Even Edison Could Not Predict What His Invention Would Do
He pictured families gathered around sermons. Listeners wanted ragtime and jazz.
David Senra · Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z & NetscapeMarc Andreessen, the Netscape co-founder turned venture capitalist, was making a case for Thomas Edison over Nikola Tesla. Tesla had the brilliant ideas, Andreessen argued, but Edison was the grinder who turned ideas into companies, "at least the way the legend goes." Then he offered his favorite warning about asking inventors to predict the future.
"The people who invent the technology are often like the least qualified people to understand the long-term implications," Andreessen said, because they are "too buried in the specifics of the here and now."
He meant it as a rule he applies to artificial intelligence. When pioneers of AI are interviewed in the press and asked to describe what comes next, he said, people assume they must know. He singled out Geoffrey Hinton, the AI pioneer, who is an actual self-declared socialist. Andreessen summarized Hinton's forecast as rampant unemployment and "we need to give UBI to everybody," then joked, "what a coincidence, the answer from the socialist is communism."
Edison is his counterexample. Edison tried a thousand combinations of materials to find a light bulb filament, built General Electric and the national electric grid with funding from J.P. Morgan, invented the movie projector and the phonograph, and then spent years trying to enforce those patents. He was, in Andreessen's telling, a very proper, religiously devout gentleman of his era, always impeccably dressed and upstanding.
So it seemed obvious to Edison what the record player was for. Every family would buy one, plus a library of discs holding the great religious sermons of the day, and gather at night after work, wife and kids around, to listen to a sermon.
What arrived instead was music, ragtime and jazz, and Edison was completely horrified. Andreessen's point is that if Edison could misread his own machine that badly, there is little chance that somebody who has "been in the lab for 20 years" can forecast the economic, cultural, and social fallout of a new technology. He includes himself in that judgment.
Questions people ask
Did Edison really invent the phonograph to play sermons?
Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 and listed many possible uses, including dictation, books for blind people, and music. In early writings he did suggest religious uses, with sermons and hymns among the examples. Music quickly became the dominant commercial use.
Who is Geoffrey Hinton and why does he warn about AI?
Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist whose work on neural networks helped make modern AI possible, and he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. After leaving Google in 2023, he began warning that AI could displace many jobs and pose larger risks. He has discussed universal basic income as one response to job loss.
What was the fight between Edison and Tesla about?
It is usually called the War of Currents in the 1880s and 1890s, a contest over whether American cities would use direct current, backed by Edison, or alternating current, backed by Tesla and George Westinghouse. Alternating current won for long-distance transmission. Tesla was a brilliant inventor but struggled to build lasting businesses, while Edison built General Electric.