Worried that AI will take your job? Marc Andreessen isn’t.
The venture capitalist and cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz says the loudest fear around artificial intelligence — that it will wipe out jobs — is aimed at the wrong problem.
The real danger, he said, is what the global economy was heading toward without AI.
“If we didn’t have AI, we’d be in a panic right now about what’s going to happen to the economy,” Andreessen said in an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” released on Thursday.
Without a major technological boost, he added, the world would be staring at “a future of depopulation,” where shrinking workforces and slow productivity growth would cause economies to stagnate or even contract.
For about the past two decades, research shows that productivity growth in advanced economies has been unusually weak by historical standards, slowing further after the global financial crisis of 2008 despite rapid advances in digital technology.
At the same time, birth rates across the US, Europe, China, and much of the developed world have remained below the replacement level of about 2.1 children per woman — the threshold needed to keep populations stable.
“Depopulation without new technology would just mean that the economy shrinks,” Andreessen said.
AI as a fix to a declining workforce
Andreessen’s assessment echoes warnings from some demographers and some tech leaders like Elon Musk, who has repeatedly warned about the economic risks of population decline — a threat that the US and Europe have been trying to avert by promoting pro-natal policies.
AI, in Andreessen’s view, arrives at exactly the right moment to fix that declining workforce.
Rather than displacing workers en masse, it will help offset the shortage of people available to do the work, he said.
“The only reason we’re not worried about that,” he said, “is because we now know that we have the technology that can substitute for the lack of population growth.”
That doesn’t mean jobs won’t change. Andreessen is clear that AI will reshape work at the task level, automating parts of roles across engineering, design, and product management.
But he rejected the idea of widespread permanent unemployment — a prediction made to varying extents by several senior AI researchers, including Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “godfather of AI,” computer science professor Roman Yampolskiy, and UC Berkeley professor Stuart Russell.
Andreessen’s case for an AI upside
Even a dramatic increase in productivity, he said, would only return the economy to levels of job churn seen during earlier industrial booms — periods widely remembered as times of opportunity, not collapse.
In fact, Andreessen expects human labor to become more valuable in many countries as populations shrink and immigration slows.
“The remaining human workers are going to be at a premium, not at a discount,” he said.
In a more extreme scenario in which AI drives massive productivity gains, Andreessen predicts falling prices across goods and services — effectively raising living standards even if some jobs disappear.
“That’s the equivalent of giving everybody a giant raise,” he said.
His conclusion is blunt: AI isn’t threatening the economic future. It’s preventing a much bleaker one.