Marc Andreessen Says One Job Is Principally Secure From AI: Enterprise Capitalist

Egg-headed enterprise capitalist Marc Andreessen is an optimist on the subject of synthetic intelligence. The explanations for this are well-known: by his agency, Andreessen Horowitz, the billionaire has invested in a broad array of AI-related ventures, which, he assumes, will each pay dividends and make the world a greater place. This week, we discovered another excuse that Andreessen doesn’t have any worries concerning the know-how: he doesn’t assume AI may ever probably substitute him.

Throughout a current a16z podcast appearance, Andreessen predicted that enterprise capital (, his job) could be one of many final remaining vocations after AI has changed giant swaths of the human labor power.

“Each nice enterprise capitalist within the final 70 years has missed many of the nice corporations of his era,” Andreessen mentioned throughout the podcast. “So, the good VCs have successful document of getting, , two out of 10 or one thing of the good corporations of the last decade.”

Andreessen described his job as a nuanced mixture of “intangible” abilities, together with psychological evaluation of the entrepreneurs he works with: “A variety of it’s psychological evaluation, like, ‘Who’re these folks?’ ‘How do they react beneath strain?’ ‘How do you retain them from falling aside?’ ‘How do you retain them from going loopy?’ ‘How do you retain from going loopy your self?’ , you find yourself being a psychologist half the time.”

“So, it’s doable—I don’t need to be definitive—but it surely’s doable that that’s fairly actually timeless. And when, , when the AI is doing every part else, which may be one of many final remaining fields that persons are nonetheless doing.”

It’s simply humorous to listen to Andreessen repeat the oft-heard chorus that “know-how is superior and every part, however there’s simply no method it may ever do what I do.” That is what folks have been telling themselves since ceaselessly, and it’s often proper earlier than they lose their job to regardless of the present type of automation is. Certainly, a strong future AI of the type that Marc and his cohort typically discuss may, when fed with ample quantities of psychiatric information, swiftly surpass a human VC’s powers of psychological divination, and make knowledgeable selections about learn how to handle enterprise leaders. Isn’t this precisely the kind of factor that folks like Andreessen have lengthy been telling everyone AI is able to doing?

That mentioned, Andreessen’s powers of self-delusion are well-known. His Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto, printed just a few years in the past, was one other nice window right into a thoughts addled by an excessive amount of money and too little frequent sense. Should you’re one in every of Silicon Valley’s Masters of the Universe, I assume having bizarre, self-serving views simply comes with the territory.