Marc Andreessen: prediction

Transcript context

…Now, how will AI make our world different five years from now? What’s the most surprising way in which it will be different? [chuckles] There’s a great breakdown on adoption of new technology that the science-fiction author Douglas Adams wrote about years ago. He says any new technology is received differently by three different groups of people. If you’re below the age of 15, it’s just the way things have always been. If you’re between the ages of 15 and 35, it’s really cool, and you might be able to get a job doing it. If you’re above the age of 35, it’s unholy and against the order of society and will destroy everything. AI, I think, so far is living up to that framework. What I would like to tell you is AI is going to be completely transformative for education. I believe that it will. Having said that, I did recently roll out ChatGPT to my eight-year-old. I was very, very proud of myself because I was like, “Wow, this is just going to be such a great educational resource for him.” I felt like Prometheus bringing fire down from the mountain to my child. I installed it on his laptop and said, “Son, this is the thing that you can talk to anytime, and it will answer any question you have.” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, no, this is a big deal. It answers questions.” He’s like, “Well, what else would you use a computer for?” I was like, “Oh, God, I’m getting old.” [laughter] I actually think there’s a pretty good prospect that kids are just going to pick this up and run with it. I actually think that’s already happening, right? ChatGPT is fully out, and Bard and Bing and all these other things. I think kids are going to grow up with basically — you could use various terms, assistant, friend, coach, mentor, tutor, but kids are going to grow up in this amazing back-and-forth relationship with AI. Anytime a kid is interested in something, if there’s not a teacher who can help with something or if they don’t have a friend who’s interested in the same thing, they’ll be able to explore all kinds of ideas. I think it’ll be great for that. I think it’s obviously going to be totally transformative and feels like warfare, and you already see that. The concern, quite honestly — I actually wrote an essay a while ago on why AI won’t destroy all the jobs. The short version of it is because it’s illegal to do that because so many jobs in the modern economy require licensing and are regulated. I think the concern would be that there’s just so much glue in the system now that prevents change. It’ll be very easy to not have AI healthcare or AI education or whatever because, literally, some combination of doctor licensing, teacher unions, and so forth will basically outlaw it. I think that’s the risk. If we think of AI and its impact in sociological terms, large language models, who will gain in status and who will decline in status? How should this affect how we think about policy?…

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