Evan Williams, a founder of Twitter, Blogger and now Medium, was less quixotic.

“Technology is the direct cause of our biggest problems – global warming, health issues, potential nuclear annihilation – and it’s also a solution,” he said. “It doesn’t have a preference. It’s like what Homer Simpson said about alcohol: It’s the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

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There is no shortage of optimism in Silicon Valley, but I’ve developed a scale to measure just how starry-eyed Silicon Valley is about its work.

On one end are Larry Page of Google (“People are starving in the world not because we don’t have enough food; it’s because we’re not organized to solve that problem and our computers aren’t helping us do that,” he said last spring — not long before starting a company to try to help humans stave off mortality) and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook (“Expanding Internet access could create another 140 million new jobs, lift 160 million people out of poverty, and reduce child mortality by hundreds of thousands of lives,” he wrote in a paper about his company’s plan to expand Internet connectivity around the world).

On the other end is Bill Gates of Microsoft (“P.C.s are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs,” he said in an interview last fall in which he argued that vaccines are more important to the developing world than Internet connectivity.)

Mr. Andreessen — whose claim that smartphones are a basic human need was in response to Mr. Gates — clearly falls on the starry-eyed end of the scale. Mr. Williams is somewhere in the middle.