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Can Marc Andreessen Stop Technology From Eating Our Jobs? (hackernoon.com)
Technology writer Tom Chanter explores the life story of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to ask whether software will not only eat the world, but also the jobs of what one historian predicts will be a "massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value." Can Marc Andreessen prevent a so-called "useless class" who "will not merely be unemployed -- it will be unemployable"?
Andreessen grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin (population: 1,500), and taught himself the BASIC programming language at age 8. He co-developed the original Mosaic web browser before he'd graduated from college, went on to co-found Netscape, and by age 23 was worth $53 million. He then transformed into a "super angel" investor in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Lyft, Facebook, Skype, and GitHub. "Having been an innovator in the tech start-up game, Andreessen is now an innovator in the tech venture capital game," writes Chanter. "He is a jedi that has become the master." In 2011, Marc Andreessen published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, Why Software Is Eating The World. He wrote, "Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software-powered insurgents will be epic...." 7 years later, it's clear Andreessen was correct. Lyft has destroyed taxi jobs. Airbnb has destroyed hotel jobs. Amazon destroyed independent bookstores. How does Andreessen feel about that? "Screw the independent bookstores," he said in his New Yorker profile. "There weren't any near where I grew up. There were only ones in college towns. The rest of us could go pound sand."
But the 4,900-word article also notes Andreessen's pledge to give half his income to charitable causes -- and his observation in a 2015 interview that outside of the United States, global income inequality is falling, not rising. "He has seen technology transform his own life, and has seen how technology has bridged the global wealth gap. Why shouldn't he be optimistic about the future of America's working class?"
And Andreessen's ultimate answer to the jobs destroyed by technology may be Udacity. The article cites Andreessen's investment in the company in 2012, and points to the online education platform's hopeful mission statement. "Virtually anyone on the planet with an internet connection and a commitment to self-empowerment through learning can come to Udacity, master a suite of job-ready skills, and pursue rewarding employment."
As a boy in Wisconsin he was starved for information. He has created an education institution accessible from Wisconsin to Africa. As a boy in Wisconsin he was starved for connection. He has married an innovative philanthropist and author, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen. They have a son named John. Andreessen is optimistic for both the working class and the future tech elite.
In his New Yorker profile he says of his son, "He'll come of age in a world where ten or a hundred times more people will be able to contribute in science and medicine and the arts, a more peaceful and prosperous world."
He added, tongue in cheek, "I'm going to teach him how to take over that world!"
Andreessen grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin (population: 1,500), and taught himself the BASIC programming language at age 8. He co-developed the original Mosaic web browser before he'd graduated from college, went on to co-found Netscape, and by age 23 was worth $53 million. He then transformed into a "super angel" investor in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Lyft, Facebook, Skype, and GitHub. "Having been an innovator in the tech start-up game, Andreessen is now an innovator in the tech venture capital game," writes Chanter. "He is a jedi that has become the master." In 2011, Marc Andreessen published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, Why Software Is Eating The World. He wrote, "Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software-powered insurgents will be epic...." 7 years later, it's clear Andreessen was correct. Lyft has destroyed taxi jobs. Airbnb has destroyed hotel jobs. Amazon destroyed independent bookstores. How does Andreessen feel about that? "Screw the independent bookstores," he said in his New Yorker profile. "There weren't any near where I grew up. There were only ones in college towns. The rest of us could go pound sand."
But the 4,900-word article also notes Andreessen's pledge to give half his income to charitable causes -- and his observation in a 2015 interview that outside of the United States, global income inequality is falling, not rising. "He has seen technology transform his own life, and has seen how technology has bridged the global wealth gap. Why shouldn't he be optimistic about the future of America's working class?"
And Andreessen's ultimate answer to the jobs destroyed by technology may be Udacity. The article cites Andreessen's investment in the company in 2012, and points to the online education platform's hopeful mission statement. "Virtually anyone on the planet with an internet connection and a commitment to self-empowerment through learning can come to Udacity, master a suite of job-ready skills, and pursue rewarding employment."
As a boy in Wisconsin he was starved for information. He has created an education institution accessible from Wisconsin to Africa. As a boy in Wisconsin he was starved for connection. He has married an innovative philanthropist and author, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen. They have a son named John. Andreessen is optimistic for both the working class and the future tech elite.
In his New Yorker profile he says of his son, "He'll come of age in a world where ten or a hundred times more people will be able to contribute in science and medicine and the arts, a more peaceful and prosperous world."
He added, tongue in cheek, "I'm going to teach him how to take over that world!"
Somebody built a replica of the house from Gone with the Wind in antarctica.
c6gunner says it's a Polar Tara.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Back in 80’s the dystopian society of Mega-City 1 could not offer jobs to only 13 percent of poplulation. The rest just had to find a hobby to keep them occupied during their useless life.
NO.
People here say "what happens when the elite no longer need the little people" but they're thinking small.
What happens when the machines no longer need the elite people?
We're going to end up the live-action equivalent of Youtube cat videos, existing for the enjoyment of robots.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Okay, Mr. Andresssen, put your money where your mouth has been. Open a small independent bookstore in Backwoods, Wisconsin (pop. 1500). Let's see you make payroll with the proceeds. Don't be shy now, get out there and show us how its done. Hint, get your neighbors to read.
You cannot avoid the truth of the normal curve of human intelligence. We are walking up the ladder of job complexity due to technology, leaving behind more and more people incapable of educating themselves up for the jobs of the future. There will indeed be a massive and growing class of the unemployed and the unemployable as programmed machines take over the lower level jobs, many of which are the entry level jobs that start one off in work life. And these people will be left out of the benefits of advancing technology due to the lack of the money necessary to avail themselves of it. A huge percentage of the human population is only suited to lower level manual labor.
E Proelio Veritas.
Why would anyone *want* that grueling horrible forced experience that we call "jobs"??
Everybody dreams of relaxing and weekends etc instead!
What we want, is money! Or, wealth to be more exact!
But if only there was a way to achieve that, without having to work...!
No, not employees, Mr. Burns!
Automation!
The problem is, that some leeches managed to take most of the income from our work, without adding value or even really working themselves, and now use that money to replace us.
Which is incredibly stupid, because who's gonna buy those products then? Peope with no money? Or the old debt scheme?
Nobody I ever asked, had a problem with *him* owning said machines, making them do his work, and still getting paid just like before. While he can choose to relax, or so something of actual worth to him, humanity or this planet.
But that option is conveniently left out of the "discussion" that the human livestock is fed hot every day.
What part of "screw the independent bookstores" is unclear?
He put at least $25 million into Udacity - that's where his mouth is.
People want wealth!
And somehow the option of having the machines create that wealth for *us* instead of our livestock handlers is conveniently omitted
Also: "Useless lives"... Seriously? Only in America could people think that way. Because enough free time to start getting bored and start really thinking is unheard of, ... and even if, the education of those is lacking too.
And only there is value defined as how much " the industry" can leech on you.
In reality, given enough free time, people start doing useful things by themselves!
Boredom is painful. Curiosity is natural. Needs drive you. Success feels amazing! Duh.
Everything I have seen, suggests that "management" and "board" are words for rather simple robots without any human-like characteristics. Might as well be Daleks. Very very booring Daleks!
Oh, and ... just for fun, ... go try and contact a human being at Google. ... ;)
Teaching everyone to code is not going to work, as basic hierarchy of competence still applies. There is still finite amount of coding that has to be done, and there still automation of coding tasks that will take place - so with this approach we will be trading unemployed factory workers for unemployed coders.
The future is bleak unless we can re-invent how society works. There isn't a job for most people. Maybe we can re-invent society, but it appears to me that future for masses will be joblessness.
Who gets to determine the "value" of someone? Everyone has value to someone else. Value is subjective and relative.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I suspect that the old practice of wealthy families employing full-time household servants will make a significant comeback over the next couple of decades, when legions of low-skill but able-bodied people find themselves irresistibly replaced by software and robotics. Sure, there'll be crying and grumbling over having to take jobs that many folks today consider to be beneath them, but personal servants for the rich were the norm for much of human history after the rise of agriculture and cities. Social expectations shifted during the Industrial Revolution and will shift again with the Robotics Revolution.
It also seems likely that that skillfully created handmade items such as fine furniture will see wider adoption among the upper crust as their wealth relentlessly increases, leading to steady employment for craftsmen in hundreds of thousands of small boutique shops. This is a historical norm as well although the scale will be larger. The rapidly advancing state of the art in low-cost but capable computer-controlled home milling machines and 3D printers obviously will help fuel this trend. In a side note, I suppose that using automated tools kind of blurs the definition of "handmade," but c'est la vie.
Likewise, personal services should see a continuing rise in popularity -- in-home pedicures, manicures, massages, and haircuts as well as expert home cooking by visiting chefs and so forth. In particular, cooking well is a wildly popular skill, and most otherwise low-skilled folks undoubtedly could pick up the knack if motivated. Really, this all happening already, but the pace should pick up quite a bit once robot-driven mass unemployment becomes a thing. Technology leads to fun possibilities -- for example, it's easy to visualize a lumbering beast of a food truck that hosts expert chefs who prepare custom orders for delivery within a limited service area around the truck by small, speedy delivery robots. Needless to say, said food truck bristles with touch screens that display a steady stream of orders from cellphone apps that also provide continuously updated GPS coordinates for the delivery robots. "Hey, Bob -- looks like your Maine lobster with lemon butter is here. I see the food truck bot coming from that corner."
The basic idea is that wealth always, always seeks avenues for spending. Few people indeed gather paper riches merely for the sake of giggling behind closed curtains over their bank balances. Admittedly, a lopsided distribution of wealth will kind of suck for those at the bottom, but outside of the true unfortunates who live on the streets, the bottom class will still be richer than kings were a thousand years ago. Who among us in the developed world doesn't have a cellphone, a color television, and access to enough cheap food to grow mightily into a fat boy or "woman of considerable girth"? Moreover, depending on political winds, a future United States might indeed see a universal basic income that very effectively persuades the have-littles from ever seriously contemplating revolution. I don't imagine the upper-crust types will squawk too much about the huge cost of such social bribery as long as they can keep tootling around in their auto-piloted Rolls-Royces and sipping their top-shelf boutique wines with Beluga caviar while smiling servants buff their toenails. That's the beauty of the increasingly automated production of wealth -- buying off the peasants becomes more and more affordable for the have-alls, and unlike ancient Rome, there aren't any Visigoths hammering on the gates.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
The fact that this whole story culminates in the punchline, "The answer is Udacity!" is kind of a sick joke. Udacity, from what I've seen of it, is comically awful. Sebastian Thrun seems to be mostly a carnival shyster from what I can tell. Their original premise was to offer a full college education (and "disrupt", run existing colleges out of existence), and they've long since retreated from that goal. Their attempt at solving the remedial-math problem was an epic disaster (link). I haven't really heard anyone hype Udacity in a few years now.
Review of Thrun's Udacity statistics course, from a statistics professor (me), on my blog:http://www.madmath.com/2012/09/udacity-statistics-101.html
Previously featured on Slashdot: https://news.slashdot.org/story/12/09/10/129231/the-problems-with-online-math-classes
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
That's why the glorious Democratic People's Republic of Korea has outlawed profit, and given its people heaven on earth. Long live the Dear Leader!
You don't think people who put up millions or billions of dollars of their own money to fund the startup capital requirements of a company deserve to be compensated for risking that money? That you should just measure how many hours a week a person spends performing labor and all profits split accordingly? You would not have any companies if you did that, because nobody would be willing to risk the money to start one, when you can go work at an existing company risk-free.
On odd days we see stories about how civilization is going to collapse because robots will steal all the jobs.
On even days we see stories about how there there won't be enough workers to support the retiring boomers.
The only thing certain is that civilization is going to end. We just can't agree on the reason.
There is no magic recipes and no powerful people that can do _anything_ effective here. The jobs are going away because machines are getting cheaper at it than humans and the results are better. There is no way to turn back that wheel without a collapse of civilization. (To be fair, the human race is hard at work to arrange for that...) These jobs go away because even an average capable person is astonishingly incompetent and mostly unable to learn. All the things you see in progress and actual productivity come from a tiny faction of the human race, maybe 20% or so. (This is mostly the number of STEM graduates. Some manual laborers will continue to be needed as well, usually at the high end, like welders, and the low end, like cleaners.) The rest are just administrators, distributors, sellers, self-promoters, etc. The thing is that the search for ever larger profits does expose that. And hence the jobs vanish.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, doing work that is worthless is pretty soul-destroying if you are smart enough to see that. As to bureaucrats, every one of those you send home at full wagers is a huge gain in efficiency. These people destroy, nothing else.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
On odd days we see stories about how civilization is going to collapse because robots will steal all the jobs. On even days we see stories about how there there won't be enough workers to support the retiring boomers.
Those two problems aren't that different. Arguably they are the same problem.
Retiring boomers are a problem because there may not be a large enough tax base to fund social security benefits from individual workers. This is made worse if less young people have jobs. Retiring boomers are also a problem because there will be a larger percentage of our population needing care workers, but that costs money. If that is automated then we still have the low worker problem, if people do it they need to be paid and we still have the funding problem.
None of these are that catastrophic of a problem, we just need to move more of the taxation burden to those who are benefiting the most from automation instead of from average citizens. Currently there is significant resistance to raising taxes on the rich and big business, but that will either break under the pressure of increased automation and globalization or we will shift further into a plutocratic / feudal society (hopefully the former).
Even though there are solutions to our problems, we still need to fight vigorously to ensure we choose solutions which are more inclusive. The default result of inaction is simply more concentration of wealth and less equality, which is the natural result of unregulated market forces.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Tough for new parents deciding on having kids, knowing even with a college education, they may never get a job.
Those parents will get little to no comfort from anything Andreessen is saying, considering all of his arguments are really for why the upper middle class and a tiny minority of very ambitious and proactive children will be fine. No one should be worried about how well students who actively seek out education will do in the future. Until robots take 100% of our jobs, those children will mostly be just fine.
Our society's problems will be how to handle the other 90+% of our population. The ones who used to be able to coast through school, learn to read and do arithmetic, and then work blue collar jobs. They are not going to learn to be scientists from Udemy courses. Those kids are still screwed in the world Andreessen envisions.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
lower the full time mark start at 32 hours also healthcare for all.
Pound sand because where he grew up bookstores didnt operate? Talk about an ignorant, selfish fuck.
Why do most humans insist on following other humans just because of past progress?
There is zero anything guaranteeing you anything -- stop looking to others to make your choices.
Wake the fuck up.
In the past, we've told the out-of-work buggy whip maker to go get an education, and learn a new trade to avoid becoming a member of the "useless class".
AI is targeting the educated mind, so Andreessen's recommendation is to go get an education??
Andreessen is an ignorant idiot. He also fails to grasp the fact that we already have a "unemployable" class in society (unless you feel infants and the retired elderly somehow aren't). The problem is NOT having an unemployable class. The problem is finding proper ways to support that inevitability, while also not succumbing to the desires of the employable who are simply fucking lazy.
Eventually, humans will be a useless class when it comes to productivity. All of them. Learn to accept that fact, and build the new society appropriately instead of regurgitating the same old "education" line that won't work going forward.
Hang on a minute. Rewind. Look at the basic premise here, and realize how there is a poisonous precept in place.
If technology can eat all our jobs, than this means that we should be free. It should be like Star Trek, where we don't have to worry about people cleaning our toilets or doing our laundry, and subsequently don't need to worry about how to the rent or the car.
If technology can eliminate most workers, then we need to ensure that everyone gets to share that prosperity, and not that those who are making it happen get to rule over the rest of us.
It was well-documented and envisioned in Star Trek - money is no longer a thing, and people spend time leveling themselves up.
People risk capital, some lose it, others get rewarded nicely. It's kind of like poker. There are winners and there are losers. People don't sit down at a table with N players and split each pot N ways. If it were like that, the rake (taxes) that the house (government) takes would eventually eat up all the money, leaving everyone with nothing.
The problem is that it would likely slide into some sort of a dystopian nightmare before too long. Humans evolved to be perpetually busy doing something to provide for their needs. Whenever we've had times where people didn't have to do that, those people just created problems. Just look at the current leisure class as a great example. The ones that don't work have far more than what they could possibly spend in several lifetimes, and so they make themselves busy trying to get a high score on net worth.
At the lower end of the spectrum, you see those that are perpetually unemployed going about causing other types of problems through petty crimes and irresponsible behavior.
It might sound great to have nothing to do for a short period of time, but eventually, you'll get bored and that never ends well. Best case scenario, would be that you just get incredibly depressed and do nothing as the years go by with nothing in particular to show for it.
That's all this is. Myopic history-forgetters spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Hell, I'm one of those people who see what could go wrong, and *I* am saying this, what does that tell you? Will things potentially suck for some people for a while? Probably. Will it destroy humanity? LOL, no. Everyone needs to calm down and take a breath.
You seem to think that our economy is based on "making stuff". But manufacturing is only 12% of the economy.
12% of the US economy. That is not true globally.
The most valuable companies in the world do no manufacturing.
Want to bet on that? Of the 10 largest companies in the world by revenue, the only one in the top ten that arguably isn't a manufacturer is Walmart and their business is almost exclusively selling manufactured goods made by other companies. Yes oil and gas is wildly valuable and processing fossil fuels IS manufacturing.
If you are measuring by market cap you still have lots of companies that make some/most of their revenue via manufacturing. The top ten there includes Berkshire Hathaway, Johnson and Johnson, Apple, Amazon and Alibaba who all either make stuff themselves or sell manufactured goods made by others.
You'll hear the meme that the US doesn't manufacture anymore which is simply not true at all. The US manufacturing sector is worth about $3 Trillion annually which by itself would one of the top 7 economies in the world.
If suddenly, machines could make everything we currently make, there would be little change in our economy.
Machines CAN make much of it. What they cannot do is make it economically. The limitations on automation are not primarily physical. They are economic. Automation carries large up front costs which require substantial production volume and/or value to recoup. There are and will remain no lack of labor intensive products where it makes no economic sense to automate. Nobody is going to buy a machine that costs more to operate than it does to hire a person.
Even if higher intelligence isn't genetic (and there are almost certainly genetic components), it is memetic. Children raised in curious, information-seeking, question-pondering experimental households are going to grow up into more new-economy-awesome adults.
And?
And, something like 15% of the eternal-60-hour-week employees of a place like Apple, Google or Amazon South Lake Union are parents. Reasonable to say that most big tech employees will die childless. A kid is the quickest way to sink your new-economy career. Meanwhile the majority of US births for the last decade have been paid for by Medicaid. The majority (!) of K-12 students qualify for free-or-reduced lunches because they're growing up in or nearly in poverty. The *only* way to make that model work over any length of time at all is to try and be Singapore and constantly import the world's smart people (and then economically discourage them from reproducing). That doesn't scale very far.
Retiring boomers are a problem because there may not be a large enough tax base to fund social security benefits from individual workers
This is a basic lie told by the Republican party and passed on for the last 20 years without question. The reality is that if you just extend the payroll tax cutoff for higher income people, you make Social Security solvent for decades to come. It's a basic lie that the problem isn't fixable, it's just the Republican party can't stand that maybe people with already very high incomes might have to pay more.
Note: this is the correct thread for the same comment moments ago mistakenly cross-posted at Revisiting the Jobs Artificial Intelligence Will Create with two tiny revisions.
I don't usually play the Jurassic card, but I was there in the late nineties when George Gilder whipped the telecosm into leaping headlong into a giant bluff of Gillette Foamy.
Question left unanswered: what are you lavishing below the elbow which requires an underhand application? It's almost as if Gillette thought to themselves: screw the magnetic screwdriver—we'll invent the magnetic screw head instead.
[*] Note: this is the seventies, man. Any hint of metrosexual grooming (outside of San Francisco) was a standing invitation to the hombre prom, out behind The Oak and Dagger, at closing time. The proposed use is not for visible grooming.
Question answered all too well: why are they lowering this scantily clad woman into your manly foam product?
Tom Chanter manages in this piece to revive some of the old Gilder magic. "I was there, Gandalf." Deep down, Gilder was barely left of the Taliban, but he a definite knack for massaging the adrenal glands of the unwashed masses to plummy plumes of imminent mass technogasm.
The Madness of King George — July 2002
"Virtually anyone on the planet with an internet connection and a commitment to self-empowerment through learning can come to Udacity, master a suite of job-ready skills, and pursue rewarding employment."
Sure but they can't actually receive that employment. Companies are still obsessed with degrees and even where they will hire people without the overpriced, slow, and poor education they treat them like second class citizens if they don't have a decade or better experience.
Places hiring with multiple years of experience per year education you have it backward. 4 years of education is almost up to par with a year of experience but in truth there are some aspects which simply can't be replaced by any amount of education.
I've always believed in Postel's robustness principle: be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept. For this reason, I'm harder on myself than I am on other people in fiddly matters orthographic.
But this is not a good venue to misspell both Andreessen and Horowitz, once each.
First:
Second:
In his defense, he did get "Andreessen" right in 53 other instances, and it all honesty, if any modern software (including Firebox) had half a spell-checking clue, your helpful software agent might have inquired: did you really mean to spell "Andreessen" differently one time out of fifty four? So I guess he only has Andreessen, himself, to blame, after all.
Also, for the nit-picky record, "Luddite" remains a proper noun.
Sometimes I maybe trust the Slashdot eggheads to fill in the blanks more than I ought to.
If you were paying full attention, you would have noticed that by managing to misspell Andreessen as "Andreesen" and "Horowitz" as "Horrowitz" he effectively fudged A16z into both A15z and A17z (not to mention a crypto A16z, because sometimes two wrongs do make a square number).
Which is partly why I drew attention to this being exactly the wrong venue for that double-action slovenliness.
Inside the United States, global income inequality is also falling. The United States is part of the globe....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.