Success Quote by Marc Andreessen

Andreessen lands the punchline with a venture capitalist's favorite move: reframe the impossible as merely inevitable arithmetic. The first clause flatters Silicon Valley's competence ("they seem to work"), but the real engine is the second sentence, which quietly indicts the rest of us. The subtext is misanthropic in a very Silicon Valley way: human beings are not just imperfect drivers; they're an embarrassingly low benchmark. If the bar is already on the floor, software doesn't need to be magical to clear it.

That rhetorical pivot matters. It's not a technical claim about autonomy so much as a cultural argument for permission. By emphasizing human error rather than machine excellence, he pre-sells the moral case for automation: you don't adopt self-driving cars because robots are flawless, you adopt them because people are reliably dangerous. It's an appeal to comparative advantage, dressed up as common sense.

The context is early-2010s techno-optimism, when Google X projects signaled that the big platforms weren't just organizing information; they were reorganizing the physical world. Andreessen, as a prominent investor and hype-magnet, is also speaking to regulators and the public, not engineers. He anticipates the most intuitive objection (What if the computer makes mistakes?) and neutralizes it by pointing at the existing carnage of human driving.

There's a sly cynicism here too: progress doesn't require utopia, just a sufficiently grim baseline. In Andreessen's framing, the future arrives not because technology becomes perfect, but because we finally admit how bad we are.