Ben Horowitz says AI could spark a post-electricity leap in living standards — but risk eroding purpose

• Ben Horowitz said AI could rival electricity in boosting living standards and reshaping life.
• Horowitz said AI will solve problems we've learned to live with but may leave people unmoored.
• While Silicon Valley leaders are broadly optimistic, AI experts warn of AI-related job loss risks.

Ben Horowitz believes artificial intelligence is about to reshape daily life as profoundly as electricity once did.

Speaking on a recent episode of the "Ben & Marc Show," the Andreessen Horowitz cofounder framed AI as a once-in-a-century technological break.

"This is on the order of the steam engine or electricity," Horowitz said, adding that the technology is so powerful it will push society into "a different world."

But while AI may deliver dramatic gains in living standards, Horowitz said it will also raise deeper questions about meaning, purpose, and what humans do with their time.

AI as a universal problem-solver

Horowitz said AI will help fix problems humans have "learned to live with," including cancer, transportation challenges, and large-scale fraud detection in the US.

The result, he believes, could be a broad-based improvement in quality of life that's difficult to fully imagine from the present vantage point.

"I think life — just the quality of life for everybody — is about to get way, way better than it's ever been," Horowitz said.

However, Horowitz also struck a cautionary note. If AI removes too much friction from life — and too many traditional sources of struggle, work, and responsibility — humans may find themselves unmoored.

"The one thing with humans that's a little messed up," he said, is that if progress pushes people "too far away from some grounded purpose," including shared beliefs or spiritual anchors, they may "attach onto some dumb stuff."

Silicon Valley leaders and AI experts diverge

Horowitz's prediction echoes those voiced by other AI leaders.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and xAI, has said AI could usher in a future of "universal high income," where work becomes optional, and abundance eliminates poverty, while Bill Gates, the Microsoft cofounder, has suggested AI may make radically shorter workweeks possible.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have both acknowledged risks to meaning in a post-work world but remain optimistic that humans will adapt and find new sources of fulfillment.

Beyond Silicon Valley's more optimistic visions, figures like Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist often called the "godfather of AI," Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, investor Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital Management, and AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky have warned of outcomes ranging from mass job losses and the erosion of meaning at work to, in the most extreme cases, threats to humanity's survival.