The New Yorker:

Silicon Valley envisions artificial intelligence ushering in an era of economic plenty. But what if the benefits are largely confined to corporations and investors that own the technology itself?

By John Cassidy

In early 2024, Anish Acharya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a big venture-capital firm based in Menlo Park, posted an article online titled “How AI Will Usher in an Era of Abundance.” Since then, and even before, various Silicon Valley types have been tossing the term around loosely. Last summer, Elon Musk even adopted the term “sustainable abundance” for a new Tesla mission statement. (Over Christmas, Musk substituted “amazing” for “sustainable,” saying the former term was “more joyful.”)

To be sure, abundance isn’t a new concept: it features prominently in the Bible. But it might surprise some people in Silicon Valley to discover that one of the first people to use it in an economic context was Karl Marx. In his “Critique of the Gotha Program,” written in 1875, Marx said that the bourgeois mode of production—capitalism—could be fully transcended only in “a higher phase of communist society . . . after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly.”

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