Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Andreessen envisions AI as augmenting human intelligence.
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Every person will have an angel on their shoulder that will accelerate productivity and lead to greater wealth and prosperity. AI will help us develop amazing technology, provide scientific insights, and better understand ourselves. This, Andreessen argues, will spark a new golden age, as AI-augmented creators will work faster, harder, and better. At the same time, AI will improve our ability to wage war. No more collateral damage, as AI will reduce death rates by allowing for greater strategic and tactical decisions that minimize “risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed.”
✏️ All of this is steeped in capitalist motivations. Productivity, products, working harder and faster and better. More streamlined war? Yikes. 🔗 View Highlight
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The private sector should lead the way on AI, deploying it to solve as many problems as possible as fast as possible—free from the shackles of government restrictions. Any regulation the US does pursue should be to limit China’s capacity to develop AI, not our own.
✏️ More capitalist rhetoric. We must pursue AI with all the money and no government regulations or restrictions (but naturally any and all money government will give us). Stop the bad guys though, government. Please take care of them for us. 🔗 View Highlight
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Like China, the United States uses AI for authoritarian ends at home and abroad. Surveillance and social control structure much of the digital technology we create. Global efforts to replicate our technological development have helped preserve the very regimes Andreessen claims must be opposed. From authoritarianism in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states of the Persian Gulf to apartheid in Israel to China’s totalitarianism, Silicon Valley tends to look the other way if money is to be made. Andreessen’s investment firm is openly courting Saudi Arabia for financing. So much for the rallying cry to stop authoritarian tech proliferation.
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John Ganz, an essayist who focuses on right-wing politics, writes in a recent SubStack post that the roots of Silicon Valley’s contemporary reactionary thought offer some insight: “what typified the thought of the Conservative Revolutionaries and a set of right-wing engineers in Weimar and then the ideologists of the Third Reich was not a rejection of modernity so much as the search for an alternative modernity: a vision of high technics and industrial productivity without liberalism, democracy, and egalitarianism.”
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This desire for authoritarianism is combined with eugenics and a crusade against negative aspects of capitalism. Ganz specifically looks at the rise of anti-Semitism among tech capitalists, for whom “the Jew could stand for the parasitic, financialized, and abstract side of capital”—the innovator versus the banker, the engineer versus the merchant, Thiel and Musk versus Soros. Race science, social control, and revitalization of some aspects of capitalism have long been integral to Silicon Valley’s ever-evolving ideologies, just as they have been for other reactionary formations.
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our technological development is largely organized for immoral ends serving people with abhorrent visions for society.
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A world where our technological prowess is finely tuned to advance the exploitation, repression, segregation, and even extermination of people in service of some strict hierarchy
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The question isn’t whether AI will destroy or save the world. It’s whether we want to live in the world its greatest shills will create if given the chance.