What is it with that name and the need to control? Or manipulate. We refer to the Mar(c)(k)s Andreessen and Zuckerberg, respectively.

Although the spellings may be different to deceive the clueless.

Marc Andreessen, who a while back explained Why Software Is Eating the World, is now instructing us on Why AI Will Save The World. Mind you, in his earlier a16Z blog post, while he was right about how technology would take over, he didn’t bother to mention what we’d have to surrender for the privilege: our privacy and all our personal information.

But just as Mark Zuckerberg assured us that Facebook was there to bring the people closer together, Andreessen assures us that “AI will make the world warmer and nicer.”

Although he failed to mention that we’re also giving up whatever shred of our privacy remains. Or that he was one of OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s mentors.

The bros tend to very cozy out there in the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

Andreessen envisions a utopian world where every child, every person, every scientist, every world leader – everyone, everywhere! – will have a personal AI assistant/collaborator of some sort that will be patient and understanding and infinitely helpful. “The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love,” the investor said.

Didn’t we read something like that in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

That’s nothing less than surveillance on a level and with a breadth and scope the likes of which the world has never seen before. And worse – and we’re being generous here – bordering on thought control/programming.

And let’s not forget about the dark side of the technology: ‘He Would Still Be Here’: Man Dies by Suicide After Talking with AI Chatbot, Widow Says The incident raises concerns about guardrails around quickly-proliferating conversational AI models.

According to The Verge, Mark Zuckerberg says Meta wants to ‘introduce AI agents to billions of people’ “in ways that will be useful and meaningful,” as he told his investors,” and as @jamespoulter tweeted, “When Meta begins to integrate #conversationalAI into their products, every business will have the opportunity to have a Central Intelligent Agent (CIA) act on their behalf.”

That just about covers it, without getting into bad actors, et al, although note to self: Generative AI is already a favorite of the dark web.

“A.I. doomers are a ‘cult’ — here’s the real threat, according to Marc Andreessen,” CNBC reported. “Andreessen starts off with an accurate take on AI, or machine learning, calling it “the application of mathematics and software code to teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it.”

All good, but then, the piece continues, “Instead of acknowledging any documented real-life risks of AI – its biases can infect facial recognition systems, bail decisions, criminal justice proceedings, mortgage approval algorithms and more – Andreessen claims AI could be “a way to make everything we care about better.”

“Yet the technology’s documented harms have led many experts to conclude that, for certain applications, it should never be used.”

As for invoking the word ‘cult,’ considering the sex and drug parties that have been a staple in Silicon Valley for some time now, and are still ongoing, it seems, “after it was revealed that Bob Lee — the tragically murdered founder of Cash App — reportedly indulged in “underground sex [and] drug parties,” as New York Post reported, not sure ‘cult’ is a word Andreessen might want to use, and not that we’re contending that he’s a participant.

AI isn’t going away, that’s for sure, but we’re personally still approaching it with extreme prejudice. How long will the tech cabal permit that? Right now, you may be able to opt-in to Bard or Microsoft’s search AI, but dollars to donuts, when the next version of the software comes out, the AI will be baked in.

Anyone who knows The Borg  understands that resistance is futile.

We’re not a fan of Andreessen’s and never were. That said, his 7.000-word missive leaves us with the feeling that he’s either incredibly naïve – or incredibly ‘selective,’ or if you’d prefer, dishonest, in his thesis. Or he lives in that Silicon Valley bubble. It’s an unnecessarily long piece and, in our opinion, a not very convincing one. While we do wonder why he wrote it, we also consider it the apotheosis of our view on the unbridled release and the countless iterations of the LLMs themselves: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. As for this becoming the seminal piece that his last missive proved to be, in our humble opinion, this one doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Onward and forward.