Why AI Will Save the World – Marc Andreessen

“The most validated core conclusion of social science across many decades and thousands of studies is that human intelligence makes a very broad range of life outcomes better. Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity: academic achievement, job performance, occupational status, income, creativity, physical health, longevity, learning new skills, managing complex tasks, leadership, entrepreneurial success, conflict resolution, reading comprehension, financial decision making, understanding others’ perspectives, creative arts, parenting outcomes, and life satisfaction.

Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years.

What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.”

It’s becoming a bit of a game to count the times a speaker/vendor says or writes “AI”. Marc Andreessen, creator of the first web browser, who has written similar thought pieces such as “Why Software Is Eating the World” has penned another great piece (yes it’s long but worth the read) that I think will give context to all the jargonism (and fear) about AI.

Steve Jobs once said a computer is a “bicycle for the mind”. Well, I think we all just traded our bicycles for a jet pack.