a16z Founder Publishes Techno-Optimism Manifesto: Technology Is the Only Lasting Source of Growth
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a16z Founder Publishes Techno-Optimism Manifesto: Technology Is the Only Lasting Source of Growth
You live in a crazy era—one even crazier than usual—where despite tremendous advances in science and technology, humanity has no idea who they really are or what they're actually doing.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsCompiled by: StartupBoy, Investment Internship Institute
I've always felt that a16z is a prime example of technological optimism in the VC world, and its co-founder Marc Andreessen epitomizes this. Recently, a16z released a lengthy article arguing that today's AI is ushering us into the third era of computing.
Today, Marc Andreessen has officially published the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" on the a16z website—a nearly 10,000-word declaration passionately articulating views on lies, truths, technology, markets, and more.
In this manifesto, Marc Andreessen states that there are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology. The only eternal source of growth is technology. Free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy—markets are a discovery machine, a form of intelligence—an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.
Below is an AI-assisted translation with some content condensed. Readers interested in the full original text can visit the a16z website.
You live in a crazy age—one crazier than usual, because despite tremendous advances in science and technology, humanity has no idea who we are or what we’re doing. —Walker Percy
Our species has existed for 300,000 years. For the first 290,000, we lived as hunter-gatherers—a lifestyle still visible among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands. Even after Homo sapiens embraced agriculture, progress remained extremely slow. A person born in Sumer around 4000 BC would be quite familiar with the resources, labor, and technologies of Norman England or the Aztec Empire at the time of Columbus. Then, starting in the 18th century, living standards surged for many people. What caused this immense progress—and why? —Marian Tupy
There’s a better way to do everything. Find it. —Thomas Edison
Lies
We’ve been deceived.
We’ve been told that technology steals our jobs, lowers our wages, worsens inequality, threatens our health, destroys the environment, degrades society, corrupts our children, damages our humanity, endangers our future, and is perpetually on the verge of destroying everything.
We’ve been told to feel angry, pained, resentful toward technology. We’ve been told to be pessimistic. The myth of Prometheus—in updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator—haunts our nightmares.
We’ve been told to renounce our birthright—our intellect, our mastery over nature, our ability to build a better world. We’ve been told to feel miserable about the future.
Truth
Our civilization is built on technology. Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the vanguard of progress, the realization of our potential. For centuries, we appropriately celebrated this—until recently.
I’m here to bring good news. We can progress to a far superior mode of life and being.
We have the tools, systems, and ideas. We have the will. It’s time to raise the banner of technology again.
It’s time to become techno-optimists.
Technology
Techno-optimists believe societies are like sharks: they must grow or die.
We believe growth is progress—bringing vitality, expanding life, increasing knowledge, improving well-being.
We agree with Paul Collier: “Economic growth isn’t a cure-all, but lack of growth is fatal.”
We believe all good things flow downstream from growth.
We believe non-growth means stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal conflict, degeneration, collapse, and ultimately death.
There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology.
Populations are declining worldwide across cultures—total population may already be shrinking. Natural resource use is severely constrained by both reality and politics.
Therefore, the only eternal source of growth is technology.
Indeed, technology—new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne—has always been the primary, perhaps the only, cause of growth, because technology enables both population growth and resource utilization.
We believe technology is the lever of the world—doing more with less.
Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: how much output we can produce each year with fewer inputs and less raw material. Productivity growth driven by technology is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed up to do more important and valuable things than before. Productivity growth leads to lower prices, increased supply, expanded demand, and improved material well-being for all.
We believe this is the story of our civilization’s material development; this is why we no longer live in mud huts barely surviving, waiting for nature to kill us.
We believe this is why our descendants will live among the stars. We believe no material problem—whether caused by nature or by technology—is insoluble through more technology.
We had hunger—so we invented green revolution technology;
We had darkness—so we invented electric light;
We had cold—so we invented indoor heating;
We had heat—so we invented air conditioning;
We had isolation—so we invented the internet;
We had epidemics—so we invented vaccines;
We had poverty—so we invented technology to create abundance;
Give us a real-world problem—we’ll invent the technology to solve it.
Markets
We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. Willing buyers meet willing sellers, prices are set, both parties benefit from the exchange—or else it wouldn’t happen. Profit is the incentive to produce supply that meets demand; prices encode information about supply and demand. Markets prompt entrepreneurs to seek high prices as signals of opportunity to create new wealth by lowering prices.
We believe market economies are discovery machines, a form of intelligence—an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.
We believe Hayek’s knowledge problem overwhelms any centralized economic system. All practical information resides at the edges, in the hands of those closest to buyers. The center is distant from buyers and sellers, knowing nothing. Central planning is doomed to fail—the production and consumption system is too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for everyone’s benefit; centralization starves you.
We believe in market discipline. Markets naturally enforce rules—when buyers don’t show up, sellers either learn and adapt or exit. When market discipline is absent, things go mad endlessly. The motto of every monopoly and cartel, every central agency not subject to market discipline, is: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.” Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.
We believe markets help people escape poverty—in fact, markets are and always have been the most effective way to lift large numbers of people out of poverty. Even under authoritarian regimes, gradually lifting repression on people’s productive and trading abilities leads to rapid income and living standard increases. Lifting the boot slightly helps. Removing the boot entirely—who knows how rich everyone could become?
We believe markets are inherently individualistic ways to achieve exceptional collective outcomes.
We believe markets don’t require people to be perfect or even benevolent—that’s good, because, have you met people? Adam Smith: “Our dinner is not secured from the benevolence of the butcher, brewer, or baker, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
David Friedman noted people act for others for only three reasons—love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so economies run on money or force. Force experiments have been tried and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.
We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they redirect people who might otherwise form armies and start religions into peaceful productive pursuits. In Nicholas Stern’s words, we believe markets are how we care for strangers.
We believe markets are how we generate social wealth to pay for everything else we want—basic research, social welfare programs, defense.
We believe there is no conflict between capital profits and social welfare systems protecting the vulnerable. In fact, they align—market production creates the economic wealth that pays for everything we as a society desire.
We believe central economic planning elevates the worst among us and drags down everyone; markets harness the best among us for the benefit of all.
We believe central planning is a doom loop; markets spiral upward.
Economist William Nordhaus showed creators of technology capture only about 2% of the economic value their technology generates. The remaining 98% flows to society as what economists call social surplus. Technological innovation in market systems is essentially charitable at a 50:1 ratio. Who gains more value from a new technology—the single company making it, or the millions or billions using it to improve their lives?
We believe in David Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage—even if one person is best at everything, opportunity cost means they still buy most things from others. Regardless of technical level, comparative advantage under appropriate free markets ensures high employment.
We believe markets set wages as a function of workers’ marginal productivity. Therefore, technology that increases productivity drives wages up, not down. This may be the most counterintuitive idea in economics, yet it’s true—and 300 years of history prove it.
We believe Milton Friedman’s observation that human wants and needs are infinite.
We believe markets also advance social well-being by creating work people can efficiently participate in. We believe universal basic income turns people into zoo animals fed by the state. People shouldn’t be fed—they should be useful, creative, proud.
We believe technological change doesn’t reduce demand for human work—it increases it by expanding the range of tasks humans can perform efficiently.
We believe since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue indefinitely.
We believe markets are creative, not exploitative; positive-sum, not zero-sum. Market participants build on each other’s work and output. James Carse described finite and infinite games—finite games end with one winner and one loser; infinite games never end because players cooperate to discover possibilities within the game. Markets are the ultimate infinite game.
The Techno-Capital Machine
Combine technology and markets, and you get Nick Land’s “techno-capital machine”—the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.
We believe the market-driven techno-capital machine won’t stop—it spirals upward. Comparative advantage increases specialization and trade. Prices fall, releasing purchasing power, creating demand. Falling prices benefit everyone who buys goods and services—i.e., everyone.
Human wants and needs are endless. Entrepreneurs constantly create new goods and services to satisfy them, deploying infinite numbers of people and machines in the process. This upward spiral has continued for centuries. Indeed, by 2019—before the pandemic temporarily interrupted it—it resulted in the largest number of jobs in Earth’s history, with the highest wages and material living standards.
The techno-capital machine makes natural selection work for us in the realm of ideas. The best, most productive ideas win and combine to generate even better ones. These ideas are realized in the real world as technology-enabled goods and services—never appearing out of thin air.
Ray Kurzweil defined his Law of Accelerating Returns: technological progress tends to feed itself, increasing the rate of further progress.
We believe in accelerationism—consciously, deliberately pushing technological development—to ensure the Law of Accelerating Returns holds. Ensure the techno-capital spiral continues forever.
We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human—in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing ever. It works for us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All machines work for us.
We believe the foundational resources of the techno-capital spiral are intelligence and energy—ideas, and the power to make them real.
Intelligence
We believe intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. On almost every measurable metric, smarter people and societies outperform less intelligent ones. Intelligence is our birthright—we should expand it as fully and widely as possible.
We believe intelligence spirals upward—first, more smart people worldwide are recruited into the techno-capital machine; second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines, creating new cybernetic systems like companies and networks; third, AI enhances both our machines and ourselves.
We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will extend our capabilities to unimaginable heights.
We believe AI is our alchemy, our philosopher’s stone—we are literally making sand think.
We believe AI is best seen as a general-purpose problem solver—and we have many problems to solve.
We believe AI could save lives—if we let it. Medicine, and many other fields, remain in the Stone Age compared to what’s possible through joint human and machine intelligence in discovering new therapies. From car crashes to epidemics to battlefield friendly fire, many common causes of death could be solved by AI.
We believe any slowdown in AI costs lives. Deaths preventable by AI are murder.
We believe in Augmented Intelligence as much as Artificial Intelligence. Intelligent machines enhance human intelligence, geometrically expanding human capability.
We believe augmented intelligence drives marginal productivity, thus wages, thus demand, thus creation of new supply…with no upper limit.
Energy
Energy is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we face darkness, hunger, suffering. With it, we have light, safety, warmth.
We believe energy should spiral upward. Energy is the fundamental engine of our civilization—the more energy we have, the more people we can support, and the better each person’s life can be. We should raise everyone’s energy consumption to our levels, then increase ours by 1,000 times, then theirs by 1,000 times.
Currently, there’s a huge gap in per capita energy use between smaller developed nations and larger developing ones. This gap will close—either through massive expansion of energy production, making everyone’s life better, or massive reduction, making everyone’s life worse.
We believe energy expansion needn’t harm the natural environment. Today, we have the near-infinite, zero-emission energy panacea—nuclear fission. In 1973, President Nixon called for Project Independence: building 1,000 nuclear plants by 2000 to achieve complete U.S. energy independence. Nixon was right. We didn’t build them then—but we can now.
Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray said in 1953: “For years, the split atom in weapons has been our chief shield against barbarism. Now, it is God’s gift to humanity for constructive work.” Murray was right too.
We believe a second silver bullet for energy is coming—nuclear fusion. We should build it too. The bad ideas that effectively banned fission will try to ban fusion—we must not let them.
We believe there’s no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment. Even without nuclear power, the U.S. today emits less carbon per capita than 100 years ago.
We believe technology is the solution to environmental degradation and crises. Technologically advanced societies improve the natural environment; technologically stagnant ones destroy it.
We believe energy-constrained, stagnant societies damage the environment; technologically advanced societies provide infinite clean energy for everyone.
Abundance
We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop and drive them toward infinity.
We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to create abundance in everything we want and need.
We believe the measure of abundance is falling prices. Whenever prices fall, the purchasing power of buyers rises—equivalent to rising income. If prices of many goods and services fall, the result is an explosion in purchasing power, real income, and quality of life.
We believe if we make intelligence and energy “too cheap to meter,” the end result will be physical goods as cheap as pencils. Pencils are actually quite complex and difficult to manufacture technically—but if you borrow a pencil and don’t return it, no one gets upset. We should adopt this attitude toward all physical goods.
We believe we should push prices downward across the entire economy through technological application until as many prices as possible approach zero, maximizing income levels and quality of life.
We believe Andy Warhol was right: “The greatness of America is that starting from the top consumer to the bottom, they buy essentially the same things. You can see Coca-Cola on TV—you know the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and you can think, ‘I drink Coke too.’ Coke is Coke—no amount of money can buy a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner drinks. All Coke is the same, and all Coke is good.” The same applies to browsers, smartphones, chatbots.
We believe technology will ultimately drive the world toward Buckminster Fuller’s concept of “ephemeralization”—what economists call “dematerialization.” Fuller said: “Technology enables you to do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.”
We believe technological progress brings material abundance for everyone.
We believe the ultimate payoff of technological abundance may be Julian Simon’s “ultimate resource”—massive human expansion. As Simon argued, we believe humans are the ultimate resource—the more people, the more creativity, the more new ideas, the more technological progress. Thus, we believe material abundance ultimately means more people—more people—which in turn brings more abundance.
We believe our planet is drastically underpopulated relative to the abundance of intelligence, energy, and material goods we can create.
We believe global population could easily reach 50 billion or more—and vastly exceed that when we finally settle other planets.
We believe among these people will emerge scientists, technologists, artists, and dreamers beyond our wildest imaginations.
We believe technology’s ultimate mission is to advance life on Earth and among the stars.
Not Utopia, But Close Enough
Yet we are not utopians. We follow what Thomas Sowell calls the “constrained vision.”
We believe the constrained vision—versus the unconstrained visions of utopianism and expertise—means accepting people as they are, testing ideas through experience, and freeing people to make their own choices.
We don’t believe in utopia or apocalypse.
We believe change happens only at the margin—but massive marginal changes can yield enormous results. While not utopia, we believe in Brad DeLong’s “slouching toward utopia”—doing the best fallen humans can, letting things get better as we go.
Becoming Technological Supermen
We believe advancing technology is one of the most beneficial things we can do. We believe consciously, systematically transforming ourselves into people who can advance technology.
We believe this certainly means technical education, but also hands-on practice, acquiring practical skills, working in teams and leading teams—desiring to build something greater than oneself, to collaborate with others to build something greater together.
We believe humanity’s natural drive to create, claim territory, explore the unknown can be effectively channeled into building technology. We believe while physical frontiers—at least on Earth—are closed, technological frontiers are open.
We believe in exploring and claiming the technological frontier. We believe in the romance of technology, the romance of industry. The eros of trains, cars, electric lights, skyscrapers. And microchips, neural networks, rockets, split atoms.
We believe in adventure. Embarking on the hero’s journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, bringing back treasure for our community.
To paraphrase a manifesto from another time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. No masterpiece lacks aggression. Technology must be a violent assault on unknown forces, forcing them to bow before humanity.”
We believe we are now, have been, and will be masters of technology—not mastered by it. Victim mentality is a curse in all areas of life, including our relationship with technology—both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not victims—we are conquerors.
We believe in nature, but also in overcoming nature. We are not primitives cowering in fear of lightning. We are apex predators—lightning works for us.
We believe in greatness. We admire the great technologists and industrialists of the past and hope they’d be proud of us today.
We believe in human nature—both individual and collective.
Technological Values
We believe in ambition, persistence, relentlessness—strength. We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in bravery, courage. We believe in pride, confidence, and self-respect—when earned. We believe in free inquiry, the practical scientific method, Enlightenment values, challenging expert authority.
We believe, as Richard Feynman said, “Science is belief in the ignorance of experts.” And, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
We believe in local knowledge—people making decisions with practical information, not playing God. We believe in embracing difference, increasing interest. We believe in risk, in leaps into the unknown.
We believe in agency, in individualism. We believe in radical competence. We believe in absolute rejection of resentment—as Carrie Fisher said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. We take responsibility. We overcome.”
We believe in competition because we believe in evolution. We believe in evolution because we believe in life. We believe in truth. We believe wealth is better than poverty, cheap is better than expensive, abundance is better than scarcity. We believe in making everyone wealthy, everything cheap, everything abundant.
We believe external motivations—wealth, fame, revenge—are good in themselves. But we believe even more in intrinsic motivations—the satisfaction of building something new, camaraderie in a team, the achievement of becoming a better self—more fulfilling, more enduring.
We believe in what the Greeks said—flourishing through excellence.
We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, nationality, gender, height, weight, or hair. Technology is built by talent from everywhere—a virtual United Nations where anyone with a positive attitude and a cheap laptop can contribute. Technology is the ultimate open society.
We believe in Silicon Valley’s “pay it forward” ethos—trusting through aligned incentives, generously helping each other learn and grow. We believe technology makes greatness possible—and more likely.
We believe in realizing our potential, becoming full human beings—for ourselves, our communities, our society.
The Meaning Of Life
Techno-optimism is a material philosophy, not a political one. We focus on the material for a reason—it opens the door to how we choose to live in conditions of material abundance.
A common critique of technology is that it removes choice from our lives because machines make decisions for us. This is undoubtedly true—but the freedom to shape our lives created by machine-generated material abundance far outweighs it.
Material abundance from markets and technology opens space for choice in religion, politics, and social and personal lifestyles. We believe technology is liberating—it liberates human potential, human souls, human spirits—expanding freedom, fulfillment, and the meaning of being alive.
We believe technology opens the space of human meaning.
The Enemy
We have enemies. Our enemies are not bad people—but bad ideas.
For sixty years, our society has suffered a massive morale-depleting campaign—against technology and life—under various names: “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “ESG,” “Sustainable Development Goals,” “social responsibility,” “precautionary principle,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” “degrowth,” “limits to growth.”
Our enemies are stagnation, anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-struggle, anti-achievement, anti-greatness. Our enemies are institutions once vibrant and truth-seeking in youth, now compromised, corrupted, collapsed—blocking progress in increasingly desperate efforts to maintain relevance, yet frantically justifying continued funding despite escalating dysfunction and incompetence.
Our enemies are all forms of control—and unrestrained utopianism. Our enemy is the precautionary principle, which has blocked nearly all progress since humans first harnessed fire. The precautionary principle was invented to prevent widespread deployment of civilian nuclear power—perhaps the most catastrophic societal mistake I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. The precautionary principle continues to inflict massive unnecessary suffering on the world today. It is profoundly immoral—and we must discard it with extreme prejudice.
Our enemies are slowdown, degrowth, population decline—the nihilistic desires popular among our elites for fewer people, less energy, more suffering and death.
We will explain to those captured by decaying ideas that their fears are unfounded and the future is bright. We invite all to join our techno-optimism. Become allies in our pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.
The Future
Where do we come from? Our civilization was built on the spirit of discovery, exploration, and industrialization.
Where are we going? What kind of world are we building for our children, and their children?
A world of fear, guilt, and resentment? Or a world of ambition, abundance, and adventure?
We believe David Deutsch: “We have a duty to be optimistic. Because the future is open, not predetermined, it cannot simply be accepted: we are all responsible for what it becomes. Therefore, striving for a better world is our duty.”
We owe it to the past—and to the future. It’s time to be techno-optimists. It’s time to build.
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