Top Venture Capitalist Says AI Will Replace Pretty Much All Jobs Except His, Which Relies on His Unique Genius

The future is a world of jobless workers — except for the enlightened philosopher-kings of venture capital, that is.

Or at least that's according to Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen, who imagines a future where the workers of the world sit jobless, in an employment apocalypse that will affect pretty much everyone except the unique genius of him and his peers.

Appearing on his company's a16z podcast, Andreessen made the case that venture capitalists — like he and his rich buddies — will be some of the only ones exempt from the AI revolution.

"Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation... if it was a science, you could eventually dial it in and have somebody who gets 8 out of 10 [right]," the investor reasoned. "There's an intangibility to it, there's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology — by the way a lot of it is psychological analysis," he added.

"So like, it's possible that that is quite literally timeless," Andreessen posited. "And when the AIs are doing everything else, like, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing."

The billionaire investor paints a pretty grim picture of life after AI takes over, especially given that Andreessen is an outspoken critic of the universal basic income, the idea that everyone in society would be given enough to live even after their jobs have been automated. Add it all up, and it's a vision of the future that gives Andreessen and his peers extraordinary power over everybody else.

"After you die, VCs are the judges of whether you get into heaven or not," as one poster quipped on X-formerly-Twitter.

In reality, whether AI will ever be able to replace a meaningful number of workers is a pretty open question. At present, the best AI isn't capable of automating any but the most basic of tasks, and some experts argue it never will; it's also easy to imagine an underwhelming future in which AI automates many roles sloppily, at the expense of quality work.

And in that case, Andreessen's no common worker — the tech titan has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in AI startups like ElevenLabs, Figma, and Applied Intuition, making his prediction more than a little biased from the jump. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, most recently announced the launch of a $20 billion megafund for AI startups, which would be the largest VC fund in history.

If the "AI takeover" does come to pass, it's hard to imagine that gigs like Andreessen's would be spared. At the end of the day, all he really does is evaluate the financial outlooks of various startup ideas, which isn't the easiest task to do well, but a far cry from punishing physical careers like nurses and loggers, or rarefied intellectual ones like scientists and teachers.

Andreessen's decidedly selfish outlook is unfortunately well-regarded among the class of libertarian thinkers, techno capitalists and political pundits who parrot his ideas. His infamous tome, the "Techno-Optimist's Manifesto," lays out just who benefits from his AI revolution: "We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward."

Put another way: there is infinite money to be mined from the workers of the world, and a special class of entrepreneurs will be the ones to do so, all in the name of innovation.

As tech and economics researcher Jathan Sadowski observed in his recent book, "The Mechanic and the Luddite": "This outcome can only be achieved to great effect by putting a highly concentrated industry that is driven by accumulating more money than god and enacting its own internalized savior complex in charge of your innovation system."

More on venture capitalists: Investor Says AI Is Already "Fully Replacing People"

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