"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.")"
"Like many of Marx's works, the passage has been interpreted in various ways. 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.""
Silicon Valley leaders frame artificial intelligence as a driver of imminent economic abundance and rapid productivity growth. Venture capitalists and executives have adopted language like "abundance" and "sustainable abundance" to describe technological goals and expected outcomes, with some predicting double-digit growth soon. The concept of abundance has historical and ideological roots, including biblical references and Marx’s claim that high productivity could enable a different social order. Proponents link AI advances to transformative economic possibilities, while concerns persist that the primary beneficiaries will be corporations and investors who own the AI technologies, raising distribution and policy questions.
Read at The New Yorker
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