Marc Andreessen - Making the Future

I've been telling my friends for years, you only live in San Francisco for the stories. You want the crazy stories—'I came home last night and there were homeless people having sex in my front yard.' Usually you get people to kind of admit that they kind of like that up to a point. But then it's like, I took my three-year-old out yesterday, went down to the park ... A junkie tried to stab my three-year-old with a used syringe. The jokes start to get less funny over time.

The 100-inch TV set that covers your wall is going to cost you 100 bucks. The four-year college degree is going to cost $1 million ... The four-year college degree is basically—just think about it technologically—it's an unchanged experience from 100 years ago. Getting a degree from a college university today, it's the same set of activities, it's the same format, it's teachers in the classroom, it's written exams. There's been no technological change whatsoever, and prices have exploded.

There's no limit to how much a house in San Francisco can cost. There is no limit to how much heart surgery in any hospital can cost. There's no limit to what a four-year college degree can cost; it can potentially cost infinite because the government will just keep subsidizing it ... It's obvious what we need to do. We need to technologically disrupt those sectors. We need to do to the slow sectors what we've done to the fast sectors. We need more technological innovation. If we don't do that, this story evolves in to the exact opposite direction that everybody's worried about, which is what's actually happening right now.

If you ask any responsible parent... 'Would you like your kid to have the same job you do, or would you like them to have a better job?' ... Ask a parent who works in a blue collar profession. Ask a parent who works on an assembly line or works in the frontline of manual labor, the harder work. 'Do you want your kid to be doing that, or would you rather your kid be a software developer or an artist or a job in which you're in a very comfortable physical environment and you're not running the risk of workplace accidents and so forth?' ... And virtually all parents will say that they are in favor of that. This is progress. This is how it happens.

Productivity growth was much higher from, call it, the 1920s to the 1970s than it was from the 1970s until today. Generally speaking, the rate of technological change in the economy has been decelerating for the last four years, not accelerating.

Just think conceptually for a second, how did Lyft and Uber come into being? The thing that literally happened was a programmer sat down, typed in a bunch of computer code on a computer, and pressed enter, and the code started to run. And then, the next day, cars and their drivers started to drive to different places and pick up passengers who they normally never would have even known about. And those passengers, all of a sudden, had a completely new way to get a ride.

Software is the lever of the world. Somebody types in code, that code runs, the real-world changes. And the real-world changes not just arbitrarily but in a way that's more efficient, that's more organized, that's more productive, that provides more opportunity to people.

If you want more job creation, if you want higher wages, and if you want more of a sense of opportunity and potential and the ability to be fulfilled and the ability for people to provide for their family and for their kids to have great jobs in the future, you actually want more technology in the economy. You want more productivity growth, you want more economic change, which again, is very contrary to current narrative.

Basically, with science and technology, we're getting better and better at doing more and more with less and less until, ultimately, one day, we'll be able to do everything with nothing.