Penniless

A world in which human wages crash from AI -- logically, necessarily -- is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero. Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.

This is the sort of techno-uptopianism that makes people suspicious. Mainly because it seems too far out of touch with reality to be genuine. I get what Mr. Andreessen is attempting to convey here: His belief that the one factor that retards a post-scarcity society is human labor. Have automation take over for people wholesale, to the point where human labor can't command any significant remuneration, and prices suddenly fall so low that people don't need to work to obtain goods and services.

"Realistically," the only way this works in practice is to have access to physical resources and automation tools be ubiquitous throughout the society. If I have access to, say, a robot plumber and materials to make pipes and whatnot, I don't need a plumber, and if the plumber has access to a robot farmer, along with some land, seeds and whatnot, he doesn't need anyone to produce food for him. And so on. But there is a dependency in this chain. For automation to lead to a post-scarcity society, the automated tools themselves cannot be subject to scarcity. Not in the sense that companies like OpenAI and Alphabet make tools free to the public to use, but in the sense that all members of the public have ownership of tools, such that they cannot be realistically taken away. So far, that particular development doesn't appear to be in the cards, even accounting for Chinese companies like DeepSeek. "Less expensive" is not the same as "available to any and everyone for the asking." And that still leaves open the question of inputs. The ability to spin straw into gold still relies on a workable source of straw. And it's unlikely that all of the inputs that people would need to be self-sufficient would grow as easily.

Does Mr. Andreessen actually believe that a revolution in automation will create enduring (or even brief) post-scarcity? I have no idea. It would not surprise me either way. But few other people see things playing out in the way he does, and I think that's why pretty much all of the reactions that I have heard to his X post have been openly incredulous. And while some people are quick to write him off as "out of touch," there's also the opinion that there's something malicious about all of this; that it's some sort of hateful trick to be perpetrated on the public. But either way, when this prediction fails to come through, it won't be Mr. Andreessen who suffers for it. And that, I think, is the reason why so few people appear to trust him on this.