The costs of housing, healthcare, and education are skyrocketing, according to a recent blog post by billionaire investor Marc Andreessen.
The investor from Silicon Valley claimed that industries supported by or under the supervision of the government have lost their technological edge. He claimed that innovation is essentially disallowed in several heavily regulated industries, such as education and healthcare, which results in high prices.
According to Andreessen, less-controlled products, such as flat-screen TVs, will grow more affordable over time while the cost of highly regulated goods will keep rising.
Andreessen illustrated his point with a graph that used information from the US Department of Labor Statistics for the period of January 2000 to June 2022.
The graph revealed that whereas the cost of hospital services and college tuition had each climbed by more than 160% over the previous two decades, the cost of television sets had reduced by more than 80%.
Despite the present fear, he is less concerned about AI innovation destroying jobs because of data like this, which he claims is the result of legislation. But he doesn’t give any concrete instances of regulation.
The billionaire has previously advanced similar claims, declaring in 2017 that there are two distinct economies: one in which innovation is promoted and proceeds swiftly, and the other in which innovation proceeds slowly as a result of rules from the government.
The chatbot ChatGPT, which was introduced in November, has given rise to rumors that it may someday displace some workers. Some occupations may be more vulnerable to AI replacement than others.
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Healthcare, Education, and Housing Costs
Yet, the technology is far from flawless and has been known to produce false information and provide the wrong solutions to code problems.
Andreessen has already made a similar case, but this past weekend he presented it in a new way. During a 2017 Code Conference speech, he classified the economy into two categories: rapid and sluggish.
He notably stated in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2011 that the former is being consumed by software and is becoming more efficient, resulting in lower prices.
But, prices are rising quickly in the slow-growing sectors—eldercare, childcare, health care, education, construction, and government—while economists’ measures of productivity show essentially no growth.
He claimed that if left unchecked, those industries would essentially devour the economy.
In this weekend’s essay, Andreessen used the justification to refute the panic that artificial intelligence is displacing humans as workers, as well as the notion that AI is somehow apart from other technologies that have been seen as posing a danger to employees.
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