[00:00:00] Speaker A: Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We have Atlas Society senior scholars Stephen Hicks and Richard Salzman discussing an objectivist perspective on Mark Andreessen's recent tech Optimist manifesto. After their opening remarks, we're going to open it up for questions. So please raise your hand if you want to ask a question. We'll try to get to as many as possible.
Stephen, thanks so much for doing this today. We'll go ahead and start with you.
Tell us about the manifesto.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: All right.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: Hi, Scott, thanks for hosting.
Mark Andreessen is now a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and a heavyweight in that ecosystem. Prior to that, he was a software development and made his name and his fortune being the developer of or co founder, I think, of one of the early web browsers.
So he has now for a generation been on the front lines of technological and capitalist development, Silicon Valley and so forth. So what was interesting, encouraging and fascinating was this past month he published a 5000 or so word manifesto called the Techno Optimist Manifesto. And because of his stature, it had immediately a million readers around the world and much agreement and a lot of vigorous disagreement. Now this is advertised as an objectivist response or perspective on it. And from my objectivist perspective, I found myself very happy, very enthusiastic to see reflected in a manifesto that's reaching millions of people all of the themes, or.
[00:02:04] Speaker D: Let me say at least 90 plus.
[00:02:06] Speaker C: Percent of the themes that we objectivists have been arguing for culturally for 50 or 60 years or so. So he is an optimist. He's an optimist about human beings, about human intelligence. He's an optimist about the power of freedom. He's an optimist about the power of markets to solve problems, to bring people together peacefully to work out win win transactions. He is especially optimistic about the power of technology to solve virtually all human problems. So on the positive side, virtually all of the themes that objectivism as a philosophy argues that we need to prize. Human intelligence, human Reason, the scientific method that stems from a fully worked out development of human reason, all of the issues of character that go into being the kind of person who can live a self responsible life, who can live freely, become an actively productive person, a discoverer of new technologies and new methodologies, the ambition, the achievement orientation, the courage in the face of risk, the pride and self esteem, thinking that your life is valuable and important, that you want to make the best of it, the individualism, the strong sense of agency that one is in control of one's life. So all of those cognitive themes, all of those moral themes that are central to objectivism are not merely reflected, but explicitly part of Andreason's manifesto.
He goes through brief histories of technology, particularly in the modern world, problems that had plagued human beings for as long as human beings had been around the darkness. And being kind of only able to.
[00:04:21] Speaker D: Do what we want to do for.
[00:04:22] Speaker C: The most part during sunlight hours. We solved that problem with electricity, the problem of coldness, and being at the mercy of the cold weather. We develop sources of heating, in many cases indoor heating, the countervailing problem on the other season, the problem of heat and excessive heat. Well, again, technology solves the problem. We develop air conditioning that we are often socially isolated. Well, we develop technologies, amazing transportation systems and the Internet that enables us to be as social as we want to be. Being at the mercy for most of human history of that pandemics, developing the sciences of chemistry and biology, and then vaccinations and so forth, to largely solve many of those problems. And then the big One, problem of poverty, and then all of the things.
[00:05:25] Speaker D: That are downstream from the problem of poverty.
[00:05:27] Speaker C: We've been able to create technologies of abundance. And a lot of that occurred in the last two to three centuries, so that human beings finally figured out some pretty fundamental things two to three centuries ago, and we now are living in the benefits of all of that. So it's very encouraging to see all of these themes. It's Also as Encouraging as THAT. On the positive side, as Andreasin goes through, he gives credit and explicit mention to many of the people whom those of us who are objectivists or fellow travelers, enlightenment thinkers, free market thinkers, other forms of pro technology thinking. So he mentions explicitly, for example, Julian Simon, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Soul, among kind of recent giants in that tradition. He's well informed on the historical tradition. He mentions David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and becomes very close to mentioning Aristotle. He does use the concept of eudaimonia when he is talking about the virtues and values of techno optimism. And that Eudaimania concept is directly out of Aristotle. And many of the specific values and virtues that Andreasan mentions are strongly Aristotelian. He also mentions several philosophers.
He mentions Adam Smith primarily as an economist, but he's also read him as a moral philosopher. He explicitly mentions Friedrich Nietzsche, the kind of romantic adventure approach to life that Nietzsche, in some of his moods, urges, and that many of us respond to positive when we read Nietzsche. To see oneself as being able to give birth to a Dancing Star, that dancing Star metaphor out of Nietzsche, and he quotes extensively from that very section. And then he goes on also in a very informed way, to mention and recommend other current thinkers who are at the forefront of our understanding of technology, capitalism, the merger of the two of them. So all of that is extraordinarily encouraging. If one has not yet read the Techno Optimist ManiFesto, I recommend that You Do So. It's well worth 20 minutes of your time, lots of excellent Follow up links, and I think YOu'Ll find it Encouraging. Now, at the same time, he's well aware that everything he says is controversial. And, of course, that there are kind.
[00:08:31] Speaker D: Of automatic enemies of anybody who is optimistic.
[00:08:35] Speaker C: So there are the pessimists on principle. There are also, though, people who are prominent in our culture who are anti capitalist, anti markets, anti technology, various forms of neoludism out there as well. And he identifies these enemies as enemies explicitly and has brief counters to each of those points. At the same time, people who are not, in principle, opposed to optimism and are opposed to technology and its developments.
[00:09:15] Speaker D: People who have standard worries, are we.
[00:09:19] Speaker C: Going to unleash Frankenstein?
Will this cause concentrations of power and monopolies and so forth? He's aware that some people who are.
[00:09:30] Speaker D: Reasonable will have the reasonable source of.
[00:09:32] Speaker C: Worry, and he takes those up as well.
He's also very forthright on the politics, naming the enemies of technology and the enemies of optimism, the enemies of progress. And it's all of the same ones that we objectivists have been arguing against for a while now. Statism, collectivism, authoritarianism, the idea of central planning, the problems of bureaucracies, entrenched bureaucracies.
[00:10:05] Speaker D: Cronyism, and all of the various forms of corruption.
[00:10:10] Speaker C: People who, for various ideological reasons, want to control our thinking, control our speech. He is explicit in identifying these people as enemies and putting them on notice that he's aware of them. So those were my initial remarks. See, I've gone on for about ten minutes or so. I've got some other things I want to say, but I don't want to monopolize the entire discussion. So, Scott, let me kick it back to you for a little bit of give and take here. What should we do next?
[00:10:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I appreciate you doing that. We did get Richard here, so I do want to throw it over to Richard for some of his initial thoughts, and then we'll maybe open it up to some questions and get some of your other thoughts.
[00:10:59] Speaker D: Stephen, thanks.
[00:11:01] Speaker E: Great Scott.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Can everyone hear me?
[00:11:03] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: I totally endorse your take, Stephen. I saw those great elements of Andreessen's work as well. I think the enemy's list is long, maybe a bit too long and too cryptic, but I'll get back to that. But I think he's got most of the right ones. But I wanted to also say that right up front. He has a brief section which as an economist, I just want to endorse his very accurate under the section called lies. And here's some of them. That tech takes jobs, that tech reduces wages, that tech increases inequality. I assume he here means inequality of wealth, that it threatens health, that it ruins the environment. Here's my favorite corrupts children.
More psychology than anything. But he's right on all these things. On the inequality. He doesn't really quite say why. A lot of these are just assertions, but I can at least report to you that all the literature and all the empirics behind these kind of statements is true.
The reduces wages is the least plausible one.
[00:12:14] Speaker E: And because technology, as we know, and.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: If that's just a fancy word for tools and capital, obviously increases our productive.
[00:12:22] Speaker E: Prowess and labor saving devices, and anything that increases our productivity is going to increase our wages.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: I will say that it is a common complaint of technological advance that the inequality that's created is the difference between those who become skilled and able to use technology and those who don't. But I believe, as an economist, the trend in capitalism is that there are always going to be leaders and then followers. And the followers aren't left in dire poverty and dire unskilled labor. They themselves move up. But regardless, equality of result shouldn't be the standard anyway. I'm not saying he goes there. I'm not saying he's an egalitarian. But I think part of the defense of tech progress should be a kind of unalloyed, unabashed defense of inequality. If that's what the result is. If the result is some people are.
[00:13:18] Speaker E: More technologically advanced and wealthier than others.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Then so be it. If that's due to really uncapitalist things like public schools, which retard the development.
[00:13:29] Speaker E: Of human capital, including skilled, that is obviously a problem of socialism, not capitalism.
I also wanted to say that on markets. Again, I'm mostly sticking here to the more the market comments he makes.
[00:13:42] Speaker B: He says of section number four, called markets. And here I think it's very interesting. He says things that are really kind of uncontroversial in the beginning, but then.
[00:13:51] Speaker E: Conventional, at least to our ears, at.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: The tail end of this section. So the opening is free markets are.
[00:13:57] Speaker E: The most effective way to organize a technological economy.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Well, to organize economy sounds a bit too top down, but nonetheless, he's endorsing free markets.
[00:14:06] Speaker E: He also says this is very good. This is Austrian economics. He says the market economy is a.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Discovery mechanism, a form of intelligence, of exploration, evolution, adaptation.
[00:14:17] Speaker E: That's really very good stuff.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: He also talks about market discipline that.
[00:14:21] Speaker E: Sellers and buyers learn through the profit and loss system of what to do.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: And what not to do.
[00:14:28] Speaker E: And also a little ideology here, which is good.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Marcus, he says, are inherently individualistic, an individualistic way to achieve superior economic outcomes.
[00:14:38] Speaker E: Well, that's consistent with his other theme.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: Of resisting collectivism and the trend towards.
[00:14:43] Speaker E: Socialism and fascism and other things.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: Now, just so you know, he does have a kind of conventional view that.
[00:14:49] Speaker E: Self interest is, if not immoral, amoral. But that was the Adam Smith view.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: So in this case, he actually cites, says, he says this system, this free market system doesn't require people to be morally perfect, doesn't require them to be benevolent. And then he goes on to cite that famous Adam Smith quote about, well, it's not from the benevolence of the.
[00:15:15] Speaker E: Baker and the brewer that we get our dinner, but from their self interest.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: And so he's endorsing that view. And as we know, that's Adam Smith's.
[00:15:24] Speaker E: View, that while self interest might have practical prosperity benefits, it's not really a moral motive.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: And he definitely endorses that view.
[00:15:33] Speaker E: Andreessen endorses that view.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: So it's not in the objectivist sense.
[00:15:37] Speaker E: It's not unreconstructed, undiluted defense of rational self interest.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: Also, he goes on just to know that that's not just a glitch in his presentation. Later in that section, he says, the ultimate quote, I'm quoting here, the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who would otherwise raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits, unquote. That's kind of interesting, because people who.
[00:16:08] Speaker E: Would otherwise, I don't know, he's basically saying do irrational things or initiate force.
It's almost like he's saying we might.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Be wired that way. So thankfully, we have this thing called markets, where people can spend their time in more peaceful, productive pursuits, rather than these.
A very, I thought that was kind.
[00:16:27] Speaker E: Of a strange, possibly malevolent view of.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: People, which is at ODs with the optimism theme of the entire one. Now, the other thing is warning at the end about enemies, including, as Stephen.
[00:16:39] Speaker E: Mentioned, socialism and any kind of collectivism.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: It is interesting because in the markets section, he says, quote, markets are the way to generate societal wealth for everything else that we want to pay for, including social welfare programs, unquote. And then later he says, there's no conflict, I'm quoting again, no conflict between capitalist profits and a social welfare system that protects the vulnerable, unquote. So this is an inconsistency. Again, I don't know if it's absolutely fundamentally contradictory to his whole theme, but you can't simultaneously embrace capitalism. And then what amounts here to is the mixed system.
[00:17:22] Speaker E: I mean, the welfare state is the.
[00:17:23] Speaker B: Mixed system that we have today, and the mixture is becoming more and more government, which is in part the problem I think he's trying to address. So he doesn't help himself here by saying, by kind of appeasing those critics who might say, what are you for? Complete, pure laissez fair capitalism. You hear he's kind of backpedaling a little bit, saying, no, still have a welfare state here, still speaking in terms of collectivist societal wealth. So that's where I'm, I have other things to say, but I too didn't.
[00:17:57] Speaker E: Want to monologue, so I just wanted.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: To deal with that section called markets. I do like the way he's organized it by sections.
Some of the sections are longer and some are shorter, but there's at least a kind of a structure here to it as well. And it ends with something as sweeping as the meaning of life, which is kind of cool.
[00:18:14] Speaker E: We could talk about that section.
[00:18:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: So it seems like the overall report is positive, even though there may be. He's not an objectivist and he may not frame everything from a rational egoism perspective.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: Yes, I would certainly say it that way. And I think we can maybe if.
[00:18:42] Speaker E: Anyone wants to talk about, is it a false alternative to, say, optimism versus.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: Pessimism, it really should be realism.
[00:18:48] Speaker E: But that maybe is just a nitpick.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: I thought one of the better sections was on intelligence. I'm quoting from it here. It's called intelligence, the section. We believe intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better.
[00:19:02] Speaker E: Smart people in smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: There's a lot of a real recognition, and I think this would be true of anyone recognizing technology.
[00:19:13] Speaker E: We're talking about the men of the mind, the women of the mind, the.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Creators in all fields. And the idea that's the source of wealth.
[00:19:21] Speaker E: Resisting this kind of Marxist, materialist, physicalist claim that is still common out there is very good.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: And of course that feeds into a.
[00:19:30] Speaker E: Brief discussion of artificial intelligence.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: He kind of jokingly says artificial intelligence is our alchemy, our philosopher's stone. He certainly doesn't believe in that. He's just saying it's really just so marvelous that there's this thing called artificial intelligence. So I guess that shouldn't surprise the readers. If this is a techno optimist, he's also going to be an optimist, as I am on AI, so we can.
[00:19:53] Speaker E: Talk about that as well.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: But yes, Scott, my overall assessment is this is a really well done piece. I think it's short enough and philosophic enough and tech savvy enough to be a good read for people in the tech field who may lean left. And at one point he actually says, we're not advocating any political philosophy here. He calls it a material philosophy. And then he says something like, even though many of us are left wing.
[00:20:23] Speaker E: Which I thought was interesting, I don't.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: Know where he gets that idea. But if you could take the tech optimists and the tech pessimists and then sort them out by really, are some of them left leaning and some of them right leaning?
[00:20:36] Speaker E: I haven't done a study of it.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: Myself, but why the left leaning would be optimists, I don't know. Left leaning to me sounds Marxist, sounds Luddite, sounds premodern. And so that mix, I think, is interesting. But if he's trying to reach left leaning people who love technology, I would think that's a conflict in the left leaning person's mind. And if they could be brought toward.
[00:21:03] Speaker E: The idea of a freer society and less government intervention, all the better.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: Great.
One thing that stuck out to me was that at the end, there's a whole list of people that he wants to give credit to. And I saw about one fictional character on there, and there may have been more, but it was John Galt, and Rand is not mentioned.
What's going on there?
[00:21:40] Speaker C: Yeah, I wanted to take that point up. I think if we were to try to put philosophical and economic and technological labels on him, then he is, in his economic approach, clearly Austrian and neoclassical. So he wants to combine the two. And he does explicitly mention Hayek. He does explicitly mention in the essay Milton Friedman. And then there's this list of patron saints, of techno optimism. He gives a list of names of people he is endorsing and suggesting for further reading, Ludwig von Mises appears on that list.
Now, I'm trying to work my way to your point about the John Gault reference here. I think Richard is right, that he's not an objectivist, that he is, by means of that Adam Smith quotation signaling a certain amount of unease about a morality of egoism.
But I do want to just say that it might be less than we think, because if we look through the.
[00:22:57] Speaker D: List of virtues that Andreessen is talking about, they're all individualistic virtues. He says we need to be individualistic.
[00:23:07] Speaker C: On principle to take seriously agency.
[00:23:11] Speaker D: And then the list of virtues, pride, self esteem, valuing achievement, being ambitious, being.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: Courageous in the face of risk, seeing.
[00:23:22] Speaker D: Your life as an adventure and as a great romance, that we should be dancing our way through lives. All of that is very objectivist ethic, even if he doesn't call it objectivist ethic.
[00:23:38] Speaker C: So.
[00:23:41] Speaker D: This might be too cutesy, but I want to say that I think, actually, Andreasin is an objectivist, or at least say, 98% an objectivist. But he's in the closet.
And by in the closet, what I mean is, if you look at all of the people he mentions explicitly, they are all of the people that we have read, that we have endorsed, that we consider being in our orbit. And so he's an extraordinarily well read man. So he has read Milton Friedman. He's read Hayek. He's read Julian Simon. He's read Champeiter. He's read Ludwig von Mises. And then he's read some more obscure people who would be known to us, people like Isabel Patterson. And he mentions her and recommends her.
He's read Israel Kursner, another Austrian school. He's read Baste Yacht. He's read Rose Wilder Lane. And he recommends these people, and as well as the Nietzsche reference.
[00:24:47] Speaker C: So there is this big question then.
[00:24:50] Speaker D: Why has he not mentioned Ayn Rand explicitly in the manifesto? And why does she not appear explicitly in the list of patron saints of this movement?
Instead, what we do get is this mention of John Gault, who is right on the list of the patron saints there.
[00:25:09] Speaker C: So I think that is intentional.
[00:25:12] Speaker D: That is a coded way for Andreas and the signal that he thinks Ayn Rand is great, that Ayn Rand has been an influence on her, but he does not want to mention her explicitly. For those who are in the know, they will know what that means.
They will find out. But he doesn't want to go public. And I think that's the in the closet poiNt. So why he doesn't want to go public with an explicit Iron man mentioned, I think that raises some other interesting questions. But I think, Scott, that's a good catch.
[00:25:46] Speaker C: Noting that.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: Stephen, if I could interject quickly here, I also interpret the mention of Gault, especially when you understand what this manifesto is about.
He is basically saying, gault is the engineer. Galt is the technologist. Gault is the one that invented the motor. Invented. When he's in Gault's gulch, they had the voice activated, opening the vault and remember all that. So I think it could be that he doesn't say Ayn Rand, because he's.
[00:26:25] Speaker E: Basically saying, well, I don't want to.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: Endorse objectivism, but I want to endorse this particular character in that book.
[00:26:33] Speaker E: In other words, he didn't say Francisco.
He didn't say Hank Reardon.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: He didn't even say, I could have said Rourke. I'm guessing that he picked Gault because of his profession, but that's a yeah.
[00:26:51] Speaker D: Although he is the hero of yeah. Yeah. I think it's not quite as narrow as the engineering professional, though I think clearly that's important. Gault is the perfect combination of scientist and engineer. And so just to follow up on that, I think, in a way, unlike many of the other figures whom he's willing to mention explicitly, Rand still is more polarizing. So he doesn't want to give enemies of the techno optimist manifesto just, oh, there's another objectivist, or it's just another Ayn Rand lover.
He's trying to create not a huge.
[00:27:43] Speaker C: Tent, but a big enough tent. He doesn't want, from his perspective, unnecessarily.
[00:27:48] Speaker D: To alienate certain people because she's such a potential alienator.
[00:27:55] Speaker A: That's a fascinating perspective. Just that there's almost echoes of the Fountainhead, that she's so precious to him that he didn't want to share her with the world or something, the way you described it.
So what is Andreessen trying to do? Is he trying to create a movement?
[00:28:20] Speaker C: I think so, yeah.
[00:28:21] Speaker D: I think this is meant to be as manifestos are, a document that rallies like minded people and gets them talking to each other and to provide an overall framework for them to think in terms of. I think it's also meant for people who are optimistic, but they are feeling embattered by waves of pessimism to have a little more starch in their shirts or a little more hopeful outlook, that there are other like minded people out there who are mounting the ramparts, and so they're more likely to join forces. So I think, yes, it's meant to.
[00:29:10] Speaker C: Be in that direction.
[00:29:16] Speaker B: Scott, if I could, I just wanted to mention something on the energy section.
[00:29:19] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: Before I read the energy section, my thought was, well, if this is a tech optimist, one critique I would have would be of today's approach is people are suspicious of many hostile to fossil fuels. They claim to worry about emissions, CO2 emissions.
[00:29:40] Speaker E: So there's a paradox because they also.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Tend to oppose nuclear, which doesn't have emissions. And then third, they seem to be endorsing precisely those uniquely preindustrial energy sources.
[00:29:54] Speaker E: That are not able to uphold what.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: We have today, namely windmills and sun and wood burning.
And as you look at this section, he says energy is life. It should be in an upward spiral. The more energy we have, the more people we can have. He's very much against the depopulation, as you can tell. But interestingly, he does have a section on nuclear. He doesn't really quite say why the culture is anti nuclear. He cites the Atomic Energy Commissioner in 1953. He cites what Nixon mentioned in 1973, that we should have 1000 nuclear plants by the year 2000. Of course, as we know, we reached a peak of 110 only in the United States, and they've decommissioned 20 of them. So I think we're down to 80. So I think this section could have been much more pro fossil fuels and much more critical of.
[00:30:51] Speaker E: Why the culture.
[00:30:52] Speaker B: And why the intellectuals and why the leftists are against nuclear energy.
[00:30:58] Speaker E: And there's an optimism here about, well.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: He said, quote, then the second energy silver bulleted is coming. Nuclear fusion. Okay, well, maybe, but not if the lidites get their way. They're not even allowing the building of.
[00:31:10] Speaker E: Nuclear plants that were discovered in the.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: So, so it's also interesting from this section you do see a premise that's environmentalist, which is kind of sad because he refers to the natural environment. Quote, we believe energy need not expand to the detriment of the natural environment, unquote. If this was really stronger, he could have said, listen, capitalism is an environment.
A free system is an environment. Humans are part of that environment. We're not non natural. I don't think he's philosophical enough for that.
And so he's not quite aware of why there's so much animosity toward technologically advanced energy. But it really definitely belongs in a tech savvy. Tech optimist manifesto has to be much better on why energy, the hostility toward energy is so great. But there's more than a few mentions of this idea of the natural environment seemingly excluding man. I'll just leave you with one more quote. We believe technology is a solution to environmental degradation.
Wow. A technologically advanced society improves the natural environment. A technologically stagnant society ruins it.
So he definitely thinks of the natural environment as the environment, apart from man, which is the environmentalist premise that's really hurting us.
[00:32:40] Speaker D: Push a little back on that. I think it might be overreading there. I think he's aware of the people who have this zero sum view between humans and the environment.
I think it's important that in both cases, he's putting it negatively. There is no inherent conflict between human aspirations and the environment.
And then he goes on to say that it should properly be win win.
[00:33:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:11] Speaker D: A technologically advanced society improves the natural environment. So I think he's aware of the other position, and he's using that language only in describing the other position, but that's not, in fact, his position.
[00:33:34] Speaker A: I'll leave that there. I wanted to touch on.
He makes some reference to becoming technological Superman.
Am I reading too much in to see any kind of potential NietzscHe overtones? The Ubermensch?
[00:33:55] Speaker D: I think, not in Nietzsche's way, but in just a more generic way. We can become superior as human beings, in our intelligence, in our moral character, in our ability to live superior lives, better lives.
Not in any Nietzschean, authoritarian, aristocratic way. Explicitly rejects those.
[00:34:23] Speaker B: I think, though, Stephen, there is in this section, I agree with you. It's not Nietzschean in that sense, but the typical phrase we hear all the time, that it's important to do something bigger than yourself, to achieve something bigger yourself. The idea that the self itself needs to be surpassed. He does have this section where he says it's under the becoming technological Superman section. He says, we believe this means technical education, but it also means going hands on, gaining practical skills, working within and leading teams. Now, here's the key. Aspiring to build something greater than oneself, aspiring to work with others, to build something greater. As a group, we believe the natural human drive to make things, natural human drive to gain territory, to explore the unknown, can be channeled productively into building technology.
I think that's the only hint I see in here of this idea that, well, the Superman is the one who goes beyond himself, and if he's know that's achievable only in a group context, well, there's a certain truth to that. Of course.
[00:35:36] Speaker E: If you're working in isolation, you're not.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: Going to achieve as much as you could if you're in a team, an engineering team, a technologically advanced company, those kind of things. But there is that little hint, I think you'd admit, right, of him saying, we need to aspire to something greater than oneself. That's the line. I mean, he actually uses the line. So there's that hint of him saying.
[00:36:01] Speaker E: That working on your own is inferior.
[00:36:07] Speaker A: Even if not Nietzsche, there's a type know. These tech leaders are kind of technocrats where they know, oh, this time we can make socialism work, or UbI or whatever their pet projects are. Even moving to a system where you don't need fossil fuels. They think they can figure it out.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And he also has this very positive vision later down. He says, we believe that we are, have been, and always will be the masters of technology not mastered by technology. Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including our relationship with technology. We are not victims. We are conquerors.
[00:36:50] Speaker E: This is really good stuff.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: Quote, we believe in nature, but also believe in overcoming nature. Well, that's not quite Francis Bacon who said, nature to be commanded, must be obeyed. But, quote, we are not primitives cowering in fear of the lightning bolt.
We are the apex predator. The lightning works for us. We believe in greatness. That's good stuff. I liked it. Did you like that stuff, Steven?
[00:37:14] Speaker E: Oh, yeah.
[00:37:14] Speaker D: It was amazing. Yeah. One question I want to put out to Richard, to Scott, and to everyone in the room is I found, as I was reading through the enemies section, that there was a very long list of enemies, and it was good that he was identifying them. And at the same time, it started to feel my spirits flagging it. Oh, my goodness. We have to fight on so many fronts, and we know how hateful some of these people are in these various subgroups. Then he makes a very interesting point.
Basically, he says, for the last two or three centuries, there have been all of these enemies doing their damnedest try to destroy technology, destroy capitalism, destroy the free society, turn our lives into boring, schmoo kinds of lives. So despite the number of enemies and all of the resources and the power of their arguments, they've not been able to stop us. And precisely in the last couple of centuries, we have made more progress than at any point in human history. And I found that very encouraging. That's to say, maybe we don't need to worry about these enemies quite as much as sometimes we do worry about them.
[00:38:38] Speaker B: Yes, and this section also says, we're not talking about bad people, but bad ideas. So that's very good. He does name groups, or he names political systems. Like, he has a list. Statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning. That's all good stuff. At one point, he actually refers to gerontocracy, which is ruled by the old.
[00:39:03] Speaker E: I thought that was funny, because that's.
[00:39:05] Speaker B: Kind of what's going on. But Steven, one of the things I liked about it is when he got conceptual, for example, he said, I'm looking here, he says, one of them is the precautionary principle. Now, for those who don't know, the precautionary principle is so anti risk. We saw this in COVID, a kind of phobia of any kind of risk taking.
It's not just be cautious, it's precaution. And if you look up the precautionary principle, it is really irrational in many senses. But the fact that he's aware of that kind of stuff, that's not really.
[00:39:43] Speaker E: Political as much as it is, I would say, epistemological, the over dramatizing and.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: The exaggeration of the risks we face. So in that sense, although it's, as we said, a long enemies list, he does have these conceptual enemies, if you will. One nice list he had was our enemy is stagnation. Then right after that, anti ambition, anti striving, anti achievement, anti greatness. Those are ein rand type sentiments, obviously, and he's got them.
[00:40:21] Speaker D: I also made a note of that point, the sentence you mentioned earlier, that our enemies are not bad people, but rather bad.
And I think Andreasin is a very nice guy, and that's the kind of thing that nice guys will say, hate the sin, not the sinner.
At the same time, he, at various other points, does mention that it's not just bad ideas, it is in fact, bad people. There are people who are driven by resentment, and that's not an idea, that's an emotion that actual people have that leads them to want to be destructive in various ways. I think that's more of a rhetorical point than an actual point. It's not the ideas in some Hegelian way or just doing things. It's bad ideas used by bad people. But he pulls that punch rather than.
[00:41:23] Speaker C: Having to be nasty.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: He also mentioned something that might interest people, because there's a whole field in.
[00:41:29] Speaker E: Economics called growth theory, and it's not having to do with the business cycle or seasonal aspects of things, but long.
[00:41:35] Speaker B: Term economic growth and progress, the ingredients that go into that. And the standard kind of classical economics view was land, labor and capital. They'd always say land, labor and capital. You need natural resources labor, not distinguishing what kind of labor, and then capital equipment, tools. It's only in the afterwards with solo and others that they started putting in technology.
And to me it's just capital advanced. So capital isn't just any spade or tool, but nonetheless they put in like a fourth category called technology. And Andreessen is aware of this, which also gets to Stephen's point about how well read he is. But he has under the technology section.
[00:42:20] Speaker E: Which is the third section, and the.
[00:42:22] Speaker B: Reason why this manifesto is the way it is. I think he says growth is progress, it's vitality, expansion, increased knowledge, higher well being. Then he says, and this is right out of the textbooks, there are three sources of economic growth and prosperity. One, population growth. Two, natural resource utilization. Three, technology.
And going through those, he says, well, we're actually depopulating, so the growth is not going to come from more people, or at least not a fasted rate of increase as we've seen before.
[00:42:56] Speaker E: Well, that of course just.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: Treats it as an amalgam. We all know that it's not just sheer number of people, but what's the.
[00:43:05] Speaker E: Distribution and what part of them are smart brainiacs and things like that.
[00:43:09] Speaker B: Second thing he says, which is interesting because it has to do with environmentalism.
[00:43:12] Speaker E: Although he doesn't say it, he says.
[00:43:15] Speaker B: Natural resource utilization, this would be the second contributor, has limits. And then he says, both real and political. That's interesting because the real part would be something like, well, we have exhaustible resources, we have things we dig out.
[00:43:31] Speaker E: Of the ground or eventually going to.
[00:43:32] Speaker B: Run out of them. Okay, that's generally true, but the capitalist method has been to find more and more things under the ground, things we didn't think we have, we really have.
[00:43:41] Speaker E: But the second one, political.
[00:43:43] Speaker B: He's saying natural resource utilization is limited by politics. Well, that means regulation, that means environmental restrictions and rules. And to the extent he's saying, well that's a restriction, he concludes with therefore technology, he said, is going to be the sole contributor. You see why though, if we don't get population growth and we're restrained in various ways from actually getting more natural resources to work with, then the only thing left is tech. And he calls it the only perpetual.
[00:44:13] Speaker E: Source of economic growth.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: So just some context and background there as why not just that he's in the tech field and might lean in.
[00:44:22] Speaker E: The direction of thinking.
[00:44:22] Speaker B: His field is very important.
[00:44:23] Speaker E: Of course it is.
[00:44:24] Speaker B: It also is from this theory he has, of the three constituents or ingredients of growth, two of them are going to be curbed. This last one is going to be our only hope. So that's another reason why he's focused on it.
[00:44:37] Speaker C: I believe that's well said.
[00:44:40] Speaker D: I to want jump in just with a couple of things. One is a recommendation. Our colleague at Atlas Society, Robert Tricinsky, wrote a very good two part article in response to Andreessen's Techno Optimist manifesto. So, for those who are interested in a very thoughtful analysis, mostly positive, but a few quibbles here and there. Google just Rob Tricinski and then Angel Andreson, and it should come up. One other question I wanted to put out for discussion was, often techno optimists.
[00:45:23] Speaker C: Tend toward a kind of determinism, the.
[00:45:27] Speaker D: Idea being that once we have made certain discoveries technologically, that the machines kind of go of themselves, and that once.
[00:45:41] Speaker C: We'Ve reached a certain level of critical.
[00:45:43] Speaker D: Mass, we can't go back, that the machines will build on themselves and we will figure out and routineize and turn into commodities the making of machines that will make better machines and so forth. And you see this sometimes in AI discussions and robotics. At a certain point, we'll just be able to outsource, so to speak, innovation to artificial intelligence, and then technological progress will go on in the future in a kind of deterministic fashion. So I was on the lookout for.
[00:46:20] Speaker C: Whether there was any sign of techno.
[00:46:23] Speaker D: Optimism in Andreas's piece, and I didn't see any, which I think is encouraging. But it does leave open the question of what we as human beings need to do if we think we are making progress, to keep the progress going. And he does indicate some of those things, we have to be aware of who the enemies are, who might potentially destroy the whole system or cripple it. We ourselves have to be certain kinds of beings, develop our cognitive capacities, have a certain kind of character, not only to enjoy it appropriately, but to be contributors to the ongoing progress. So I wanted to just ask it.
[00:47:09] Speaker C: As a question.
[00:47:12] Speaker D: Is this a more deterministic process or something close? Do we need to worry too much that it will all collapse?
[00:47:24] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a whole rich, fascinating vein of topic. I've phrased it before, is, can there be a new dark Ages, but also what you're saying about the rate of technological progress, that it's not steady, and are there things we can do to be increasing it? Is there a certain amount of rate that people are comfortable with before they start moving to Luddite philosophies?
[00:48:05] Speaker B: Stephen, Apropole your question, I think there is just slightly in the technocapital machine section references to we are inherently inclined to be technologically curious, advanced. Quoting here also, human wants and needs are endless, and entrepreneurs continuously create new goods and services to satisfy.
There's not a conditionality here, although if you pressed him, I'm sure he'd say there isn't. Meaning? Well, yeah, if we live in a free society. If people choose values and want their needs and wants to be endless. If you said to him, well, in medieval times, humans didn't want progress and growth, they were looking for the afterlife. So it does require the kind of philosopHic, pro reason, pro earthly views. But I agree with you. It isn't obvious from this essay that he believes it's automatic. In fact, you could say that the very fact that he's arguing for anything and seeing potential impediments like enemies defies that theory.
[00:49:18] Speaker E: Right? If he actually thought it was inevitable, and we're going to succeed anyway. Kind of call it the wig theory of history, only applied to technology, ever upward, ever progressing. No real setbacks. Don't worry about it. This thing is on autopilot.
That's not his view. I don't think I agree with you. I don't see it in there. But if it were, it would be the kind of argument, it wouldn't need the argument, so to speak. Kind of like when Mark said, capitalism's collapse is inevitable. Okay, then why are you arguing for to? There's no need to persuade anybody how terrible it is.
[00:49:59] Speaker D: A follow up question on that. A lot of my work is in history of philosophy, history of ideas as they've developed.
And if we take the kind of techno optimism that Andreasin is endorsing, that starts to come into existence in the 18th century, in the 17 hundreds, during the age of the Enlightened, and then all of the upward economic trends, the.
[00:50:29] Speaker C: Upward trends in health and life expectancy, the upward rate of technological advancement, all of that, we can map it and chart it from the 17 hundreds, which raises always the very interesting question of why it happened in the 17 hundreds. If human beings have been around for 300,000 years, right?
[00:50:54] Speaker D: If we've always been beings with the big brain that we have biologically, if.
[00:51:01] Speaker C: We'Ve been tinkerers, if we've been curious, right, and so on, why is it only in the last 1% of human history that finally something has happened? So as a philosophy guy, I like to say, well, there was sort of philosophical revolutions in epistemology and moral theory and metaphysics, our understanding of human nature, that started to happen in the 15 hundreds and 16 hundreds, and those bore fruit in the 17 hundreds, which is why the political, technological and economic revolutions took off then.
So then the follow up question is, well, now that it has taken off and we have a critical mass of people who understand all of that, are we in any danger of losing that? Is it that those preconditions, cultural, philosophical preconditions have to be maintained.
Or is it the case that the technological and capitalist revolution is like a rocket that took off from Earth, but Earth doesn't have to be there anymore.
It can just go of its own? So that's just another open question on my mind. I have my answer to that question, but I want to put it out there.
[00:52:24] Speaker B: Yeah, and, Steven, when I think of.
[00:52:26] Speaker E: That question as well, I think in.
[00:52:27] Speaker B: The case of Andreessen, and I think part of the limit to speculation on that is what's possible in our.
Like, suppose you could answer that question definitively and say, well, we may lose knowledge of the light bulb or how to build nuclear power plants, and 150 years from now, people will be saying, what's a nuclear power plant? And we're all in the cold. But some of it has to do with what will transpire in my lifetime. And maybe that's why people don't go there. I wanted to, Scott, just quickly plug.
[00:53:01] Speaker E: One of the morals and markets I did last May.
[00:53:04] Speaker B: It was the 23rd, and it is on the website at Atlas. Society was AI promise and peril.
[00:53:11] Speaker E: So that was specifically a discussion associated.
[00:53:15] Speaker B: With AI, not technology broadly, but an optimistic take on my part. But that is available on morals and.
[00:53:23] Speaker E: Markets session, May 23.
[00:53:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that was a good one. I do want to encourage people, if you want to comment or have a question or raise your hand, we'll bring you up. Lawrence, I think you had something you wanted to say.
[00:53:39] Speaker F: Thanks, Scott.
[00:53:40] Speaker C: Hi, Richard.
[00:53:41] Speaker F: Hi, Steven. So my question is, we've been talking about what's in the manifesto, but I want to get y'all's thoughts on the detractors of said manifesto, because I've been looking to see what are the critiques that people have been bringing up. And I think neither of you will be surprised by some of the statements that come out. A lot of them relate to, oh, he's talking about this future filled with wealth and more prosperity, but then again, who is he to say that living in his wealthy mansion while. And then they say things like life expectancies going down or this technology unbridled by just individuals. Well, that's not going to help society. We need to make sure there's regulation in check. So there's a lot of recurring themes of anti individual, a bit of what we might call Ludditeness towards technology, and even envy as well. So we're seeing a lot of these trends come out and not really addressing his claims directly in the manifesto, but just sort of the same tried and true tactics that we've seen from anything in regards to technological progress.
[00:54:58] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I think that's right, Lawrence. I did some poking around as well about criticisms, and most of them came, from my perspective, from people who are a little more left leaning, putting the word left in quotation marks or scare quotes.
[00:55:17] Speaker D: But yes, all of the, there's a.
[00:55:20] Speaker C: Certain amount of envy that comes out.
[00:55:21] Speaker D: In that ad hominem argument. Yeah, you're just a rich guy from Silicon Valley.
[00:55:26] Speaker C: Or that it's going to take my jobs away.
Typically, that's more of a left leaning concern that a certain category of people won't be able to keep pace, and.
[00:55:39] Speaker D: Then the other ones as well.
[00:55:41] Speaker C: So I wasn't surprised by those. And there wasn't anything particularly powerful. It just seemed more of a knee jerk standard set of reactions, at least from what I've seen. One thing I was looking for was that there is, on the putting again in scare quotes, the right side, there are conservatives who also have been a little more marginalized, but nonetheless, advocates of tradition, advocates of going back to the good old days, not liking capitalism, not liking the artificiality of modern society and so on. But I haven't come across any conservative critiques of Andreasin's manifesto. So that might just be that I haven't come across them, or it might be that they haven't encountered Andreessen yet and formulated their responses. But to me, I think it will be interesting since my sense is that conservative traditionalists are reorganizing themselves this generation after having been somewhat in the wilderness intellectually for the past century. So I'm on the lookout for what their responses will be.
[00:56:57] Speaker E: I have found after I read just, I waited a couple of weeks and then I just Googled criticism of Andreessen Manifesto. There's just scores and scores of articles. First thing that came to my mind was, he has succeeded.
If this was ignored, then it wouldn't show how influential he is or whether he hit the right buttons or not. So whether he intended that or not, the first thing you could say is, well done.
[00:57:29] Speaker B: So that's a good thing.
[00:57:30] Speaker E: It's good to have this debate.
[00:57:32] Speaker B: Fantastic to have this debate.
[00:57:34] Speaker E: Okay, then the three or four I.
[00:57:35] Speaker B: Read, yes, the ones from the left.
[00:57:38] Speaker E: Interestingly, didn't denounce him or critique him on his views of the actual possibilities.
[00:57:45] Speaker B: Of technology helping human beings.
[00:57:48] Speaker E: They were much more bothered about his philosophic stuff, free markets, individualism.
[00:57:55] Speaker B: No limits.
[00:57:56] Speaker E: To growth, let's have a big population.
So interestingly, from that standpoint, you didn't get many technicians themselves. Ah, the guy doesn't know what he's talking about on AI and how many jobs it'll save. So I find that interesting.
[00:58:11] Speaker B: Which means the real battle as we've.
[00:58:13] Speaker E: Seen it at the Atlas Society is philosophical, political. The other thing, Stephen, is curiously, yes, I look for some on the right and the conservatives, the conservatives are very worried about this, of technological advance, partly from the standpoint of losing jobs. But that's just the standard economic myth. To the extent any of them hold that they just don't know how markets work. But some of them will refer to something called transhumanism. And if you search by transhumanism, the.
[00:58:43] Speaker B: Conservatives and the religious people are most worried about this.
[00:58:46] Speaker E: The idea is these guys like Andreessen.
[00:58:50] Speaker B: Are trying to perfect humanity.
[00:58:52] Speaker E: They're trying to do something like the progressives did with eugenics 100 years ago. They're trying to create androids, part human.
[00:59:03] Speaker B: Part machines, and therefore dehumanizing us.
[00:59:07] Speaker E: And so you can see where from that standpoint, and they're godlike. They're replacing God, the God of the machine. They're replacing the true, genuine God with these tech gods, these robots that can do all these.
[00:59:24] Speaker C: The conservatives are more worried about the techno side and the leftists are more worried about the market side.
[00:59:31] Speaker E: Right.
[00:59:31] Speaker B: But I think they do come full.
[00:59:33] Speaker E: Circle in the idea of dehumanizing.
[00:59:36] Speaker B: It's dehumanizing or to the extent it's creating superhumans, they're leaving other humans in the dust.
[00:59:44] Speaker E: And that's unfair.
Something like that, yeah.
[00:59:49] Speaker A: I think it can be applied to just the life extension movement, but I know some conservatives see it that way. We do have some people up on the stage. Contra, welcome.
[01:00:01] Speaker G: Hi, Scott. This is JP from Clubhouse. You may remember me.
Well, first, it's so nice to see the Atlas Society now on X.
Many of the greater conversations are happening here, and it's so nice to see you here. And the think, I don't know if it was Richard that was taken aback, but one of the statements by the author on stating that most of the Silicon Valley folks are left leaning. And I wonder if that's actually the case because it's been in my experience that these crowd from clubhouse, from the same circles that we moved around, that they are in fact very much left.
And so I wanted to clarify, were you aware of this?
[01:01:15] Speaker E: I'm not really aware of the ideological political profile of Silicon Valley.
[01:01:26] Speaker B: I just pointed out that he said.
[01:01:27] Speaker E: In the manifesto, many of us are left leaning, but by us he meant optimists.
So that breaks it down further. I have no idea. I was just surprised that in the manifesto he brought that up.
[01:01:44] Speaker B: Because it seems od to me that someone would.
[01:01:46] Speaker E: Be a tech optimist and left wing, unless he's describing left wing as someone who's socially, in civil rights, liberal.
[01:01:55] Speaker B: But left wing usually means anti capitalist. It usually means a Marxist leaning.
[01:02:00] Speaker E: It usually means intervention.
And that view was not that technology is good, but that it's a blood sucking, terrible thing unique to capitalism, and let's get rid of it as soon as possible. And to the extent, the environmentalists, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the environmentalists kind of adopted that anti capitalist thing to a greater extent. And a lot of the former socialists.
[01:02:25] Speaker B: Went into the green movement.
[01:02:27] Speaker E: It just seems od to me that he would classify tech optimists, not tech pessimists. But he said others, like us, other tech optimists, tend to be left leaning. I didn't know that. I don't know whether he has any polls.
[01:02:41] Speaker C: Let me jump in on that one.
I've spent some time interviewing entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and studying them and so on. And I think it is true that they self describe as being on the left. But left, as we know, like right is a big tent. And it tends in Silicon Valley circles not to mean what philosophically and economically you and I would mean. It does typically mean clearly the social liberalism, they will put themselves on the left. Because when you say to them, what does the right mean? Well, that means people who are anti immigrant, they're a little bit racist, they are anti gay, they want to control your sex life, and we are opposed to that. So if all of that is on the right, then we are on the left. And that means being immigrant friendly.
Half of our new entrepreneurial startups are created by people of different races and diversity of sexual lifestyles and so on. So it's a softer social left. At the same time, though, on the economic front, there is a kind of cognitive paternalism at work there that most of these entrepreneurs and tech engineer types tend to know that they are smarter than the average person. And they do think that with the right piece of technology and the right people organizing technological systems, that they can show. I don't want to overstate this, the ignorant masses, the way forward.
And so it's a soft paternalism, but nonetheless, there is a kind of hierarchy, a kind of centralization that fits perhaps better with the more progressive left.
And they don't want to go as far as communism and socialism. And so on. But nonetheless, it's not that right wing. Just leave things open to the free market and everything being bottom up, we don't think that works. That's too anarchic.
[01:05:02] Speaker E: Yeah.
[01:05:03] Speaker B: The other things I've throw this question out too, Steven.
[01:05:06] Speaker E: I wonder what you think about this, or what Andreessen might. One of the reasons I'm a tech optimist, and especially on AI as I research it, is if the brainiacs, for lack of a better phrase, who make these things, and they call it artificial intelligence, if you will, if they can, as they're starting, they're already doing this. But continue to advance this amazing technology and displace stupidity, displace the non intelligence that seems to be spreading bottom up, if you will say, because of bad schooling and bad public schools and things. There's a certain salvation there that we get.
[01:05:56] Speaker B: Precisely because of this.
[01:05:58] Speaker E: And one obvious example would be we all know the checkout person at the grocery store. So those of us old enough to remember the old days, she'd have to count the change, which means she would have to know the currency and the subdivisions of it. Well, then they electrified, then it became electronic, right, and she's just punching the numbers on the screen, but she still have to punch the numbers correctly. Right? And then as the intelligence goes down, maybe now there's pictures on the screen, so she just punches the thing. Looks like a hamburger or meal number six. So in other words, there's technological advance.
[01:06:35] Speaker B: But it means the person using it.
[01:06:37] Speaker E: Doesn'T have to be as smart. And I'm thinking, thank goodness there is this AI, because if the culture is becoming generally less intelligent, maybe we can be saved by the fact that these brainiacs, these engineers, these mechanics, and these coders are replacing bad human intelligence with artificial and superior intelligence. Any thoughts?
It's part pessimistic, I guess, and part optimistic. It's pessimistic about the intelligence level of the broader population. But I hope you know what I'm getting at.
[01:07:17] Speaker D: Yeah, it's pointing in general terms, there's a gap between those who adopt the.
[01:07:22] Speaker C: New skills and the mindset that enables.
[01:07:26] Speaker D: Them to utilize the new skills and.
[01:07:29] Speaker C: The new technologies and those who fall behind.
And the question then, whether the technology brings with it a way to save those who fall behind in some way or other.
[01:07:49] Speaker D: And there.
[01:07:51] Speaker C: I don't know the answer.
[01:07:52] Speaker D: I don't know the answer to that question.
[01:07:54] Speaker C: But I think part of it is that the people who are left behind with respect to one skill set is my understanding of the history, they then tend to develop skills in other areas. So the woman, stereotypically, who's behind the cash register at the grocery store.
[01:08:19] Speaker D: She.
[01:08:19] Speaker C: Loses a certain skill set. But over the course of a generation, that woman goes away and has developed some other skill set that doesn't require math or even recognizing the numbers on the screen. So I think we need better demographics and better historical case studies to be able to answer that question.
[01:08:43] Speaker E: Great.
[01:08:43] Speaker A: I do want to give Luke a chance. Thanks for your patience, Luke.
[01:08:50] Speaker H: Oh, you're welcome. Can you hear?
[01:08:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:08:53] Speaker H: Yes. I was more interested in the Randian take on AI when it becomes a super intelligent species, but I got a house full of dogs in the Yappin right now, so I was more listening. But you're touching on that, because I think. I'm quite certain rand would be 100% in favor of the technological of artificial intelligence up until the point at which we've created a super intelligent species, which will be then a competitor to humanity. So was curious if anyone had thoughts about that, or if that's even relevant to the topic at hand. If not, my apologies. I just joined in our first chat.
[01:09:40] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't know that Andreessen's manifesto speaks to that issue, so it might be a little outside the scope of this conversation, but it is a fascinating one.
My quick rejoinder to that sort of thing is whether it would be a competitor.
It could be a healthy competitor. That would make us betteR.
[01:10:06] Speaker D: That would be a good thing.
[01:10:09] Speaker C: Or it could be an adversarial competitor. And I think that would depend on what value framework initially gets programmed into it.
I also want to say that that's sort of a general problem, because it could be artificial intelligence that evolves in a super intelligent direction, but it also is possible that other natural species can evolve intelligently. Suppose, I don't know, dolphins go through.
[01:10:35] Speaker D: Another evolutionary spur and become even more.
[01:10:38] Speaker C: Intelligent than they are, and start conceptualizing and doing math and developing technology. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Well, that's worth exploring.
[01:10:52] Speaker A: Richard, did you want to add to that?
[01:10:54] Speaker B: No, I'm fine.
[01:10:56] Speaker A: Okay, great. Well, yeah, I thank you for that.
How compatible is this with other major people out there? Take Jordan Peterson. He just had a huge conference in London, where he was presenting himself as kind of an.
Is that. Does it maybe seem like they could work together or just speculating?
[01:11:34] Speaker C: Well, that's an interesting question.
Jordan Peterson is a mixed case on this.
He is a man of science, and fairly consistently, over recent years, when he came to prominence, he has been a fan of the Enlightenment, a fan of capitalism, a fan of free markets, fan of the technological achievements.
And I know that he did at least the organizing committee at that conference invite several very good people on energy, including Alexepstein, and several good people on environmental issues and resource economics, like Marion Tupi, who also appears on Mark Andreasan's list of patron saints.
So I think Jordan Peterson in particular would have some overlap. The question mark, though, is that Jordan Peterson is also a man of religion and has deep sorted conservative impulses as well.
My reading right now is that there is some tension between those two aspects of Jordan Peterson.
And I don't know which one is going to prevail or if he'll find a way to integrate them harmoniously. But I do also know at the London conference there was a strong contingent of more traditionalist conservatives who would be anti capitalist.
There were quite a few negative things said by prominent panelists and prominent speakers about free markets.
[01:13:35] Speaker E: The other thing you get from conservatives I've seen is social media would be an example.
To the extent that is obviously a tech sector, a tech technique, see it as harmful to the nuclear family, seeing it as harmful to face to face interactions. The fakeness, how many friends you got? I have 3000 friends. No, you don't really have 3000 friends. The fakeness of it. You do see that critique a lot from those concerned with the family, the integrity of the family, gather around the dinner table at 630 and become a family.
[01:14:13] Speaker B: So there's that.
[01:14:14] Speaker E: The other thing is I teach a section of this to my Duke students and they're all optimists, and I've taught it at least five years in a row, it's not an entire course, it's just a couple sections. And when I ask them, because I have them read pessimists, and when I ask them, why do you think you're optimist? Because it's really overwhelming. It's not even a mix. And many of them will say, interestingly, because we expect to be the ones running the, we're the ones who's going to be running the tech, and we're not fearful of it because we know it. And it's really interesting because the very prior section might have been on environmentalism and therefore square against nuclear energy. So say, well, nuclear energy is very technologically advanced. Why are you negative on that but positive on AI or in regards to Andreessen, even though he's talking broadly about technology, you can if you want. It's kind of interesting. Line up the major tech names or geek names and ask whether they're optimists or pessimism. And why?
[01:15:12] Speaker B: Because Elon Musk, for example, is a.
[01:15:14] Speaker E: Pessimist, and Stephen Hawking was before he died. Now, they were particularly, though, opining on AI, but still, AI is part of tech, and I think Zuckerberg from memory now, I'm thinking Zuckerberg is an optimist.
So if you just lined up the ones who are on record, say, the top ten, starting with Andreessen, Musk and others, it would be interesting to kind of look for patterns of why are some of the pessimists? Why are some of them optimists?
I haven't done that yet, but it's an interesting question now that we're seeing them being more vocal.
[01:15:51] Speaker C: To put out one other dimension.
This is more of a question or an observation that leads to a question. But in Andresen's manifesto, he mentions the cognitive achievements, scientific method, and intelligence, and.
[01:16:12] Speaker D: That we have made great strides in that area. And so the continued progress of technocapitalism requires human intelligence to be trained up in each generation and then hopefully improved and then augmented by artificial intelligence.
One of the worries then is going to be, what about all of those who, perhaps because we have a dysfunctional education system, don't get trained up cognitively, and they are then going to fall behind, and then we have a big social problem there? Another aspect of this is Andreasin's mentioning the importance of certain character traits, that people need to be courageous, they need to be proud of themselves. They need to have ambition.
We need to take self responsibility in our lives. So he's playing up the character that's necessary for a person to be able to live in this technologically advanced capitalist society that's created. And then the worry there is going to be, well, what about all of those people? Perhaps because of dysfunctional education or dysfunctional families, they never acquire the character traits.
It's not that they have to be that smart, but they just don't have the character in order to be self responsible. And so they are going to fall behind, and then again, we're going to have a social problem to deal with. I wonder if another aspect of it, though, is more aesthetic or at the sense of life level, that what Andreason is partly doing is telling a narrative that is optimistic, but he's using the language of adventure, of romance, of dancing one's way through life. That another possible gap is in every generation, there are people who go through their teen years and come to adulthood.
[01:18:26] Speaker C: And have that sense of life and.
[01:18:29] Speaker D: This cuts across their character issues and cuts across their cognitive development issues. Just they have this sense that their life is an adventure, this great quest, and they're going to treat their life in that way, versus those who, by the time they come to adulthood, are having a sense that life is misery, that life is a waste of time, they are demoralized, or whatever they try, they're going to fail.
Society is going to beat them down. The gods are going to beat them down. So is there then a necessity for that sense of life to be widespread enough in the culture for the techno optimist, capitalist movement to succeed? Or are we going to have another gap between those who, in their sense of life, just aren't able to cut it in the kind of shining, adventurous and entrepreneurial life and future that Andres and is painting?
[01:19:38] Speaker A: So you're saying that he is using that kind of sense of adventure and dance to make it more of a sense of life issue?
[01:19:50] Speaker D: Yes, but also saying that it's that kind of person who not only can succeed in that world, but advance that world. It's the adventurers among us, it's the explorers, it's the dancers. It's that kind of person who is going to make things move forward.
So the question then is not in every generation can we train people to be smart enough and self responsible enough, but also to have the romantic sense of life enough?
[01:20:30] Speaker E: I love that insight on the cognitive and the aesthetic, Stephen, and connecting the two, which I'm not sure he entirely does, but I think it's implicit in it is cognitive confidence goes together with adventuresome risk taking, let's have fun.
[01:20:47] Speaker B: Whereas cognitive humility or skepticism to the.
[01:20:52] Speaker E: Sense of disarming us intellectually is going to make us fearful phobic.
The precautionary principle, so uniquely objectivist, right. That these go together, whether he fully gets that or not, cognitive competence. And what was self esteem? Not only the capacity to live, but the moral worthiness of living. Going together, you're going to be a much more energetic, aesthetically interested in the finer things of art and the wonderful things of art, I think of movies, actually.
[01:21:24] Speaker B: So many movies have the pessimism in.
[01:21:26] Speaker E: It, from Frankenstein, Jurassic park, iRobot. On the other hand, movies themselves have become technologically advanced.
So young kids can also see Avatar, and they can also see really spectacular things up on the screen, and they're loving that. But anyway, I love your point about the cognitive and the aesthetic. It is in Andreessen, to some degree. The connection between the two is very interesting. More and more.
[01:22:00] Speaker A: Richard, I just wanted to go back for a moment to your point about leftist optimism. I mean, is it related to this idea? Know, many on the left believe that socialism is just our inevitable place and know we're actually slowly moving that way towards a globalized WEF.
[01:22:21] Speaker E: Well, I don't know. I think it's just unfortunate that he used the word left because whole left right thing is all messed up anyway. Yeah, it just doesn't capture it correctly. I think Stephen's absolutely right that really, if these people were truly philosophic materialists of the Marxist kind, they wouldn't have developed their brains enough to be of any consequence in Silicon Valley. So at some level you have to believe they believe in intelligence is important. Intelligence is their creative faculty. That's what makes technology possible.
Technology is advanced human achievement, making human life. All that stuff is sounding capitalist. So yeah, I think leftist to the extent it's not the Marxist thing, but rather the idea of we're social liberals. Okay, so are we. We want to be liberal on civil rights and that kind of thing as well, but also in business.
[01:23:18] Speaker B: But yeah, apparently they tend to lean Democrat.
[01:23:21] Speaker E: That doesn't mean all Democrats are left wing, but yeah, I don't think it's all that important to the manifesto.
[01:23:28] Speaker A: Wait, he's using the term left?
[01:23:30] Speaker E: Yes, he is.
It's when he says, he says, at one point, I'm advocating here a material philosophy, not a political one. That alone is kind of weird. No one thought of it as political, but some of it's political. Then he says, and even though most of us are left wing or something like that, so us refers to techno optimists and he must know something about the political leanings of Silicon Valley more than. I'm just, I was an eye opener when I saw that.
But again, I don't think it's central to the success or failure of the manifesto.
[01:24:06] Speaker A: Not to be too cynical, but I mean, to the extent we're saying he's maybe a closet rand fan and maybe he's a closet fossil fuel fan, that maybe he's just seeing the writing on the wall and painting himself as a leftist to just kind of show that he's not against the prevailing.
[01:24:28] Speaker E: Yeah, he might say the biggest risk coming from that sector or from that group is demanding that Washington regulate AI and curb technological advance for whatever mythical reasons. He's already suggested, as Stephen's point about our point jointly, about the gap that potentially exists between the brainiacs and technologically advanced and those who can handle skilled, that are skilled labor, versus those who are coming out of the public schools and with degraded human capital. The biggest risk, I think, would not be that they can't handle the technology, because I think AI is making it easier for them to do so. As I said before, it's making it easier for dumb people to use advanced technology. I mean, even in the checkout counter example, the last step was there are no checkout people. You check yourself out.
[01:25:21] Speaker B: How is that possible?
[01:25:22] Speaker E: Because they made these machines where even stupid customers can check themselves out, which is amazing. But the bigger danger, I think, would be that that large majority, if it is of uneducated people, will vote for politicians who are Luddites. See, then it won't matter whether the brainiacs are brainiacs.
You know what I'm saying? They can try all they want, but if they're overwhelmed by kind of mob mentality, know, we're going to ban this or that because it's robbing us of all the myths that Mark outlays. That's a bigger risk. He doesn't quite say that, that we're endangered of anything, not by technology and the robots hurting us, but by a mass diluted public voting us away and our rights away and our technology away in a Luddite type manner, if that makes any sense.
[01:26:14] Speaker C: That makes good sense.
[01:26:18] Speaker A: Well, thank you. This has been a great topic. I'm so glad you both took the time to go into this. There's a lot, just cultural implications. But if any of you are in Southern California, the Atlas Society is hosting a happy hour tonight from 530 to seven Pacific time at Spoons Restaurant in Fountain Valley. And tomorrow at 07:30 p.m., Eastern, Stephen will be the featured scholar at our Fountainhead Book Club. This is going to be Section three on Gail Winand. You can register for
[email protected]. Under events. So just thank you both again.
Any final thoughts?
[01:27:13] Speaker D: Lots, actually, but unfortunately, we're out of time. This has been a very enriching discussion.
[01:27:19] Speaker C: Thanks for hosting, Scott, and thanks for your insights, Richard.
[01:27:22] Speaker E: Yes, thank you as well, Stephen. My final thought is I really think it's wonderful that this manifesto came out and that it got reaction and that it has stimulated debate and conversation. I just think it's healthy in that regard. Very good. And I'm glad you guys pointed it out as something worth talking about. I totally agree. Great. So thank you. Thank you so much, Scott, for organizing this. Great questions.
[01:27:44] Speaker A: Absolutely. Thanks for everyone who joined. Take care, everyone.
