"AI Can Replace Artists But It Cannot Replace Investing Because Investing is an Art"
Marc Andreessen, he of the anti-democracy group chats, came out a couple days ago and stated that of all the jobs that can be automated, being a Venture Capitalist (his job, if a man who spend 20 hours a day in radical right wing group chats can be said to have a job) will not be among them. This is stupid in many ways, and I want to explore a couple of them. The implications are, I think, revealing.
Automating VC would be one of the easiest tasks in the world. All you need to do put in the business case, background checks, and past deals and their returns into a model. You could 90-95% of that job with no human intervention, maybe almost all of it. At the end, you’d likely end up with better performance as you wouldn’t be held hostage to the biases of men who spend twenty hours a day in an anti-democracy chatroom.
He is obviously engaged in special pleading, because, frankly, a lot of senior executive jobs, the ones done badly (Naive I may be, but I still do think a good CEO has value. Someone who ensures that issues are cleared out of the way of the people doing the work and as a point of tie-breaking when needed has worth), are transparently easy to automate. Andreessen is probably just trying to protect his own. Which highlights a point I have been making for a while — imitative AI is about class warfare not about actual technology.
I won’t go too deep into that here — you can read the post itself — but the gist is that imitative AI isn’t actually good enough to do any real job. It is, however, good enough to look good in a demo and to do enough of a job that business owners can pretend that they can get away with fewer people. They “just” need people to “validate” the work and off they go. Free stock increases for everyone! That is not how these tools have played out in real life of courser. You either end up with minimal to no gains since everything has to be checked by experts, or you end up with crappy products that, say, cost your company subscribers when they invent a policy that does not exist to explain a minor technical hiccup. No one who actually cares about running an efficient business would trust these systems as far as they can throw them. And smart companies, it turns out, aren’t. But people like Andreessen need these things to work, both for monetary reasons and to validate their own warped view of the world.
Which brings me to the phrasing that Andreessen used. Andreessen said that VC investing was more like an art, not a science. Everyone knows that imitative AI pushers have been going hard after creative workers. This is in part because they hate that artists have a skill they do not, and in part because art is one of the more human intensive industries left and thus must look tantalizing to someone whose path to riches depends on automating away jobs faster than they burn through billions of dollars on imitative AI systems. So, the claim that VC jobs cannot be taken away by imitative AI because they are an art is darkly amusing. But I also think it might show how at last some of these people simply do not understand creativity.
The ides that an art cannot be automated away but actual art producing workers can be read as the speaker believing that art is actually formulaic. In this I partly blame artists, especially writers. There is a little mini industry propping up the idea that either you must write to a specific formula to be read/produced or that all that matters is the formula. This is, of course, nonsense. Even a film that contains the tropiest trope that ever did trope lives or dies on the execution, the little things that the artists bring to it that make it uniquely the product of those artists. Writing to a formula will not make something good, nor will it guarantee being read. And everything, whatever Save The Cat and its imitators might claim, does not follow those “rules”.
But, boy, if you want to get rid of people making art, isn’t that a comforting idea? You don’t have to write well; you just have to plug into a specific formula and voila! Book! As a failed writer, I can assure you that it is not that easy. Craft matters. Execution matters. The little quirks, obsessions, oddities, and weirdness inherent in you that makes up your voice matters. There is no formula, nothing that ensures a good book or play or piece of art other than the humanity of the artists mediated through their skill. No one can replicate that with a word calculator. Andreessen’s own words could be an indicator that he realizes this, at least somewhere in the lightless expanse of what used to be his soul.
Andreessen may very well believe that what he does is important and tricky — an “art” not a science. If so, he clearly knows that some things cannot be replicated by a word calculator. He just wants to define those things as unique to what he values — money and investing — and not that anyone else values — actual art.