Two videos
Does wealth correlate with wisdom? Consider this:
David Senra: You don’t have any levels of introspection?
Marc Andreessen: Yes, zero. As little as possible.
DS: Why?MA: Move forward, go. Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s just a real problem. It’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home.
DS: So I’ve read obviously four-hundred, I think now ten, biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs. And that was one of the most surprising things, like, what’s the most surprising thing that you’ve learned from this? It’s like, oh they have little or zero introspection. Like Sam Walton didn’t wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up, he’s like, “I like building Walmart. I’m going to keep building Walmart. I’m going to make more Walmarts.” And just kept doing it over and over again.
MA: And you probably know if you go back before a hundred years ago, it never would’ve occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like it’s the whole idea of--I mean it just, all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are you know kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s.
DS: Say more about that.
MA: Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff at any prior point right? It’s all a new construct. So first, Western civilization had to kind of invent the concept of the individual, right? Which was like a new concept, you know, several hundred years ago. And then for a long time it was, alright the individual runs, right? And like does all these things and builds things and, you know, builds empires and builds companies and builds technology, does all these things. And then, you know, kind of this kind of guilt-based whammy, you know, kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910s, 1920s. Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to like, you know, basically second-guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual, the individual needs to self-criticize, right? The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.
To speak this authoritatively and incorrectly is an embarrassing display, as plenty of others have commented; the comments on the video alone would be helpful reading for Andreessen.1 It’s a failure on multiple levels:
As a historical account, it’s laughable. Introspection and the quest to find the right way to live have been preoccupations of every civilization and religious tradition, including Western civilization, for millennia. They were not invented a hundred years ago in Vienna.
As practical guidance, it’s dangerous. These two are probably right that many of history’s “great men” were not particularly introspective, but many of them also left trails of misery and privation as they built their empires. I like aspiration and striving, but without reflection and deep concern for others, ambition and ability are a destructive combination. This is not an example to follow.
There’s also meaningful irony here. Andreessen says it’s a problem to get stuck in the past, and in the next breath justifies that position with nostalgia for a time when (as he imagines it) great men didn’t have to consider the consequences of their actions.
Now here’s Bernie Sanders, proposing a moratorium on data centers:
The risks of AI are absolutely real: environmental harm, job loss and inequality, social and democratic abuses, and of course existential risk for the species. Sanders and others (including me) are right to be worried.
But a data center moratorium is a singularly terrible idea.
First, pausing AI development is not a practical possibility. We might be able to accomplish it in the United States, most likely through regulation and with great difficulty, but we will not achieve it internationally. Think about the efforts we’ve made to coordinate global action, starting with nuclear non-proliferation and climate action. Each of them has taken decades and committed effort to achieve even mixed results. AI is developing and will develop far more quickly than any of those other areas; by the time we’ve built domestic support and started to build an international coalition, we will be years or decades in while this technology evolves meaningfully in a matter of months or weeks.
Without international coordination, an American pause can only slow global development in the near term. In the long term, it will shift the center of gravity elsewhere. Americans, left and right, often act as though our position in the global economy is so singular that we don’t have to factor other decisionmakers in: our companies will stay put and other nations will obediently follow our lead. The second Trump administration is a case study in the failure of that assumption.
But there is a deeper failure: there are no serious ideas here about how to adapt, to create a world in which people can thrive with AI. AI broke into the public consciousness with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, so we’ve been talking about this for at least three and a half years. We don’t need a moratorium to start preparing. For example:
We need AI literacy for our kids. Code has shaped the lives of Americans for decades, and we still don’t adequately teach children how to understand the way that it does that. “Digital native” generations are comfortable users of technology, but that’s not the same as understanding how it operates and how it works to shape our environments and our minds. This was already an unconscionable public failure in the age of the Internet and then social media, but as AI spreads rapidly, it’s an urgent crisis.
We need an approach to education, skill development, and credentials that lets people stay ahead of a job market that evolves rapidly. I don’t know exactly how AI will disrupt the job market (and I don’t believe anyone does), but I am certain that it will require major changes to primary, secondary, vocational, and post-secondary education as we know them. Making college more affordable or free does not begin to address the ways in which we and our children are unprepared for what’s coming.
We need not only new regulations, but a new approach to regulation. The way we regulate industry today—a box of lawyers in Washington creating complex rules at a distance and then suing to enforce them in court—is what we invented to regulate railroads and has remained essentially the same since then. At the frontier, this approach can’t keep up with the pace of innovation and competition. Instead, we’ll have the worst of both worlds: the public won’t have enough of a voice in AI development, and companies will be held back.2
Those are a few of the many questions we should be, but aren’t, discussing widely. In a nearly ten-minute video on his proposal and the risks of AI, Sanders doesn’t talk about any of these challenges, or any other ideas for the future. I’m focusing on him because he’s a prominent voice, but this is a much broader problem. The volume of commentary about AI now is staggering, and we add seemingly millions of words to it every day, but how much of that is engagement with the questions above, or better ones? What will a moratorium accomplish if the best idea for action we’ve had in three and a half years is a moratorium?
Our future is fractured
There was a time—not so long ago but also a lifetime ago—when America’s major political orientations were self-consciously divided by their attitude towards the future. Liberals saw the compromises and constraints and humiliations of the present and wanted to break free of them. You can sum up the view with that Robert F. Kennedy quote: “Some men see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’”
The conservatives argued that what we had built over thousands of years of tradition couldn’t be easily dismantled and rearranged without painful disruption. They saw their project as “prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past.” Or in William F. Buckley’s phrase, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”
Now, we still have a part of our political sphere pushing for social progress: civil rights, human rights, social support, dignity and equality at work, space for everyone to live and love as they choose. And we still have a part pushing for technological progress, and particularly AI: investments in infrastructure, favorable trade and immigration policies, a regulatory environment that makes it possible for American business to compete.
Both are orientations toward the future, but they are now politically at odds. Today, those who want social progress are often the strongest critics of AI, and sometimes technology more broadly. A moratorium, after all, is standing athwart history and yelling Stop. Meanwhile, those pushing most forcefully for technological progress have made common cause with MAGA: they bankrolled President Trump’s 2024 campaign and put themselves and their people in positions of authority—as AI and Crypto czar, through DOGE, and as Vice President. They signed on to the MAGA agenda and all of the social regression it entails. This isn’t just a marriage of convenience: as Andreessen revealed, it is also about a shared nostalgia for a past, more congenial concentration of cultural, economic, and political power.
So there are now influential factions that want progress in some areas and stasis or even reversal in others. There is no longer a party of the future.
There used to be. The first election I followed closely was Bush vs. Gore, when I was a senior in high school. Democrats were the party for social equality and mobility, for freedom of speech and religion, for international engagement and human rights. They also had, in Al Gore, a candidate who was a leader in information technology, and particularly the Internet, and on climate change. George W. Bush was none of that; he held competence and intellect in contempt and would go on to support constitutional bans on gay marriage, erosion of the separation of church and state, and other backwards policies. I wanted leadership that saw possibility in the future and wanted to strive for it, and that was obviously Gore.
In embracing the future, he was carrying on a tradition. We remember John F. Kennedy, for example, both for sending the National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama and for challenging the nation to send astronauts to the moon.
Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.
We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?
There was no contradiction between social progress and scientific and technical progress, because they were part of the same project of principled American leadership.
That shared project is gone from the Democratic Party, or at least from its most vocal quarters. Having worked in both civil rights and in technology, I mourn its loss.
But I understand it. It must have been easier to hold these together in Kennedy’s time, when the Cold War focused the American mind on demonstrating progress in every sphere, and when the central scientific project was a source of global hope and inspiration. It was easier in the Clinton and Obama eras, too, when the information technology companies at the forefront of innovation were new and exciting, and even seemed friendly.
Things have changed. Those tech companies became the tobacco companies, shamelessly addicting all of us, including children, and lying about it. They became the oil companies, extracting wealth and buying the loyalty of elected officials. They became Wall Street, creating enormous risks, pocketing the returns, and letting the public absorb the losses. Their leaders became robber barons, living symbols of outrageous inequality who use their influence to buy a newspaper or a president when they need a hobby. And, as the second Trump administration has waged a sustained campaign against America’s strength and our values, (almost) none of them has used any of that stratospheric power and influence to stop it. Many of them are participating.
Seeing all of this, Americans understandably do not want a future shaped by these companies and these people and their products. The public’s concern with a technology like AI is real in itself, but it is hardened into resistance by a deep and warranted mistrust of the people building and selling that technology.
Necessary work
But technological progress is a historical force larger than the people who happen to profit from it today. It is and has always been essential to the future, and we shouldn’t turn away from it. We can’t, even if it is more difficult now to square social and technical progress. We live in a political era that abhors complexity, when a popular response to tension between two values is to choose one absolutely instead of working through the tradeoffs. Still, that’s the difficult work we have to do.
To focus on AI, there are the obvious, instrumental arguments: new medicines, breakthroughs in alternative energy, etc., that AI can enable to advance the human condition. I believe that potential alone makes it worth moving forward while addressing the risks, but I’ll brush past it because it’s raised all the time and doesn’t seem to move the debate. So here are other arguments:
The future is inevitable, so we should engage
Technology will move forward, whatever we do, because finding a better way to get things done is as powerful a drive as any humanity has. Somebody, in some company, in some laboratory, in some country will invent, and the question is who. For Americans, the obvious answer is that if it’s not us, it will be China. I believe that.
But even within the United States, there are alternatives. When people who want protections for intellectual and creative work, environmental mitigation, rights for labor, and safety from bias disengage from technological progress, they leave it to the Andreessens and Musks and Altmans and Karps to define our future for us.
The future is inevitable, but it is not inevitably good. I am not a techno-optimist nor do I believe that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. We can make the future we want, but only with engagement, not denial. Regulation that aims to stop or slow development is unlikely to pass and, if it does, will move that development elsewhere. Governance that brings the public into technology development and preparation, while still prioritizing rapid innovation, can help us align the future with our values. There is a vast difference between the two.
Social and technical progress are entwined
Social progress can be set back by technology, but it is also contingent on technology, because progress depends on expanding economic capacity, and that expansion is driven by technology. A nation’s ability to take care of its people—to educate them, to treat their illnesses, to house and feed them—depends on its capacity to provide. So does the space for citizens to follow events, to debate, and to take action. We need more people working for better pay in healthcare, in education, and in social services, but America’s debt-driven economy does not have the capacity to do it. Taxing the rich can close some of the gap, but there’s no path to a future of greater liberation and care for everyone without greater capacity, and no path to greater capacity without innovation.
Again, there is nothing inevitable about technology ushering in social progress; it can just as easily widen inequality or restrict our freedom, as it has in the last few decades. That’s why it’s critical to engage.
Technology creates the conditions for change
More abstractly, a technological revolution can upend things sufficiently to allow reinvention.
I started watching The West Wing twenty years ago, and now leave it on in the background sometimes. The most depressing thing about that show, aside from the contrast with our current White House, is how little has changed. It has been more than a quarter century since the show started and we are still having the same debates they were then. Some things have advanced (same-sex marriage) and others have regressed (reproductive freedom), but most seem about the same: we’re still struggling to provide everyone with healthcare, our schools are still uneven and underperforming, Social Security is still not secure, we’re still running enormous budget deficits, and that’s all before factoring in what the current administration has done. Administrations of both parties have come and gone, Congress has flipped back and forth, and we remain stuck. How much of the anger and frustration and division in our politics comes from the feeling that change is impossible? How much hope did we pour out for Obama and then for Trump in the hope that they might break through? Over and over, the lesson is that our political system is built to preserve the status quo.
What can break it? Sanders promised a “political revolution,” but while we wait for that, a technological one is happening. In time, it will touch every part of our lives, our relationships, our economy, and our democracy. It could be on the scale of other major revolutions: in the American context, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War—each was a time when great change was possible. AI and other frontier technologies will create a moment of flux. That is an opportunity to reinvent, but too many who want social progress do not see it.
These are still instrumental arguments for a politics that fully embraces the future. I believe all of them, but there is something deeper.
This was published in The Guardian earlier this month:
There is a chasm separating this take and me; I barely know how to engage. Commenters tried to make instrumental arguments—for example, by drawing a line from space exploration to scientific advances that have had practical benefits on Earth. They’re right, but those are not the reasons why millions, maybe billions, of us want humanity to go to space. It’s because there are more things to find and to understand, more things to explore and to create. There are great works of art that have not yet been produced, great insights into the human condition that have not yet been articulated, and great discoveries that have not yet been made. Some of them are in space, and all of them are in the future.
That’s part of what I feel when I encounter blanket rejection of AI. I’ll say again: there are tremendous costs and risks, for us, for our posterity, and for all life on this planet, and I want to see every effort to address them and contribute where I can. There are layers of hype and misinformation and greed caked on, and I’ll be glad when some of the current cast of characters have moved on. But there is something truly strange and fascinating happening in those datacenters. We don’t have to call it intelligence or pretend that it’s the same or better than a human mind to appreciate that a breakthrough is underway.
That is an argument specifically about AI, but also about every frontier technology happening now or on the horizon—first, because each of them is going to meaningfully incorporate AI in some way, and second, because they are all going to present a complicated mix of risk and reward. I want us to engage and bring our values to all of them, rather than try to hold them off (or pretend that we can).
I want a new politics of the future, one that strives for invention, liberation, growth, and justice, even when they do not sit neatly together. I want a politics that embraces that difficulty and digs in, because reaching for all of them is the only way we’ll have any of them.
One of the defining problems of this era is that influence is convertible but intelligence is not. A gifted investor or entrepreneur or executive can convert their money and connections into a platform for their ideas or a position in public office, but that doesn’t mean any of their insight or capabilities translate. You can be a phenomenally successful venture capitalist with weak social and historical insight, and be invited to advise the President. Or, you can start world-changing electric vehicle and space travel companies and turn those into an opportunity to run rampant through the federal government, leading to an unthinkable number of lives lost. Think of all that we suffer because fame and money are mistaken for universal competence.
I’ve proposed some ideas for what we could do differently, and there are others out there.
Read the work as it develops.
Long-form essays, short notes, and the occasional dispatch from the open questions NAC is pursuing.