Marc Andreessen Says One Job Is Largely Protected From AI: Enterprise Capitalist

Egg-headed enterprise capitalist Marc Andreessen is an optimist with regards to synthetic intelligence. The explanations for this are well-known: by means of 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 came upon one more reason that Andreessen doesn’t have any worries concerning the know-how: he doesn’t suppose AI might ever presumably exchange him.

Throughout a latest a16z podcast appearance, Andreessen predicted that enterprise capital (you realize, his job) is perhaps one of many final remaining vocations after AI has changed giant swaths of the human labor drive.

“Each nice enterprise capitalist within the final 70 years has missed a lot of the nice firms of his technology,” Andreessen mentioned throughout the podcast. “So, the nice VCs have a hit file of getting, you realize, two out of 10 or one thing of the nice firms 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 individuals?’ ‘How do they react beneath stress?’ ‘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 already know, you find yourself being a psychologist half the time.”

“So, it’s doable—I don’t wish to be definitive—nevertheless it’s doable that that’s fairly actually timeless. And when, you realize, when the AI is doing the whole lot else, that could be one of many final remaining fields that individuals are nonetheless doing.”

It’s simply humorous to listen to Andreessen repeat the oft-heard chorus that “know-how is superior and the whole lot, however there’s simply no method it might ever do what I do.” That is what individuals have been telling themselves since endlessly, and it’s often proper earlier than they lose their job to regardless of the present type of automation is. Certainly, a robust future AI of the kind that Marc and his cohort typically talk about might, when fed with ample quantities of psychiatric knowledge, swiftly surpass a human VC’s powers of psychological divination, and make knowledgeable choices about how you can handle enterprise leaders. Isn’t this precisely the type of factor that individuals like Andreessen have lengthy been telling all people 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. In the event you’re considered one of Silicon Valley’s Masters of the Universe, I assume having bizarre, self-serving views simply comes with the territory.