Silicon Valley icons Marc Andreessen, co-founder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, were on the stage at the Code 2017 conference in California on May 30th 2017 and spoke about the the impact of autonomous vehicles on jobs. Andreessen explained how the idea of automation stealing jobs is a fallacy, pointing to the lump of labor fallacy and the luddite fallacy.

“It’s a recurring panic. This happens every 25 or 50 years, people get all amped up about ‘machines are going to take all the jobs’ and it never happens.”

“I think the self-driving car has the opportunity to not only improve productivity for the people in the car, which will be a huge economic boost for those people. Not only has the opportunity to save lives — over a million people die worldwide in road deaths today caused by human drivers, and I think we can take that very close to zero, which is very good for both human welfare and for economic productivity — it’s a very serious dent in productivity when people get killed.”

Watch the part on autonomous cars and jobs starting in the video around the 27:45 mark:

This article has been also published in German.