The other evening, I listened to one of the few intelligent & public-spirited billionaires1 America can boast, Marc Andreessen, talk on Twitter about his new public commitment to AI, both in order to overcome the “moral panic” threatening now to destroy the reputation of AI & in order to encourage ambitious young men to get involved in AI development. Andreessen was talking about an essay, or rather an AI manifesto he has written, about technology delivering the chosen people into the promised land—I’ll write about that humanitarian dream tomorrow—finally, I’ll write about the ancient teaching about Prometheus, a subject Andreessen takes up, but barely.
The rhetoric of “moral panic” is somehow connected to the awareness of political danger, without any political knowledge, either in the narrow sense of figuring out the actors & events in the particular situation, or in the general sense of understanding the character of the regime & of its elites. “Moral panic” is almost the same thing as “religious hysteria,” a more truthful & honest term of the political art, but with certain subtle differences. Religion was previously understood to be a permanent fact of human nature; this is no longer the case. Hysteria, too, was understood to be a permanent possibility, on the assumption that madness is inextirpable & that chance events or important failures can excite it. You cannot control people… Moral panics, however, can be conquered, they are removable obstacles in the path of or to Progress. Quoth Andreessen: “A moral panic is by its very nature irrational,” but, happily “we can apply rationality instead.” Such rhetorical choices make you wonder whether Andreessen knows what world he’s living in—but it would be better to wonder instead about his audience of enthusiastic rationalists. An author, in a sense, cannot be better than his audience, or he will not have an audience. Techies have been panicking lately about the open hatred they excite in the media, about political regulation of AI (& the previous enthusiasm in tech, bitcoin & the blockchain tech), &, more generally, their “deal” with the liberal wing of the Democratic party falling apart. Their worries, of course, could not be called a moral panic, because they share this much in common with the rest of mankind—they lack self-awareness. Andreessen knows this, so he makes a noble effort to appeal to their prejudices in order to help them rise to the occasion & rise above the twin temptations of despair & bitterness.
Andreessen is an apostle of technological enlightenment, his gospel is the salvation offered by intelligence. We don’t starve anymore, we aren’t victims of a pitiless world, because of the use of our intelligence. It’s what stands between us & a cruel fate. The more useful uses of intelligence are distinguished by one of two features, that they are very reliable or that they are astonishingly out of proportion to the ordinary ability. The reliable uses of intelligence are habits or institutions or tools. One could interpret the history of political thought as the movement from habits to tools, which along the way involved the abandonment of concern for virtue or soul altogether. The astonishing uses of intelligence come from those achievements which are as apt to disturb to our reflection & as to relieve our present fears, worries, anxieties.—Our submission to doctors is not as important a sign of their power over us as our endless litigiousness, our only recourse, given that they are knowledgeable & we are ignorant.—But everything astonishing is unreliable & intelligence is especially a political problem, since it separates a few people of superior ability from most, who can neither compare nor, in a commercial regime powered by technology, ignore the shocking inequalities of human intellect.
This is why we have moral & institutional bans on research into the genetic aspect of intelligence. This is why our elites do not talk about the eugenics they practice in their choices of mates & the eugenic therapy they practice on their children through schooling & any number of charms, incantations, & magical pills. It’s why our elites don’t mix with the poor & have also turned atheist. It’s why our public schools achieve nothing worth mentioning in terms of intelligence. It’s also why we now have a Progressive movement to destroy intellectual meritocracy in entrance & graduation exams in educational institutions in the name of racial equity. Like many libertarians, Andreessen enjoys the somewhat fantastic rhetoric of “Baptists & bootleggers,” which is more honestly, if in uglier terms, rendered grifters & the establishment. In terms of education, abolishing examination standards flatters the mob, & profits the grifters, but also helps the rich profit by buying their kids’ way into the next generation of the elite without having to compete so much. The suckers in such scams are the middle classes—the workhorse of all modern political development.
AI could solve a lot of the political problem of intelligence in America, largely by dissolving the bonds that hold together the many institutional & habitual enemies of intelligent individuals. Disruption is good for people who feel shackled by mediocrity; though you could wonder whether boredom is a sufficient justification for the dissolution of society. This is the tech story in our times, largely untold for reasons of political correctness & caution: Libertarianism was the major beneficiary of feminism. Now, however, techies are as despised as they were glamorized when Obama first became president & promised to reconcile science & activism, the techies & the media, wealthy & poor…
The more depressive types in tech, like Balaji, are talking all the time about the need of the intelligent & daring to secede from society & found for themselves an utopia. It is universally true that only depressive types know anything abut politics: Peter Thiel sounds like a scholar of political philosophy & occasionally writes learned, subtle essays—Elon Musk sounds like a teenager hopped up on memes. But depressives obviously aren’t going to achieve much in their lifetimes & threaten to give intelligence a bad reputation.
Andreessen seems to wish to combine Musk’s enthusiasm with Thiel’s broad perspective, while substituting the need for the latter’s education & the former’s unique ability. Syntheses, we know, effect miracles. AI is tasked to perform such a miracle, to both allow the prospering & supplant the need for the talent of a dude who’s one in a million by distributing work until it solves the crisis of our dissolved society & the nostalgic, backward capitalism which can no longer connect money & problem-solvers & problems & consumers. Andreessen seems a true believer in the modern theory of cause, often expressed as some variation of form follows function.
This is something that should astonish intelligent people, how few of the people too wealthy for dreams have any practical wisdom or any care for their underlying position; & everyone should worry that the creatures of our way of life who most succeed don’t seem particularly grateful for that success.