The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Thu, 16 Jan 2025
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with entrepreneur and software pioneer, Marc Andreessen. They discuss the timeline of the woke institutional takeover, the ruinous effects it has had on Western ideology and business, the ways in which AI will shape society, and the immense responsibility we have to instill the future with an ethos and morality that serves human flourishing. Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov, Samsara, Simple Things, and TipTop Labs. He is also on the board of Meta. This episode was filmed on December 18th, 2024. | Links | For Marc Andreessen: On X https://x.com/pmarca?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Substack https://pmarca.substack.com/ “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (Book) https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
This movement, you know, that we now call wokeness, it hijacked what I would, you know, call sort of at the time, you know, bog standard progressivism. But, you know, it turned out what we were dealing with was something that was far more aggressive. You're pouring cultural acid on your company and the entire thing is devolving into complete chaos.
Chapter 2: How did wokeness affect the tech industry?
It's also, I think, the case that the new communication technologies have also enabled reputation savages in a way that we haven't seen before.
The single biggest fight is going to be over what are the values of the AIs. That fight, I think, is going to be a million times bigger and more intense and more important than the social media censorship fight. As you know, out of the gate, this is going very poorly.
Stop there for just a sec, because we should delve into that. That's a terrible thing. Hello, everybody. So I had the opportunity to talk to Mark Andreasson today, and Mark has been quite visible on the podcast circuit as of late.
And part of the reason for that is that he's part of a swing within the tech community back towards the center and even more particularly under the current conditions toward the novel and emerging technology players in the Trump administration. Now, Mark is a key tech... visionary. He developed Mosaic and Netscape and they really laid the groundwork for the web as we know it.
And Mark has been a investor in Silicon Valley circles for 20 years and is as plugged into the tech scene as anyone in the world. And the fact that he's decided to speak publicly, for example, about such issues as government, tech,
collusion, and that he's turned his attention away from the Democrats, which is the traditional party, let's say, of the tech visionaries, and they're all characterized by the high openness that tends to make people liberal. The fact that Mark has pivoted is, what would you say, it's an important it may be as important an event as Musk aligning with Trump.
And so I wanted to talk to Mark about his vision of the future. He laid out a manifesto a while back called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which bears some clear resemblance to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Policy Platform, that's ARC. which is an enterprise that I'm deeply involved in.
And so I wanted to talk to him about the overlap between our visions of the future and about the twist and turns of the tech world in relationship to their political allegiance and the transformations there that have occurred, and also about...
The problem of AI alignment, so to speak, how do we make sure that these hyper-intelligent systems that the techno-utopians are creating don't turn into cataclysmic, apocalyptic, totalitarian monsters? How do we align them with proper human beings? interests and what are those proper human interests and how is that determined? And so we talk about all that and a whole lot more.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of AI alignment?
And so join us as we have the opportunity and privilege to speak with Mark Andreessen. So, Mark, I thought I would talk to you today about an overlap in two of our projects, let's say, and we could investigate that. There should be all sorts of ideas that spring off that.
So I was reviewing your techno-optimist manifesto, and I have some questions about that and some concerns, and I wanted to contrast that and compare it with our ARC project in the UK, because I think we're pulling in the same direction. And I'm curious about why that is and what that might mean practically. And I also thought that would give us a springboard
off which we could leap in relationship to, well, to the ideas you're developing. So there's a lot of that manifesto that, for whatever it's worth, I agreed with, and I don't regard that as particularly, what would you say, important in and of itself. But I did find the overlap between what you had been
and the ideas that we've been working on for this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in the UK, quite striking. And so I'd like to highlight some similarities, and then I'd like to push you a bit on some of the issues that I think might need further clarification. That's probably the right way to think about it. So for this art group, we set up as...
what would you say, a visionary alternative to the Malthusian doomsaying of the climate hysterics and the centralized planners. Because that's just going nowhere. You can see what's happening to Europe. You see what's happening to the UK. Energy prices in the UK are five times as high as they are in the United States. That's obviously not sustainable. The same thing is the case in Germany.
Plus, not only are they expensive, they're also unreliable, which is a very bad combination. You add to that the fact, too, that Germany's become increasingly dependent on markets like they're served by totalitarian dictatorships, essentially. And that also seems like a bad plan. So one of our platforms is that
We should be working locally, nationally, and internationally to do everything possible to drive down the cost of energy and to make it as reliable as possible. Predicated on the idea that there's really no difference between energy and work. And if you make energy inexpensive, then poor people don't die. And so...
Because any increase in energy costs immediately demolishes the poorest subset of the population. And that's self-evident as far as I'm concerned. And so that's certainly an overlap with the ethos that you put forward in your manifesto.
You predicated your work on a vision of abundance and pointed to, I noticed you, for example, you quoted Marion Tupe, who works with human progress and has outlined quite nicely the manner in which over the last 30 years, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall, People have been thriving on the economic front, globally speaking, like never before.
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Chapter 4: How do values shape AI technology?
It's a problem of aligning the humans, right? It's a problem of aligning the humans and how we're going to use the AI, right? Precisely to your point. Yes, right. Right. And that is one of the very big questions. There's another book I'd really recommend on this, directly to your point. It's got Peter Huber wrote this book called Orwell's Revenge.
And famously in 1984, as you mentioned, there's this concept of the telescreen, which is basically the one-way propaganda broadcast device that goes into everybody's house from the government. top-down and then has cameras in it so the government can observe everything that the citizens do. That is what happens in these totalitarian societies. They implement systems like that.
In the book, Our World's Revenge, he does this thing where he tweaks the telescreen and he makes it two-way instead of one-way. Um, and so he gives, so, you know, the revolutionaries give it the, the, the sort of resistance force to the totalitarian government, give it the ability to, uh, let people upload as well as download. Um, and so all of a sudden people can actually express themselves.
They can express their views. They can organize. And of course, then based, based on that, they can then use that technology to basically rise up against the totalitarian government and, and, and achieve a better, uh, a better society. Um,
Look, as you mentioned earlier, the ability to do universal two-way communication also lets you create the sort of mob effect that we were talking about and this sort of kind of personal destruction engine. And so there's two sides to that also.
But it is the case that you can squint at a lot of this technology one way and see it as an instrument of totalitarian oppression, and you can squint at it another way and see it as an instrument of individual liberation.
I think, for sure, there are a lot of, you know, how you design the technology matters a lot, but I at least believe the big picture questions are all the human questions and the social political questions, and they need to be confronted directly as such. And we need to confront them directly for that reason. So, these are human questions, ultimately, not technological questions.
Okay, so that's very interesting because that's exactly what we concluded at ARC. So one of the streams that we've been developing is the better story stream because it's predicated on the idea, which I think you're alluding to now, that the technological enterprise has to be nested inside a set of propositions that aren't in themselves part and parcel of the technological enterprise.
And then the question is, what are they? So let me outline for a minute or two some of the thoughts I've had in that matter, because I think there's something crucial here that's also relevant to the problem of alignment. So like you said that the problem with regard to AI might be the problem that human beings have is that we're not aligned, so to speak. And so why would we expect the AIs to be?
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Chapter 5: Why is there a concern about AI being 'woke'?
So all the people that Elon cut out of the trust and safety group at Twitter when he bought it, many of them have migrated into these trust and safety groups at these AI companies, and they're now setting these policies and doing this training.
So the terrifying thing here is that we're going to produce... hyper-powerful avatars of our own flaws. Right, and so if you're training one of these systems, and you have a variety of domains of personal pathology, you're going to amplify that substantively.
You're going to make these giants, like I joke with my friend Jonathan Paggio, who's a very reliable source in such matters, that we're going to see giants walk the earth again. I mean, that's already happening, and that's what these AI systems are. And if they're trained by people who
well, let's say, are full of unexamined biases and prejudices and deep resentments, which is something that you talk about in your manifesto, resentment and arrogance being like key sins, so to speak, we're going to produce monstrous machines that have exactly those characteristics, and that is not going to be good.
And you're absolutely right to point to this, as you know, to point to this as perhaps the serious problem of our times. If we're going to generate augmented intelligence, we better not generate augmented pathological intelligence.
And if we're not very careful, we are certainly going to do that, not least because there's way more ways that a system can go wrong than there are ways that it can, you know, aim upward in a...
unerring direction and so okay so why is it these people who were this is so awful i didn't know that that were say part of this safety and trust issue at twitter who are now training the bloody ais how did that horrible situation come to be
It's the same dynamic. The big AI companies have the exact same dynamic as the big social media companies, which have the exact same dynamic as the big universities, which have the exact same dynamic as the big media companies. You have these either formal or de facto cartels. You have a small handful of companies at the commanding heights of society that hire all the smart graduates.
Take a step back. You don't see ideological competition between Harvard and Yale, right? You would think that you should because they should compete in the marketplace of ideas. And of course, in practice, you don't see that at all. You see no ideological competition between The New York Times and The Washington Post.
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Chapter 6: What role does government play in AI development?
We very specifically want government to not protect these companies, to not put them behind a regulatory wall, to not be able to control them in the way that the social media companies got control before Elon. We actually want like full competition. And if you want your woke AI, you can have it, but there are many other choices.
Well, can you imagine developing a super intelligence that's shielded from evolutionary pressure? Like that is absolutely insane. That's absolutely insane. I mean, we know that the only way that a complex system can regulate itself across time is through something like evolutionary competition. That's it. That's the mechanism.
And so if you decide, what, that this AI is correct by fiat, and then you shield it from any possibility of market feedback or environmental feedback, well, that is literally the definition of how to make something insane.
And so now you talked about in some of your recent podcasts, you talked about the fact that the Biden administration in particular, if I got this right, was conspiring behind the scenes with the tech companies to cordon off the AI systems and make them monolithic. And so can you elaborate a little bit more on that?
Yeah, so this is this whole dispute that's playing out. And, you know, this gets complicated, but I'll try to provide a high level view. So this is a whole dispute about so-called AI safety. Right, and so there's this whole kind of, you might call it concern or even panic about like, are the AIs gonna run under control? Are they gonna kill us all?
By the way, are they gonna say, are they gonna be racist? All these different concerns over all the different ways in which these things can go wrong. There's this attempt to impose the precautionary principle on these AIs where you have to prove that they're harmless before they're allowed to be released, which inherently gets into these political questions.
And so anyway, the AI safety movement conjoins a lot of these questions into kind of this overall kind of elevated level of concern. And then basically what has been happening is the major AI labs, basically they know what the deal is. They watch what happened in social media. They watch what happened to the companies that got out of line. They watch the pressures that came to bear.
They watch what the government did to the social media companies. They watch the censorship regime that was put in place, which was very much a political, you know, top-down censorship regime. And basically they went to Washington over the course of the last several years and they essentially proposed a trade. And the trade was, we will do what you want politically.
We will come under your control voluntarily from a political standpoint, the same way the social media companies had. And in return for that, we essentially want a cartel. We want a regulatory structure set up such that a small handful of big companies will be able to succeed in effect forever. And then new entrants will not be allowed to compete.
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Chapter 7: How should we address the ethics of AI?
You said that something changed quite radically in 2017. I'd like you to delve a little bit more into the breakdown of this deal. Like your claim there was that for a good while, center-left positions politically, let's say, and philosophically were compatible with the tech revolution and with the big business side of the tech revolution.
But you pointed to a transformation across time that really became... unmistakable by 2017. Why 2017 as a year and what is it that you think changed? You painted a broad scale picture of this transformation and also pointed to the fact that It was no longer possible to be an economic capitalist, to be a free market guy, and to proclaim allegiance to the progressive ideals. That became impossible.
And in 2017, what do you think happened? How do you understand that?
Yeah, so different people, of course, have different perspectives on this, but I'll tell you what I experienced. And I think in retrospect what happened is Silicon Valley experienced this before a lot of other places in the country and before a lot of other fields of business.
And so I have many friends in other areas of business who live and work in other places where I would describe to them what was happening in 2012 or 2014 or 2016, and they would look at me like I'm crazy, and I'm like, no. I'm describing what's actually happening on the ground here.
And then, you know, three years later, they would tell me, oh, it's also happening in Hollywood, or it's also happening in finance, or it's also happening in, you know, these other industries. So, in retrospect, I think I had a front row seat to this just because Silicon Valley was, you know, I've been using the term first in. Silicon Valley was first in.
Like, Silicon Valley was the industry that went the hardest. for this transformation upfront. And so what we experienced at Silicon Valley, and then the nature of my work, over this entire time period, I've been a venture capitalist and an investor.
And so the nature of my work is I've been exposed to a large number of companies all at the same time, some very small, and then by the way, also some very large. So for example, I've been on the Facebook board of directors this entire arc, right? And a lot of what I'm describing, you can actually see through just the history of just the one company, Facebook, which we can talk about.
But anyway, so I think I basically saw the Vanguard movement up close. And, you know, essentially what I saw was it was really 2012. It was the beginning of the second Obama term. And it was sort of the aftermath of the global financial crisis. And so it was some combination of those two things. The global financial crisis hits in 2008. Occupy Wall Street takes off, but it's this fringe thing.
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Chapter 8: What visions for the future do we need?
Absolutely. Men will use it. They typically don't in the real world. But if the pathway is laid open to it, On social media, let's say. And there's a particular kind of man who's more likely to do that too. Those are the dark tetrad types who are narcissistic and psychopathic and Machiavellian and sadistic. Lovely combination of personality traits. And they're definitely enabled online. So...
Yeah, so we've had plenty of them as well. Yeah, so the government pressure side. So when this all hit, like I said, nobody I knew understood what was happening. I didn't understand it. And so I did what I do in circumstances like that. And I basically just tried to work my way backwards through history and figure out where this stuff came from.
And I think for pressure on corporations, the context for this is that corporations are – There's this cliche that you'll hear actually interesting from the left, which is, well, private companies can do whatever they want. They can censor whoever they want. Private companies have total latitude to do whatever they want. And of course, that's totally untrue.
Private companies are extensively regulated by the government. Private companies have been regulated by a civil rights regime imposed by the government for the last 60 years. That civil rights regime certainly has done many good things in terms of opening up opportunities for different minority groups and so forth to participate in business. But
You know, that civil rights regime put in place this standard called disparate impact in which you can evaluate whether a company is racist or not on the basis of just raw numbers without having to prove that they intended to be, right? In terms of like who they select for their employees.
And so companies, you know, predating the arrival of what we call woke, they already had legal and regulatory and political and compliance requirements put on them to achieve things like racial diversity, gender diversity, and so forth. And I grew up in that environment. I considered that totally normal for a very long time.
I just figured that's how things worked, and that was the positive payoff from the civil rights movement and from the 1960s, and that was just the state of play. And by the way, it was, I think, manageable and good in some ways, and kind of on and away we went. We could deal with it. But basically what happened was— When woke arrived, that regime was enormously intensified.
And what happened was a sequence of events, and literally there was a playbook where, for example, per DEI, there was a sequence of events where activists and employees and board members would push you. First of all, you had to start doing explicit minority statistical reporting.
So you had to fully air in public any disparate impact, any differences in racial, gender, ethnic, sexual differences relative to the overall population in a statistical report you had to update every year. And of course, they would tell you, as long as you issue this report, you're fine. Well, of course, that wasn't the case.
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