Marc Andreessen: prediction

Transcript context

…It's interesting because there's all this concern that young people, jobs are not going to be there for them, AI is replacing them. On the flip side, there's what you're describing here. It feels like people coming in learning today are going to move so fast and learn so much more. And where do you sit on this divide of, young people are in big trouble or they're actually going to be the ones winning in the end? Yeah. So the job substitution, job loss thing is just, it's very reductive. I think it's an overly simplistic model. And again, it goes back to what I said at the very beginning, which is, we've actually been in a regime for 50 years of very slow technological change in the economy. And so again, like I said, it's at half the rate of the previous era and then a third of the rate of 100 years ago. And so we're coming out of this kind of phase where we've had almost no technological progress in the economy, we've had remarkably little job churn as a result of that relative to any historical period. And so even if AI ticks up, even if AI triples productivity growth in the economy, which would be a massively big deal, it would take us back to the same level of job churn that was happening between 1870 and 1930. And if you go back and you read accounts of 1870 to 1930, people just thought the world was a watch with opportunity. At that rate of technological transformation, kids were able to develop new careers into new areas of the economy, building new kinds of products and services. I mean, a huge part of everything in our modern world today was kind of invented and proliferated during that period. And so even if AI triples the pace of economic change in the economy, it's going to just translate to a much higher rate of economic growth, it's going to translate to a much higher rate of job growth. And there'll be some level of task level and job level substitution that will take place, but that will be swamped by the macro effects of economic growth and innovation that will happen. And then corresponding to that, there'll be hiring booms, quite honestly, I think all over the place. And then again, go back to the other thing, which is like, this is all happening in the face of declining population growth and increasingly population shrinkage. And so human workers in many, many, many countries over the next 10, 20, 30 years are going to be at more and more of a premium, literally because you're going to have shrinking population levels. We don't really want to get into politics particularly, but it does feel like the world broadly is going to reverse course on the rates of immigration that we've had for the last 50 years. It seems to be kind of a broad-based thing happening with rise to nationalism, concerns about the rate of immigration and immigration historically in countries like the US, it's kind of ebbed and flowed over time based on how the national mood shifts. And so if you sort of combine in a country like the US or any country in Europe, if you combine declining population with less immigration, the remaining human workers are going to be at a premium, not at a discount. And so I think that combination of faster productivity growth, faster economic growth, and then slower population growth and less immigration actually means there's going to be much less of this kind of dystopian no jobs' thing. I just think it's probably totally off pace. That is extremely interesting. So what I'm hearing is, you're not super worried about job loss. Is the key here that the timing kind of just works out, this population decrease, all these kind of have to line up for there not to be this massive job loss with AI?…

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