Why You Should Be Optimistic About the Future

it feels like the Internet's impact on culture is just beginning in the sense of like a world in which culture is based on the Internet which is what I think is happening it's just at the very start right because it had to get universal before it could set the culture but that's actually happening [Music] good afternoon thank you mark for answering some questions I have a bunch of questions which I hope that we can talk about and these all have to do about the future where we're going I want to start with a question about the past you know a generation ago a lot of smart people didn't think the internet was going to work and therefore they were unprepared for its benefits what are we smart people and today not prepared for yeah so you may remember actually generate it wasn't even a lot of was even just that a lot of people thought that the internet was gonna work a lot of smart people didn't think that in fact the inventor I can't resist I can't resist on the story they actually the inventor of Ethernet which is a foundational trait of the Internet spent the 90s actually predicting the internet would crash would collapse and what he called it would be the giggle apps would take down the internet by like 1986 1987 he wrote a column at the time for a magazine called info world and he said that if he was wrong by a the internet hadn't collapsed by 1997 he would eat his column and to his enormous credit in 1988 he actually went on stage of the conference he actually took ripped his column out of the magazine he put it in a blender with water he blended it up and he drank it on stage so it's one of the one of the one of the more shining examples of intellectual honesty I've never seen as it turns out he was wrong it turns out the internet did work so I think the big thing I've been thinking about this a lot you know if it feels to a lot of people like things are getting strange there maybe I'm the only one who feels that way but if you read the news they're just track things up in the world as things feel things feel kind of weird and different over the last few years I actually think there's like there is an actual generational thing that's happening and you alluded to the generational component like it did take 25 years to get everybody online and like we're not quite there yet but we're getting very close mm-hmm like I think the most exciting thing happen in the world right now is Mukesh Ambani is the richest man in India has this program called geo where he is literally providing internet access to the 500 million lowest income Indians like from screw it's like but like literally it's like free for six months and then it's like $1 a month it's like the most amazing thing and it's like it's working incredibly well and so we are very very close to every every at least every adult in the planet being internet connected but it took 25 years to get there and so so that so for me it's like okay so so then what and one interpretation of that is okay we're done we did it the other interpretation of that is actually okay that's just the beginning point right right and it's like the beginning point of what right and I think it's beginning point of like okay like what if you actually interconnected everybody on the planet like what you know there's like the metaphor of the global the global mind the global mind with a global brain like what if you actually connected everybody together and let everybody find out what everybody else was thinking it's one of those things that people think sounds good then they encounter it face to face and they're like I don't know right that was like during my time that wired people were kind of concerned about the digital divide and I said the digital divide is going to cure itself the thing you should be worried about is what happens when everybody is online so you think they were not prepared for what will happen when everybody is online no well I think I think we're not we're not prepared and then I think it's going to be very exciting I mean I think we're already seeing that in many ways I think that there's and then I think we've kind of figured out collectively that it's gonna be different and so the initial impulse to sit-ins to say things are gonna get much worse I don't think that's right I think it's things are gonna get very different I think these will be yep much more positive and we'll talk a lot about that today hopefully but things are definitely going to be different um I think one lens that I've been trying to put on lately is kind of think about through a cultural lens sort of what happens to culture because culture you know Ben Ben just you know wrote this book about culture being kind of the foundation of behavior and I think that's really true certainly in companies but I think it's also true in countries and globally and it feels like the Internet's impact on culture is just beginning in the sense of like a world in which culture is based on the Internet which is what I think is happening is just at the very start right because it had to get universal before it could set the culture but that's actually happening now okay at the same time a generation ago well there was a few people who actually did think the internet was going to work but they were also like myself expecting VR and conversational AI to happen tomorrow so what are we expecting to happen now that it's not going to happen yep so I object to the question so this is one of those things in our business that you deal with a lot which is you know you find yourself you know these the Antron errs come in and they pitch an idea and you kind of feel like you should draw a judgment or whether the idea is going to work or not if it's something I'm really leery of doing anymore and the reason for that and think you know this from all if you're reading every successful technology that I'm aware of you know the things that are like all of a sudden like the next big thing like the iPhone a 2007 or just as an example they all have this like incredible 25 or 40 or 50 year backstory to them that you sometimes have to go back and excavate right because you haven't heard a lot of the back story because the previous efforts failed right but if you go back and look like there's often this often a multi-generational run-up and sawdust give you a few my favorite examples so iPhone you know hit big in 2007 I bi out four years went around say well iBM is there was a 20-year project IBM shipped the first smartphone in 1997 called the Simon I thought that was true it actually turns out it's not true I found the other day RadioShack had a smartphone in 1982 with their Tia they literally have a phone version of their trs-80 mini computer they sold about four of them but it was a thing right so that that had a 25-year fuse on it video conferencing you know video conferencing goes back at least to the mid 60's to the World's Fair yep the telegraph was invented in the 1870s and then sat on a shelf for a hundred years before the Japanese turned it into an industry and then my favorite is fiber optics nominal your you can't stretch you could say fiber optics were invented in 1840s Paris had a optical Telegraph network under under the city you could actually do you could actually under out you get flogged Rafi in the 1840s and in Paris it was literally they were shining flashes of light through glass tubes so there's this like this incredibly rich backstory to all these things and so as a consequence it's actually less a question of like what's the new idea it turns out the idea is probably already out there someone right okay and then it's less the question of like is it going to work it's more the question of like when is it going to right and I pushed it so far people in our office have heard this I push the push all the way to the point where I just think we should assume that whatever we're being pitched is going to work it's just a question of timing and of course timing turns out to be the hard part but right at least focuses the conversation right right so it's the same idea of kind of looking at the history of things one wonders who really made all the money when electricity came along it probably wasn't the people necessarily generating electricity who do you think is going to make the money when a eye comes along who is is it the yeah I providers is that the AI a service is that the out we're the writers who's gonna be making money in AI yeah so we think that there's two obvious business models and probably others but the true obvious one is to be a sort of a horizontal platform provider and for social provider you know for AI kind of analogous to the operating system or the database or the cloud you know the other opportunities kind of in a in the verticals and so the applications of AI and there's certainly a lot of those so that's the general answer I think that the deeper answer is there's an underlying question that I think is an even bigger question about AI that that reflects directly on this which is is AI a feature or an architecture is AI feature we see this we see this with pitches we get now which is this like we get the pitch and it's like here are the five things my product does right and both points one two three four five and then oh yeah number six is AI right and so you guys it's always number six right because it's the bullet that was added after they created the rest of the deck and so it's like okay if AI is a feature then that's actually correct which is like ever every basically everything is just gonna kind of have a I sprinkled on it a I features kind of every product that's possible we are more believers in the other scenario that AI as a platform and as an architecture if in the same sense that like the mainframe was architecture or the many computers in architecture the PC the Internet the cloud type in architectures we think is very good as a eyes the next one of those and if that's the case then it means that basically when there's an architecture shift in our business that means basically everything above the architecture gets rebuilt from scratch because the fundamental assumptions about what you're building change right and so you're no longer building a website or not like you're building a mobile app you don't like a building any of those things you're building instead an AI engine that it's just like in the ideal case it's just giving you the answer to whatever the question is and if that's the case then basically all applications will change along with that all infrastructure will change basically the entire industry will turn over again the same way that it did with the internet and the same way did with mobile and cloud and so if that's the case then it's just it's going to be like an absolutely explosive here to growth rhythm for this entire industry because it means then that all the incumbents supposed incumbents really aren't incumbent at all yeah they just the products just won't be relevant more I mean I just give you example there are lots and lots of sort of you know business applications there's your business apps as an example there's lots of business apps you know were you basically you're type data into a form and then they'd stores the data and later on your run reports against the data charts and that's been the model of business software for you know 50 years and in different versions you know what if that's just not needed anymore like what if what if in the future what you'll do is you'll just give the AI in your business access to all you know email all phone calls all everything all business records all financials in the company and just let AI give you you know give you the answer to whatever the motion was and you just don't go through any of the other steps Google's a good example that's like they're pushing hard on this like the consumer version of this right as search right so search has been that you know it's been the 10 blue links you know for 25 years now you know what Google's they talk about this publicly what they're what they're pushing towards this is just like no it'd just be that answer right which is what they're trying to do with their with their voice you eyes and so that that concept might really generalize out right and then everything gets rebuilt right so so one of the new interfaces to AI that people are talking about is voice as the new interface what are we likely to get wrong about voice yeah so I think the thing that if we're gonna get right something wrong about voice I think it's gonna be that it would be a one-to-one replacement for existing user interaction models so that it would be like a replacement for keyboard there to be replacement for the mouse or for touch probably not because it's a different modality right it's it's it's not you know weird like we know exactly what they keep you know after all this time we know what to give words for we know it touches for and for voice to displace those seems like a stretch on the other hand to the previous to the previous question there has been this turning point reached it feels like in a I applied to language and from there to voice write to text into speech which is it filled it feels to us in the technology like the natural language processing methods that people been working on for again for 50 years computer scientists been working on getting computers to understand basically speech and and what we're seeing now is in the technology is that that now has started to work in the same way that machine vision started to work about seven years ago and so if that's the case then all of a sudden the conversational UIs are about to get much better again you and then you couple that with okay what are you actually trying to achieve when you talk to a click when you talk to a computer are you actually trying to like you know are you trying to write a document or you're trying to read an email or you're trying to like do all these other things you do today or are you fundamentally gonna be doing something different because the machines gonna be so much smarter and I think that's a very interesting open question when I think about the AR mirror world I find how very hard to imagine without it having a voice component where we can understand what you're saying besides what you're looking at that is an essential part of the AR world yeah I think actually I'd go so far as to say it may be the case that voice actually is the key to the air like voice may be the thing voice may actually be the foundation of the whole thing you know for this is kind of a cliche at this point but like you know the Apple earpods I think we're a fundamental breakthrough like we is there's even one of these funny things where it's like okay wireless headphones okay cool like where else headphones where there's you know there's not even a wire connecting the two things cool okay it seems like more of the same but you know that if you want the experience you can have now is like you can wear one of these things basically all day and you can you can talk to it all day and you know they're getting you know the new versions are getting better you know that and you know Siri and Google now Cortana all these things are getting really good really fast and so it may be that we have just this constant ongoing running dialogue this is kind of you know basically the machine not talking to our ear and then you know the visual the visual overlay of AR will obviously be important and valuable but it might be it might visual overlay might be supportive on top of the voice experience and we could very quickly have universal language translation if I speaking of years and I think people underestimate the change that would bring about in the world you'd have millions of people who were highly skilled and everything I stepped the skill of English now being able to participate in a global economy we were talking about unexpected unexpected things biology which is a million times as complicated as digital we're now talking about a biotech revolution are we misunderstanding what biotechnology actually is yeah so that's the big bet that we've made with our with our with our bio effort that we started a few years back we think biological sciences at a turning point at the scientific level and we think it's at a turning point from basically being a process of discovery of how biology works to being able to engineer biology right up to it including literally being able to program biology right being able to actually built it basically be able to use electrical engineering a computer science and these mechanical engineering and these kind of fields for engineering things and be able to apply those kinds of skill to biology if we're right about that then the whole concept of kind of how bio and biotech work might be on the verge of really changing the most obvious Apple application that would be in pharmaceuticals you know there's this concept of drug discovery really right and sorry is the word discovery and discovery it's always like you know discovery sounds great it's like it's optimistic it's like ooh this is something you like discovering things that's fantastic the problem is right discovering like just leave a callback is like they literally have to like run all these experiments and try to discover the drug that works like trying to kind of you know reverse engineer back from nature and and the problem is like sometimes they discover it sometimes they don't right and so even so the example we always give us we talk about with computers right we've been on this kind of a 50-year track of what's called Moore's Law right working where chips make any faster and cheaper every year for a long time in biology and drug discovery there's what they call a Rooms law which is more spelled backwards and it's the cost of discovering a new drug and it's exactly the wrong direction that's right it's something to the right you know billions of dollars now and so if you could actually engineer biology right then all of a sudden you can start to apply this like just you know these decades of skills that we built up and how to engineer things and be able to do things like engineer new pharmaceuticals from scratch and it all runs on basically ultimately Moore's Law Moore's law has been foundational to this here it's almost hard to imagine anything we have in the modern world today without Moore's Law do you think Moore's law has a another 30 years run is it limited as finite we'll go on forever will define Moore's law and a broadest sense of computers getting cheaper by half every couple of years so what's your take on Moore's law yes the traditional definition is is computer in the form of the chip like in a specifically a chip right so Moore's law has always been expressed it's kind of unit 1 of chip and that could be right that could be a CPU or it could be a graphics card or it could be a graphics chip or a memory chip and then and then specifically what you were doing was you were able to put more transistors on that chip right for the same cost and actually for a long time as you did that you're actually able to reduce the power requirement for per transistor which was this kind of added at an added benefit and so chips kind of kind of got you know simultaneously they got faster they got cheaper and they got more power efficient and that was kind of a cornucopia effect agenda as you said most of most of what you see today in the computer industry so the bad news is that that in in that form seems to be coming to something of in hand which is we have we're to get out we've hit basically we being the semiconductor industry broadly the tech industry have kind of hit the limits of fundamental physics like we're now down at the sort of deep atomic level mm-hmm and it's becoming much harder to make there's still progress because much harder to make progress at the per chip level the good news is that the industry starting 10 or 15 years ago the computer industry broadly refocused off of what you do with a chip to what you do with a large number of chips right so kind of the old model of a chip was you make the chip more powerful because you're trying to scale up what you can doing the chip the new model is you use thousands of chips in parallel and you have this kind of approach to scaling out and of course the full form of that is what's now known as the cloud and so we now have a few no 15-year had a steam going to basically be able to get good at using lots of chips to do things and that's why you see the continued ability to write to accelerate you know a lot you know many many things that you deal with they're getting you know still much faster as if they're still on the Moore's Law the experiences you're having or getting faster so we think number one like the rise of scale on architectures is a really big deal like you know in modern clouds as a developer you don't really care about what the power of any particular chip is you just like light up some more of them and they don't cost much so there's that the other thing as chips are now specializing in particularly you've got the rise of these new dedicated chips for things like neural networks where there's another level another level of opportunity optimize and then the other kicker is the programmers software people like me get to step up in the old days when computers were expensive programmers are really good at optimizing every single step of a software program programmers got out of that habit probably starting thirty years ago where it didn't matter as much anymore because Moore's law was working so well and so software today is just like massively inefficient there's actually I forget the name there something called birth flaw which is that it was written at the time if it still holds but it was somebody did benchmarks of you take Microsoft Office 2008 PC from 2000 and you take Microsoft Office 2007 on a PC from 2007 and every function you could do you could not doing twice the time right so like literally like the old the old adage in in in tech in the 90s was when Andy Grove was wanting Intel and Bill Gates or any Microsoft it was Andy Gibb Moore's law and then bill taketh away in the form of in the form of software bleh and so and worth lot literally as a mathematical proof of that and so like it's become prime time again for software programmers to get really good at optimization which is like what's happening in AI world and also in the cryptocurrency world and so with those different approaches it feels like we've got you know it feels like decades of advances ahead that aren't purely dependent on classic Moore's Law and because if we take the long term like the thinking of a hundred year span to have prosperity like we've seen we'd kind of require that computer power sort of get cheaper every year because of a dent that's hard to imagine a world like this so is your confidence that we could kind of keep this going based on just sort of human ingenuity or is your do you think that there's some basic principles of science that suggests that we're just at the beginning of what we can discover well so weird Gordon Moore who invented Moore's Law is co-founder of Intel you know we said Mars lives was interpret as a prophecy and he said it was not a prophecy it was this it was a goal right right and it was a goal basically what you could do if you focused intensely if you focus entire industry intensely on a set of engineering optimizations right over a long period of time and so he used to say it's just like there's nothing a little inevitable about it it's a consequence of thousands and then tens of thousands and then millions of engineers like working to actually deliver on these kind of sets and my arbitrary goals and so I think the I think the answer that is we have many many areas of improvement as I said the problem is we don't have the one that we have which is this transistor doubling kind of effect but we've got many men I mean looks I mean there's far more engineers working on all this stuff today that were working on it in 1965 when he invented Moore's law or in nineteen you know 95 when everybody bought a PC like we've got we have a lot of a lot of mind power going into this we've got a lot of different technological options we've got a lot of you know incredibly impressive work happening all over the world the other thing is you can't you know you never like you know some of those things like the transistor was not obvious and then they invented that and then this integrated microchip was like not obvious and then they event than that and so you don't quite know you know there are lots of technical proposals for how to get to the next level Moore's law you know there's all kinds of theories running optical computing and then in the long run biological computer computer watching computing exactly and so over the course of the next like 20 years like look for this way this is one of the world's largest prizes right if you write if you're the engineer who figures out how to reseller at Moore's Law or how to shift computing onto a new substrate like biology that is the thing to do and so that that's the prize yeah and that historically it's been pretty motivating me so taking this kind of theme of marching forward progressively we have 4G we're talking about 5g so far 5tu seems to be faster 4G with a lot of hype added to it there's a technical specification for 5g which is really awesome you know 100 gigabytes to millisecond latency almost impossible do you are you counting on that for the next decade that we're gonna have actual what they promise with 5g yes I think there's pretty good as we will and the reason is because 5g has become a national geo political battle like it's actually a very interesting twist it's become actually a primary like you know if the cold war between the US and USSR was like defined by the space race like at least the sort of nascent cold war with China is actually a lot of it is around 5g interestingly enough I mean it could have been around a lot of things but it happens that it's around 5g and so you now have nation-states that very very badly need to win and two big nation-states in particular and so I think there's going to be a lot of you know so I start with the payoff from the space race it's like all the products they got you know spun off from them satellites and GPS and everything else and the other thing on 5g you know sometimes so if I vo lead to applications say I've even thought of yet and I think that's kind of true but I look at it a little bit differently which is a little bit like the Moore's Law conversation we're having which is look a little bit as a math kind of question which is there's there's sort of three classic rules for how networks scale and how networks scaling turns into value or usefulness and there's sort of historically there's what it's called Sarnoff's law which was based on broadcast TV which is the value of a network is equivalent to the number of nodes right so it's it's it scales with n right so a TV network with 10 million viewers is twice as valuable as a TV network of 5 million viewers so that's kind of the obvious one then there was Metcalfe's law which is basically the value to network is on number of kin between two points and that's like how email works right it's emails a person a person and that's correlates to end square it's the value of the network Rises exponentially with N squared and then there's this thing called reads law which is called the group forming law which is the value of network is proportional the number of groups and subgroups that conform inside the network which turns out to be due to the ambient yeah and if you want to have fun in your plane flights know them it's like oh just go on Excel and like chart you know and N squared and 2 to the enth right and 2 to the ants just goes like straight vertical like you can't even put them on the same chart and and 2 to the N tha's like what what's not happening with like social networks right so like Facebook groups and all these all these all these other things people whatsapp groups noise every things people do with social networks and games and all these other things and so so those are like the three ways in which network growth pays off and like all three are working now based on you know broadband wire a broadband they're all working you know you see it happening very much with mobile you know the introduction of 5g the way I think about it is it's going to turbocharge those three networks in particular that last one or though you know those last two and so it's gonna add a lot more and there's just be a lot more devices on the network there gonna be a lot more things that those devices can do they're gonna be a lot more point-to-point connections that make sense to have there's going to be a lot more groups that form a lot more economic activity that happens something that was again we're expecting to happen but dint was in the world of what's sometimes called the sharing economy there was a after Airbnb and uber there was a stampede of companies that were going to be uber for X and then X was everything in the world very few of them have succeeded again there was an expectation we'd see more of them but we haven't so is that whole idea kind of at a dead end is that is it just we're in a very slow disruption this is gonna take a while like the generational requirements we were talking about technology earlier or is something else so what's what do you think happened there and what are we looking at once again I object to the question okay throw the gavel so I I look at a little bit differently which is the this is something we try it hard to do it at our place it is very tempting and we do have this conversation all the time at our place so it's like okay what about the trend what about the theme right what about the variations on the same kind of as you said and this is something happen where something wins back you always get this kind of you know we've described it as kind of a Hollywood model of you know it's like you know what you know what's your new movie about a pretty woman Meets The Rock right or you know whatever and so in the valley it's you know super fracture most recently super human 4x which I'm very excited about it's one of the one of the big new trends after another one of our companies so but I don't think it's really that that's not how the great ideas arrived they don't look like that they look like very specific they look at very specific theories not general theories so they tend to be very specific to the details of the market involved one of the things that I think we've learned about ride-sharing why ride-sharing works so well I'm it worked well for many reasons one of the reasons that were so as an idea is because as long as the driver is good as long as I rated as a certain level it doesn't really matter who the driver is so like one of the classic examples was uber for cleaning your house for your apartment and it just it turns out you just don't want a different person over every week to clean your house like it's a problem and so so there's a lot of these kinds of I would say simple you know sort of the simple applications the idea they don't necessarily work now by trying all those ideas you kind of map the idea space and you start to get a better sense of like what the overall structure is and and I think what's happening now is you're starting to see another set of companies coming out the other end that have kind of fully internalized that lesson and had figured out new models that work and so my favorite example might one of my companies called honor so honors you might think loosely might think of it as kind of a burr for senior care for for in-home care for seniors it's it's a loose my wife she turns out it's a very loose model for a couple reasons one is it's really deeply not a fungible service like if you have an aging parent you actually very much don't want somebody different to show up all the time you want you want the same person and so in that case for example honor actually is actually has full-time employment relationship salaried employment relationships with with with the workers right which of course is very different than the uber and lyft model it actually turns out the matching problem is much more complicated right because you've when you're mashing human beings in somebody's home there's like 20 variables that you need to match on so that everybody's comfortable with the experience as an example you know in some cases you literally need people with the physical strength to be able to live people when you're caring for them you do want to be able to do this kind of multi-dimensional mapping and so that and that models really working and so I think we're gonna see a whole set of these like I think there's a big kind of Vista of exploration that's gonna happen from okay and I would I would suspect there'll be dozens if not hundreds and new models that people figure out so speaking of new bottles do you ever think about new models for the VC industry itself and how you would apply the principles of innovation and disruption to what you do in general so as you look out 30 years what kinds of innovations would you expect in the basic business that you're in yeah so there's something very timeless about venture which is there's actually a new book out called literally called VC actually tells the story that has been kind of hard to get out for a long time in a really clear way which is then the modern venture model is actually one of the one of the historical precedents for it was actually how whaling expeditions got financed in the 1600s so coming up on five hundred years ago so whaling of wedges it was literally like okay you're gonna have like a ship with a captain and a crew that's gonna go out and try to like bring back a whale right and it's like a problem number one it's like only two-thirds of the ships are gonna come back right so like high failure rate to is like okay like whoo you know what the ship has really matters who the captain is really matters how do you know who could captain is and then you know what's what's a good crew and like you know the crew are they gonna be willing to follow the captain and then there's all these like strategy questions like do you want the captain who knows where all the whales have been caught recently so they go there or do you want the captain that says no that's here it's gonna be over fish you want to go someplace else and so literally all the whaling voyages like in the in the in the in the colonies 500 years ago got funny asked with basically angel syndicates basically a venture capital effectively and then literally that the term carry which is sort of how feces get paid the so called carried interest which is like the 20 or 25 percent that you make that you have the profits that you share the term carry actually was the percentage of the whale that the ship carried it was literally physical carry it was literally that part of the whale like that's where that term came from and so there's a timelessness to the art of trying to figure out how to finance these kind of expeditions and to be unknown that is you know this likely to endure the big question for me is how will the shape of the companies or they'll say the ventures themselves change right and so you know today there's like a well known understood template for kind of prototypical Silicon Valley venture investment and it's like a company in a certain place it's a c-corporation domiciled in the US it's financed a certain way and and certain types of employees a certain relationship with its employees and so forth you know 30 years from now you know or what you know are these are we gonna be financing companies here or you know anywhere or you know in two places 50 places 500 places or the company's still gonna have physical place or are they gonna be fully virtual are they gonna be companies or are they all gonna be blockchains right are they gonna be right are they gonna have actual employment relationships or are they gonna have you know basically developers incentive through cryptocurrency that's a real model and so I think the big question is like we don't even know what the shape of companies is gonna look like their ventures is gonna look like in 30 years so if I could figure that out then I could answer with venture it looks like without that I think it's hard to say okay so we were tempted to do a little bit of long-term thinking and learn long-term thinking is sort of rare and often ignored whereas civilizations demanded as being necessary so do you have any suggestions about how long-term thinking could be applied in Silicon Valley and and whether you have even any suggestions to the people in this room about how they could use long-term thinking yeah so the thing I've always found about long time having long term thing is of course Central especially one of the things about the valley that I find outsiders miss the most which is it you feel it feels like it's all moving so fast and yet like any of the important companies and the important products take like a decade or more to build and so it's like everything important basically takes a long time and so it actually a lot of it actually feels quite slow and so I have long term orientation is absolutely necessary and I think we probably all agree there's not enough of it in the world the thing about long term thinking I found is like it's really easy if you know the thing is gonna work right like a boy that's it's completely straightforward let's go on a 10-year journey to a place where we know it's gonna be great right the problem is this long-term thinking crossed with uncertainty right and quite possibly fatality like the thing they just simply not work for any of a thousand reasons and so that's the issue and so I think the issue is less around long-term thinking I think the issue is more about how to deal with risk and how to deal with uncertainty and how to make really big consequential decisions in the face of like you know literally an unknowable you know future landscape and for their I mean this is kind of kind of secret weapon adventure it's like it's like ventures the worst of all asset classes in a lot of ways and that it's like it's a liquid and it's like incredibly volatile and it's like hitting you know it's hit or miss in this kind of crazy way the one thing that venture really has going for it is an asset class is we have the concept of the portfolio kind of wired into the model in which you just kind of assume in top adventure you just kind of assume fundamentally it's half the company's gonna work after the mark right and then the classic right the class the cliche is like the ones that work then you don't have to pay you have to work enough so that they pay for the ones that don't to make to make the whole enterprise work and so if you can adapt yourself from the mentality of will this thing work right - will this will this portfolio of things basically pay off right well enough things work that they'll actually pay for the portfolio then at that point you can start to make risk somewhat tractable thing to contemplate it's still hard to divorce yourself emotionally from it right because it's just like it's still like absolutely no fun you know it's just terrible and when any of the individual things don't work but at least you have a conception of frame rate for able to it'll make ten long-run bets and being able to get to the other side now the response don't forget - that is oh that's great if you're a VC the problem is your portfolio you know you're you're a founder or a CEO like you don't you don't get that right you have to you have the much harder version of the problem which is you're on a one-way journey like you're the captain of the whaling ship yeah there's all those other captains over there but like you know they're on their own you're on your own even there though you know the best run companies tend to run experiments they tend to run right multiple experiments against against against their goals and they and they certainly want this experiment sequentially as they kind of you know try to figure out what works in a lot of cases they want experiments in parallel is they're trying to test different things and so I also think that's kind of mentality is sort of portfolio risk also applies to how you run a company which is you want to basically you you want to have a great deal of conviction about retrying ahead but you want to have a lot of flexibility inherent and how you're gonna get there right and what the tactics are and then you wanna be able to run a lot of experiments against that and you can kind of diversify your risk of any one theory by doing that and that's what governments are in some senses they have a portfolio of different kind of prospects about the future bets and in some senses so they think that's an optimistic view yeah exactly like what governments do yeah so I mean that's what they're and they're adverse to risk unfortunately so well the problem is the problem governments from government is like the end of one right so there's only one government per weight right we're really good run you know I mean next federalism which has been a huge huge advantage I think for the u.s. but like well you know the u.s. national government only gets to run one scenario right running experiments in the population is not necessarily well-received because they can't tolerate failure yeah right failure has real consequences so there's there's currently not only introspection about government but also about capitalism and capitalism so far has depended on growth and growth is something that VC's pay attention to but we're now wondering if what's the minimum amount of growth that you might need to have prosperity can you have prosperity with low growth can you have prosperity with fixed growth do you have any insights about about that at the civilizational scale yes I think in actually I don't even say that the issue is even more intense these days because there's now very prominent people in public life arguing that growth is bad right and in fact it's it that it that it in fact is ruinous and destructive and that the right goal might actually be they have no growth or to actually go into negative growth then especially in a very common view in the environmental movement so I'm a very strong proponent a very strong believer that growth is absolutely necessary and I'll come back to environmental thing in a second because it's a very interesting case of this I think growth is absolutely necessary and I think the reason growth is absolutely necessary is because you can fundamentally have two different mindset views of how the world works right one is positive some which is you know rising tide lifts all boats we can all do better together and the other is is is a zero-sum right where for me to win somebody else must lose and vice-versa and reason I think economic growth is so important at cores because if there is fast economic growth then we have positive some politics and we start to have all these discussions about all these things that we can do as a society and if we have zero some grow if we have if we have a flat growth or no growth or negative growth all of a sudden the politics become sharply zero-sum and in the most in the most the most you just kind of see this if you kind of track you know kind of the political climate you just basically it's the wake of every recession right it's just in the wake of every economic recession the politics just go like seriously negative on in terms of thinking about the world's is zero-sum and and then when you get a zero-sum outlook Impala six that's when you get like anti-immigration that's when you get anti trade that's when you get anti tech if the world's not growing then all that's left to do is to fight over what we what we already have and so my view is like you need to have economic growth you need to have economic growth for all of the reasons that I would say right wingers like economic growth which is you want to have higher levels material prosperity more opportunity more job creation all those things you want to have economic growth for the purpose of having like sane politics like a productive political conversation and then I think the kicker is you also want economic growth actually for many of the things that left-wing people want one of the best books this year new books this year is a guy Andrew McAfee I was reading a book called I think more from less it's actually a story of a really remarkable thing that a lot of people are missing about what's happening with the environment which is globally carbon emissions are rising and resource utilization is rising in the u.s. carbon emissions and resource utilization are actually falling and so in the u.s. we have figured out to grow our economy while reducing our use of natural resources which is a completely unexpected twist right to the plot of what kind of if you lose environmentalists in six years of seventies like nobody predicted that and it turns out he talks about this in the book but it turns out basically what happens is economies when economies advanced to a certain point they get really really good at doing more with less right they get really really good efficiency and they get really good at energy efficiency they get really isn't about you use environmental resources they really go to recycling in lots of different ways and then they get really good at what's called dematerialization which is what is happening with digital technology right which is basically taking things that used to require atoms and turning them into bits weight which inherently consumes consumes less resources and so what you actually want like my view unlike the environmental issues is like you've got a global problem which is you have too many people in too many countries stuck in kind of mid amid the Industrial Revolution they've got to grow to get to the point where they're in a fully digital economy like we are precisely so that they can start to have declining resource utilization right right I mean the classic example energy like you know the big problem of the energy emissions global a huge problem of emissions and with health from emissions is literally people burning wood like in their houses right to be able to eat and cook and what you want to do is you want to go to like hyper efficient solar or ideally nuclear right you want to go to these like super advanced forms of technology so actually it so you want that and by the way if you want like a big social safety net you know and all the social programs you want to pay for that stuff you also want economic growth because that generates taxes of pace of that stuff and so like growth is the single kind of biggest form of magic that we have right to be able to like actually make progress and hold the whole thing together and you know to your point about the developing countries I think the idea of leapfrog and technology is a myth it doesn't really work you actually have to if you want to have a high-tech infrastructure you actually need the intermediate roads clean water you can't skip over that and so they all need to be built out in order to have that prosperity at the end so you know the simplest you know seems like you don't worry about much I don't worry about much but one thing I do worry about this cyber conflict cyber war partly because I think we have no consensus about what's allowable does this worry you at all so I think there there's a lot of unknown as to it I think people are trying to figure this out but it's it's a complication to grapple with I will make an optimistic argument which is going to sound a little strange if you kind of project forward what's happening with with generally cyber with information you know operations of different kinds but also with drones you know UAVs and then also with you know unmanned you know unmanned fighter jets right um and you know ships increasingly being built it'll be unmad submarines at some point if you projected stuff forward you start to get this very interesting potential world in which basically the way I think about it it's like all human conflict between peoples are between nation-states up until now has been basically throwing people at each other right throwing soldiers at each other and like letting them make the decision of who to shoot and like hoping they don't get shot like with very serious repercussions of all those individual human decisions you do have the prospect of basically a new world of both offense and defense it's like completely motorised completely mechanized completely software driven and technology driven and a lot of people it's just immediately like oh my god that's horrible you know Terminator like you know Skynet like you know this is just the worst thing ever there's a novel called kill decision if you wanted to snow Pinsky okay there's a novel called kill decision by daniel suarez dinosaurus then extrapolates the the drones forward and a little it'll keep you up late at night but the optimistic view would be like boy isn't it good that there aren't beings involved isn't it good like if the machines are shooting at each other like isn't that good isn't that better than if they're shooting at us by the way and by the way yeah I would go so far as to say like I don't know that I'm in favor of like the machines making like kill decisions like decisions on me to shoot but like the one thing I know it's humans do that very badly like very very very badly I'm the opposite of pearl war I don't want to see any of this stuff actually play out but if it has to play out there maybe having it be software machines it's gonna be actually better outcome right I mean this kind of weird that we don't allow we don't want machines to kill humans we want other humans to kill you but we want 18 year olds we want to take 18 year olds out of their homes right we want to put a gun in their hand and send them someplace and tell me decide who to shoot like it that that is gonna go down to history's haven't been a good idea okay it just strikes me as like unlikely so we have only time for one last question which is I'm usually I claim to be the most optimistic person in the room but with you sitting across to me I don't think that may be true what is your optimism based on so my optimism okay so get cosmic for a second why not I guess we're here it's the last question last question so the science fiction author science fiction science fiction authors always talking about was good they called the singularity this constant singularity answer it's a singularities basic what happens when the machines get so smart than all of a sudden everything goes into exponential mode and all of a sudden you know the entire world changes so I am I reading history is actually we actually were in the singularity already and that it actually started 300 years ago mm-hmm and if you look at basically if you look at basically any chart of human welfare over time and you can look at no child mortality is an obvious one but like there's you know there's many many many others and you just look at progress on that metric so your telomere tality as an example and it's just basically flat flat flat flat flat flat flat for only fifty thousand years right is everything and you know if this is the family offices at Thomas Hobbes you know life is you know nasty brutish and short right it was just like the thing like everything was terrible everywhere all the time forever the end until 300 years ago when all of a sudden there's this me and the curve and then all the indicators of human welfare not uniformly across the planet but in societies that we're making progress the societies weren't making progress first all of a sudden all those indicators of human welfare went up into the right right I don't know of course bonded by the way to economic growth but it was also right it was the Enlightenment it was the rise of democracy it was the rise of markets was the rise of rationality of the scientific method by the way human rights free speech free thought right and they all kind of catalyzed right around around around 300 years ago and and they've been making their way into the world you know in sort of increasing concentric circles kind of ever since and so we have you know I would argue like we have the answer it's like we actually don't need new we don't need new discoveries to have the future be much better we actually know how to do it is to apply basically those systems and and and basically contra the sort of constant temptation from all kinds of people to try to you know compromise on these things or subvert these things you know basically double down on these systems that we know work right so double down economic growth double down on human rights double down on markets on capitalism double down on the scientific method fix science like we got as far as we did with science actually being pretty seriously screwed up right now with the replication crisis like so we should fix that and then science will all of a sudden start to work much better technology right used to yeah use of technological tools so we should we literally have the systems like we know how to do this we know how to make the planet much better in every respect and so what we just need to do is is keep doing that and then what I try to do when I read the news is notwithstanding everything's going on is basically try to look through whatever's happen at the moment try to look underneath and kind of say okay are those fundamental systems actually still working like is the world getting more democratic or less right this is free speech spreading or receiving right or markets expanding or falling right are more more people able to participate in a modern market economy or not and you know those indicators generally are all or all still up into the right mm-hmm so let's go out and make the world better yeah thank you thanks everybody [Applause]

Channel: a16z

Views: 86,610

Rating: 4.9075828 out of 5

Keywords: artificial intelligence, social networking, optimistic about the future, climate change, economic growth and development, andreessen horowitz, marc andreessen, future of technology, future of technology 2030, reasons to be optimistic about the future, andreessen horowitz interview, embracing new tech, evolution of technology

Id: UnU5Dikdr2U

Length: 44min 29sec (2669 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Flexit4Brexit]

Submission statement: Kevin Kelly interviews Marc Andreesen. What are the trends in technology and will they continue?