In Which I Direct You to Unfinished Piece on Techno-Optimism by John Quiggin, & a Semi-Finished Piece by Noah Smith

Because I want to be a card-carrying techno-optimist, but an accurate and helpful one...

I see that John Quiggin is starting an analysis of Marc Andreesen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto:

John Quiggin: Starting a response to Andreesen manifesto: 1. Markets, characterized as "Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit from the exchange or it doesn’t happen"have played a very minor role in the rise of the Internet.

— Internet itself created in the public/non-market sector.

— Same for World Wide Web, Wikipedia, blogs.

— Google, Facebook etc rely on attaching ads to content produced by others, not market transactions as defined above.

— Rest of tech sector relies on state-created intellectual property rights to exclude competing sellers.

Andreesen’s enthusiastic support for nuclear fission is a revealing error. On any objective basis, nuclear power is a dead duck, a C20 technology with a string of failed revivals in C21. New additions have barely kept pace with closures of old plants. By contrast, solar PV is the biggest single example in support of techno-optimism. From essentially zero, it’s reached the point where annual additions are around 400 GW a year, almost as much as the *total* installed capacity of nuclear. Costs have plummeted and, after some generous initial support from government, most of the process is being driven by markets. There is no better case of creative destruction than the rise of solar PV. Andreesen’s failure to recognise this illustrates two points:

— He’s ignorant and doesn’t choose to inform himself, instead gullibly following sources that pander to his confirmation bias

— He’s driven not by rational belief in the progress of technology but by rightwing culture war politics…

I wish him well, and I look forward to what he comes up with—I do not have time to dissect it, or even to offer suggestions to John how to proceed, other than that he should riff not just off of Andreesen but off of the much clearer-seeing Noah Smith, who has a piece I think he should revisit because since he wrote it too quickly it is too long (it is 5000 words, and I think he could make it half that):

Positive techno-optimism is basically the opposite of stagnationism… says that… there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit, and relative to our total GDP it’s still not that expensive to find it. Normative techno-optimism… says that more technology will make the world a better place for humanity…. This kind of techno-optimism is surprisingly rare…. [The belief] that no matter how our capabilities improve, humans’ fundamental brutish nature will never change… comes from the World Wars in the 20th century….

You can then define both active and passive forms… that technology either will keep progressing at a rapid clip, and/or that it will improve human life…. Active optimism is the idea that… we humans [need to] take the appropriate actions to make sure this happens…. So you could define a little two-by-two chart:

Personally, I subscribe to both positive and normative techno-optimism… with reservations… [and] I’m more of an active than a passive optimist…. Technology… expands our collective set of choices…. The main reason I think technological progress is usually good for humanity—why I’m a techno-optimist of the “normative” variety—is that I fundamentally believe that humans should be given as much choice as possible…. Techno-optimism of the normative, humanist variety requires a belief that on average, over the long run, societies will make choices that result in greater individual choice as well—that some sort of liberalism will eventually prevail. So it’s a bit of a Fukuyaman idea as well. It entails a belief that society—generally, eventually—does what’s right for the individual…

Thoughts on techno-optimism

But I do have one thought: The real deep problem, I think, is that we have a large gray area of fog between two lighthouse beacons of our understanding, and Marc’s key problem is that he thinks he knows how to dispels this fog. And he does not.

The first lighthouse beacon is our understanding of what Michael Polanyi termed the fiduciary institution of science: we understand modern science, and how it works pretty well. The second lighthouse beacon is our understanding of what Michael Polanyi termed the mercenary institution of the market—the creation of a sophisticated division of labor and the regulation of efficient production using known developed technologies by individuals and small-scale workshops of commodities under constant returns to scale and competitive conditions.

But in between? Where the technologies are not known and developed, but need to be developed, learned, and created? Where returns to scale are not constant, but increasing? Where fixed costs are high, and marginal costs are near zero? Where production is not small-scale, but rather requires the orchestration via corporate central planning of a globe-spanning value chain? And how whatever institutions we cobble together as we grope through the fog enable domination and unfreedom as well as opportunity and choice?

In understanding all that vast terrain that lies between our two lighthouse beacons, we are nowheresville.

And I suspect Marc Andreesen is probably deeper into nowheresville than the rest of us, because:

1. He has a book to talk.

2. His current book is a bad one—much too crypto-heavy, where Andreesen-Horwitz has really not covered itself in glory over the past decade.

3. He has, since he became a VC, surrounded himself with too many yesmen and yeswomen and so lost his ability to judge his own ideas.

4. He seems to believe what he sees on Fox News.