Le manifeste de l'optimisme technologique du fondateur d'a16z : la technologie est la seule source éternelle de croissance
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Le manifeste de l'optimisme technologique du fondateur d'a16z : la technologie est la seule source éternelle de croissance
Vous vivez à une époque folle — plus folle encore qu'à l'ordinaire, où, malgré d'immenses progrès scientifiques et technologiques, l'humanité ignore totalement qui elle est ou ce qu'elle fait.
Dédié à des analyses Web3 approfondiesCompilation : StartupBoy, Investment Internship Institute
I've always felt that a16z is a representative of technological optimists in the VC world, and its co-founder Marc Andreessen is a classic example. Recently, a16z published a lengthy article arguing that today’s AI is ushering us into the third era of computing.
Today, Marc Andreessen has officially released the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" on the a16z website—a nearly 10,000-word declaration explaining his views from perspectives such as lies, truths, technology, and markets, delivered with great passion.
In this manifesto, Marc Andreessen states: The only sources of growth are three: 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, I’ve used AI for a basic translation, with some sections slightly condensed. Readers interested can refer to the original text on 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 years, 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 adopted agriculture, progress remained extremely slow. A person born in Sumer around 4000 BC would be quite familiar with the resources, work, and technologies of Norman England or the Aztec Empire at the time of Columbus. Then, starting in the 18th century, living standards surged dramatically for many people. What brought about this massive progress—and why? — Marian Tupy
There is a better way to do it—find it. — Thomas Edison
Lies
We have been lied to.
We were told that technology takes our jobs, lowers our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, destroys the environment, degrades society, corrupts our children, damages our humanity, endangers our future, and is perpetually on the brink of destroying everything.
We were told to feel angry, hurt, and resentful toward technology. We were told to be pessimistic. The myth of Prometheus—in updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator—haunts our nightmares.
We were told to renounce our birthright—our intellect, our mastery over nature, our ability to build a better world. We were 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 properly celebrated this—until recently.
I am here to bring good news. We can progress to a far superior way 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 that societies, like sharks, must either grow or die.
We believe growth is progress—bringing vitality, expanding life, increasing knowledge, and enhancing 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.
No 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 use, and technology.
Population is declining across cultures and geographies in developed countries—global population may already be shrinking. Natural resource use is severely constrained by both reality and politics.
Therefore, the only enduring source of growth is technology.
Indeed, technology—new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne—has historically been the primary, perhaps the only, driver of growth, since 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 engine of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed up to do ever more important and valuable things. Productivity gains lead to lower prices, increased supply, expanded demand, and thus 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 there is no material problem—whether caused by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved by more technology.
We faced hunger—so we invented green revolution technologies;
We faced darkness—so we invented electric light;
We faced cold—so we invented indoor heating;
We faced heat—so we invented air conditioning;
We faced isolation—so we invented the internet;
We faced pandemics—so we invented vaccines;
We faced poverty—so we invented technology to create abundance;
Give us a real-world problem—we’ll invent 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, and 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 them.
We believe market economies are discovery machines, a form of intelligence—an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.
We believe Hayek’s knowledge problem defeats any centralized economic system. All practical information resides at the edges, held by those closest to buyers. The center is distant from buyers and sellers, knowing nothing. Central planning is doomed to fail—the systems of production and consumption are too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for everyone’s benefit; centralization starves you.
We believe in market discipline. Markets naturally enforce rules—if buyers don’t show up, sellers must learn and adapt or exit. When market discipline is absent, things go mad endlessly. The motto of every monopoly, cartel, and centrally controlled institution 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 the most effective way ever devised to lift large populations out of poverty, and always have been. Even under authoritarian regimes, gradually lifting repression on people’s ability to produce and trade leads to rapid income and living standard improvements. Lift the boot a little—results improve. Remove the boot entirely—who knows how rich everyone could become?
We believe markets are an individualistic path to collective excellence.
We believe markets don’t require people to be perfect, or even benevolent—and that’s good, because, have you met people? Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, 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 observed that people act for others for only three reasons: love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale—so economies run on money or force. Force has been tried, and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.
We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they redirect those who might otherwise raise armies or 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 value—basic research, social welfare programs, defense.
We believe there is no conflict between capital profits and social welfare systems that protect the vulnerable. In fact, they align—market production generates the economic wealth that pays for everything we want as a society.
We believe central economic planning elevates the worst among us and drags everyone down; markets leverage the best among us for the benefit of all.
We believe central planning is a doom loop; markets are a spiral upward.
Economist William Nordhaus showed that creators of technology capture only about 2% of the economic value their inventions generate. The remaining 98% flows to society as what economists call social surplus. Technological innovation within market systems is inherently charitable—at a 50:1 ratio. Who gains more value from a new technology—the single company that builds it, or the millions or billions who use it to improve their lives?
We believe in David Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage—even if someone is the best in the world at everything, opportunity cost makes it rational to buy most things from others. Comparative advantage ensures high employment under appropriately free market conditions, regardless of skill level.
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 all of economics—but it’s true, and 300 years of history prove it.
We believe Milton Friedman’s observation that human desires and needs are infinite.
We believe markets also enhance social well-being by creating meaningful work people can efficiently participate in. We believe universal basic income turns people into zoo animals, fed by the state. Humans should not be fed—they should be useful, creative, proud.
We believe technological change does not reduce the need for human work, but expands the scope of human-effective work, thereby increasing demand for human labor.
We believe that because human desires and needs are infinite, so is economic demand—and employment growth can continue indefinitely.
We believe markets are creative, not exploitative; positive-sum, not zero-sum. Market participants build upon each other’s work and output. James Carse described finite games and infinite games—finite games have endings, one winner, 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 with markets, and you get what Nick Land calls the technocapital machine—the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.
We believe the market-driven, innovating technocapital machine won’t stop—it will spiral upward indefinitely. 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 desires 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 had created the largest number of jobs in Earth’s history, with the highest wages and material living standards.
The technocapital machine enables natural selection to operate 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 is fulfilled. Ensure the technocapital spiral continues forever.
We believe the technocapital machine is not anti-human—in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing possible. It works for us. The technocapital machine works for us. All machines work for us.
The foundational resources of the technocapital 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 individuals and societies perform better than less intelligent ones. Intelligence is humanity’s birthright, and we should expand it as fully and widely as possible.
We believe intelligence is spiraling upward—first, through the recruitment of more and more smart people worldwide into the technocapital machine; second, through humans forming symbiotic relationships with machines, creating new cybernetic systems like companies and networks; third, through AI augmenting both our machines and our own capabilities.
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 left to solve.
We believe AI could save lives—if we choose to. Medicine, and many other fields, remain in the Stone Age compared to what we could achieve through combined human and machine intelligence research. Many common causes of death—from car crashes to pandemics to battlefield friendly fire—can be addressed with AI.
We believe any slowdown in AI costs lives. Deaths that could have been prevented by AI constitute murder.
We believe in Augmented Intelligence just as strongly as we believe in Artificial Intelligence. Intelligent machines amplify human intelligence, geometrically expanding human capability.
We believe augmented intelligence drives marginal productivity, which drives wages, which drives demand, which drives new supply creation…with no upper limit.
Energy
Energy is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we face darkness, hunger, and 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 current levels, then increase ours by 1000 times, then theirs by 1000 times.
Currently, there is a vast 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, improving everyone’s lives, or through massive reduction, worsening everyone’s lives.
We believe energy expansion need not harm the natural environment. Today, we possess 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 full U.S. energy independence. Nixon was right. We didn’t build those plants then, but we can build them now.
Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray said in 1953: “For years, the fissioned atom in weapons has been our chief shield against barbarism. Now, it is God’s gift to man for constructive work.” Murray was also right.
We believe the second silver bullet of energy is coming: nuclear fusion. We should build it too. Bad ideas that effectively ban fission will try to ban fusion—we must not let them.
We believe there is no inherent conflict between the technocapital machine and the natural environment. Even without nuclear power, the U.S. today emits less per capita carbon than it did 100 years ago.
We believe technology is the solution to environmental degradation and crises. Technologically advanced societies can improve the natural environment; stagnant societies destroy it.
We believe stagnant societies with limited technology destroy the environment at high cost; advanced societies provide limitless 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.
The measure of abundance is falling prices. Every time prices fall, the purchasing power of buyers increases—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 that if we make intelligence and energy “too cheap to meter,” physical goods will eventually become as cheap as pencils. Pencils are actually fairly complex and difficult to manufacture technically—but if you borrow a pencil and don’t return it, no one gets angry. We should adopt the same attitude toward all physical goods.
We believe we should drive down prices across the entire economy through technological application until as many prices as possible are effectively zero—pushing income and quality of life to their maximum levels.
We believe Andy Warhol was right: “The beauty of this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. Coke is Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” The same applies to browsers, smartphones, chatbots.
We believe technology will ultimately push the world toward what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization”—what economists term “dematerialization.” Fuller said: “Technology enables us 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. Like Simon, 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 creates more abundance.
We believe our planet is severely underpopulated relative to the number of people we could support with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods.
We believe the global population could easily reach 50 billion or more—and far beyond when we eventually settle other planets.
We believe among all 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 called 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 liberating people to make their own choices.
We do not believe in utopia, nor apocalypse.
We believe change happens only at the margin—but enough marginal changes can yield enormous results. Not utopia, but 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 in consciously, systematically transforming ourselves into people capable of driving technological progress.
We believe this certainly means technical education, but also hands-on practice, acquiring practical skills, working in teams, and leading teams—yearning to build something greater than oneself, eager to collaborate with others to build something even greater together.
We believe humanity’s natural drive to create, claim territory, and explore the unknown can be effectively channeled into building technology. We believe while physical frontiers—on Earth at least—are closed, technological frontiers are wide 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 territories, and bringing back treasures for our communities.
To paraphrase a manifesto from another time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. No masterpiece lacks aggression. Technology must be a violent attack on unknown forces, forcing them to bow before humanity.”
We believe we are now, have always been, and will always be masters of technology—not its victims. Victimhood is a curse in every domain of life, including our relationship with technology—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 we long for them to be proud of us today.
We believe in humanity—both individually and collectively.
Technological Values
We believe in ambition, persistence, relentlessness—strength. We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in courage, bravery. We believe in pride, confidence, and self-respect—when earned. We believe in free inquiry, the practical scientific method, Enlightenment values, challenging the authority of experts.
We believe, as Richard Feynman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” And, “I’d 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 better than expensive, abundance better than scarcity. We believe in making everyone wealthy, everything cheap, everything abundant.
We believe extrinsic motivations—wealth, fame, revenge—are good in themselves. But we believe even more in intrinsic motivations—the satisfaction of building something new, camaraderie in teams, the achievement of becoming a better self—deeper, more lasting.
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 a virtual United Nations of talent from everywhere—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” principle—trust through aligned incentives, generosity in helping others learn and grow. We believe technology makes greatness possible, and more likely.
We believe in fulfilling our potential, becoming whole 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 material abundance.
A common criticism of technology is that it deprives us of choice, as machines make decisions for us. This is undoubtedly true—but the freedom to shape lives enabled by machine-created abundance far outweighs it.
Material abundance from markets and technology opens space for choices in religion, politics, and personal and social lifestyles. We believe technology is emancipatory—liberating human potential, the human soul, the human spirit—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 demoralization 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 enemy is stagnation, anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-struggle, anti-achievement, anti-greatness. Our enemy is institutions once vibrant and truth-seeking in youth, now compromised, corrupted, collapsed—desperately struggling to maintain relevance amid escalating dysfunction and incompetence, frantically justifying continued funding.
Our enemy is control, and also boundless utopianism. Our enemy is the precautionary principle, which has blocked nearly all progress since humans first tamed fire. The precautionary principle was invented to prevent the widespread deployment of civilian nuclear power—perhaps the most catastrophic societal error I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. The precautionary principle continues to inflict immense unnecessary suffering worldwide. It is profoundly immoral—and we must discard it with extreme prejudice.
Our enemies are slowing down, degrowth, population decline—the nihilistic desire prevalent among elites for fewer people, less energy, more suffering, more 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 did 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 filled with fear, guilt, and resentment? Or a world filled with 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 a techno-optimist. It’s time to build.
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