I'm totally on board with techno-optimism. Capitalism and technological progress have been the two biggest drivers of a better standard of life for humanity (although I have to note that capitalism is pretty bad at distributing the gains).
As a society, it seems like we're still pretty immature in our thinking about the risks and externalities of new technology. In my opinion, too many people are either going full booster like Andreessen and ignoring any downsides, or full naysayer and making claims like a modest amount of misinformation on social media being one of society's major ills. People seem to have the hardest time taking costs and benefits into account. We also seem to have lost sight of material progress in particular. The most important thing we can do for people is to make sure they have food, housing, healthcare, and so on. But we seem to keep taking our eye off the ball and worrying about things like relative status.
“Marc lists various “enemies” — not people, but ideas and institutions that he thinks restrict the growth of technology.”
Andreessen is just another whiney tech-bro. Apparently, he forgets taxpayers subsidized most of his education at a State Land Grant University. If he’s not baiting-and-switching naive investors with shitcoins. He’s far from a candidate for canonization. In fact, there are people much smarter and thoughtful than Andreessen that have worked for institutions such as DARPA whose names will never know. These are people who easily could have gone into private enterprise and earned much more. Personally, I’m weary of the worship of the tech-bro culture. I, too, an a techno-optimist, but I see Andreessen, Musk, Dorsey, et alia who are self-referential and give themselves far more credit than they deserve. Being a tech billionaire doesn’t give one license to expound as an expert on everything under the sun. The world and universe are much bigger and more important than the insulated billionaires of Silicon Valley.
I had more fun looking at the clip art you chose for today's post than I had trying to even read one paragraph of Andreesen's screed. I fall in the Ed Zitron camp (see this week's Substack where he skewers Andreesen) that bloviating posts are just not worth my time these days. Clearly anyone can write on the Internet and even maintain a website (I've done both over the years) but they have to be judged by the content and in this case there is nothing there other than some Randian platitudes and general complaints. Folks should really pay more attention to Molly White if they really want to know where the future of Web3 and assorted other scams.
So happy you inserted that paragraph about animals. Until I reached it I was getting worried that my brain was going to get stuck in an endless loop: “What about animals? What about animals? What about animals…”
There should be an international treaty on medical research that pushes governments to spend more. The mRNA tech shows what can be done even in a short period of time when you have money and focus.
This could be a disaster or a great advacement. How many medications or procedures are no longer used because they cause more harm than good? Individual countries approving delays improvements in life but also sometimes delays harm and wasted money.
The uterine replicator seems just around the corner, technologically. Birth rates are gonna get real weird when rich people in developed countries can decant platoons of babies.
I don't think artificial uteruses are the limiting factor in rich-person reproduction, at all. Upper-class and upper-middle-class people do not put social value or status on having lots of kids; if anything having a lot of kids is low status. Then there's the cost of having all those kids, which can be prohibitive when the parents are trying to give each one a maximal shot at the upper class. EDIT: I only know about US culture and can't speak for elsewhere.
Just around the corner as in 20-30 years from now (which we know sometimes means much longer)? Since it's a medical technology (meaning FDA approval), high stakes, and borderline taboo, I don't see how this would get adopted fast. What do you think? Am I thinking about it wrong?
More like 200-500 years. This technology would be so hard to build, and currently has so little demand, that we shouldn't expect it for a very long time.
It's not surprising that there's no demand for a product that doesn't exist. Since having a child involves a lot of pain, inconvenience, and even a risk of death, I think there would be a lot of demand.
You definitely might be right that it would be popular if it existed. It often works out that way.
But lots of technologies were in huge demand before they existed. We've sought cures for most diseases for as long as we've known they existed, and the drugs, vaccines, etc that we now use against them were often invented hundreds of years later.
So that tangible current demand is what I'm saying is missing.
In addition to that I don't believe the tech is even nearing feasibility.
In general, if a medical tech is just around the corner, there is a company with at least $20M in funding and at least $200M of biobucks working toward clinical trials.
I appreciate the "sustainability is technology" call-out and I think it gets to a simple and much deeper disagreement between perhaps Marc and most of the people poo-pooing the manifesto. Everyone has a different definition of technology.
Let's take another "enemy" Marc calls out -- trust and safety. That's technology! In the social media context, it's a solution to "how do you scale conversation". It sometimes has the imprimatur of government, but it's largely a free market response. Meta has paid moderators. Reddit has volunteers and more granular communities. X is doing a free for all but you have to pay money. BlueSky and the Fediverse are trying more distributed approaches. Some will fail. Some will find product market fit. Some are more organizational or business methods than hard tech. Some are clever techniques like shadow banning. And some are actual hard tech than using machine learning.
Marc doesn't think that's real tech because he doesn't think trust and safety solve real problems. But if you buy that things like disinfo, polarization, harassment, spam, and social media induced depression are both real and bad, then attempts to solve this are as real a "technology" as attempts to cure disease or male pattern baldness or whatever else bothers people these days.
Good luck. What's missing is ecology and the interdependence of species. You've left out the rest of life on the planet and the conditions it creates that allow us to survive. Humans are not smart enough to get a techno world right. We are, in fact, messing up the future with technologies that damage ecosystems. In other words, I feel you are thinking about it wrong, leaving out the rest of creation.
"And there are many more varieties and numbers of plants and animals in the world since humans started domesticating and breeding them."
I cannot believe I am responding to somebody wrong on the internet, but holy fuck bud is this bit as insane as it is ignorant.
No, absolutely there are not "many more varieties and numbers of plants and animals in the world since humans started domesticating and breeding". This is innumerate and cannot be supported by any data. For anybody who stumbles upon this comment, we are experiencing mass extinction, a massive, overwhelming reduction in the number of species that will take millions of years to recover, not an expansion: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2306987120
Our current use of technology is anti-life, even if it is "pro-human" in a narrow, short-term sense. The absolute biomass on our planet is going DOWN, not up: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5
Again, sustainability itself is a technology. Promoting life is a technology. Choices are tech. And currently, our tech is not being used optimally. Quite literally, the planet and the rest of creation created the conditions that allowed us to begin this technological journey, they are the substrate that we build upon. And they are finite. Really worrying that this basic fact could be missed as a result of "techno-optimism".
What metric would you propose for judging whether innovation is accelerating or decelerating?
In other words, how can I even tell whether the optimists or the pessimists are correct about the rate at which fruit (low-hanging or not) is being picked?
Yeah, and it seems like it would be noisy, since it's obtained, I think, by subtracting other data. Also the only TFP data I've seen that goes back to the 19th century is in Gordon's book, and his 50-year bins make me suspicious—even though I find his qualitative narrative pretty convincing. Your narrative sounds convincing too, but I can't tell whether you actually disagree with Gordon on any testable claim. Do you?
But TFP is the best objective measure I know of. Life expectancy seems like another good one. Gordon's idea is to pick out some technologies and decide he's more impressed by the toilet than Facebook or whatever. But those things aren't objectively comparable, nor can he even begin to make a complete list.
Well, to give Gordon's argument a real world example, indoor plumbing and water treatment eliminated cholera and typhoid fever from killing people, and increased life expectancy. I don't think Facebook is comparable in that way.
Life expectancy is definitely a good measure of progress, which is why I mentioned it above. A measure of overall burden of disease is also good. Same with labor saved, median $ consumed, or GDP.
If Gordon mentioned things like the toilet merely as examples of these phenomena, I'd be with him. His book predates the episode where covid vaccines saves millions of lives, but now we have it as an example too.
But Gordon seems also to be saying that modern technologies are less impressive than older ones. Now, to me, covid vaccines are more impressive than the toilet, and I say that partly because such immense modern skill was needed to create them. But I don't think the two can really be compared in their impressiveness, because they are unlike each other, despite both having health benefits.
Nor do I even think we have a good definition of what we think makes technologies impressive.
Certainly fun to read about each one in detail, though.
I always thought the argument was that technologies like vaccines or inoculation, which go all the way back to Edward Jenner's experiments with cowpox, which ultimately resulted in the world's first vaccine, and eventually resulted in the elimination of smallpox, are less important to humanity than social media or email. Now, the question is what defines importance?? Here, it seems it'd be defined as things that would be an inconvenience to live without, versus things that would be fatal to live without. People could live without cellphones, or email, but they'd die without radiation therapy, antibiotics, or clean drinking water.
Good article overall - BUT the key thing missing in my opinion is any discussion of the negative externalities of techno-optimism. Yes, with the "right policies", that is taken care of - but realistically in our world, that simply doesn't happen. Some technologies make only minimal sense given the externalities.
Noah's seed example is a good one - the externality of depleting the ability to grow more trees is critical - in this case, his example is a small group where that effect is felt by the people who make the technology change - But in the real world, the externality is often an effect on others (pollution near industrial facilities, etc, etc and of course warming). So, the feedback loop is missing.
The hard problem isn't whether technology can advance or even be generally useful, but how to craft a system where those externalities fit into the equation of what is useful, feasible, etc.... Technology is likely to keep advancing no matter what (positive), but "normative" only happens to the overall population if the externalities really are dealt with.
Actually, externalities are still ignored frequently. Lots of folks object to their externality not being paid attention to - and it can take a lot of people together to actually make something happen (Noah's "right policies"). Pollution is down because a ton of people demanded it eventually. But there are still bad sources of pollution being built all the time (especially in poorer neighborhoods where there is less power to affect it).
So, yes, when enough people object, the externality can be dealt with - but it isn't inherent in society or the system. Which is my point. Normative "techno-optimism" in its naive form assumes that technology causes an overall society benefit - but that benefit is often at the cost to portions of the society that have less political say. And many technologists ignore that part of the equation since it doesn't affect them directly.
The free market provides incentives to privatize gains and socialize losses, or in this case to drive “positive internalities” at the expense of negative externalities. Without regulation this is an unstable system, leading to excessive swings and ultimately violent uprising and revolution. The trick is to find the right balance of regulation, limiting the pollution without stifling further innovation and development. To argue for the technolibertarian extreme of no regulation is not a sustainable path and seems a bit naive.
While largely agreeing with Andreessen’s manifesto, the strict rejection of regulation and of UBI seems strange to me, given that his main argument is that technology exists for the betterment of all humans.
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.
Noah, you've just made the case for teaching HumanEcology K-14!!!! Yea!!! Without first instilling the rationale for Active/Normative, the risks will be high. Human Ecology first gels the concept of healthy society and then develops it one on one so it can be experienced by choice in each student's life. Learning it early is key, so is making it experiential -- it then lasts a lifetime. When you can cook a meal responsibly and enjoy sharing it, you get the lesson. Human Ecology sets the table for a really big meal, everyone invited! If it was delivered via our public schools, both humans and animals and their ecosystems, might survive.
I constantly see GDP measured as the amount of stuff people buy instead of how much our country produces. Is that just how GDP is measured, or is it really Gross National Consumption?
GDP is more than consumption, because it also includes investment. But GDP measures production according to how much people pay for it. Payment is how we aggregate the various things that people buy for investment and consumption; if people pay $100 for a TV, that's $100 of GDP.
I'm totally on board with techno-optimism. Capitalism and technological progress have been the two biggest drivers of a better standard of life for humanity (although I have to note that capitalism is pretty bad at distributing the gains).
As a society, it seems like we're still pretty immature in our thinking about the risks and externalities of new technology. In my opinion, too many people are either going full booster like Andreessen and ignoring any downsides, or full naysayer and making claims like a modest amount of misinformation on social media being one of society's major ills. People seem to have the hardest time taking costs and benefits into account. We also seem to have lost sight of material progress in particular. The most important thing we can do for people is to make sure they have food, housing, healthcare, and so on. But we seem to keep taking our eye off the ball and worrying about things like relative status.
“Marc lists various “enemies” — not people, but ideas and institutions that he thinks restrict the growth of technology.”
Andreessen is just another whiney tech-bro. Apparently, he forgets taxpayers subsidized most of his education at a State Land Grant University. If he’s not baiting-and-switching naive investors with shitcoins. He’s far from a candidate for canonization. In fact, there are people much smarter and thoughtful than Andreessen that have worked for institutions such as DARPA whose names will never know. These are people who easily could have gone into private enterprise and earned much more. Personally, I’m weary of the worship of the tech-bro culture. I, too, an a techno-optimist, but I see Andreessen, Musk, Dorsey, et alia who are self-referential and give themselves far more credit than they deserve. Being a tech billionaire doesn’t give one license to expound as an expert on everything under the sun. The world and universe are much bigger and more important than the insulated billionaires of Silicon Valley.
I had more fun looking at the clip art you chose for today's post than I had trying to even read one paragraph of Andreesen's screed. I fall in the Ed Zitron camp (see this week's Substack where he skewers Andreesen) that bloviating posts are just not worth my time these days. Clearly anyone can write on the Internet and even maintain a website (I've done both over the years) but they have to be judged by the content and in this case there is nothing there other than some Randian platitudes and general complaints. Folks should really pay more attention to Molly White if they really want to know where the future of Web3 and assorted other scams.
I don't know, I love bloviating, so... 😅
So happy you inserted that paragraph about animals. Until I reached it I was getting worried that my brain was going to get stuck in an endless loop: “What about animals? What about animals? What about animals…”
Also, why are we so cheap and restrictive on medical research? There are a lot of medical issues to improve and resolve. Like only now has the US government started to get serious about osteoarthritis https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230626928821/en/AngryArthritis-Founder-and-Osteoarthritis-Patient-Steve-O%E2%80%99Keeffe-Applauds-ARPA-H-Moonshot-to-Find-a-Cure-as-He-Works-to-Eliminate-Joint-Replacements
There should be an international treaty on medical research that pushes governments to spend more. The mRNA tech shows what can be done even in a short period of time when you have money and focus.
This could be a disaster or a great advacement. How many medications or procedures are no longer used because they cause more harm than good? Individual countries approving delays improvements in life but also sometimes delays harm and wasted money.
The uterine replicator seems just around the corner, technologically. Birth rates are gonna get real weird when rich people in developed countries can decant platoons of babies.
I don't think artificial uteruses are the limiting factor in rich-person reproduction, at all. Upper-class and upper-middle-class people do not put social value or status on having lots of kids; if anything having a lot of kids is low status. Then there's the cost of having all those kids, which can be prohibitive when the parents are trying to give each one a maximal shot at the upper class. EDIT: I only know about US culture and can't speak for elsewhere.
This correlation doesn't seem to be holding any longer. High status, high income families are starting to show higher fertility than middle income families in the US. Here's one reference, although I'm not sure it's the best one. I think Noah or maybe Matt Yglesias has written about this before. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/new-economics-of-fertility-doepke-hannusch-kindermann-tertilt
there's also no point in decanting platoons of babies if you have no platoons of parents to love and care for each one of them.
Platoons of childless lower class adults forced by economic circumstance into being full-time hired caregivers?
Oh there's an idea. Can't buy love though.
Just around the corner as in 20-30 years from now (which we know sometimes means much longer)? Since it's a medical technology (meaning FDA approval), high stakes, and borderline taboo, I don't see how this would get adopted fast. What do you think? Am I thinking about it wrong?
More like 200-500 years. This technology would be so hard to build, and currently has so little demand, that we shouldn't expect it for a very long time.
It's not surprising that there's no demand for a product that doesn't exist. Since having a child involves a lot of pain, inconvenience, and even a risk of death, I think there would be a lot of demand.
You definitely might be right that it would be popular if it existed. It often works out that way.
But lots of technologies were in huge demand before they existed. We've sought cures for most diseases for as long as we've known they existed, and the drugs, vaccines, etc that we now use against them were often invented hundreds of years later.
So that tangible current demand is what I'm saying is missing.
In addition to that I don't believe the tech is even nearing feasibility.
In general, if a medical tech is just around the corner, there is a company with at least $20M in funding and at least $200M of biobucks working toward clinical trials.
I appreciate the "sustainability is technology" call-out and I think it gets to a simple and much deeper disagreement between perhaps Marc and most of the people poo-pooing the manifesto. Everyone has a different definition of technology.
Let's take another "enemy" Marc calls out -- trust and safety. That's technology! In the social media context, it's a solution to "how do you scale conversation". It sometimes has the imprimatur of government, but it's largely a free market response. Meta has paid moderators. Reddit has volunteers and more granular communities. X is doing a free for all but you have to pay money. BlueSky and the Fediverse are trying more distributed approaches. Some will fail. Some will find product market fit. Some are more organizational or business methods than hard tech. Some are clever techniques like shadow banning. And some are actual hard tech than using machine learning.
Marc doesn't think that's real tech because he doesn't think trust and safety solve real problems. But if you buy that things like disinfo, polarization, harassment, spam, and social media induced depression are both real and bad, then attempts to solve this are as real a "technology" as attempts to cure disease or male pattern baldness or whatever else bothers people these days.
Good luck. What's missing is ecology and the interdependence of species. You've left out the rest of life on the planet and the conditions it creates that allow us to survive. Humans are not smart enough to get a techno world right. We are, in fact, messing up the future with technologies that damage ecosystems. In other words, I feel you are thinking about it wrong, leaving out the rest of creation.
"And there are many more varieties and numbers of plants and animals in the world since humans started domesticating and breeding them."
I cannot believe I am responding to somebody wrong on the internet, but holy fuck bud is this bit as insane as it is ignorant.
No, absolutely there are not "many more varieties and numbers of plants and animals in the world since humans started domesticating and breeding". This is innumerate and cannot be supported by any data. For anybody who stumbles upon this comment, we are experiencing mass extinction, a massive, overwhelming reduction in the number of species that will take millions of years to recover, not an expansion: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2306987120
Our current use of technology is anti-life, even if it is "pro-human" in a narrow, short-term sense. The absolute biomass on our planet is going DOWN, not up: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5
Again, sustainability itself is a technology. Promoting life is a technology. Choices are tech. And currently, our tech is not being used optimally. Quite literally, the planet and the rest of creation created the conditions that allowed us to begin this technological journey, they are the substrate that we build upon. And they are finite. Really worrying that this basic fact could be missed as a result of "techno-optimism".
This.
Effective acceleration of technology. Particularly AI.
Don't be a decel.
What metric would you propose for judging whether innovation is accelerating or decelerating?
In other words, how can I even tell whether the optimists or the pessimists are correct about the rate at which fruit (low-hanging or not) is being picked?
Well, TFP is one metric, though it's also affected by other things besides technology.
Yeah, and it seems like it would be noisy, since it's obtained, I think, by subtracting other data. Also the only TFP data I've seen that goes back to the 19th century is in Gordon's book, and his 50-year bins make me suspicious—even though I find his qualitative narrative pretty convincing. Your narrative sounds convincing too, but I can't tell whether you actually disagree with Gordon on any testable claim. Do you?
But TFP is the best objective measure I know of. Life expectancy seems like another good one. Gordon's idea is to pick out some technologies and decide he's more impressed by the toilet than Facebook or whatever. But those things aren't objectively comparable, nor can he even begin to make a complete list.
Well, to give Gordon's argument a real world example, indoor plumbing and water treatment eliminated cholera and typhoid fever from killing people, and increased life expectancy. I don't think Facebook is comparable in that way.
Life expectancy is definitely a good measure of progress, which is why I mentioned it above. A measure of overall burden of disease is also good. Same with labor saved, median $ consumed, or GDP.
If Gordon mentioned things like the toilet merely as examples of these phenomena, I'd be with him. His book predates the episode where covid vaccines saves millions of lives, but now we have it as an example too.
But Gordon seems also to be saying that modern technologies are less impressive than older ones. Now, to me, covid vaccines are more impressive than the toilet, and I say that partly because such immense modern skill was needed to create them. But I don't think the two can really be compared in their impressiveness, because they are unlike each other, despite both having health benefits.
Nor do I even think we have a good definition of what we think makes technologies impressive.
Certainly fun to read about each one in detail, though.
I always thought the argument was that technologies like vaccines or inoculation, which go all the way back to Edward Jenner's experiments with cowpox, which ultimately resulted in the world's first vaccine, and eventually resulted in the elimination of smallpox, are less important to humanity than social media or email. Now, the question is what defines importance?? Here, it seems it'd be defined as things that would be an inconvenience to live without, versus things that would be fatal to live without. People could live without cellphones, or email, but they'd die without radiation therapy, antibiotics, or clean drinking water.
I think it needs to be much more fundamental I.e., Energy production etc.
I think the follow are good metrics b/c there’s a component of time so you can measure whether you’re successful or not. My top contenders are
1. Henry Adams Curve or 2% CAGR
2. Kurzweil curve
3. Birth rate >2.5
4. Lifespan, 1-2% CAGR
5. Human freedom index (or something like it)
Good article overall - BUT the key thing missing in my opinion is any discussion of the negative externalities of techno-optimism. Yes, with the "right policies", that is taken care of - but realistically in our world, that simply doesn't happen. Some technologies make only minimal sense given the externalities.
Noah's seed example is a good one - the externality of depleting the ability to grow more trees is critical - in this case, his example is a small group where that effect is felt by the people who make the technology change - But in the real world, the externality is often an effect on others (pollution near industrial facilities, etc, etc and of course warming). So, the feedback loop is missing.
The hard problem isn't whether technology can advance or even be generally useful, but how to craft a system where those externalities fit into the equation of what is useful, feasible, etc.... Technology is likely to keep advancing no matter what (positive), but "normative" only happens to the overall population if the externalities really are dealt with.
Actually, externalities are still ignored frequently. Lots of folks object to their externality not being paid attention to - and it can take a lot of people together to actually make something happen (Noah's "right policies"). Pollution is down because a ton of people demanded it eventually. But there are still bad sources of pollution being built all the time (especially in poorer neighborhoods where there is less power to affect it).
So, yes, when enough people object, the externality can be dealt with - but it isn't inherent in society or the system. Which is my point. Normative "techno-optimism" in its naive form assumes that technology causes an overall society benefit - but that benefit is often at the cost to portions of the society that have less political say. And many technologists ignore that part of the equation since it doesn't affect them directly.
The free market provides incentives to privatize gains and socialize losses, or in this case to drive “positive internalities” at the expense of negative externalities. Without regulation this is an unstable system, leading to excessive swings and ultimately violent uprising and revolution. The trick is to find the right balance of regulation, limiting the pollution without stifling further innovation and development. To argue for the technolibertarian extreme of no regulation is not a sustainable path and seems a bit naive.
While largely agreeing with Andreessen’s manifesto, the strict rejection of regulation and of UBI seems strange to me, given that his main argument is that technology exists for the betterment of all humans.
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.
Wow. A Vision for Humans.
Nice article for the weekend
Noah, you've just made the case for teaching HumanEcology K-14!!!! Yea!!! Without first instilling the rationale for Active/Normative, the risks will be high. Human Ecology first gels the concept of healthy society and then develops it one on one so it can be experienced by choice in each student's life. Learning it early is key, so is making it experiential -- it then lasts a lifetime. When you can cook a meal responsibly and enjoy sharing it, you get the lesson. Human Ecology sets the table for a really big meal, everyone invited! If it was delivered via our public schools, both humans and animals and their ecosystems, might survive.
Related:
https://www.sciencealert.com/we-may-be-witnessing-the-death-of-nature-expert-warns
I think that no matter how optimistic one is about what "could" happen, we need to recognize that there are competing processes in our world.
If the destructive processes are actually occurring at a faster pace than the positive innovations .. what role optimism?
Sustainability and technology are completely intertwined. See https://www.amazon.com/Sustainability-Technology-Finance-Herman-Bril/dp/1032200545/ref=sr_1_3?crid=OGE5GQ7M8ZAX&keywords=Herman+bril&qid=1697846325&sprefix=herman+bril%2Caps%2C81&sr=8-3
I constantly see GDP measured as the amount of stuff people buy instead of how much our country produces. Is that just how GDP is measured, or is it really Gross National Consumption?
They don't have to be the same, I would think.
GDP is more than consumption, because it also includes investment. But GDP measures production according to how much people pay for it. Payment is how we aggregate the various things that people buy for investment and consumption; if people pay $100 for a TV, that's $100 of GDP.
(but only if the TV is new, of course)
I agree. As is human flourishing.