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WHY AI WILL SAVE THE WORLD

by Marc Andreessen
* AI, machine & deep learning
* Generative AI

* Facebook
* LinkedIn
* Twitter

Table of contents
* AI can make everything we care about better
* Why the panic?
* The Baptists and Bootleggers of AI
* AI Risk #1: Will AI kill us all?
* AI Risk #2: Will AI ruin our society?
* AI Risk #3: Will AI take all our jobs?
* AI Risk #4: Will AI lead to crippling inequality?
* AI Risk #5: Will AI lead to people doing bad things?
* The actual risk of not pursuing AI
* What is to be done?
* Legends and heroes

Explore more: AI + a16z

The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out.

Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world,
and in fact may save it.

First, a short description of what AI is: The application of mathematics and
software code to teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate
knowledge in ways similar to how people do it. AI is a computer program like any
other – it runs, takes input, processes, and generates output. AI’s output is
useful across a wide range of fields, ranging from coding to medicine to law to
the creative arts. It is owned by people and controlled by people, like any
other technology.

A shorter description of what AI isn’t: Killer software and robots that will
spring to life and decide to murder the human race or otherwise ruin everything,
like you see in the movies.

An even shorter description of what AI could be: A way to make everything we
care about better.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

* AI CAN MAKE EVERYTHING WE CARE ABOUT BETTER
* WHY THE PANIC?
* THE BAPTISTS AND BOOTLEGGERS OF AI
* AI RISK #1: WILL AI KILL US ALL?
* AI RISK #2: WILL AI RUIN OUR SOCIETY?
* AI RISK #3: WILL AI TAKE ALL OUR JOBS?
* AI RISK #4: WILL AI LEAD TO CRIPPLING INEQUALITY?
* AI RISK #5: WILL AI LEAD TO PEOPLE DOING BAD THINGS?
* THE ACTUAL RISK OF NOT PURSUING AI
* WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
* LEGENDS AND HEROES

EXPLORE MORE: AI + A16Z

WHY AI CAN MAKE EVERYTHING WE CARE ABOUT BETTER

The most validated core conclusion of social science across many decades and
thousands of studies is that human intelligence makes a very broad range of life
outcomes better. Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of
activity: academic achievement, job performance, occupational status, income,
creativity, physical health, longevity, learning new skills, managing complex
tasks, leadership, entrepreneurial success, conflict resolution, reading
comprehension, financial decision making, understanding others’ perspectives,
creative arts, parenting outcomes, and life satisfaction.

Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to
create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics,
chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art,
music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of
intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts,
scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used
our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over
the last 4,000 years.

What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to
make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation
of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the
stars – much, much better from here.

AI augmentation of human intelligence has already started – AI is already around
us in the form of computer control systems of many kinds, is now rapidly
escalating with AI Large Language Models like ChatGPT, and will accelerate very
quickly from here – if we let it.

In our new era of AI:

* Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely
compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor
will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them
maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.
* Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist
that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely
knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present
through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s
outcomes.
* Every scientist will have an AI assistant/collaborator/partner that will
greatly expand their scope of scientific research and achievement. Every
artist, every engineer, every businessperson, every doctor, every caregiver
will have the same in their worlds.
* Every leader of people – CEO, government official, nonprofit president,
athletic coach, teacher – will have the same. The magnification effects of
better decisions by leaders across the people they lead are enormous, so this
intelligence augmentation may be the most important of all.
* Productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically,
driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs,
and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity
across the planet.
* Scientific breakthroughs and new technologies and medicines will dramatically
expand, as AI helps us further decode the laws of nature and harvest them for
our benefit.
* The creative arts will enter a golden age, as AI-augmented artists,
musicians, writers, and filmmakers gain the ability to realize their visions
far faster and at greater scale than ever before.
* I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by
reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by
terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited
information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and
political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better
strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary
bloodshed.
* In short, anything that people do with their natural intelligence today can
be done much better with AI, and we will be able to take on new challenges
that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to
achieving interstellar travel.
* And this isn’t just about intelligence! Perhaps the most underestimated
quality of AI is how humanizing it can be. AI art gives people who otherwise
lack technical skills the freedom to create and share their artistic ideas.
Talking to an empathetic AI friend really does improve their ability to
handle adversity. And AI medical chatbots are already more empathetic than
their human counterparts. Rather than making the world harsher and more
mechanistic, infinitely patient and sympathetic AI will make the world warmer
and nicer.

The stakes here are high. The opportunities are profound. AI is quite possibly
the most important – and best – thing our civilization has ever created,
certainly on par with electricity and microchips, and probably beyond those.

The development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should fear –
is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our
future.

We should be living in a much better world with AI, and now we can.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXPLORE MORE: AI + A16Z

SO WHY THE PANIC?

In contrast to this positive view, the public conversation about AI is presently
shot through with hysterical fear and paranoia.

We hear claims that AI will variously kill us all, ruin our society, take all
our jobs, cause crippling inequality, and enable bad people to do awful things.

What explains this divergence in potential outcomes from near utopia to
horrifying dystopia?

Historically, every new technology that matters, from electric lighting to
automobiles to radio to the Internet, has sparked a moral panic – a social
contagion that convinces people the new technology is going to destroy the
world, or society, or both. The fine folks at Pessimists Archive have documented
these technology-driven moral panics over the decades; their history makes the
pattern vividly clear. It turns out this present panic is not even the first for
AI.

Now, it is certainly the case that many new technologies have led to bad
outcomes – often the same technologies that have been otherwise enormously
beneficial to our welfare. So it’s not that the mere existence of a moral panic
means there is nothing to be concerned about.

But a moral panic is by its very nature irrational – it takes what may be a
legitimate concern and inflates it into a level of hysteria that ironically
makes it harder to confront actually serious concerns.

And wow do we have a full-blown moral panic about AI right now.

This moral panic is already being used as a motivating force by a variety of
actors to demand policy action – new AI restrictions, regulations, and laws.
These actors, who are making extremely dramatic public statements about the
dangers of AI – feeding on and further inflaming moral panic – all present
themselves as selfless champions of the public good.

But are they?

And are they right or wrong?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXPLORE MORE: AI + A16Z

THE BAPTISTS AND BOOTLEGGERS OF AI

Economists have observed a longstanding pattern in reform movements of this
kind. The actors within movements like these fall into two categories –
“Baptists” and “Bootleggers” – drawing on the historical example of the
prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920’s:

* “Baptists” are the true believer social reformers who legitimately feel –
deeply and emotionally, if not rationally – that new restrictions,
regulations, and laws are required to prevent societal disaster. For alcohol
prohibition, these actors were often literally devout Christians who felt
that alcohol was destroying the moral fabric of society. For AI risk, these
actors are true believers that AI presents one or another existential risks –
strap them to a polygraph, they really mean it.
* “Bootleggers” are the self-interested opportunists who stand to financially
profit by the imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that
insulate them from competitors. For alcohol prohibition, these were the
literal bootleggers who made a fortune selling illicit alcohol to Americans
when legitimate alcohol sales were banned. For AI risk, these are CEOs who
stand to make more money if regulatory barriers are erected that form a
cartel of government-blessed AI vendors protected from new startup and open
source competition – the software version of “too big to fail” banks.

A cynic would suggest that some of the apparent Baptists are also Bootleggers –
specifically the ones paid to attack AI by their universities, think tanks,
activist groups, and media outlets. If you are paid a salary or receive grants
to foster AI panic…you are probably a Bootlegger.

The problem with the Bootleggers is that they win. The Baptists are naive
ideologues, the Bootleggers are cynical operators, and so the result of reform
movements like these is often that the Bootleggers get what they want –
regulatory capture, insulation from competition, the formation of a cartel – and
the Baptists are left wondering where their drive for social improvement went so
wrong.

We just lived through a stunning example of this – banking reform after the 2008
global financial crisis. The Baptists told us that we needed new laws and
regulations to break up the “too big to fail” banks to prevent such a crisis
from ever happening again. So Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which
was marketed as satisfying the Baptists’ goal, but in reality was coopted by the
Bootleggers – the big banks. The result is that the same banks that were “too
big to fail” in 2008 are much, much larger now.

So in practice, even when the Baptists are genuine – and even when the Baptists
are right – they are used as cover by manipulative and venal Bootleggers to
benefit themselves.

And this is what is happening in the drive for AI regulation right now.

However, it isn’t sufficient to simply identify the actors and impugn their
motives. We should consider the arguments of both the Baptists and the
Bootleggers on their merits.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXPLORE MORE: AI + A16Z

AI RISK #1: WILL AI KILL US ALL?

The first and original AI doomer risk is that AI will decide to literally kill
humanity.

The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is
deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus
Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally
technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual
torture by the gods. Later, Mary Shelley gave us moderns our own version of this
myth in her novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, in which we develop
the technology for eternal life, which then rises up and seeks to destroy us.
And of course, no AI panic newspaper story is complete without a still image of
a gleaming red-eyed killer robot from James Cameron’s Terminator films.

The presumed evolutionary purpose of this mythology is to motivate us to
seriously consider potential risks of new technologies – fire, after all, can
indeed be used to burn down entire cities. But just as fire was also the
foundation of modern civilization as used to keep us warm and safe in a cold and
hostile world, this mythology ignores the far greater upside of most – all? –
new technologies, and in practice inflames destructive emotion rather than
reasoned analysis. Just because premodern man freaked out like this doesn’t mean
we have to; we can apply rationality instead.

My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a
profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by
billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of
the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built
by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people. The idea that
it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it has
motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a superstitious handwave.

In short, AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you,
because it’s not alive. And AI is a machine – is not going to come alive any
more than your toaster will.

Now, obviously, there are true believers in killer AI – Baptists – who are
gaining a suddenly stratospheric amount of media coverage for their terrifying
warnings, some of whom claim to have been studying the topic for decades and say
they are now scared out of their minds by what they have learned. Some of these
true believers are even actual innovators of the technology. These actors are
arguing for a variety of bizarre and extreme restrictions on AI ranging from a
ban on AI development, all the way up to military airstrikes on datacenters and
nuclear war. They argue that because people like me cannot rule out future
catastrophic consequences of AI, that we must assume a precautionary stance that
may require large amounts of physical violence and death in order to prevent
potential existential risk.

My response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable
hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are
getting into a danger zone? These questions go mainly unanswered apart from “You
can’t prove it won’t happen!” In fact, these Baptists’ position is so
non-scientific and so extreme – a conspiracy theory about math and code – and is
already calling for physical violence, that I will do something I would normally
not do and question their motives as well.

Specifically, I think three things are going on:

First, recall that John Von Neumann responded to Robert Oppenheimer’s famous
hand-wringing about his role creating nuclear weapons – which helped end World
War II and prevent World War III – with, “Some people confess guilt to claim
credit for the sin.” What is the most dramatic way one can claim credit for the
importance of one’s work without sounding overtly boastful? This explains the
mismatch between the words and actions of the Baptists who are actually building
and funding AI – watch their actions, not their words. (Truman was harsher after
meeting with Oppenheimer: “Don’t let that crybaby in here again.”)

Second, some of the Baptists are actually Bootleggers. There is a whole
profession of “AI safety expert”, “AI ethicist”, “AI risk researcher”. They are
paid to be doomers, and their statements should be processed appropriately.

Third, California is justifiably famous for our many thousands of cults, from
EST to the Peoples Temple, from Heaven’s Gate to the Manson Family. Many,
although not all, of these cults are harmless, and maybe even serve a purpose
for alienated people who find homes in them. But some are very dangerous indeed,
and cults have a notoriously hard time straddling the line that ultimately leads
to violence and death.

And the reality, which is obvious to everyone in the Bay Area but probably not
outside of it, is that “AI risk” has developed into a cult, which has suddenly
emerged into the daylight of global press attention and the public conversation.
This cult has pulled in not just fringe characters, but also some actual
industry experts and a not small number of wealthy donors – including, until
recently, Sam Bankman-Fried. And it’s developed a full panoply of cult behaviors
and beliefs.

This cult is why there are a set of AI risk doomers who sound so extreme – it’s
not that they actually have secret knowledge that make their extremism logical,
it’s that they’ve whipped themselves into a frenzy and really are…extremely
extreme.

It turns out that this type of cult isn’t new – there is a longstanding Western
tradition of millenarianism, which generates apocalypse cults. The AI risk cult
has all the hallmarks of a millenarian apocalypse cult. From Wikipedia, with
additions by me:

> “Millenarianism is the belief by a group or movement [AI risk doomers] in a
> coming fundamental transformation of society [the arrival of AI], after which
> all things will be changed [AI utopia, dystopia, and/or end of the world].
> Only dramatic events [AI bans, airstrikes on datacenters, nuclear strikes on
> unregulated AI] are seen as able to change the world [prevent AI] and the
> change is anticipated to be brought about, or survived, by a group of the
> devout and dedicated. In most millenarian scenarios, the disaster or battle to
> come [AI apocalypse, or its prevention] will be followed by a new, purified
> world [AI bans] in which the believers will be rewarded [or at least
> acknowledged to have been correct all along].”

This apocalypse cult pattern is so obvious that I am surprised more people don’t
see it.

Don’t get me wrong, cults are fun to hear about, their written material is often
creative and fascinating, and their members are engaging at dinner parties and
on TV. But their extreme beliefs should not determine the future of laws and
society – obviously not.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXPLORE MORE: AI + A16Z

AI RISK #2: WILL AI RUIN OUR SOCIETY?

The second widely mooted AI risk is that AI will ruin our society, by generating
outputs that will be so “harmful”, to use the nomenclature of this kind of
doomer, as to cause profound damage to humanity, even if we’re not literally
killed.

Short version: If the murder robots don’t get us, the hate speech and
misinformation will.

This is a relatively recent doomer concern that branched off from and somewhat
took over the “AI risk” movement that I described above. In fact, the
terminology of AI risk recently changed from “AI safety” – the term used by
people who are worried that AI would literally kill us – to “AI alignment” – the
term used by people who are worried about societal “harms”. The original AI
safety people are frustrated by this shift, although they don’t know how to put
it back in the box – they now advocate that the actual AI risk topic be renamed
“AI notkilleveryoneism”, which has not yet been widely adopted but is at least
clear.

The tipoff to the nature of the AI societal risk claim is its own term, “AI
alignment”. Alignment with what? Human values. Whose human values? Ah, that’s
where things get tricky.

As it happens, I have had a front row seat to an analogous situation – the
social media “trust and safety” wars. As is now obvious, social media services
have been under massive pressure from governments and activists to ban,
restrict, censor, and otherwise suppress a wide range of content for many years.
And the same concerns of “hate speech” (and its mathematical counterpart,
“algorithmic bias”) and “misinformation” are being directly transferred from the
social media context to the new frontier of “AI alignment”.

My big learnings from the social media wars are:

On the one hand, there is no absolutist free speech position. First, every
country, including the United States, makes at least some content illegal.
Second, there are certain kinds of content, like child pornography and
incitements to real world violence, that are nearly universally agreed to be off
limits – legal or not – by virtually every society. So any technological
platform that facilitates or generates content – speech – is going to have some
restrictions.

On the other hand, the slippery slope is not a fallacy, it’s an inevitability.
Once a framework for restricting even egregiously terrible content is in place –
for example, for hate speech, a specific hurtful word, or for misinformation,
obviously false claims like “the Pope is dead” – a shockingly broad range of
government agencies and activist pressure groups and nongovernmental entities
will kick into gear and demand ever greater levels of censorship and suppression
of whatever speech they view as threatening to society and/or their own personal
preferences. They will do this up to and including in ways that are nakedly
felony crimes. This cycle in practice can run apparently forever, with the
enthusiastic support of authoritarian hall monitors installed throughout our
elite power structures. This has been cascading for a decade in social media and
with only certain exceptions continues to get more fervent all the time.

And so this is the dynamic that has formed around “AI alignment” now. Its
proponents claim the wisdom to engineer AI-generated speech and thought that are
good for society, and to ban AI-generated speech and thoughts that are bad for
society. Its opponents claim that the thought police are breathtakingly arrogant
and presumptuous – and often outright criminal, at least in the US – and in fact
are seeking to become a new kind of fused government-corporate-academic
authoritarian speech dictatorship ripped straight from the pages of George
Orwell’s 1984.

As the proponents of both “trust and safety” and “AI alignment” are clustered
into the very narrow slice of the global population that characterizes the
American coastal elites – which includes many of the people who work in and
write about the tech industry – many of my readers will find yourselves primed
to argue that dramatic restrictions on AI output are required to avoid
destroying society. I will not attempt to talk you out of this now, I will
simply state that this is the nature of the demand, and that most people in the
world neither agree with your ideology nor want to see you win.

If you don’t agree with the prevailing niche morality that is being imposed on
both social media and AI via ever-intensifying speech codes, you should also
realize that the fight over what AI is allowed to say/generate will be even more
important – by a lot – than the fight over social media censorship. AI is highly
likely to be the control layer for everything in the world. How it is allowed to
operate is going to matter perhaps more than anything else has ever mattered.
You should be aware of how a small and isolated coterie of partisan social
engineers are trying to determine that right now, under cover of the age-old
claim that they are protecting you.

In short, don’t let the thought police suppress AI.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXPLORE MORE: AI + A16Z

AI RISK #3: WILL AI TAKE ALL OUR JOBS?

The fear of job loss due variously to mechanization, automation,
computerization, or AI has been a recurring panic for hundreds of years, since
the original onset of machinery such as the mechanical loom. Even though every
new major technology has led to more jobs at higher wages throughout history,
each wave of this panic is accompanied by claims that “this time is different” –
this is the time it will finally happen, this is the technology that will
finally deliver the hammer blow to human labor. And yet, it never happens.

We’ve been through two such technology-driven unemployment panic cycles in our
recent past – the outsourcing panic of the 2000’s, and the automation panic of
the 2010’s. Notwithstanding many talking heads, pundits, and even tech industry
executives pounding the table throughout both decades that mass unemployment was
near, by late 2019 – right before the onset of COVID – the world had more jobs
at higher wages than ever in history.

Nevertheless this mistaken idea will not die.

And sure enough, it’s back.

This time, we finally have the technology that’s going to take all the jobs and
render human workers superfluous – real AI. Surely this time history won’t
repeat, and AI will cause mass unemployment – and not rapid economic, job, and
wage growth – right?

No, that’s not going to happen – and in fact AI, if allowed to develop and
proliferate throughout the economy, may cause the most dramatic and sustained
economic boom of all time, with correspondingly record job and wage growth – the
exact opposite of the fear. And here’s why.

The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the
Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a
fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either
machines do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work
for people to do.

The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive
intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get
productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs.
The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and
services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending
power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy,
which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new
industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by
machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material
prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs.

But the good news doesn’t stop there. We also get higher wages. This is because,
at the level of the individual worker, the marketplace sets compensation as a
function of the marginal productivity of the worker. A worker in a
technology-infused business will be more productive than a worker in a
traditional business. The employer will either pay that worker more money as he
is now more productive, or another employer will, purely out of self interest.
The result is that technology introduced into an industry generally not only
increases the number of jobs in the industry but also raises wages.

To summarize, technology empowers people to be more productive. This causes the
prices for existing goods and services to fall, and for wages to rise. This in
turn causes economic growth and job growth, while motivating the creation of new
jobs and new industries. If a market economy is allowed to function normally and
if technology is allowed to be introduced freely, this is a perpetual upward
cycle that never ends. For, as Milton Friedman observed, “Human wants and needs
are endless” – we always want more than we have. A technology-infused market
economy is the way we get closer to delivering everything everyone could
conceivably want, but never all the way there. And that is why technology
doesn’t destroy jobs and never will.

These are such mindblowing ideas for people who have not been exposed to them
that it may take you some time to wrap your head around them. But I swear I’m
not making them up – in fact you can read all about them in standard economics
textbooks. I recommend the chapter The Curse of Machinery in Henry Hazlitt’s
Economics In One Lesson, and Frederic Bastiat’s satirical Candlemaker’s Petition
to blot out the sun due to its unfair competition with the lighting industry,
here modernized for our times.

But this time is different, you’re thinking. This time, with AI, we have the
technology that can replace ALL human labor.

But, using the principles I described above, think of what it would mean for
literally all existing human labor to be replaced by machines.

It would mean a takeoff rate of economic productivity growth that would be
absolutely stratospheric, far beyond any historical precedent. Prices of
existing goods and services would drop across the board to virtually zero.
Consumer welfare would skyrocket. Consumer spending power would skyrocket. New
demand in the economy would explode. Entrepreneurs would create dizzying arrays
of new industries, products, and services, and employ as many people and AI as
they could as fast as possible to meet all the new demand.

Suppose AI once again replaces that labor? The cycle would repeat, driving
consumer welfare, economic growth, and job and wage growth even higher. It would
be a straight spiral up to a material utopia that neither Adam Smith or Karl
Marx ever dared dream of.

We should be so lucky.

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AI RISK #4: WILL AI LEAD TO CRIPPLING INEQUALITY?

Speaking of Karl Marx, the concern about AI taking jobs segues directly into the
next claimed AI risk, which is, OK, Marc, suppose AI does take all the jobs,
either for bad or for good. Won’t that result in massive and crippling wealth
inequality, as the owners of AI reap all the economic rewards and regular people
get nothing?

As it happens, this was a central claim of Marxism, that the owners of the means
of production – the bourgeoisie – would inevitably steal all societal wealth
from the people who do the actual work – the proletariat. This is another
fallacy that simply will not die no matter how often it’s disproved by reality.
But let’s drive a stake through its heart anyway.

The flaw in this theory is that, as the owner of a piece of technology, it’s not
in your own interest to keep it to yourself – in fact the opposite, it’s in your
own interest to sell it to as many customers as possible. The largest market in
the world for any product is the entire world, all 8 billion of us. And so in
reality, every new technology – even ones that start by selling to the rarefied
air of high-paying big companies or wealthy consumers – rapidly proliferates
until it’s in the hands of the largest possible mass market, ultimately everyone
on the planet.

The classic example of this was Elon Musk’s so-called “secret plan” – which he
naturally published openly – for Tesla in 2006:

> Step 1, Build [expensive] sports car
>
> Step 2, Use that money to build an affordable car
>
> Step 3, Use that money to build an even more affordable car

…which is of course exactly what he’s done, becoming the richest man in the
world as a result.

That last point is key. Would Elon be even richer if he only sold cars to rich
people today? No. Would he be even richer than that if he only made cars for
himself? Of course not. No, he maximizes his own profit by selling to the
largest possible market, the world.

In short, everyone gets the thing – as we saw in the past with not just cars but
also electricity, radio, computers, the Internet, mobile phones, and search
engines. The makers of such technologies are highly motivated to drive down
their prices until everyone on the planet can afford them. This is precisely
what is already happening in AI – it’s why you can use state of the art
generative AI not just at low cost but even for free today in the form of
Microsoft Bing and Google Bard – and it is what will continue to happen. Not
because such vendors are foolish or generous but precisely because they are
greedy – they want to maximize the size of their market, which maximizes their
profits.

So what happens is the opposite of technology driving centralization of wealth –
individual customers of the technology, ultimately including everyone on the
planet, are empowered instead, and capture most of the generated value. As with
prior technologies, the companies that build AI – assuming they have to function
in a free market – will compete furiously to make this happen.

Marx was wrong then, and he’s wrong now.

This is not to say that inequality is not an issue in our society. It is, it’s
just not being driven by technology, it’s being driven by the reverse, by the
sectors of the economy that are the most resistant to new technology, that have
the most government intervention to prevent the adoption of new technology like
AI – specifically housing, education, and health care. The actual risk of AI and
inequality is not that AI will cause more inequality but rather that we will not
allow AI to be used to reduce inequality.

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AI RISK #5: WILL AI LEAD TO BAD PEOPLE DOING BAD THINGS?

So far I have explained why four of the five most often proposed risks of AI are
not actually real – AI will not come to life and kill us, AI will not ruin our
society, AI will not cause mass unemployment, and AI will not cause an ruinous
increase in inequality. But now let’s address the fifth, the one I actually
agree with: AI will make it easier for bad people to do bad things.

In some sense this is a tautology. Technology is a tool. Tools, starting with
fire and rocks, can be used to do good things – cook food and build houses – and
bad things – burn people and bludgeon people. Any technology can be used for
good or bad. Fair enough. And AI will make it easier for criminals, terrorists,
and hostile governments to do bad things, no question.

This causes some people to propose, well, in that case, let’s not take the risk,
let’s ban AI now before this can happen. Unfortunately, AI is not some esoteric
physical material that is hard to come by, like plutonium. It’s the opposite,
it’s the easiest material in the world to come by – math and code.

The AI cat is obviously already out of the bag. You can learn how to build AI
from thousands of free online courses, books, papers, and videos, and there are
outstanding open source implementations proliferating by the day. AI is like air
– it will be everywhere. The level of totalitarian oppression that would be
required to arrest that would be so draconian – a world government monitoring
and controlling all computers? jackbooted thugs in black helicopters seizing
rogue GPUs? – that we would not have a society left to protect.

So instead, there are two very straightforward ways to address the risk of bad
people doing bad things with AI, and these are precisely what we should focus
on.

First, we have laws on the books to criminalize most of the bad things that
anyone is going to do with AI. Hack into the Pentagon? That’s a crime. Steal
money from a bank? That’s a crime. Create a bioweapon? That’s a crime. Commit a
terrorist act? That’s a crime. We can simply focus on preventing those crimes
when we can, and prosecuting them when we cannot. We don’t even need new laws –
I’m not aware of a single actual bad use for AI that’s been proposed that’s not
already illegal. And if a new bad use is identified, we ban that use. QED.

But you’ll notice what I slipped in there – I said we should focus first on
preventing AI-assisted crimes before they happen – wouldn’t such prevention mean
banning AI? Well, there’s another way to prevent such actions, and that’s by
using AI as a defensive tool. The same capabilities that make AI dangerous in
the hands of bad guys with bad goals make it powerful in the hands of good guys
with good goals – specifically the good guys whose job it is to prevent bad
things from happening.

For example, if you are worried about AI generating fake people and fake videos,
the answer is to build new systems where people can verify themselves and real
content via cryptographic signatures. Digital creation and alteration of both
real and fake content was already here before AI; the answer is not to ban word
processors and Photoshop – or AI – but to use technology to build a system that
actually solves the problem.

And so, second, let’s mount major efforts to use AI for good, legitimate,
defensive purposes. Let’s put AI to work in cyberdefense, in biological defense,
in hunting terrorists, and in everything else that we do to keep ourselves, our
communities, and our nation safe.

There are already many smart people in and out of government doing exactly this,
of course – but if we apply all of the effort and brainpower that’s currently
fixated on the futile prospect of banning AI to using AI to protect against bad
people doing bad things, I think there’s no question a world infused with AI
will be much safer than the world we live in today.

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THE ACTUAL RISK OF NOT PURSUING AI WITH MAXIMUM FORCE AND SPEED

There is one final, and real, AI risk that is probably the scariest at all:

AI isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the West, it
is also being developed by the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of
China.

China has a vastly different vision for AI than we do – they view it as a
mechanism for authoritarian population control, full stop. They are not even
being secretive about this, they are very clear about it, and they are already
pursuing their agenda. And they do not intend to limit their AI strategy to
China – they intend to proliferate it all across the world, everywhere they are
powering 5G networks, everywhere they are loaning Belt And Road money,
everywhere they are providing friendly consumer apps like Tiktok that serve as
front ends to their centralized command and control AI.

The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we –
the United States and the West – do not.

I propose a simple strategy for what to do about this – in fact, the same
strategy President Ronald Reagan used to win the first Cold War with the Soviet
Union.

“We win, they lose.”

Rather than allowing ungrounded panics around killer AI, “harmful” AI,
job-destroying AI, and inequality-generating AI to put us on our back feet, we
in the United States and the West should lean into AI as hard as we possibly
can.

We should seek to win the race to global AI technological superiority and ensure
that China does not.

In the process, we should drive AI into our economy and society as fast and hard
as we possibly can, in order to maximize its gains for economic productivity and
human potential.

This is the best way both to offset the real AI risks and to ensure that our way
of life is not displaced by the much darker Chinese vision.

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WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

I propose a simple plan:

* Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as
they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to
establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from market
competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk. This will maximize the
technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these
companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism.
* Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively
as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of
big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should
simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their
presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be
their best – our economies and societies win either way.
* Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both
big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open
source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its
widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to
learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and
will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no
matter who they are or how much money they have.
* To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments
working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in
each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive
capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more
general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an
incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as
such.
* To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the
full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our
governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global
dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose.

And that is how we use AI to save the world.

It’s time to build.

LEGENDS AND HEROES

I close with two simple statements.

The development of AI started in the 1940’s, simultaneous with the invention of
the computer. The first scientific paper on neural networks – the architecture
of the AI we have today – was published in 1943. Entire generations of AI
scientists over the last 80 years were born, went to school, worked, and in many
cases passed away without seeing the payoff that we are receiving now. They are
legends, every one.

Today, growing legions of engineers – many of whom are young and may have had
grandparents or even great-grandparents involved in the creation of the ideas
behind AI – are working to make AI a reality, against a wall of fear-mongering
and doomerism that is attempting to paint them as reckless villains. I do not
believe they are reckless or villains. They are heroes, every one. My firm and I
are thrilled to back as many of them as we can, and we will stand alongside them
and their work 100%.

* * *

The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management,
L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its
affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from
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June 6, 2023

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