Marc Andreessen says everything tech optimists want to say to skeptics (in three quotes and two graphs).
My colleague over at New York Magazine, Kevin Roose, just conducted a superb interview with Silicon Valley's favorite Twitter philosopher king, Marc Andreessen. Roose is one of the most thoughtful journalists investigating the unintended side effects of disruption. The Netscape founder and self-proclaimed tech optimist responded to all of Roose's questions in a massive 7,000-word interview.
If you're a tech optimist, Andreessen says pretty much everything you want to say to the tech skeptics in your life. And if you're tech skeptic, it's still fascinating to see some of the most thoughtful reasons to be an optimist. I've summarized the best nuggets below.
"I think the critique that Silicon Valley companies are deliberately, systematically discriminatory is incorrect ... We think access is broadening out the network so that everybody who could contribute can get access to the network. And that’s the one that we’re working on."
As the above graph notes, Silicon Valley, especially the leadership, is mostly white males. Andreessen argues that Silicon Valley is desperately seeking to change this, but the old boys' network makes it difficult. Silicon Valley is a high-trust industry, where personal referrals are the currency of human resources departments.
Companies are now investing heavily in programs to give talented women and minorities access to their closed networks, encourage female computer scientists, and fund online education programs that bring Ivy League professors into the developing world. Google is aggressively studying how to reduce psychological biases in the internal promotion process.
If I can offer my own two cents: I don't think Silicon Valley gets enough credit here. I don't see a similar amount of funds or intellectual curiosity coming from the finance industry, where diversity is also a problem. The finance industry employs lobbyists to fight transparency laws, while Silicon Valley volunteers the information for public scrutiny.
"Nobody wants to talk about the old. The old farming jobs were fucking terrible jobs. I mean, farmers wake up at six in the morning and work 14-hour days. Industrial jobs -- people would get killed in these factories all the time. Coal miners -- people are trying to protect coal-mining jobs. They’re terrible, terrible jobs. The new jobs are better."
Yes, robots are destroying some jobs -- perhaps faster than new jobs are being created. Technology is certainly contributing to the widening pay gap between skilled and unskilled labor. But what's the alternative? We'd have to stop all of the technological progress over the last century to maintain the jobs technology replaced.
Instead, Andreessen argues that we need some type of social safety net, like a simple universal basic income, to ensure that everyone at least has a certain level of quality of life.
My own two cents again: There are organizations that take the 'Let's stop tech from stealing jobs' to a logical extreme. In the 19th century, railroad unions fought against automation that replaced the jobs of people who shoveled coal into train engines. Today, taxi groups admit to me that they basically don't want Uber and Lyft to exist because competition is unfair.
If we critique Silicon Valley for replacing jobs, we should be honest about the tech-inhibiting policies that are required to stop it.
"But this is the big story of our time — the elimination of poverty. We have people rising out of poverty at a global level and in the U.S. at unprecedented rates. In 50 years, we’ve gone from hunger being the dominant problem among lower-income people to obesity being the dominant problem."
Inequality may be up, but poverty is way down. Because of advanced food production and processing, the share of money spent on food has been cut by one third (graph below from The Atlantic).
The rate of worldwide hunger has also been cut about a third, as measured by the number of undernourished people.
The rest of the Roose's interview is great, from politics to television. Read the full transcript here.