Marc Andreessen isn’t worried about artificial intelligence taking people’s jobs. The way he sees it, technological innovation should not be allowed to disrupt much of the economy.
The founder of venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz expressed his thoughts in a newsletter this weekend.
In a less regulated sector of the economy, Andreessen said, “technology is accelerating, reducing prices and improving quality every year.” Consider computer software, cell phone service, and TV.
But in other sectors, technological innovation is “virtually banned,” he wrote.
“The price of education, health care, and housing as well as anything provided or controlled by the government will rise to the moon, even if these sectors are technologically stagnant,” he said.
What’s more, very little is being done to address this problem, he wrote: “We’re going into a world where a flat screen TV covering your entire wall costs $100, and a four-year college degree costs $1 million, and nobody has anything. it even resembles a proposal on how to fix this systematically.
Over time, he added, the price of regulated, non-technological products rose, while the price of less-regulated, technology-driven products fell.
“Who eats the economy? The regulated sector continues to grow as a percentage of GDP; the less regulated sector shrinks,” he wrote. “At the limit, 99% of the economy will be organized, the non-technological sector, which is exactly where we are headed.”
Andreessen has made similar arguments before, though this weekend he used them in a different way. In 2017, speaking at the Code Conference, he divided the economy into a fast sector and a slow sector. The former is being “eaten” by the software, as he famously put it in a The Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2011, and become more efficient, with lower prices.
But in the slow-moving sectors—elderly care, child care, health care, education, construction, and government—prices are rising fast and there’s almost no productivity growth as measured by economists. “Left unchecked, the sector will just eat the economy,” he said.
In a post this weekend, Andreessen used his argument to debunk the “panic” about artificial intelligence jobs, and the idea that AI is different from past technologies that are considered to threaten jobs.
“AI cannot cause overall unemployment to rise, even if the Luddite argument is correct at this point,” he wrote. “AI is already illegal in most economies, it will be in almost all economies.”
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