A quarter century ago, Marc Andreessen pioneered the web browser, and as a venture capitalist today he remains a fount of capitalist optimism. In an interview with The Verge, Andreessen says he still hears a "steady drumbeat of empowerment and opportunity coming underneath what looks like a very stressed, very angry time."
He also thinks the autonomous-vehicle-driven future may take longer to arrive than we expect — the transition will be slow and complex, as NewCo's John Battelle has argued. But flying cars might well come sooner than you think. "I don't know if they'll get them to work," he admits, but if there's a breakthrough in battery tech, get ready.
Andreessen argues that the U.S. now has two different economies — one, led by tech, where giant leaps in productivity have transformed work and driven costs down, and the other, concentrated in healthcare and education, where labor costs dominate and keep rising. Startups are beginning to tackle those industries today, and they could start transforming very quickly — or, Andreessen admits, "the other possibility is this is just pure hubris, and five years from now you're going to play this back and you'll be like, 'Aha! Dot-com bubble 2.0.' "
If a tech-driven productivity boom shakes up the service economy, what happens to all the workers? Andreessen reminds us that the economy is furiously creating and destroying jobs — more than 20 million a year, roughly — so there's more room to absorb change than we think.
Source: Andreessen Talks Flying Cars and Fleeing Jobs
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