Optimism, Technology and Progress

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I've got sunshine on a cloudy day When it's cold outside, I've got the month of

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October the 20th, a Friday, 2023, not perhaps the most cheerful of weeks when it comes to international politics. So we need a little bit of cheering up and who better than cheering, who better than cheering us up, that's a terrible way of putting it, is my old friend, Keith Teer, the CEO of SignalRank and the author of That Was The Week newsletter on developments in AI and technology. This week his newsletter is entitled Optimism, Technology and Progress. Mark Andreessen, Sam Altman and Jeffrey Hinton, three very familiar names from big tech and AI. The image, Keith, though, is back to your old terrible AI art. Doesn't make me feel very cheerful. Why did you fall back on this one? Can't we have some real art? So you wouldn't notice it because I don't say so, but this is not mid journey. This is, ChatGPT now includes DALI 3. So this is my very first attempt to ask DALI 3 to make a front cover. All I did is tell it what the newsletter was about, and this is what it came up with. And for people viewing, you can see the image, for people just listening, there's a rather colourful image, very artificial, of a robot, a high tech helicopter, some sort of alien object, and then some normal people, contemporary people and some farmers and some trees. So it's not exactly innovative, Keith, is it? Well, it's meant to depict a leisure society, where work no longer exists, so people can have a picnic, and the robots are doing all the work. The robots, it's true, the robots are doing all the work, although there's a lady carrying some food, who's growing the food in this? Where's the food coming from? One has to imagine that it's automatic agriculture, and probably chemistry. You're beginning to make me a little bit more miserable. So cheer me up. The three essays this week are from Andreessen, Hinton, and Altman. The first is a hardcore, almost a sort of hysterical manifesto, I think, from Mark Andreessen. What is Andreessen saying here that is in any way original? It's called the techno-optimist manifesto, but it's a certain kind of almost manic shrillness to this essay. I think it's kind of Arrington-esque. Let's say that. Which is, in your words, a manic shrillness. Well, on the plus side, deep belief and preparedness to put yourself out there, which is another side of it. It's called the techno-optimist manifesto. It isn't a narrative, it's a manifesto. In the spirit of a manifesto, it's full of bullet points, beliefs, declarations, things not to believe in. It doesn't read as much more than a highly organized brain dump that is designed to get a response. I think that's really the right framing. He's looking for a reaction and he's gotten one. There's lots and lots of feedback, including long pieces and then shorter tweets with opinions about what he said. So he's put himself in the middle of the debate about the meaning of progress and civilization. If we draw down into what he says, I'd say firstly, it's got a lot to give it credit for, but it's also got a lot of blind spots and some absolute incorrect points of view, all blended into one. So you really have to unpack it. Well, it's classic Andreessen or classic Andreessen behaving like your friend who founded TechCrunch, Mike Arrington. If it wasn't Mark Andreessen and it was some kid on the internet who has a sub stack or a medium page or a Twitter page, would anyone even read this stuff? When I was reading, I was thinking, yeah, kind of interesting, his argument. Well, we got to progress. Technology has always benefited mankind. I mean, it was profoundly unoriginal and childish, the thing to me. Anyway, what do I know? No, I think you can make that case. And it would be hard to say you're wrong. But that's the interesting thing about the piece. You could make about seven different cases. Does he say anything interesting? I mean, what does he say in this piece, Keith? This manifesto went on and on. He kept on repeating the same phrase. Is there anything original here that we haven't read or heard before? I think from a practical point of view, it forces you to grapple with the question whether technology could create abundance and abundance meant fully as in the entire world can live free of need. That's really what he's saying. Some of his critics, he's pretty anti Marxist, uses the accusation of communism quite a bit against his rivals. But there's quite a few people who have responded to it saying, actually, this almost is Marxist. This sense of a utopia that is going to follow from technical innovation, where the definition of utopia is freedom from work or the requirement to work. Yeah, at one point, I'm not sure if I'm quoting him exactly. He says, we were hungry, therefore we created abundance. I don't see any evidence of abundance. Many, many hungry people in the world today. Where's the abundance? Well, you've got to be historically specific, Andrew. I mean, if you look backwards, there's more abundance. There's more abundance, but it's not abundance. I mean... Yeah. No, but he's not really claiming we've reached that point. He's claiming we can. He's claiming it's possible. Well, no one would argue it's not impossible. I think many people would argue... It just doesn't make it realistic. Well, no, there are, you know, there's a whole narrative around the green movement that says the world needs 2 billion people, not 7 billion. And that the way to get abundance is to kill off the population, not literally, but through birth control and such. So there are many narratives. And one of the sustainability narratives is there's too many people. Andriessen argues there's going to be many more people and they'll all be supported through abundance due to technology. And I tend to side with him. Some people would say that's utopian, but I think he's right. But again, coming back to this essay, is there anything... I mean, he's just this noisy, angry, angrily optimistic person, clearly out to outrage people. Is there any value in this sort of piece, apart from getting lots of Twitter retweets and all the rest of it? I mean, he's not... You say he's a Marxist, he's not a Marxist. He's about as much of a Marxist as my dog or your cat. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or my dog and your cat. Yeah, I don't have a cat. And you have a dog, but you know what we're talking about. My son and his girlfriend have a cat, a little kitten. Well, their cat is more Marxist or more anti-Marxist than Marc Andriessen. Yeah. He's become a parody of himself. I mean, he's a multi-billionaire VC. He knows what he thinks. Why does he even care about what other people think? Well, because I think he has an unfinished agenda, which you can give him credit for. He is not sitting there patting his stomach saying... And he has quite a stomach, or patting his head. He's not saying, I'm good, I'm done. He's saying, we collectively are not done, but we can be. And now what is he trying to achieve here? He has a few jobs. His first job is to attract capital to his fund. So the first thing he's trying to do is say to those people who invest in funds, hey, I'm still here, I'm still alive, and I have a big project, and you can be part of it. The second thing he has to do is attract entrepreneurs who are thinking big. The biggest problem for an investor is to get lots of entrepreneurs who are thinking small. So you really have to encourage people to think big. Peter Thiel does that when he talks about dropping out of college and taking on big challenges. It's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but there's also a reality to it, which is, please think big. Change something meaningful. And to be fair to Andreessen, in contrast with a lot of the other bomb throwers, especially libertarian bomb throwers, he really has changed the world. I mean, if there's one figure or one company that enabled the internet, it was Netscape. So you've got to give the guy credit. There's something bizarre about him. What about Geoffrey Hinton, a very different kind of character, a highly respected AI scientist who resigned from Google, I think it was earlier this year, because he was troubled by some of the implications of generative AI. What's Geoffrey Hinton been saying this week? I included him because there was an interview. I think it was Fortune that published it, but it doesn't matter. Somebody published the interview. And in the interview, he self-declared himself as a pessimist and went on to say that pessimists are usually right. And the context was his belief that generative AI has produced too much intelligence to such an extent that it endangers humanity because it can do things we can't. And honestly, I can't take him seriously, personally. You can take him less or more seriously than Marc Andreessen. Way less seriously than Marc Andreessen, because he's abandoning ship. He's like the captain that's saving himself in the middle of the storm. Well, I don't think that's fair. I mean, he's making these pronouncements. He's decided he wants to work for Google, but he's not abandoning the ship. Well, no, it's like the Titanic is halfway across and he's gotten a lift back to England and he's saying he's bound to sink. You know, he's safe back on shore, saying he's bound to sink. Yeah, I don't think that's fair. I mean, he's not safe or otherwise and he wouldn't have been safe or otherwise if he'd have stayed at Google. He just chose to resign. And I'm guessing that there's a bigger story there, a political story internally at Google. Yeah, but, you know, it's in the spirit of that was the week I published things I disagree with. So he's fearful of too much intelligence rather than not enough. He's fearful of too much intelligence and humans freed from work is a plus for Andreessen. Humans replaced by AI is a minus for Hinton. So it's it's kind of a binary decision. Is it good or bad if AI takes over work from humans? I don't think either Geoffrey Hinton or Marc Andreessen are particularly well equipped to address those issues. The reason, by the way, Geoffrey Hinton is a pessimist is because he's a big Spurs fan. So we are all pessimists. I know the guy is a nice guy and he may do something else. I mean, I'm sure he'll get involved with somebody like Gary Marcus, some institute focusing on the responsibilities of AI. So I think you're being a little unfair to suggest that he abandoned the Titanic. And are you suggesting then that Google was the Titanic or is the Titanic?

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Google has definitely got some holes. Like the Titanic. Yeah, it could be an endangered species. Yeah, but that's another issue. You're talking about the corporate Google. We're talking about the Titanic in terms of sinking humanity. I mean, if there is a company that's going to sink humanity, it's some open AI. It's not Google. They're second at best in this race. Yeah, or save humanity either way. That's the binary decision. I mean, I don't think you can be in the middle of that discussion. Yeah, and I think, Keith, I mean, you're a historically literate enough man to understand that we've often believed that we're on the verge of the apocalypse of one kind or another. And this is probably no different, isn't it? No, but I think, I don't know if you saw Biden's speech last night, but it was masterful, especially for an aging gentleman as he is. It was a very good speech, but the core of that speech was we can decide the future if we choose to. And I think that's massively true in tech. Tech is one place that humans are 100% in control and capable of making decisions. And the decision to stop seems to be about the worst decision you could make. The decision should be to progress. And that's where technology and human end games converge in the meaning of progress. So I do think that this is not the time to be doomsayers or Luddites even, the worse than doomsayers. Well, we are talking with Keith Teer, the CEO of SignalRank and the author of the invaluable That Was The Week newsletter, All Things Tech. We talked, Keith, about Mark Andresen and Geoffrey Hinton, one an optimist, one a pessimist. The third figure in your headlines, and I know you're a big Mo, we've done lots of shows on him in the past, is Sam Altman. Is Sam Altman someone who exists between Andresen and Hinton? Is that the best way, the best spin on Altman? I think spiritually he's closer to Andresen, but he's a practical implementer of AI as opposed to a pontificator. So he gets to push the buttons and twist the levers of how fast or slow AI goes. He's in the lead globally, by far, and no sign of him slowing down. So he was interviewed this week at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live conference, along with his CTO, who is a woman, great woman, Mira. Does she have a last name? It's Mirabi or something like that. I'm blanking on her last name. I bet you prefer her to Lena. Well, she's a technologist at the centre of AI. So she's clearly got some credentials. She's done more than write a PhD thesis. Okay, enough Lena Kahn for this week. So what was Sam Altman? The headline is like that famous headline from The Times, the most boring headline in history, earthquake in Chile, people injured. I mean, Sam Altman warning that AI is going to destroy a lot of people's jobs isn't exactly news. Everybody knows that. Well, in a week where the media was shown to be opinion focused, not news focused, it's worth saying the Wall Street Journal determined the content of this interview, not Sam Altman. So the Wall Street Journal chose to drill down into... But it's their conference, so they should. Yeah. So the headline is really, you should credit the Wall Street Journal with the headline. So what did he say in the interview that was interesting? He said that the destruction of jobs is a human good. So normally the assumption is when a job is destroyed, that's bad. And that emotional response to job destruction is incorrect, historically incorrect. Job destruction is the most progressive thing humans can do because it replaces human effort with some kind of automation or replacement. And so he made the point, job destruction is a good thing. And yes, AI will destroy jobs and that will free time for people to find new roles, including possibly jobs. Although Marc Andreessen envisages a further stage when there's no need to work, when work is optional, not required. And so both of them are on this part of this conversation that tries to give meaning to creative destruction. And I think Altman is actually doing it, whereas Andreessen is imagining it. Well, they're both profiting from it. I mean, Andreessen is profiting from it, from his investments, Altman by running OpenAI. Okay, he may not own stock, but as he said, he's so wealthy, he doesn't need to. So what about the issue that either of them, Andreessen or Altman address the fact that while all this technological progress is going on, we have more and more inequality and more and more sharp cleavage between a tiny group of billionaires and multibillionaires and another class and a shrinking middle class? Well, that's a good question, Andrew. And that's where I take the discussion in my editorial. Altman and Andreessen are actually completely different when it comes to the consequence of abundance. They both tend to agree that technology will lead to abundance. And what they mean by abundance is an unlimited supply of things that does not require human labor to produce, all the needs of life and then some. And Andreessen has this kind of capitalist utopian vision that doesn't even ask the question, who owns the benefits of that? He just assumes that the market and capitalism is the right mechanism. And he doesn't even discuss who owns the outputs. To his credit, Altman says, this will lead to a broken society if all the wealth remains in the producers, the owners of production. And he goes some way towards having an idea of how you would fix that. The first is universal basic income derived from the wealth created. The second is some kind of social tax on automated profits, where the proceeds of those profits go to society, broadly speaking, hospitals, roads, schools, what have you. And so Altman at least has, and he's built a company called WorldCoin that's part of that effort. He has at least addressed the question. Andreessen is more in a kind of a capitalist libertarian mode where he assumes there is no problem to solve, or at least he's silent on it. Yeah, and he's angrily silent. He's not willing to even acknowledge it. I wonder whether privately he does recognize it. This is all very abstract and important. And I think you present Altman fairly. I think Altman is hopeful and perhaps the most responsible of people in Silicon Valley. It would be interesting to see how his story plays out. We certainly haven't heard the last of Sam Altman. In fact, if anything, I think he has much of his story to go. And we've done shows in the past on Sam Altman. You've always been a big admirer. Meanwhile, Keith, for all the theory, there's still reality. John Thornhill, my friend at the FT, the tech writer, columnist, and entrepreneur himself has an interesting piece, which I thought really kind of reflected what you've been arguing over the last few months or indeed even years about the VC industry needing to rip up the playbook and start again. Did you like the Thornhill piece? You know, it's pretty obvious to you because you've been thinking it. But yeah, yeah, I thought it was good. You know, I like his publication. It's called Sifted. It's a UK digital magazine focused on venture capital, particularly European venture capital. So he is a trailblazer when it comes to the narrative around venture capital. And I thought he summarized things fairly well. I think if you added in this week's video of the week, which is an interview with Beezer Clarkson from Sapphire Partners, talking about the same subject, and she's a practitioner, she invests in early stage funds, you would get a very good sense of where things are at. Broadly characterized is that the oil that fuels venture capital and startups has stopped flowing. And of course, that means money has stopped flowing in all directions. There are very few exits, so money isn't going back to the investors. Therefore, they're not investing as much in new initiatives. And so the cogs are kind of grinding and creating friction. And I think they both focus on the details of that. In the case of Beezer Clarkson, a lot of details. It's over an hour long. I think that for our viewers and listeners, I mean, I know we have some of your followers, Keith, who know a lot about this stuff, but for ordinary people, the Thornhill piece was good. And it's reflected in one piece of news this week that the biggest IPOs of 2021 have already shed 60% of their value. That's astonishing. Yeah, well, it kind of shows the mismatch between private and public markets. Public markets are still, you know, today, the 10 year bond went above 5% and the Dow dropped 100 points, because investing in equities is no longer the only game in town. There was a great piece this week by the CEO of Oaktree, which I didn't put in the newsletter, but it talks about private credit yields being at roughly 8 to 10% a year. So if you invest in private credit over 10 years, you're going to get 10% every year compounded. And that's better than the S&P 500. So the whole narrative is that investing in risk through equities, public equities in particular, may not be the best way to grow your money. And private markets have, you know, even though they're depleted, they haven't really caught up with that narrative. So surprisingly, seed prices for seed investments are the highest ever. They haven't gone down. It's very competitive, because more and more people... You're still dealing with human beings who think they know everything and think that they're going to discover the next Google or Amazon or something. So that's never going to change for all the numbers, all the statistics that guys like you at SignalRank have researched. People are not driven by reason, are they? When it comes to investment, they all think they're smarter and more prescient than they actually are. Well, on both sides, there's smart pessimists and smart optimists. So everything is driven by self-belief. It's interesting, I went to an MIT gathering this week in Palo Alto, about 50 people. And one of the questions was, is there an AI bubble? You don't have to go to MIT to ask that question. Well, funnily enough, their answer was no. I think I was the only person in the room whose answer was yes. You think there is, even though last week you talked about OpenAI being the most valuable company on the planet in five years' time, and you talked about them raising $100 billion in the next round. Well, that's the interesting conundrum. Bubbles happen when real value is being produced. So the fact that OpenAI is real, and probably super valuable, attracts capital to everything in the space. And so the bubble is actually a positive signal of something real. And it gets overextended, as is normal in human nature. Greed leads to exuberance. In other words, the title of your newsletter this week, Optimism, Technology and Progress. Yeah. And certainly there was not a lot of optimism or progress today, this week in the Middle East. Tech has always found its way to get into the story. Lots of anger, particularly in the United States, between people sympathetic to Israel and to the Palestinians. And even Paddy Cosgrave, the CEO of Web Summit, who we all know, he somehow got embroiled in it. I mean, if Paddy's involved in it, then God knows what's happening. What was this story? So Cosgrave's Web Summit, for those who don't know, is one of the largest tech conferences on earth. And it isn't in the United States. He's an Irishman. And he's somehow managed to put himself in the middle of tech. And it's an event everyone goes to. Because he's Irish and Catholic, his view of conflicts involving, let's say, ethnic or religious division is very personal. And he made the point in a week where there was not enough intellectual space to make this point. He made the point that there are victims on all sides in Israel. In a week where really, you know, Hamas's brutality should have meant, at least for the time being, there is only one side. And he got punished. That's your opinion. Yeah, that's my opinion. And now that doesn't mean I'm not aware of the bigger context and the issue of Palestinians. Of course, I am. But what happened on the 7th of December is not justifiable in any way. Now, unfortunately, he said something quite reasonable, but at the wrong time, and he is effectively being cancelled for saying it. And I have some sympathy for him. Even though I diplomatically, I would not have said what he said. I completely understand why he said it. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong about it. But it is what it is. I mean, and we can see from the on the ground stuff, that the future of that region really relies on understanding the whole context. Yeah, which goes without saying, I don't want to get into that story. But it certainly reflects on the way in which social media, there was already a crisis in social media. This is intensified. You have a couple of pieces from Malik about social media. Excuse me, social media being dead, get over it. And social media is history. Just ask the kids. Do you think that this week when historians of technology and social media look back, they will see it as a particularly dark moment in the history of social media? Well, I think Om is hitting on something that as soon as you read it, you recognize it to be true. He's making the point that the two biggest tech stacks being used today by young people are YouTube and TikTok. Neither of which is social media. They're both entertainment, short based entertainment, sometimes longer. That certainly rings true for my kids as I see what they're doing. They're not on Twitter. They're not on Facebook. They're barely on Snap. They're a little bit on Instagram if they have friend networks there. But the majority of their time is watching live streams or on demand stuff on TikTok and YouTube. And that isn't social media. That is one directional entertainment, not two directional engagement. And that is interesting. I think for the purposes of impact, Om overstates what that means for social media, because social media still exists and is still huge. It's just not where the action is for young people. And I think that's a key learning. And it means the future of consumer tech, especially in the age of AI, is that it's going to be reinvented. Facebook and Twitter don't represent an endgame. And because of AI, they're not even on the journey to the endgame. They're kind of stuck in the past. Ever the optimist, Keith. I hope you're right. And certainly, I'm far less optimistic than you, certainly on tech. But I was encouraged by your startup of the week. This product, Pebble, looks very cool. Tell me about it. Well, Pebble is basically an electric caravan. That's a low-dye one. Well, it looks like a very high-tech postmodern caravan. It's a high-tech postmodern caravan, exactly what it is. It has battery storage with a regular EV charging port. It's got tech. There's an app inside that you can sleep. There's a king-size bed. You can cook. You can relax and be entertained with streaming video and such with Wi-Fi. It costs $125,000 to pre-order one. Which isn't a lot. I mean, it's not much more than a Tesla. It's a bit more than a Tesla. But if you have this yearning to go to the Grand Canyon or drive across Route 66, this would be the perfect way to do it. And it's the way they present it as an office or a rental space or even a backup battery. Tell me a little bit about the company. Have they got a lot of financing? They haven't got a lot of financing. I think they just raised $40 million. But they've got enough to complete their product. These are former EV guys from Tesla and also from Cruze. So they're skilled technologists in the electric vehicle world. So they're credible technologists. And they look like they've got great design chops. Yeah, the design is... I mean, just looking at the website, it looks incredible. How big is it? It can fit a king-size bed in about a third of the space, if you can imagine that. Between the back end and just before the wheels there, that's a king-size bed. And then the next third is a kitchen. And then the third at the front is a leisure sitting area. So it is a caravan. It doesn't go on its own. It has to be dragged by something. It has to be dragged by an EV. And they can share the batteries, by the way. Yeah, it looks very cool. I think it's the kind of thing that will attract younger people and older people like you and I, Keith. I'm going to buy one. How much did you say? $125,000? I think it starts at just under that. But by the time you've built the options in, it's $125,000. I assume you ordered one, maybe two. One for you, one for Jeanne. I didn't order one because I'm not yet at the age where I want to be free of labor and live a life of leisure. So if I was, I would have one. We'll all be able to. If Marc Andreessen's right, we'll all be able to own a Pebble and just drive around and look out the window and have fun, right? Exactly, with the robots doing the work. Right. That's, of course, the image that you have, this idyllic, bucolic image,