Chris Dixon: prediction

Transcript context

…The Sphere, right? — handcrafted books. I don’t know. People say this all the time, that chess is now more popular than ever even though AI is better than humans in chess. In the end, we’re monkeys. Like other monkeys, there is this fundamental human nature that doesn’t change. Machines can do very powerful things and can be useful. That would be my naive default assumption. The other really interesting thing with media that I think about is, when film came along, the first cameras and photography. These famous essays, like The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, by Benjamin — it was all this discussion of what is the future of art now that we can take a picture. What’s the role of the representational artist? Of course, the rise of photography coincided with art becoming abstract and all those modern art movements. So, in some sense, the camera did replace the representational art. But another thing happened, which is a new medium was formed, which is, you take a photo and you take a series of photos and you make a film. So, you had two things happen when the camera developed. You had the old medium get replaced. Of course, high art then pivoted into abstract art, but then you had a brand-new medium that simply couldn’t exist before. That was film, and a whole industry was created around it. One thing I like to think about when I think about media is, maybe AI will be the camera and it will replace illustration. The role of the illustrator will go away, and AI will replace it. But on the flip side, maybe it will enable a new AI native form of media that couldn’t have existed before. What will AI competition for a16z look like? You have an AI competitor. What are they like?…

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