💭 My thoughts ... on Noah Smith's and Matt Yglesias' thoughts on Marc Andreessen's 'Techno-Optimist Manifesto'
It's an important essay on an important topic: technological progress
Quote of the Issue
“My conservative Up Wing futurism rejects commanding society and its resources toward fulfilling some detailed central plan created by governmental and other elites. Such blueprints would assume impossible powers of prescience. But our society and economy are complex and fluid systems created by the decisions of all of us, as well as our leaders. No lone genius or government panel of geniuses can know all or process all the information generated by our decisions nor predict all the consequences of our actions.” - James Pethokoukis, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised
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The Essay
💭 My thoughts … on Noah Smith's and Matt Yglesias' thoughts on Marc Andreessen's 'Techno-Optimist Manifesto'
My previous post, “Critics of Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto fail basic economics,” looked at some of the viral but low-quality attacks on the venture capitalist’s recent essay — an essay I happen to like very much. Two other notable analyses of the Andreessen manifesto and/or the broad topic of progress are from two high-quality writers, namely Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias. So I wanted to deal with them separately.
In a long piece, “Thoughts on techno-optimism,” Smith notes that he’s pretty much endorsed Andresseen’s manifesto — and then launches into an explanation of what techno-optimism means to him, weaving in plenty of economics. Among his many excellent points, these are the ones that jumped out at me:
First, Smith discusses different types of optimism related to technological progress. He categorizes optimism into "positive" (belief in useful undiscovered technology) and "normative" (belief in technology improving the world). He also differentiates between "passive optimism” (technology's automatic, life-improving progress) and "active optimism" (technological progress requiring human action). A two-by-two chart from Smith:
Smith categorizes himself this way: “I subscribe to both positive and normative techno-optimism, but with reservations in both cases. I think there are plenty of new important discoveries out there to be made, but I do think it’s likely that they’ve become more expensive to find. I also think technology usually ends up making life better for most people, but that this isn’t always the case.”
Smith explains that he believes technological optimism is a kind of humanism because he defines technology as a tool that expands human choice. And he thinks more useful technology remains to be discovered because innovators don't fully capture the benefits of their innovations. This gap reduces the incentive to innovate. So the right policies to incentivize innovation can drive continued technological advance.
➡ My take: My new book, “The Conservative Futurist” makes a similar case that humanity can do better. There is more welfare-improving science to discover and technology to create. Our public policy decisions matter in the discovery and creation process, sometimes helping (government R&D, letting entrepreneurs get super-rich by providing innovative and useful goods and services) and sometimes harming (regulations that make it hard to build innovate — especially in the physical world, an immigration system that makes it hard for talented people to come to America). A culture that supports techno-optimism/techno-solutionism by supplying positive but realistic images of the future is also crucial. People need to believe that the churn and disruption from tech-driven economic growth are worth it for them and their families, that their kids will live in a better world — a world of greater wealth, health, opportunity, choice, and resilience.
Oh, and let me offer my own four-quadrant chart on future optimism, one created by Peter Hayward from Swinburne University and based on the magisterial The Image of the Future, a foundational futurist tech from Dutch sociologist Frederik Polak (who gets a big shout-out in my book). Up and to the right, my friends. ⤴↗
Second, Smith argues for a comprehensive societal approach to sustain technological progress. He explains that various entities — corporations, startups, universities, and government agencies — all play crucial roles because they focus on different aspects of technology and have varying incentive structures: DARPA, Alphabet’s X, “scrappy inventors in their garages.” Moreover, the widespread diffusion and implementation of technology requires cooperation among institutions, as exemplified by green energy technologies being hampered by regulatory hurdles such as the National Environmental Protection Act. Neither the private sector nor government alone can drive tech innovation at a rapid pace. Public-private partnerships, efficient bureaucracy, and even some monopolies have historically contributed to major technological breakthroughs.
➡ My take: In my book, I describe my version of Smith’s “all hands on deck” approach to tech progress in this way: Think of the American economy as a $25 trillion supercomputer, a wealth-generating techno-organism of connected companies, governments, and universities. This economic system's purpose is to process information (converting our thoughts into matter by reordering atoms) to create a modern prosperous society. The complex networks that form this high-energy computer must work creatively and productively. Policy must help produce educated, healthy humans who can connect to generate what statistical physicist César Hidalgo calls “crystals of imagination.” In short, pro-connection economics is pro-progress, pro-growth, Up Wing economics.
Third, Smith argues that “sustainability” is not the enemy of technological optimism but, in fact, a core aspect of it. He sees technological innovation as crucial for ensuring the long-term sustainability of society since it allows us to fix or ameliorate the problems caused by previous tech advancements, such as fossil fuel consumption and environmental degradation. In this way, the desire for tech progress is driven by the desire for a better future that values the well-being of future generations. At its core, techno-optimism is a belief in humanity's ability to advance and ensure a prosperous future for all. Smith: “Techno-optimism is thus much more than an argument about the institutions of today or the resource allocations of today. It’s a faith in humanity — and all sentient beings — propelling ourselves forward into the infinite tomorrow.”
➡ My take: The folks at Our World in Data provide the interesting fact that the lifespan of the typical mammalian species is about a million years. If you humans are the same, that’s 100 trillion future humans that our decisions today will affect to some degree or another. Maybe greatly affect our descendants if our tech advances can prevent, say, a giant hunk of ice and rock smashing into our planet or make us resilient to massive solar flares or gamma-ray bursts. Elon Musk makes a great point when he says, “We have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future” bycreating a multi-planetary civilization. It’s the Great Secular Commission!
Look, Smith and I no doubt have specific policy disagreements, such as where we should draw the line between too little and too much government intervention into the economy. But starting from a point of what I call “Up Wing” and Smith calls “Active Positive/Normative Optimism” produces a lot of common ground that I hope can eventually be found in our politics.
As for Matt Yglesias (whom I think basically and broadly agrees with Smith and me), his piece “The techno-optimist's fallacy” was also inspired by Andreessen’s manifesto, which Yglesias thinks suffers from the eponymous malady, described thusly:
What is the fallacy? It starts with the accurate observation that technological progress has, on net, been an incredible source of human betterment, almost certainly the major force of human betterment over the history of our species, and then tries to infer that therefore all individual instances of technological progress are good. This is not true. Indeed, it seems so obviously untrue that I couldn’t quite convince myself that anyone could believe it, which is why I kept abandoning drafts of the article. Because while I had a sense that this was an influential cognitive error, I kept thinking that I was maybe torching a straw man. Was anyone really saying this?
Yglesias apparently thinks Andreessen believes wholeheartedly in this fallacy, as evidenced by his essay. I don’t. Because Andreessen isn’t an idiot. And you would have to be an idiot to be unaware that sometimes nuclear power plants leak radiation and that internal combustion engines pollute. To be sure, Andreessen didn’t spend time on the downside trade-offs of tech progress. Why? My guess: because we have spent a half-century utterly obsessed with those trade-offs and soaking in a culture of future pessimism! We have that part down. Indeed, how much time have we spent discussing the downsides of the internet revolution — specifically social media — versus how our ability to research and collaborate online has been enhanced by the internet? No internet, ChatGPT or CRISPR, nuclear fusion, or SpaceX rockets — at least not yet.
One other thing: Andreessen is a fan of economic historian Joel Mokyr, who is mentioned in the essay. A big theme of Mokyr’s work: the ambiguities of tech progress. As Mokyr has written:
Whenever a technological solution is found for some human need, it creates a new problem. As Edward Tenner put it, technology ‘bites back’. The new technique then needs a further ‘technological fix’, but that one in turn creates another problem, and so on. The notion that invention definitely ‘solves’ a human need, allowing us to move to pick the next piece of fruit on the tree is simply misleading.
Or as the rescued astronaut Mark Watney says in The Martian in a wonderful distillation of Up Wing conservative futurism:
When I was up there, stranded by myself, did I think I was going to die? Yes. Absolutely, and that’s what you need to know going in because it’s going to happen to you. This is space. It does not cooperate. At some point everything is going to go south on you. Everything is going to go south and you’re going to say 'This is it. This is how I end.' Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math, you solve one problem. Then you solve the next one, and then the next and if you solve enough problems you get to come home.
And if you solve enough problems, if you do the math, you get to invent a tomorrow of more abundance and less suffering. Not a Utopia by any means, but a more humane world without many of the problems created by deep scarcity and zero-sum thinking. Faster, please!
Micro Reads
▶ Is America Raising a Nation of Scaredy-Cats? - Jessica Carl, Bberg Opinion |
▶ Religion and Growth - Sascha O. Becker, Jared Rubin, and Ludger Woessmann, SSRN |
▶ Is A 15-minute City within Reach in the United States? An Investigation of Activity-Based Mobility Flows in the 12 Most Populous US Cities - Tanhua Jin, Kailai Wang, et al., arXiv |
▶ Induced Innovation, Inventors, and the Energy Transition - Eugenie Dugoua and Todd Gerarden, NBER |
▶ Chevron Bets on Peak Green Energy - Editorial Board, WSJ Opinion |’
▶ Can we get limitless green hydrogen by splitting seawater? - James Dinneen, NewScientist |
▶ What are solid-state batteries and why do we need them? - Matthew Sparkes, NewScientist |
▶ AI Backlash May Bring UK Social Unrest, Infosys Partner Says - Lucy White, Bloomberg |
▶ Tech alliance in AI standards push to fill ‘gap’ in regulation - Cristina Criddle and Madhumita Murgia, FT |
▶ Art Has Long Shaped Technology. With AI, the Roles Reverse - Alex Webb. Bloomberg |
▶ White House to unveil sweeping AI executive order next week - Cat Zakrzewski Cristiano Lima, and Tyler Pager, WaPo |
▶ California suspends Cruise robotaxis after car dragged pedestrian 20 feet - Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica |
▶ Sam Altman on the Future of AI—and How to Navigate the Tricky Path Forward - WSJ |
▶ Why I let an AI chatbot train on my book - Bryan Walsh, VOX |
▶ This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI - Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review |
▶ Will ChatGPT’s hallucinations be allowed to ruin your life? - Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica |
▶ Apple, caught by surprise in generative AI boom, to spend $1 billion per year to catch up: Report - Jake Piazza, CNBC
▶ Microsoft Gets Another Leg Up on Google in AI Race - Dan Gallagher, WSJ |
▶ Language Models Hallucinate, but May Excel at Fact Verification - Jian Guan, Jesse Dodge, David Wadden, Minlie Huang, and Hao Peng, arXiv |
▶ Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig on why AI and social media are causing a free speech crisis for the internet - Nilay Patel, The Verge |
▶ Marc Andreessen and John Doerr Join Closed Senate Forum on AI - Oma Seddiq, Bloomberg |
▶ Minds of machines: The great AI consciousness conundrum - Grace Huckins, MIT Technology Review |
▶ Google Founder’s Airship Gets FAA Clearance - Mark Harris, IEEE Spectrum |
▶ What would it take to make the most inhospitable planet for life? - Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte, NewScientist |
▶ The Space-Based Drug Factory That Can’t Come Home - Mark Harris, IEEE Spectrum |
▶ Space Manufacturing is Not Science Fiction - Jason Drakeford, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper, and Jeffery DelViscio, Scientific American |
▶ Painting Mars green! Amazing oxygen-producing paint could make space colonization possible - StudyFinds |
Andreessen's manifesto is like a boxer who's forgotten to guard his chin, leaving himself wide open for a knockout punch. By failing to acknowledge the potential downsides and trade-offs of technological progress, he's practically gift-wrapped a target for critics.
Just as a poorly argued legal case can set a damaging precedent, Andreessen's manifesto risks becoming a reference point for critics who wish to dismiss the pro-progress position as naive or out of touch with reality.
So, Andreessen, if you're listening, it's time to step up to the plate. It's time to add some nuance to your argument, and to stop making it so easy for critics to knock down your position. Because right now, your manifesto is doing more harm than good to the pro-progress movement.
Andreessen's piece reads a bit like Galt's speech.