NYC just stop these kids from stealing cars?
TikTok is Chinese spyware.
Privacy continues to be under attack, this time with an expansion of the TSA’s facial recognition program. News flash: you can keep people safe without violating privacy.
Unfortunately, many Zoomers and Millenials disagree with me.
People are using deepfaked nudes to blackmail victims into giving them their real nudes. I don’t know about you, but giving your real nudes to stop your fake nudes from spreading seems like a bad idea.
Gerrymandering is now done with math.
DeSantis’s campaign has some weirdos on staff.
This is the bottom.
If true, this is child abuse.
Until next time, ✌️
Hit me up on Twitter!
I agree with this one
My opinion
And you don’t have to worry about cancel culture beyond just being cringe.
Famous
People compress historical timelines to come up with the 'tech benefits society' platitude, leaving out the decades of pain that hit average workers during the Industrial revolution.