‘Techno-Optimism’ is Not Something You Should Believe In Current … – Current Affairs

Billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen recently published a manifesto for techno-optimism, a worldview that contends technology will solve all of humanitys problems and create a world of infinite abundance for all. Andreessens manifesto is so extreme that it has been heavily criticized even in the tech sector. It accuses anyone who opposes the unrestricted development of AI of having blood on their hands (since AI will save lives, meaning that if you slow down its development, you are essentially a murderer). It quotes favorably from Italian fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in envisioning a race of technologically-augmented supermen and conquerors. It condemns socialism in favor of merit and achievement and treats social responsibility, trust and safety, risk management, and even sustainable development goals as enemy ideas.

Andreessens manifesto comes across as unhinged and manic. It is, in fact, more a religious catechism than a manifesto. It is filled with We believe assertions that lay out the core of the Techno-Optimist faith. For example:

Are any of these beliefs substantiated by actual evidence? Do we get convincing proof, or even substantive argument, that human wants and needs are infinite or that every single material problem can be solved by technology? No. All we get is assertion, even around highly dubious claims about human nature and the workings of free markets. For instance, Andreessen claims that free markets are the only sensible way to organize society in part because humans are motivated by the selfish pursuit of money:

David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons love, money, or force. Love doesnt scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Lets stick with money.

But whether or not David Friedman says people only do things for other people for three reasons, empirical evidence suggests that people actually often do things for other people out of a sense of perceived fairness. Scientists who study statistically valid samples of actual humans, instead of projecting from their own inclinations or observations of their abnormally greed-motivated peers, find that humans evolved to beas Frans de Waal observedmoral beings to the core. Andreessen is not interested in evidence, though. He makes this clear at the end of his manifesto, which says that in lieu of detailed endnotes and citations, read the work of these people, and you too will become a Techno-Optimist, before listing a series of figures ranging from anonymous Twitter accounts (e.g., @BasedBeffJezos, @bayeslord) to right-wing economists (Ludwig von Mises, Thomas Sowell).

It would be easy to dismiss Andreessens manifesto as the frenzied ranting of another rich man who thinks that the depth and correctness of ones opinions on political and social matters exist in proportion to ones net worth. But Andreessens techno-optimism is hardly new, unique, or persuasive. (Optimism has always been a tool used by the powerful to advance their interests.) In this particular philosophy, growth and technology have magical problem-solving capabilities, and if we pursue them relentlessly, we will eliminate the need to ask any deeper questions (such as growth toward what? or technology that does what? or, crucially, how the benefits are allocated, i.e. growth and tech for whom?). The optimism in techno-optimism is the idea that we can be confident that the future will be a certain way without having to do much work ourselves to make sure it is that way. The cult-like chanting of the god-word technology is typically an attempt to evade the political (i.e., ethical) work of deciding how to justly allocate harms and benefits. Andreessen is unashamed about this: he explicitly rejects the need for socially responsible technology and the precautionary principle. He doesnt spend a moment dealing with the many serious dangers that people have highlighted around current artificial intelligence technology (such as its capacity to propagate racial biases or manufacture hoaxes and lies at breathtaking speeds). For Andreessen, we dont need to think about which technologies to develop or how to develop them responsibly. The invisible hand of the free market knows best.

Faith is indeed the appropriate word for this kind of optimism, which is a totally unjustified confidence in ones ability to know how the future will unfold. Is it actually the case that all of our problems can be solved by technology? That question is never considered, because in a catechism it doesnt have to be. After all, we believe that all problems can be solved by technology. For Andreessen, belief is enough. (Likewise, he believes that it is OK for the global population to reach 50 billion, therefore there is no need to prove that the Earth can sustain this population.)

What happens when Andreessens confident beliefs are actually put to the test? Is he right that capitalist markets and technology create abundance for all? To assess the credibility of that claim, we can examine how real-world abundance has been allocated by greed-driven markets in practice. Take, for instance, our global food system. We produce more than enough calories to feed all humanswhich is to say that our total food supply is adequatebut 77 percent of global farmland fattens livestock to make meat for the wealthy, and rich-world pets seem to have better food securitythan 2.37 billion people (nearly one in three humans do not have access to adequate food, according to the U.N.). Meanwhile, 150 million kids are stunted by malnutrition, and we waste enough grain to feed 1.9 billion people annually in the production of environmentally disastrous biofuels. And under the guise of enhancing market efficiency, some of the worlds richest people and institutions, like hedge-funders and elite university endowments, invest (which is to say gamble) in food commodity markets. We can see clearlywithout elaborate economistic euphemismsthat the market ensures that greedy ghouls are profiting by taking calories out of the mouths of the planets poorest and most vulnerable children.

The chart on the left shows the steady global supply of calories per person, which bears no relation to the rollercoaster ride of food commodity prices on the right.

Those huge price swings, which harmed the global poor, were driven by commodity speculation, not by the fundamentals of supply and demand. Clearly, the market is not producing morally acceptable outcomes here. Does this not mock the fine Enlightenment philosophizing about equal human dignity among all? More importantly, does this provide justification for Andreessens doctrine of market- and tech-driven optimism? How does this argument about the efficiency of the markets look to the eyes of the worlds poorest and least powerful people? Only the absurdly blinkered could imagine that our global food abundance is used rationally or efficientlynever mind ethically. Is there any reason to expect Andreessens techno-capital machine will allocate any other kind of abundance in a better or more morally justifiable manner?

One concrete example of how capitalist-controlled technology is actually used is the Covid crisis, where profits have been placed above the lives of the poor. The moral fiasco of vaccine apartheidwhereby rich countries hoarded vaccines and refused to waive intellectual property patent rights so that lower-income countries might produce affordable vaccine for their populationshas been linked to more than a million avoidable deaths (even today, according to the U.N. and the W.H.O., two-thirds of people in low-income countries remain unvaccinated against Covid). That was on top of an already inadequate and unjust healthcare system for the worlds population overall. Scholars estimate that 15.6 million excess deaths per year could be prevented through universal global healthcare and public health measures. (The climate crisis has also created a deadly battle over howand for whomour technologies will be used, as four billion people face health-threatening heat by 2030.)

Do any of these preventable deaths or harms appear at all in Andreessens calculus? No. Instead, he perversely focuses on the fear that the deceleration of AI will cost lives, likening AI skeptics to murderers. But the market, as we have seen, already kills millions by allocating goods and services according to ability to pay rather than need. The loss of life due to not developing AI sufficiently is merely speculative, while the avoidable deaths of people who have fallen victim to the markets are already well documented. By Andreessens logic, we ought to consider these millions of deaths to be mass murder by markets, which arent historically rare.1 To ignore so many deaths happening now is absurd and cruel.

The markets distribution is grotesquely unfair, and this fact undercuts Andreessens faith that the techno-capital machine is not anti-humanin fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us. The machines, in fact, do not work for us automatically, even if they could be put to humane use. To quote an astute insight from science fiction legend Ted Chiang, Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. Without a suitable political and social context, technology will often be used against those with the least power.

It is also always crucial to probe the meaning of human and us. Us often means me and people like mein this case, rich humans. (See, for instance, Steven Pinkers claim that we are insufficiently grateful for human progress, which implicitly excludes those who do not experience its upsides.) If poor humans cant meet market prices, they get a far less pro-human fate: death by preventable disease.

A common claim often pushed by rich elites like Andreessen is that market growth is solving global poverty. As Andreessen puts it, markets are by far the most effective way to lift vast numbers of people out of poverty. But Andreessen is wrong, and these ideas are wildly misleading.

For instance, the income gains made by the worlds people in recent years have been anything but fair. World Inequality Database data show that from 2009 to 2019, the aggregate global personal income pie grew by $37 trillion. Of that, the top 10 percent took $8.7 trillion (24 percent) while the bottom 10 percent got $25 billion (0.07 percent). Thats not a typo. The poor got 0.07 percent, about 350 times less than the rich.

Claims that global growth is lifting people out of poverty do not square with the following figures. Zooming in on the World Inequality Data reveals that average annual individual income gains in that decade for top versus bottom ten-percent earners were $1,800 and $5. Five dollars a year is 1.3 cents per daya far less laudable feat than Andreessen et al. celebrate. Its hard to argue that $5 added to the extreme poverty level of $6942 per year is really an escape from anything.

Now lets consider what would happen if we redistributed some of those earnings from top to bottoma thought experiment I wrote about in Jacobin last year. If just 5 percent of these top 10-percenter gains were redistributed, the bottom 10 percent would gain $90. Theyd escape poverty 18 times better than their current gain of $5 which is to say that theres so much more we could be doing to increase the resources available to the poor.

Now lets say our aim were to end extreme poverty without delay. This could be achieved. The World Inequality Lab (WIL) has calculated that a tiny wealth tax on the obscenely wealthy (those who have at least $100 million) would net $581 billionthats almost triple the amount of current global aid. The same tax on all millionaires would net $1.6 trillion. Thats more than enough resources to get the job done pronto.

But under the greed-driven, market growth method that Andreessen advocates, the poor will just have to wait. It takes around $1,400 of global income growth to put an extra $1 into the hands of a person at the global bottom. This is an enormously inefficient method! It also amounts to hundreds of times more in gains for the already rich, thus making this approach more about perpetuating inequality than about alleviating poverty.

The truth here is that the improvement in extreme poverty levelsthe metric so beloved by progress-cheering elites and which is shown on the left belowis nothing more than, as I have stated before, a tiny fig leaf barely concealing an ugly truth. The data couldnt be clearer: the GDP per capita gap between rich and poor nations, as shown by the figure below on the right, is growing, not shrinking.

And without robust redistribution, as U.N.s Olivier De Schutter notes, it would take 200 years to eradicate poverty under a $5 a day line, assuming empirical market growth rates. It is therefore grotesque for anyone to claim that this situation ought to be seen as good news for humanity, especially when we note that $5 per day amounts to one-eighth Americas already too-low poverty line, and in each and every one of those 200 years, gains for the global rich will be hundreds of times greater than for the poor. Two hundred years amounts to eight generations of people being denied an appallingly low level of resources so that the rich can get richer.

The idea that market progress is closing the rich-poor gap is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy, an elite-flattering story. The global economy, which is run by gangster financial institutions, has no real mechanism for alleviating inequality and poverty, and there are no grounds to support optimism that it will create universal abundance if left to its own devices. That so many believe capitalism is making fantastic progress against poverty by showering the poor with trickle-down blessings testifies to a spectacularly successful cover-up. Disguising rapacious global profiteering as anti-poverty do-gooding is genius PR, and Andreessen is just the latest to parrot this delusional assertion that the markets will alleviate poverty.

We have seen that the assertion that a techno-capital machine will produce an infinite upward spiral of abundance has no grounding in the world of fact. It is a pleasant fantasy that exists in the minds of believers and keeps them from having to ask hard questions about how we can actually create economies that produce a decent standard of living for all without imperiling the planet.

Optimism expresses unwarranted confidence that the worlds problems will somehow be solved without our having to do the difficult work of coming up with (and implementing) political solutions ourselves. It is worth emphasizing that optimismtechno or otherwiseis always a dangerous philosophy. This becomes clear by looking at how the word has evolved conceptually over time.

Optimism was coined by 17th-century polymath Gottfried Leibniz, who used the term to mean that we live in literally the best of all possible worlds. Leibnizs argument that this had to be absolutely the best of all possible worlds had been meant in both a moral and a mathematical sense. He was a god-and-math smitten genius; in his teens he imagined settling all philosophical debates using a purely logical language that an arithmetical machine could process. He and his Enlightenment peers harbored vast hope for what math-driven thinking could do. To Leibniz it was obvious that the god-ordained order of nature operates by maxima and minima. By Gods very nature, his creation must do the most good at the cost of the least evil. Thus, all that exists is part of the divine plan, and all evil serves Gods greater good (albeit in often mysterious ways). This calculus-like optimizing and economizing imagery was vital to casting all woes as necessary evils. Philosophical poet Alexander Pope, in perhaps the 18th centurys favorite poem, stated the dont-worry-be-happy doctrine similarly, asserting that One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

Then comes Voltaire, who saw both these views as obviously preposterous. Far from benign, these ideas were, to his mind, dangerous. In his famous 1759 novella Candide, or Optimism, he mercilessly lampooned these ideas and popularized optimism as an insult. In the novella, throughout Candides many ordeals, his tutor (every young aristocrat had one back then), Dr. Pangloss, applies strict optimism: all events, crises included, are for the best. Even Pangloss acquisition of syphilis is deemed positive, since the pathogen came with the plunder that brought chocolate to Europe. Voltaire saw that optimism could easily sanction a numbing indifference to human suffering. It was a worldview plausible only to young aristocrats born into blessings and privilege.

As Voltaire warned, the idea of an all-for-the-best grand plan has long been used to justify inaction in the face of suffering. Examples abound. For instance, titan of early economics Reverend Thomas Malthus decried conventional charitymisery and starvation were Gods provident checks on the poor, to keep them from reproducing like rabbits. Providence was better served by toil in harsh for-profit workhouses. Charles Dickens wrote Hard Times to attack the scientific cruelty (a phrase from Karl Polanyi) of economists who advocated that workhouses served the all-for-the-best optimistic grand plan. Dickens skewers a character who felt the Good Samaritan was a bad economist. Up to well into the 19th century, economics, often thought of as a rational and neutral science, was heavily influenced by theology. Of course, resource allocation is always a deeply moral endeavor, even when supposedly inspired by heavenly plans or hidden under earthly mathematical schemes. But that morality need not be dictated by the doctrines of a particular religion.

Similarly concerning, economics as currently practiced often presents itself as morally neutral. As Freakonomics authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner put it, Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work whereas economics represents how it actually does work. For Andreessen, it seems that worshiping thein his viewomnipotent and omniscient market is central to his religious cult of techno-optimism.

Many economists and market optimists like Andreessen now sanction a similar scientific cruelty. Like Pangloss, todays pro-market pundits in effect preach that present material suffering is just part of the grand plan on the road to a bright future. Its a seductive message to the contemporary equivalents of Voltaires smug upbeat aristocrats. Like Leibniz, todays Optimists urge the continuation of staggeringly unjust but self-serving systems. Their equivalent of a best-of-all-possible outcomes is the rational resource allocations of the great Invisible Hand. The economy is seen as a mathematical optimization scheme, which operates with qualities tantamount to omniscience and quasi-omnipotence. Indeed, thats precisely how Andreessen speaks of it, repeating the idea that no human has sufficient information to question the Invisible Hand judgements.

But this notion of Market Providence is, of course, riddled with deep anti-poor biases. To the market gods, your ability to avoid material suffering, never mind aspire to happiness, should be granted strictly in accordance with your demonstrated market virtues, expressed solely in cold hard cash. Thats the core doctrine of trickle-down market theology. But as the Federal Reserves own Jeremy Rudd wrote: the primary role of mainstream economics is to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order.

Andreessens manifesto is a perfect example of a bundle of ideas that have been called TESCREAL by mile Torres and Timnit Gebru (this acronym stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism). According to these ideas, humanity is on a trajectory toward some great technological miracle that will massively augment human capacities and produce endless abundance for all. The ideas themselves often come uncomfortably close to those of classical eugenics (see Andreessens quotation of a fascist and belief in Nietzschean supermen). In practice, they seem likely to produce a dystopia that only a billionaire could love. But sadly, the billionaires who believe this stuff have a great deal of power in our world as it exists.

In a way, it is a good thing that Andreessen wrote and published his manifesto. It lays bare what the planet is up against. These are the beliefs that many of the aspiring masters of the universe hold. They preach a dangerous faith in technology and capitalist markets and are unwilling to consider any of the disastrous drawbacks produced by poorly-designed tech and unregulated markets. They dismiss socialism as the enemy of growth and abundance, waving away all considerations of justice and equality. They are utterly detached from the real-world conditions of peoples lives (TechCrunch asked, When was the last time Marc Andreessen talked to a poor person?). Like any other monomaniacal faithin which doubters are seen as enemies and beliefs are accepted without evidencethis package of beliefs is deeply threatening to any moral persons vision of a just and sustainable future for humans and all that inhabit the planet. As Voltaire knew, optimism is typically a demon in disguise.

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'Techno-Optimism' is Not Something You Should Believe In Current ... - Current Affairs