Are you worried that AI will take your job? Not Marc Andreessen.
The venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz says the biggest fear around artificial intelligence – that it will destroy jobs – is focused on the wrong problem.
The real danger, he said, is where the global economy is headed without AI.
“Without AI, we would be panicking right now about what’s going to happen to the economy,” Andreessen said on Thursday’s episode of Lenny’s Podcast.
He added that without major technological advances, the world will face a “depopulation future” in which economies stagnate or even shrink due to a shrinking workforce and slowing productivity growth.
Research shows that productivity growth in developed countries has been unusually weak by historical standards for the past two decades or so, and has slowed further since the 2008 global financial crisis, despite rapid advances in digital technology.
At the same time, fertility rates in the United States, Europe, China, and much of the developed world remain below the replacement level of about 2.1 children per woman, the standard needed to stabilize the population.
“Without new technology, a shrinking population will only mean a shrinking economy,” Andreessen said.
AI to solve workforce decline
Andreessen’s assessment echoes the warnings of some demographers and tech leaders like Elon Musk, who have repeatedly warned of the economic risks of population decline, a threat that the United States and Europe are trying to head off by pursuing prenatal policies.
In Andreessen’s view, AI is coming at just the right time to solve a shrinking workforce.
Rather than laying off workers en masse, he said it would help fill the gap in available talent to do the work.
“The only reason we’re not worried about it is because we now know there are technologies that can compensate for the lack of population growth,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean the work won’t change. Andreessen is clear that AI will restructure jobs at the task level and automate some roles across engineering, design, and product management.
But he rejected the idea that permanent unemployment would become widespread. This prediction was made to varying degrees by several senior AI researchers, including Jeffrey Hinton, often referred to as the “godfather of AI,” computer science professor Roman Yampolsky, and University of California, Berkeley professor Stuart Russell.
Mr. Andreessen’s argument for AI turnaround
He said even a dramatic increase in productivity would only return the economy to the levels of job losses seen during the earlier industrial boom, a period widely remembered as a time of opportunity rather than bust.
In fact, Andreessen predicts that the value of human labor will increase in many countries as populations decline and immigration declines.
“The remaining human workers will be working at a premium, not a discount,” he said.
In a more extreme scenario in which AI greatly increases productivity, Andreessen predicts, the overall price of goods and services will fall, and living standards will rise substantially, even if some jobs are eliminated.
“This is the equivalent of giving everyone a huge raise,” he says.
His conclusion is straightforward: AI does not threaten the future of the economy. It will prevent a much darker situation.
