High-tech legend Marc Andreessen has recently published an article entitled "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," which can be read here. Let's look at some of the more erring parts of this manifesto, one that is characterized by bombast and hubris.
Very strangely the manifesto starts out with a quote by someone saying that "man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing." Besides being untrue, this claim clashes very much with the triumphalist claims in the manifesto, which have a "we are gods in the making" ring to it. The first section is entitled "Lies" and lists some things we are supposedly being told, without giving any specific quotes, things that sound pessimistic or anti-technology. The next section is entitled "Truth," and ends with the claim "It is time to be Techno-Optimists." The statements in this section aren't very noteworthy.
The next section is entitled "Technology." We hear a quote of someone saying, "Lack of growth is a kill-all." That isn't true. Once humans reach adulthood, they do not physically grow, and manage to do fine with no further growth. Most people don't grow much mentally after the age of 25, but the lack of intellectual growth does not kill them. And a nation can do fine with a stable population, without growing. We are told that "the total human population may already be shrinking." It's actually growing at a rate of about 1% per year. We have the bungling statement, "We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars." You cannot live inside a star, and nothing preceding the statement has justified a claim of the feasibility of interstellar colonization.
We then have the statement, "Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it." That's a silly thing to say. There are real world problems that humans hate and fight other humans, and that many humans are too greedy and selfish and biased. There is no technology that will solve such problems.
In a section called "Markets" we have this silly statement: "We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits." No, markets don't stop people from starting religions, and there's nothing wrong with starting a religion as long as you teach something reasonable and moral. We have this equally silly statement: "We believe markets, to quote Nicholas Stern, are how we take care of people we don’t know." We then have this equally senseless statement: "We believe in Milton Friedman’s observation that human wants and needs are infinite." No, actually, they are finite.
After a rather bombastic section entitled "The Techno-Capital Machine," we have a section entitled "Intelligence," which quickly states, "Intelligence makes everything better." That isn't always true. It took intelligence to build A-bombs and H-bombs, but the world was made much worse after they were introduced, with half of the world's population fearing a nuclear holocaust. We then have some lines singing the praise of so-called Artificial Intelligence. "Artificial Intelligence" is just a misleading term for computer programming and data processing. We have this silly claim: "Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder."
Then there is a section called "Energy" which begins with the very ignorant statement that "Energy is life." No, energy is not life. Life is an information-rich physical state of very high hierarchical organization, and energy such as sunlight is neither information-rich nor organized. We have this bizarre recommendation: "We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well." The life of people would not be improved if they started using a thousand times more energy. We are told, "We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited zero-emissions energy today – nuclear fission." I guess the techno-optimist author forgot about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the latter two being the most horrible environmental disasters caused by malfunctions at nuclear fission plants.
A section called "Abundance" starts out with the loopy statement, "We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity." Humans actually know of no way of substantially increasing intelligence to achieve a mind smarter than any man who has lived. Faster and more powerful computers do not have intelligence. Humans have no credible theory of how intelligence arises. We do not have any credible theory by which the human mind arises from the human brain. As shown in the many posts of my blog here, scientists are unable to give any credible neural explanations for such basic mental phenomena as memory formation, instant memory recall, life-long preservation of memories, imagination, self-hood, or abstract thinking. There is no hope that we will be be able to greatly increase human intelligence by genetic engineering or by giving people bigger brains. Lacking any understanding of a neural basis for intelligence, it will be impossible to build machines smarter than humans by leveraging some neuroscience discoveries. Just as goofy is the writer's claim that "the ultimate result will be that all physical goods become as cheap as pencils."
What follows is a shallow "pie in the sky" vision of material abundance that seems to be based on a hollow "all you need is more and more stuff" outlook. Ignoring how unneeded material consumption worsens global warming, Andreessen seems to think that some glorious climax of humanity will be reached if the world is loaded up with 50 billion people who all have lots and lots of material possessions. It's a fundamentally misguided philosophy. After their basic material needs are met, humans do not need more and more material possessions. The things that mostly drive human happiness are immaterial things such as self-fulfillment, love, personal relationships, friendships, good family relations, esthetic appreciation, personal growth, intellectual and spiritual enrichment and mental outlook. A man with access to good public transportation does not need a car, and will not be made much happier once he gets two cars and a garage to park them in.
Here are some examples of how technology has failed to make man happier. When I was a boy my family had bookcases filled with books, and people would take out many books from libraries. I could find out what was happening in the world and my city very well by reading the morning newspaper and my weekly copy of Time magazine and Life magazine. Now people tend not to have bookshelves, and tend not to get magazine deliveries. We get our information by the Internet. Has this made us any happier? I doubt it. Turning the pages of a book was just as convenient a way of reading as swiping your fingers across a screen. And today we can play games with Playstations and X-boxes. But when I was a kid it seemed I had just as much fun playing board games with my siblings. Nowadays, I can shop using Amazon.com, and I haven't been to a mall in a long time. But it seemed like just as much fun (or even more fun) to shop in a big shopping mall. People used to ride bicycles to get around in Beijing. Now a large fraction ride cars, but in 2018 the air in Beijing was terrible because of all the pollution from cars.
So much of what technology has given us consists of things we don't need. You don't need for your friends to know within 5 minutes your thoughts about some thing a politician or celebrity said 10 minutes ago. Nor does the average person even really need some site on which to post his photos. People were able to share photos before the Internet by putting physical photos in photo albums, and showing the albums to visitors to their residence. It used to be people would watch movies on huge screens. Now people mainly watch movies on hand-sized smartphones, with sound not-as-good as what you had in movie theaters. I remember listening to operas using stereo headphones, getting the tenor singing in my left ear, and the soprano in my right ear. Audio-wise it was an experience better than the average smartphone user gets. In many cases such as these technology has mainly made things different rather than very obviously better.
Technology has given us a hundred forms of glitzy distraction, and thousands of entertainment options, but maybe that makes it less likely you'll spend an afternoon absorbed in deep thoughts while reading a long book of intellectual depth. Nowadays someone may say, "I don't need to invite people for dinner, because I already keep up with them by getting their posts in my Facebook feed." Maybe you would be a little happier if you instead had dinner with such people, and were able to laugh with them face-to-face. Decades ago, people would write their friends and family members long handwritten letters. A person could save those letters, and have wonderful easy-to-access snapshots of what someone was thinking years ago. Now, you might instant message someone, writing "How r yu?" But it might be too hard for you to retrieve what the person thought years ago, as that might involve too much finger-swiping through spam in your text messages. People used to have old photos in photo albums that might last a lifetime. Now accessing your old photos may depend on whether you remember some user id and password and URL of some system where you posted the photos, and whether some web site is still operational and allowing free access. We may ask: have such technology changes made us any happier?
There is no evidence that people in the US are happier than they were fifty years ago. As for Andreessen's enthusiasm about going out and conquering space, that won't make mankind any happier. You won't get happier or wiser people by putting people on the moon or Mars, to live underground. The suicide rate in the US has risen by more than 30% since the year 2000, despite all of the marvelous increases in technology during that period.
Andreessen seems to pay no attention to the extremely large potential for technology to have disastrous effects on human happiness. One example is how automobile use and jet travel and heavy computer use have worsened global warming. It has been estimated that computer use and electronic gadget use accounts for 4% of global warming, with another 4% caused by air travel. Another example is the risk of nuclear war. Another example is the risk of runaway AI. Another example is the very substantial possibility that gene splicing may lead to some pandemic far worse than COVID-19. It is claimed by one US intelligence agency with medium confidence that COVID-19 itself arose because of bungled technological fiddling.
Some of the vast increase in material abundance Andreessen forecasts would need to come from asteroid mining, but asteroid mining would be a risk to mankind as great as nuclear warfare, because ships with the power to move around asteroids would have the power to launch them towards Earth as super-weapons. A relatively small asteroid manipulated to hit Earth would have such kinetic energy that it would be more destructive than a hydrogen bomb. Once you have spaceships going to asteroids, the task of re-routing the path of an asteroid so that it hits Earth is a technological feat much simpler than creating a hydrogen bomb.
While Andreessen gives away animosity towards religion (with the comment quoted above), what he is actually preaching seems almost like a kind of religion in itself. As I have argued at length elsewhere, religions have extremely diverse forms, and do not always involve a belief in a deity. A good definition of a religion (one I previously used) was this: "A set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs." Centered around a recommended way of living in which consumption and material possession acquisition seem to be the chief virtues, Andreessen's techno-materialism seems rather like a kind of religion in which people such as him, Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil are the high priests, asking us to believe in some looming transformative Singularity that serves like the Second Coming. It is interesting that Andreessen ends his piece with a list of what he calls "Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism," a list that includes Friedrich Nietzsche (who was also a favorite of some well-known bad guys). I fail to recognize any morally-noteworthy figure on this list of so-called "saints."
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