Here’s a Jan 25th 2025 quote on X/Twitter (which his firm helped Musk buy) from Marc Anderessen, head of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz/a16z.
“A world in which human wages crash from AI – logically, necessarily – is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero. Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.”
This is the world Big Tech is building for us. Given their hold over the current US administration, barring a political revolution - there’s not much to stop them for the next 4 years.
If their power to create that world via AI & robotics is seemingly unstoppable, what about a counter-intuitive idea? Engage them on it seriously. At the very least the transition to this world might need the kind of emergency economic supports the Covid era had.
It seems strange Big Tech is so open about what it intends to do, yet we are still not taking it seriously, despite them saying it all out loud.
The odd thing I find in statements like this from the likes of Marc Anderessen, is that if prices tend towards zero that means ALL prices. Stocks, property, 401K portfolios.
I’m sure if challenged on that, he would say he doesn’t support any such thing, but the economic logic seems inescapable.
Zero / zero is mathematically undefined. Zero price with zero wages is undefined and it creates instability.
Such dead ends shows that these questions should be adressed in other ways.
P.S. : in my previous comment, to avoid this uncertainty, i look at the relative value of human work versus energy value.
I should have been more accurate. What I meant was the economics term - zero marginal cost.
There’s an excellent book by Jeremy Rifkin speculating on what an AI/robotics automation zero marginal cost society might be like.
The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism