Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:18:42 · Marc Andreessen
[00:18:42] S0: This is the challenge. And again, this kind of goes to your original question, which is education, there's two completely different ways to think about education. The way that it's usually thought about and talked about is kind of at the level of a nation. So it's like a national level issue or maybe a state level issue in the US, which is basically, how do you educate all the kids? And of course, that's incredibly important. And of course, you're going to need some level of large scale system, like the national K through 12 school system or something like that in order to do that. But then there's this other question, which is like, N=1, for an individual kid, what can you do with an individual kid? And so I'll just give you the ultimate answer to that question, which is, it's been known for centuries that the ideal way to teach a kid at the unit of N=1, by far the ideal way to do it is with one-on-one tutoring. If you just have an individual kid and the goal is to maximize an individual kid, by far you get the best results with one-on-one tutoring. And this is something that every royal family knew in history. It's something that every aristocratic class knew in history. There's all these amazing examples. Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle. He took over the world. Many of the great kings, queens, royal families, aristocrats and so forth over the course of centuries kind of always had this approach. There's actually also statistical evidence, analytical evidence that this is correct. There's this massive question in the field of education, which is, how do you improve educational outcomes? And basically, it turns out it's very hard to improve educational outcomes except there's one method that always does it, which is called the Bloom's 2 Sigma effect, which is there's one method of education that routinely raises student outcomes by two standards of deviation and will take a kid from the 50th percentile to the 99th percentile and that's one-on-one tutoring. So again, if you go back to N=1, you have a kid and a tutor and they're in this very tight loop with each other, where the kid is able to constantly kind of be on the leading edge of what they're capable of doing and they can move incredibly fast and they get kind of correction in real time, you get these better outcomes.
00:20:43 · Marc Andreessen
But to your question, it's never been economically feasible for anybody other than the richest people in society to be able to provide one-on-one tutoring for kids. AI provides the very real prospect of being able to do that, because obviously now, if you have a kid that's super interested in something and they can talk to an LLM about it and they can ask an infinite number of questions and they can get instantaneous feedback. And in fact, you can even tell an LLM, it's like, "Teach me how to do the following." And you can say, "Wow, I don't quite understand what you're saying. Numb it down for me a little bit." "Okay, now quiz me, do I actually understand this?" People can just do this today. And so I think there's this massive opportunity for parents in many walks of life, with a little bit of time at focus, to be able to say, " Okay, my kid's probably still going to go through a traditional education system, but I'm going to augment this with AI tutoring." And of course, there's going to be tons of startups, and there already are, that are going to try to build on all the products and services for this. Khan Academy, on the nonprofit side, has a big push to do this. And so I think the broad answer might be a hybrid approach with schools plus one-to-one tutoring through AI. You may have heard, there's this great new private school system called Alpha, in which everything I just described is kind of the basis of their philosophy, which is, it's a combination of in person schools and teachers, but it's also heavily based on AI and AI tutoring. And so I think there is a magic formula in here that I think is going to apply much more broadly. And really, for parents interested in this, now it'd be a great time to really start to think hard about that and to look at the options.
00:22:17 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:22:17] S1: It's interesting because there's all this concern that young people, jobs are not going to be there for them, AI is replacing them. On the flip side, there's what you're describing here. It feels like people coming in learning today are going to move so fast and learn so much more. And where do you sit on this divide of, young people are in big trouble or they're actually going to be the ones winning in the end?
00:22:38 · Marc Andreessen
[00:22:38] S0: Yeah. So the job substitution, job loss thing is just, it's very reductive. I think it's an overly simplistic model. And again, it goes back to what I said at the very beginning, which is, we've actually been in a regime for 50 years of very slow technological change in the economy. And so again, like I said, it's at half the rate of the previous era and then a third of the rate of 100 years ago. And so we're coming out of this kind of phase where we've had almost no technological progress in the economy, we've had remarkably little job churn as a result of that relative to any historical period. And so even if AI ticks up, even if AI triples productivity growth in the economy, which would be a massively big deal, it would take us back to the same level of job churn that was happening between 1870 and 1930. And if you go back and you read accounts of 1870 to 1930, people just thought the world was a watch with opportunity. At that rate of technological transformation, kids were able to develop new careers into new areas of the economy, building new kinds of products and services. I mean, a huge part of everything in our modern world today was kind of invented and proliferated during that period. And so even if AI triples the pace of economic change in the economy, it's going to just translate to a much higher rate of economic growth, it's going to translate to a much higher rate of job growth. And there'll be some level of task level and job level substitution that will take place, but that will be swamped by the macro effects of economic growth and innovation that will happen. And then corresponding to that, there'll be hiring booms, quite honestly, I think all over the place. And then again, go back to the other thing, which is like, this is all happening in the face of declining population growth and increasingly population shrinkage. And so human workers in many, many, many countries over the next 10, 20, 30 years are going to be at more and more of a premium, literally because you're going to have shrinking population levels. We don't really want to get into politics particularly, but it does feel like the world broadly is going to reverse course on the rates of immigration that we've had for the last 50 years.
00:24:32 · Marc Andreessen, Lenny Rachitsky
It seems to be kind of a broad-based thing happening with rise to nationalism, concerns about the rate of immigration and immigration historically in countries like the US, it's kind of ebbed and flowed over time based on how the national mood shifts. And so if you sort of combine in a country like the US or any country in Europe, if you combine declining population with less immigration, the remaining human workers are going to be at a premium, not at a discount. And so I think that combination of faster productivity growth, faster economic growth, and then slower population growth and less immigration actually means there's going to be much less of this kind of dystopian no jobs' thing. I just think it's probably totally off pace. [00:25:10] S1: That is extremely interesting. So what I'm hearing is, you're not super worried about job loss. Is the key here that the timing kind of just works out, this population decrease, all these kind of have to line up for there not to be this massive job loss with AI?
00:25:24 · Marc Andreessen
[00:25:24] S0: Yeah. Well, look, if we didn't have AI, we'd be in a panic right now about what's going to happen to the economy. Because what we'd be staring at is a future of depopulation. And depopulation without new technology would just mean that the economy shrinks. So it would mean that the economy kind of itself kind of shrinks over time. The opportunity diminishes. There are no new jobs, there are no new fields, there's no new source of consumer demand for spending on things. And so you would be very worried about going into a period of severe decline of stagnation. And essentially, you'd be looking at these very dystopian scenarios of an economy kind of self-euthanizing itself over time. And so you'd be very worried about the opposite of what everybody thinks that they're worried about. The only reason we're not worried about that is because we now know that we have the technology that can substitute for the lack of population growth and then also for the lack of immigration that's likely. And so I would say the timing has worked out miraculously well in the sense of, we're going to have AI and robots precisely when we actually need them, to keep the economy from actually shrinking. And I just think that's just a fundamentally good news story. To get to the mass job loss thing that people are worried about on the other side of things, you'd have to look at far, far, far higher rates of productivity growth. You'd have to look at rates of productivity growth that are 10, 20, 30, 50% a year, something like that, which are orders of magnitude higher than we've ever had in an economy in the history of the planet. It's possible that we get that. I mean, look, I have my utopian temptation along with everybody else. If AI radically transforms everything overnight, then maybe let's play out the kind of utopian- ... radically transforms everything overnight. Then maybe let's play out the kind of utopian scenario. You get to a much higher level of productivity growth, you get to much higher level of technological change. Corresponding to that, you'll have a massive economic boom. You'll have a massive growth in the economy. And then corresponding with that, you'll have a collapse in prices. And so the price of goods and services that are, whatever you're going to call it, affected by or commoditized by AI, the prices of those goods and services will collapse.