It would be reasonable upon reading Marc Andreessen’s “techno-optimist manifesto”, to feel somewhat perplexed, and then to wonder: is the billionaire bitcoin-backing venture capitalist OK? After all, the 5,000-odd-word essay, published on his VC fund a16z’s website on Monday, does contain such phrases as: “Love doesn’t scale . . . Let’s stick with money”; “We believe in the romance of technology . . . the eros of the train, the car, the electric light”; and, perhaps most startlingly: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”
Yet many Silicon Valley types who have read Andreessen’s screed — the central argument of which is that “there is no material problem . . . that cannot be solved with more technology” — seem not only to see nothing even mildly unusual about it, but to believe that it is actually a work of genius.
“This is the path towards progress,” Brian Armstrong, founder of crypto exchange Coinbase, enthused on X. “Decel narratives are all around us in popular culture and in meetings among elites. Thank you @a16z for a breath of fresh air,” he added. The fact that a16z is an investor in his company presumably makes the air extra fresh.