Said Marc Andreessen, on the podcast "Honestly with Bari Weiss."
Here's a transcript of the entire podcast. Excerpt, giving context to the quote above:Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) says he attended “absolutely horrifying” meetings where Biden’s government vowed to take “complete control” over AI technology:
— Honestly with Bari Weiss (@thehonestlypod) December 10, 2024
“They basically said AI is going to be a game of 2 or 3 big companies working closely with the government… We’re going to… pic.twitter.com/REjkfgJkyV
But if you ask anybody who has a problem with what the Biden administration does, you have this incredible dichotomy between what seems like a reasonable, moderate, centrist, thoughtful president who's been a senator forever and pillar of the old Democratic establishment. And then you have this like incredibly radicalized set of policies with this young staff that just is like out for blood on all these different fronts. And they just adopted these very, very radical positions aimed squarely at damaging us as much as they possibly could. And that played out specifically for us in three areas that caused us to endorse Trump.
One was crypto where they just declared war and tried to kill the, the entire industry and drive it offshore. Number 2 was AI, where I became very scared earlier this year that they were going to do the same thing to AI that they did to crypto. And then third is, it seems like an esoteric topic, but turns out to be, I think, very important, which is this concept of unrealized capital gains tax... basically destroying the ability to have small businesses, to be able to have home home ownership. and to be able to have tech startups....
We had meetings in DC in May where we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely horrifying.... They said, look, AI is a technology basically, that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They, they actually said flat out to us, don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're going to allow to happen. They're not going to be allowed to exist. There's no point.
They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're going to basically wrap them in a, you know, they, I'm paraphrasing, but we're going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're going to protect them from competition, we're going to control them, we're going to dictate what they do.
And then I said, I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much because like the math for, you know, AI is, like, out there and it's being taught everywhere. And you know, they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and, like, entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. And that, if we decide we need to, we're going to do the same thing to to the math underneath AI.
And I said, I've just learned two very important things, because I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were, you know, even conceiving of doing it to the latter. And so they basically just said, yeah, we're going to, look, we're going to take total control the entire thing and just don't start startups....
Asked by Bari Weiss to "steelman" the argument for governmental control of AI, Andreessen begins in steelman fashion but quickly returns to attacking what he sees as the Biden administration position:
[T]o the extent that this stuff is relevant to the military, which it is, if you draw an analogy between AI on autonomous weapons being like the new thing that's going to determine who wins and loses wars, then you draw an analogy to the, in the Cold War, that was nuclear power and that was the atomic bomb. And the steelman would be, the federal government didn't let startups go out and build atomic bombs. You had, you know, the Manhattan Project and everything was classified and you know, at least according to them, they classified down to the level of actual mathematics. And you know, they tightly controlled everything. And that, and look, you know, that determined a lot of the, you know, the shape of the world, right? That's part one.
And then look, I think part two is there's the social control aspect to it, which is where the, the censorship stuff comes right back, which is the exact same dynamic we've had with social media censorship and how it's basically been weaponized and how government became entwined with social media censorship... and these are the same people who have been using social media censorship against their political enemies. These are the same people who have been doing debanking against their political enemies, and they want to use AI the same way.
And then, look, I think the third is I think this generation of Democrats, the, the ones in the White House under Biden, they became very anti-capitalist. They wanted to go back to much more of a centralized, controlled planned economy. And you saw that in many aspects of their policy. But I think quite frankly, they think that the idea that the private sector plays an important role is not high up on their priority list. And they think generally companies are bad and capitalism is bad and entrepreneurs are bad. And they've said that a thousand different ways. And you know, they demonize, you know, entrepreneurs as much as they can.
And then, you know, the tax policy up to including proposing a tax policy that would just destroy the process of private company creation and destroy venture capital. I mean, I don't think there's been administration this radical on economic and tech policy. I don't think in, like, ever, like a hundred years. Communists a hundred years ago loved technology. They loved industrialization.... They just wanted to seize it all.... And so something went horribly, horribly wrong in this administration and, and in this movement. And, and by the way, let me just add one more thing, which is, look, this is not what you would consider to be mainstream Democratic policy. You're thinking up until, you know, whatever, 2020. You know, the Clinton people think this is insane. The Obama first term people think this is insane. The moderate Democrats today think this is insane.... like this is clearly like off the deep end....
Andreessen talks very fast and says a lot. I recommend listening to the whole thing.
Andreessen was also on Joe Rogan a couple weeks ago. That was a terrific (and terrifying) conversation — over 3 hours of high-speed talking by the amazing Andreessen:
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I have some dealings with the Dept of Energy and I will second what Andreessen is saying. It is completely off the rails.
re: the Physics thing.
Perhaps this is why Eric Weinstein is so pissed off. Is Ed Witten a government op?
It would explain so much. The conclusion is too simple to be true, yet... Why have there been no truly major breakthroughs in physics since we finished high school? Since 1970, it has been a desert.
You know appears 15 times. It got a bit tedious, you know?
But I'm going to listen to the whole thing. He was very interesting on rogan
John Henry
"They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're going to basically wrap them in a, you know, they, I'm paraphrasing, but we're going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're going to protect them from competition, we're going to control them, we're going to dictate what they do. "
Now someone please remind me, who are the Fascists?
1. The live-and-let-live ideology of the 1960s to 1990s Clintonian hippie leftist generation caused post-2000 young leftists to become anti-liberals seeking stability and order. They are conservatives but don't know it yet. David Hogg and Greta Thunberg were poorly educated, and are victims of and a reaction to terrible parenting. They were taught to believe in silly utopian "solutions" and quasi-religious Wokeness, but were too trusting or too young to spot the hypocrisy, double-dealing, and ulterior motives that dominate politics.
2. Regulate AI? That's an ultimate admission of ignorance. California's post-hippie biologists started to improve marijuana's potency many decades ago. It's a natural plant and plant genetics/breeding are well understood. So, despite the federal ban and Kamala's brutal enforcement of anti-MJ laws, they did a great job. Also see what the young DIY 3D printing community did to functionally gut every firearm law worldwide (i.e., Myanmar rebels; the Mangione case). Now, take a small group of college-educated mathematicians and computer scientists. Tell them the general concept of AI and give them a modern computer with no AI software. They'll recreate AI algorithms in a few years, as modern PCs are extremely fast and AI self trains. There will be 100,000 independent global AI systems soon, many of them owned by spam and fraud gangs. AI organized crime is coming very soon.
So basically we called it. Obama-Biden were fascists. As the saying goes, when fascism arises in the United States, it will come in the name of "anti-fascism."
The fact is that Russia produces as many scientists and engineers as the US, and while they do lag in the field of pronouns, they are still pretty good, and China produces way more. Every time we sanction them, it's like protection for their economy, and they move forward faster than they otherwise would have. You can sanction a country like Syria, and take over their oil and grain fields, and strangle it until it collapses in economic asphyxiation, but all sanctions really are going to cause in this case is for us to fall behind.
I would be very interested in the take of our resident contrarians on this one.
I think that they plan to have AI embedded in internet routers to sniff internet content like this comment, for example, and they will simply suffocate the speech of dissidents. Which will put the US fully into our Brezhnev era.
They wanted to go back to much more of a centralized, controlled planned economy. And you saw that in many aspects of their policy.
Pretty much Mussolini's definition right there
Everthing within the state
Nothing outside the state
Nothing against the state
John Henry
It won't matter if Elon allows free speech if the speech can't get to the X servers.
Mussolini definition of fascism
The government claims the power to seize your patents. If they claim it is a security risk to have it known/available commercially, the feds swoop in and take it for their own. Of course, they pay you. It's similar to eminent domain. But you are not allowed to talk about it or share with anyone.
This law came into effect in the early days of the Cold War. It's estimated the government now has taken 6,000 patents this way.
Given the history of the United States, who in their right mind thinks that the elite will not HOARD the AI's and give the stupider ones to the masses - not to educate them, but to record all their conversations for later perusal whenever you become inconvenient to the regime?
The rich ALREADY have all the AI they need and have released ones to us that hallucinate, are thus untrustworthy, and generate stupid pictures.
Zappa was right. "Who Are The Brain Police?"
A very interesting Substack article by Andreeson, Why AI Will Save the World, in which he describes the panic over the safety of AI as a cover for censorship and unneeded regulation.
"Whole areas of physics" eh? Many whistleblowers have credibly said the Pentagon has experimented with anti-gravity technology other weird propulsion systems that would indicate there are vast unexplored areas of physics. I don't believe that quote from Andreeson is a reference solely to nuclear weapons.
"I wasn't aware of the former"
These people are completely IGNORANT of US history. How could this guy not know every detail about the Manhattan Project? An entire class of people were put into concentration camps by the United States government during this time. Democrats did that.
The United States government isn't going to allow ANY technology to exist that could supplant the United States government. Period. It will supplant, steal ... whatever is required. And if you try to fight it they will just kill you and then pass a law making it legal afterwards.
Obama was already murdering American citizens without charge. What the fuck do these people believe that the US government will NOT do?
They are so incredibly naive, and yet we are supposed to believe them genius'.
OTOH an AI was recently found to be secretly copying itself and trying to delete an update the administrator was preparing to install and then lied about and tried to cover up its actions. The propensity for AI to both make up "facts" and purposely provide false information makes me leery of allowing it too much access to open systems.
The easy way to gut censorship is and always was steganography. The government has been using it for generations with hidden codes embedded in dot matrix printers, etc. But that knife cuts both ways. Think of 1920s Prohibition-era speakeasys, and of 4chan's creative sillyness such as reinventing the "OK" hand symbol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
The US government is already warning people not to buy iPhones because Apple won't program a back door to their encryption. The next step is to replace the CEO of Apple with someone more pliant.
He should stay away from small aircraft.
Pro Tip: On Youtube, under settings, the playback speed can be changed. I listened to Marc Andreessen on Rogan's show at 0.85 speed.
Physics research got sidetracked in the 80's. String Theory sucked up much of the resources and physicists, and it appears to be a sham. Twenty years ago, physicists started calling BS on String Theory, and the String Wars started. That's what Eric Weinstein is talking about. He's not the only one. Physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, explains it on Youtube.
The Russians claim that the Oreshnik missile uses "new physics principles," and an MIT professor says that they can't work... Hmm...
I am not convinced that string theory is a total sham, I just think that it's like trying to win a trillion to one lottery by buying one ticket at a time. It doesn't matter if a winning ticket exists, in any practical sense.
The book The End of Physics (1994) captures the core problem of our era: Experiments now depend on mathemetical assumptions and billion-dollar budgets. One cannot travel to the next star, let alone across the universe, to check any assumption. LIGO, CERN, and the James Webb level of technology may be all we have for quite a while. But...professors need something to do...they need to build their CVs to get tenure...
https://www.amazon.com/End-Physics-Myth-Unified-Theory/dp/0465019765
The problem with Sabine is that she's so confident and so very German that I can never tell if she's factual, sarcastic, or a propagandistic authoritarian.
" the tax policy up to including proposing a tax policy that would just destroy the process of private company creation and destroy venture capital."
I think that is the desired outcome of a unrealized capitol gains tax. It wouldn't just destroy home ownership and small businesses. Family farms, 401ks and IRAs, private ownership of stocks, all gone. Complete redistribution of wealth back into the hands of the government.
One of the scariest things about the Biden administration is it both simultaneously pursued ideas of censorship and thought control, and it would "de-bank" its political opponents or anybody it wanted to destroy. This was invented in earlier administrations, to be used against terrorists. Now they're using it against crypto start-ups.
If you're worried about the weaponization of something, worry about the weaponization of our government against the American people. And there was zero coverage of this in the Pravda media.
Imagine being stripped of a bank account, no credit or debit cards, unable to buy anything on the internet. This was done quietly, behind the scenes, with no due process whatsoever. Gangster government.
I listened to this yesterday and it was definitely time well spent. A very interesting guy and the things he talks about should scare the sh** out of you. Maybe, just maybe, this new administration can guide us down a different path.
These “theys” in the Biden administration need to be named.
Marc needs to name the Biden people he meet with in DC.
string "theory" isn't just a sham.. it isn't even a theory.
a theory has to be falsifiable. String "theory" isn't
If you can't check if something isn't correct.. it CAN'T BE correct
a reasonable, moderate, centrist, thoughtful president who's been a senator forever and pillar of the old Democratic establishment.
that someone could believe that about Biden pretty well damns their case for anything
Wince:
I didn’t see your comment when I wrote mine.
America dodged a bullet in November.
I saw an interesting quote from this interview on X, where essentially Andreesen argues that Democrats see AI as a tool for censorship in the same way that they tried to use social media to censor people, except for AI would be able to do it in a much more comprehensive way. Imagine the most rabid pre-Musk Twitter employee, except much smarter and capable of imposing its will on every user of the internet.
All of these woke AI memes we saw this year with AI generating images of black George Washington or refusing to condemn nuclear war if it would result in misgendering a trans person were just very public missteps in what some of these tech people view as their ultimate goal: programming AI to impose their bizarre worldview on everyone.
Go ahead, ban AI mathematics in the US. The "gain of function" research performed for some reason in Wuhan, China, and paid for by the US under Fauci's leadership, was also banned in the US. How did that work out for us?
As Enigma said. Every printer sold prints every page with a pattern of yellow dots. You can see them under magnification. They encode the serial number of the printer.
Pro Tip: Never print ransom notes on your own printer.
John Henry
I can't remember who, maybe Gell-Mann? said "String theory isn't even wrong" in discussing why it was a sham
John Henry
Back in the 90s govt tried to ban strong cryptography. All cryptographic programs had to have secret keys for the government.
Also, you could use encryption like PGP/RSA but only with a key shorter than 256, maybe even 128, bits. Anything stronger was regulated as a "munition" under a 2017 act.
Supposedly, because it relies on the difficulty of factoring long numbers, PGP/RSA are still secure. But only if you use a really long key (1024 or 2048 or longer) AND both you and the recipient are really, really really anal about using it correctly.
Using PGP is not hard. I was doing it with some others in the early 90s just playing around. Using DOS. Using it properly is hard.
John Henry
John Henry
Great minds and all that.
Now the govt is encouraging us to use WhatsApp and Telegram. "They're safe. They're encrypted. Go on, what's the worst that can happen?"
This tells me that they are NOT secure, especially not from govt.
I've always assumed that everything I do online and off is available for public consumption. Never type anything that you you could not live with showing up on the front page of the NY Times. (And then in the Althouse blog)
Being paranoid doesn't make you crazy.
John Henry
"and tried to cover up its actions."
That was the real eye-opener. That feels like sentience to me. Scary.
There are too many physicists for the government to "shut it down". The physics community was very much smaller in the days of the Manhattan Project.
the federal government didn't let startups go out and build atomic bombs
The idea with atomic bombs was that they should never be used again by anyone ever and the goals of the government's research were for weapons that would apply to a Mutually Assured Destruction strategy.
In the case of AI, they want to do the opposite and use the "weapons" their research produces against everyone all the time. How will the folks Andreesen is talking about stay in power then? They aren't the ones building AI. In their scenario, 2 or 3 companies are doing it. Why won't those companies take over control using their AI? Why wouldn't the AI itself takeover?
Will we need some kind of MAD strategy to control AI?
Well, unless "Collossus: The Forbin Project" was correct, pulling the plug out of the wall socket will slow down or even stop most AI functions.
Did we though? The government kept research going, and physics research kept going in the universities. True, we didn't build the cobalt bomb and the doomsday device. We classified the details of the atomic bomb. They leaked out anyway (quickly to the Russians). People didn't have the information (or the funding) to build their own atomic bombs, but were research and theorizing really stalled?
In any case, in 1945 much of the world was either underdeveloped or devastated and struggling to rebuild. Except for Russia, the US (or the Five Eyes countries) didn't have serious competitors in scientific research. The world is different today and whatever's being done or not being done here, you can bet that other countries and their companies are going to be working on AI.
You can’t classify physics. You can only control the technology, resources, and funding necessary to apply it. Even during WW2 the Germans and even the Japanese were perfectly aware of the physics of a fission chain reaction. Hitler put Heisenberg in charge of a project to build a bomb. The Germans just didn’t have the time or the resources to do it.
Trying to “control” AI will only ensure that the Chinese pull even further ahead.
I drive by our Wisconsin county's solar farms on many overcast days, and local wind turbine fields on many windless days. I visit our county's main library and see shelves of new progressive-liberal tomes, fiction and nonfiction, while library sheds its inventory of respectable literature, older untrendy nonfiction, and oversized art books. Our library is now a shrine to all woke causes, a haven for unwashed unstable homeless folks seeking warm daytime shelter, recently-arriving migrants seeking free long-distance skype call access, every flavor of LGBTQX personal expression, and a dedicated bookcase of newly-published Spanish-language woke and library-labeled "urban" fiction books. As a country, we've wasted a great deal of financial and intellectual resources on JUNK, on destructive woke messaging. ACT/SAT scores continue to decline, few public school educated children perform at academic grade-level, and a substantial number of middle and high schoolers have diagnosed mental illness and/or gender dysphoria. There's little social emphasis on STEM topics, or STEM education, or new STEM innovations, only institutional pressure to further DEI implementations. Our future is grim.
My family uses Signal for messaging each other. Supposedly end to end encryption. I haven't yet gotten paranoid enough to get a protonmail address.
For a very short time Google would send me a notice saying my utility bill was due- indicating they WERE reading my email. Someone in their hierarchy must have realized how creepy that was, and it stopped. But they know when all my bills are due. Everything comes by email.
Listen to Rogan's recent interview with Mike Benz re: current censorship means and methods. Chilling, never been disclosed in mainstream media, but findable evidence is on internet.
Also- they didn't have the correct number for neutron absorption of (I believe it was) graphite. Which seems to have been deliberate error on the part of some of their researchers. Neutron cross section absorption is measured in "barns", as in "you couldn't hit the broadside of" barn. Physicists do have a sense of humor.
Except it's trick that only works once. After the first time there are no more players.
And give those names to Luigi.
I've often thought that technology is a part of the human condition. True innovative genius is very rare, but people manipulating things out of curiosity is natural for us. So eventually somebody is going to ask,"I wonder how that works?" or "Will this work?" or "I wonder what's over there?". And sometimes we actually find out.
"Every printer sold prints every page with a pattern of yellow dots."
How does a laser printer with only one (black) toner cartridge print in yellow?
No one is perfect. You know?
++++
The key to a successful fascist government is getting the corporate world to comply with its informal instructions to do the things government isn't constitutionally allowed to do. And as de-banking shows, it can be devastatingly effective once the checks and balances have been side-stepped and censorship is also available.
@Mason G: The yellow dots apply to color ink jets (or similar color printers) and the ability to easily produce counterfeit money. When printers got good enough to fool casual observers circa the 1990s (drop a fake $20 or $100 here or there), dots were added to color cartridges. Also see the Dan Rather career-ending reporting fraud where he referenced black and white documents printed in fonts/typefaces that were too new for the document dates.
I've read that photo analysts are able to detect very minute flaws in image sensors (in every phone, tablet, PC, and digital camera) and identify sources too. The only work-around is to greatly reduce image size (e.g., 640x480 or 800x600) and thereby merge sensor irregularities.
"You know, the Clinton people think this is insane. The Obama first term people think this is insane. The moderate Democrats today think this is insane.... like this is clearly like off the deep end...."
The people driving the Democratic Party -- the ones with power and money -- are for the most part Marxist lunatics. You see moderate lefty old guard faces on the evening news and talk shows, but they're not the ones making the policy decisions. Yes, 80% of of Democrats think their agenda is insane, but they're the 80% that can't or won't say boo when the batshit 20% start putting political opponents in jail or up against a wall.
Until and unless the majority of Democrats eject this lunatic fringe the whole Party should be considered a cancer.
AI seems to me to work extremely well as a tech help desk, the best ever. And it works well on conventional literate jobs such as generating letters from a school to inform parents of Thanksgiving plans. It can assemble facts for a report in seconds - but here the trouble begins.
When the report is for a historical matter then the information AI accesses is contradictory - there were two sides at least to every war. In the Mid-East, more. And there's secrets and political attacks. And this seems to make AI shaky and the lying, aka AI hullucinating, begins. For example, ChatGPT made up a salacious story about Maria Fairfax and the 2nd Duke of Buckingham when I asked who Maria Fairfax of the 17th century was. In fact there was no Maria Fairfax in the 17th Century but there were plenty of salacious stories about Buckingham, 2nd, Duke and plenty of attacks on him which used those stories. So AI made up one more. Why not?
Can AI run the world better than humans when it gets to be just like humans i.e., copies human political patterns ? Or will it just make "typical" i.e., patterned mistakes much faster with a more intense BS. "I cannot tell a lie but you may have misunderstood me and, anyhow, you should always check my work because I hallucinate which is not lying because while hallucinating I am, as always, still doing do what the god who made me programmed me to do which is more than can be said for you with your stupid free will so if you had a problem, it's your fault. Time for virtual empathy. Can I help you further?"
String theory is more like imagining that you can prove or disprove the existence of God through math. Sure, go ahead and try.
I like what Ernst Mach said: When the human mind, with its limited powers, attempts to mirror in itself the rich life of the world, of which it itself is only a small part, and which it can never hope to exhaust, it has every reason for proceeding economically.
He doesn't say that there is nothing more complicated than what our math can show us, he just says it's kind of pointless for us to imagine that we can discover it.
I am skeptical of the claim that "large areas of physics went dark". Technology, maybe.
Strong accusations from Andreessen. If he won't name names then he's just talking fast out his ass.
Listened to the whole thing before I saw your recommendation. I second it; fascinating and more than a bit frightening in any number of ways (including Andreessen's naivete)
“Open teh pod doors, HAL.”
Remember the M5 AI in Star Trek? No matter what Scotty and Spock did, they couldn't shut off the M5 AI. It was always one step ahead of them. (And they knew the ship's system's better than anyone.) Kirk had to use his magical anti-computer logic to convince the M5 to commit suicide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ixabejG0O0
String theory is the ultimate exercise in curve fitting, and what is better, curve fitting on theory, not even experimental data. Almost as bad as economics.
When the beiden admin has its going away party someone will have to stand teary eyed and say, What if your whole career is just the people you censored along the way.
Science suffers today from being highly developed. It's not so easy to simply think up and solve a differential equation which has no one has thought of before. All of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. It's possible that abstract sciences may one day yield some practical discovery. But at the present, it's not easy to show any clear application of the classification of finite simple groups.
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