Jack Clark on AI's Uneven Impact

Few understand both the promise and limitations of artificial general intelligence better than Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic. With a background in journalism and the humanities that sets him apart in Silicon Valley, Clark offers a refreshingly sober assessment of AI's economic impact—predicting growth of 3-5% rather than the 20-30% touted by techno-optimists—based on his firsthand experience of repeatedly underestimating AI progress while still recognizing the physical world's resistance to digital transformation. In this conversation, Jack and Tyler explore which parts of the economy AGI will affect last, where AI will encounter the strongest legal obstacles, the prospect of AI teddy bears, what AI means for the economics of journalism, how competitive the LLM sector will become, why he's relatively bearish on AI-fueled economic growth, how AI will change American cities, what we'll do with abundant compute, how the law should handle autonomous AI agents, whether we're entering the age of manager nerds, AI consciousness, when we'll be able to speak directly to dolphins, AI and national sovereignty, how the UK and Singapore might position themselves as AI hubs, what Clark hopes to learn next, and much more. Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jack-clark/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/U1ZMmKMMHgQ. Recorded March 28th, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by donating https://mercatus.donorsupport.co/page/podcastgift?utm_source=cwt+podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=shownotes today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Follow Jack https://x.com/jackclarkSF on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:25Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am at Anthropic with Jack Clark. As you may know, there is now an Anthropic Economic Index, which is measuring the effect of advanced AI on the US economy. There were two associated reports as of March 2025, and soon more to come. Jack, of course, is the co-founder of Anthropic. Before that was the Policy Director at OpenAI, a reporter at Bloomberg, and originally has his background in the humanities, and he comes from Brighton, England. Jack, welcome.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Well, thanks for having me, Tyler. A pleasure to be here.

• 1:01Tyler Cowen?

  Where is it in our economy that AGI will affect last in a significant manner?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Oh, I'd hazard a guess that it's going to be things that are the trades and the most artisanal parts of them. So you might think of trades as having things like electricians or plumbing, or also things like gardening. But I think within those you get certain high-status, high-skill parts where people want to use a certain tradesman, not just because of their skill, but because of their notoriety, and sometimes an aesthetic quality. I think that my take might be gardening, actually.

• 1:37Tyler Cowen?

  And they won't use AGI to help design the garden, or just the human front will never disappear?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  I think the human front will never disappear, and people will purchase certain things because of the taste of the person, even if that taste looks like certain types of modern art production where the artist actually backs on to thousands of people that work for them, and they're more orchestrating it.

• 2:01Tyler Cowen?

  And how about in the more desk-bound part of the service sector? Where will it come last?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Come last? Oh, good question. I think that on this...

• 2:11Speaker 01

  There are certain types of desk-bound work that just require talking to other people and getting to alignment or agreement. You might, if you count certain types of sales.

• 2:21Tyler Cowen?

  But it's great at doing that already, right? It's a wonderful therapist.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  It is, but we don't send Claude to sell Claude. Yet, we send people to sell Claude. Even though Claude could probably generate the text to do the sales motion, people want to do commerce with other people. So I think that there'll be certain relationships which get mediated by people. And people will have a strong preference, probably for deals that they make on behalf of their larger pools of capital, where the deals are done by human proxies for large automated organizations or pools of capital.

• 2:53Tyler Cowen?

  Where will AGI encounter the strongest legal obstacles?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  I think a few years ago, it was encountering quite strong obstacles in the law itself, because lawyers tended to like being able to charge very high prices and had a dislike of things that could bid them down. But my less flippant answer is probably big chunks of healthcare, because it's bound up in certain things around how we handle personal data, all of the standards around that. All of those standards are probably going to need to be changed in some form to make from amenable to being used by AI. And we've had a really hard time updating or changing data standards in general.

• 3:34Tyler Cowen?

  But once you can put the AI on your own hard drive, which will be pretty soon, right? Won't that all change?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  It will change in the form of gray market expertise, but not official expertise. I had a baby recently, and so whenever my baby like bonks their head, while I'm dialing the advice nurse, I talk to Claude just to reassure myself that the baby isn't in trouble. I don't think we actually fully permit healthcare uses by our own terms of sorts. We don't recommend it because we're worried about all of the liability issues this contains. But I know through my revealed preference that I'm always going to want to use that. But I can't take that Claude assessment and give it to Kaiser Permanente. I actually have to talk through a human to get everything else to happen on the backend to work out if they need to prescribe my child something.

• 4:21Tyler Cowen?

  So the number one job will be surreptitiously transmitting the generation of information that comes from AIs, in essence?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Some of it may be that. Some of it is about laundering the information that comes from AIs into human systems that are not predisposed to that information going in directly.

• 4:39Tyler Cowen?

  I was thinking you might say that United States government or some parts of it would be where strong AI would come last. I think that would be my forecast. They still use software from the sixties or maybe even the fifties sometimes.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  They do, but I actually suspect that that could be a place where we see really rapid changes, actually, and for a couple of reasons. One, we know that AI has relevance to national security. It develops certain types of capabilities.

• 5:09Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, yeah, that will happen quickly.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  That'll happen quickly.

• 5:11Tyler Cowen?

  But the rest of government.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  The rest of government.

• 5:12Tyler Cowen?

  Department of Education, HHS.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  The non-scary, sharp part of government. I would wager that it will become surprisingly easy to get it into really hard parts of government, and then there will be a question of political will. But all around the world, and I'm sure you experience this, governments desperately want growth and they desperately want efficiency. I mean, we see that here today.

• 5:37Tyler Cowen?

  Do they?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  They they say that.

• 5:39Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, I agree there.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  But I think if you look at also things like voter polling and other things, people want to see more changes out of government than they're currently getting. And I think sometimes constituent preferences do ultimately change what their elected officials do. I would just take the the other side of this, that government may move slightly faster than you think. It may be very large, established companies that end up having some of the greatest resistance to this in certain areas.

• 6:07Tyler Cowen?

  Let's say it was decided that half of the staff of H U D or Department of Education could be replaced by strong AI or AGI. Do we first need to hire more people to make that happen? And who is it we can hire, what wage, that switches the system so you can lay off the remaining half? I don't understand how that's ever going to work.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I think that it will only work in a scenario where the system has got so powerful that you can bring the AI system in itself to help you think through this. And then there will be a question of political will, which is where the system might, this all might break down.

• 6:46Tyler Cowen?

  What do you think is the chance that we decide to protect, say, half of the jobs in existence today with laws analogous to those we find in law and medicine against strong AGI?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  I think there is a high chance for a political movement to arrive, which tries to freeze a load of human jobs in bureaucratic amber as a way to deal with the political issues posed by this incredibly powerful technology and how fast the changes are going to come from. I don't think that we'll do this in like a reasoned way. I think it'll be driven by the chaotic winds of like political forces. And it feels like the sort of outcome that happens if we as the companies building this stuff and our customers don't generate enough examples of what good transitions look like.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  The fewer bits of evidence you have there and the more evidence you have of larger economic changes, probably the higher chance there'll be a desire to step in and protect workers in different domains, which comes from an impulse based around wanting to help people. But it might ultimately not be the most helpful thing over the course of decades to do that.

• 8:00Tyler Cowen?

  But is it possible that's actually in a constrained sense, the very best outcome? People will still have a job. They'll go somewhere in the morning. A lot of the work, especially the hard work, will be done by the AIs. Obviously, we'll be richer so we can afford this all of a sudden. It won't feel that bad to people. Life will look familiar. Isn't that in a sense what we should be aiming for?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  I think we should be aiming for

• 8:25Tyler Cowen?

  In the same sense, you might need, say, a generous welfare state to have free trade.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:29Tyler Cowen?

  The welfare state isn't always the most efficient, but if people accept freer trade, it's an okay bargain. Isn't this in a sense the welfare state for the service workers? And they still get to go somewhere in the morning if they want to, but they don't have to.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I believe that people, all people have a desire for meaning and like salient to what they do on a day to day basis. And my worry with what you describe is it might not feel like it has meaning, sufficient meaning. I think that there is some giant class of activity that we want to continue happening in the world that people do and from which they draw meaning. But I don't know that the best way to get there is to take some class of work and say, this is work that we're like protecting and from which meaning will spring. Because I'm not confident that you'll pick a load of jobs which naturally create their own meaning in that sense.

• 9:21Tyler Cowen?

  But hasn't this succeeded in academia, pre-AI? So most academic jobs are not that meaningful. The research people do, it's not read by anyone. Maybe there are decent teachers. But people take great pride in their research. They put a lot of effort into it. It's meaningless. It seems we solve that problem already. We're just going to take the academic model. But instead of it being research, bring it to, say, half of our current economy, just to keep it going.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  But isn't there a kind of angst and nihilism even within high achieving parts of academia for this reason? Seems like when you speak to people, even very smart people who sometimes are doing the things you describe, they know they could be doing different things and they're trapped into some kind of status game.

• 10:03Tyler Cowen?

  There's some of that. But even the Nobel laureates, they're rivalists with each other. They can be very bitchy, very petty. But that's just human nature, right? If the Nobel laureates aren't happy, there's no post-AI world that's going to do much better than how we're doing for the Nobel laureates today, right?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I maybe my pushback is, I think that all of this could happen sufficiently quickly, that we might have the opportunity to just play different higher status games that are afforded to us via AI and the productive capacity it unlocks. I'm wondering if there are, there are definitely going to be entirely new jobs that are involved marshaling and fielding AI systems for all kinds of work. I think there'll be-

• 10:45Tyler Cowen?

  But those are hard jobs, right?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yes, but I think that there are going to be analogs which look more like fun exercises in getting AIs to kind of build things or make things or almost carry out like competitions and games where people can play even with one another. And I think there'll be entirely new forms of entertainment that has some amount of meaning and perhaps an economic engine wired into it that people can participate in.

• 11:08Tyler Cowen?

  I believe we're not that far from the age of what I call the AI teddy bears. You know what I mean when I say that? What percentage of parents now will buy those teddy bears for their kids and allow it?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  I I mean, I've I've had this thought since I have a a person that, you know, is my child that's almost two.

• 11:26Tyler Cowen?

  Sure.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  And I am annoyed I can't buy the teddy bear yet. I think most.

• 11:30Tyler Cowen?

  But you're an outlier.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

• 11:33Tyler Cowen?

  You are co-founder of Anthropic, right?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I don't think I'm an outlier. I think that once your lovable child starts to speak and display endless curiosity and a need to be kind of satiated. You first think, how can I get them hanging out with other human children as quickly as possible? So we're on the preschool list, all of that stuff. I also think, I mean, I've had this thought. Well, I wish you could talk to like your bunny occasionally so that the bunny would provide you some entertainment while I'm putting the dishes away or making you dinner or something. Often you just need another person to be there to help you wrangle the child and keep them interested.

• 12:08Tyler Cowen?

  But say that the kid says to you, Daddy, I prefer the bunny to my friends. Can I stay at home today? Do you take the bunny away? That's the tough part, right?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  I think that's the part where you have them spend more time with their friends, but you keep the bunny in their life. Cause the bunny is just going to get smarter and be more around them as they grow up. So if you take it away, they'll they'll probably do something really strange with AI friends in the future. No, I don't think I'm an outlier here. I think most parents would. If they could acquire a well-meaning friend that could provide occasional entertainment to their child. When their child is being like very trying, they would, they would probably do it.

• 12:48Tyler Cowen?

  But I feel the word occasional is doing a lot of work in that sense. So if you can just ration how much your kid has the bunny, parents are going to love it. I agree.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:57Tyler Cowen?

  But the same is with screens. A lot of children, they keep on wanting it. It's hard to tell the child you can't have it now, right? It's like in the old days, it was watching television. Oh, mom, can I watch Star Trek again? And can I watch TV seven hours a day? Well, that's not good. And that's hard to ration.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's some question here of how we portion this out. I mean, we do this today of TV where if you're traveling with us, like on a plane with us, or if you're sick, you get to watch TV for the baby and otherwise you don't because from from various perspectives, it seems like it's not the most helpful thing. You'll probably need to find a way to gate this and it could be when mom and dad are like doing chores to help you. You get the thing. When they're not doing chores, the thing goes away.

• 13:42Tyler Cowen?

  Do you end up with too much surveillance over your kid? Cause you'll know everything if you want to, right? And that might be a reason why you give the kid the bunny all the more.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  I think it comes down to frequency, which I mentioned, and also what you are and aren't allowed to know. I find surveillance puzzling. We have one of these smart webcams that we got, you know, when when the kids are early so that you just see that they're asleep. And, you know, if they're waking up, you work out if they're okay or not. And the main thing that that meant is that when the baby like cries at night, sometimes we go in less than if we didn't have the camera, because if we didn't have the camera, we'd have to go and check. And I think as a consequence, my baby tends to like sleep through the night a lot more because they don't get occasionally interrupted. Sometimes they wake and cry for a minute and just go back to sleep. So I think sometimes this stuff allows you to actually

• 14:33Speaker 01

  interfere less in a person's life if you know certain things about her.

• 14:38Tyler Cowen?

  But say you have the hypothesis that so many like seven year olds, they talk to themselves, they say weird things. And the AI bunny is going to report back to you.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, if the bunny says like your kid's saying strange stuff.

• 14:50Tyler Cowen?

  But they all say strange stuff. I might have been chattering on him at the New York Mets at age seven and it would have been perfectly harmless, but it may not have sounded that way.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're going to need to create spaces for unmonitored creativity in people. Actually, the same as how we have. An approach to AI research today, like now AI systems can output their chains of thought, right? Which is the reasoning they use to come up with with answers. And we've had this question at Anthropic of how much should we monitor the chains of thought? Because if you actually monitor them, you might create an anti-goal where the system ends up wanting to have chains of thought which are like, safe to be monitored and which don't cause demerits, which might actually break how it thinks in a bunch of ways. I think this is, this analog applies here,

• 15:39Speaker 01

  where you're going to need to choose how much you actually decide to know about people, or you risk creating incentives that change their behavior such that they, they have a negative effect.

• 15:51Tyler Cowen?

  You'll go out on a date and your date will say, please show me your AI report, right? What you've been talking to yourself about for the last three months.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:59Tyler Cowen?

  And you cannot show it, which is a negative signal, or show it.

• 16:04Tyler Cowen?

  We all learn what what other people are really like and we just grow to accept that.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, although if the person asks you to do that on the first date, it's fine. And if they ask on the second date, you probably shouldn't be dating that person, right?

• 16:14Tyler Cowen?

  But even during the swipe, right? The AI, you're asked to upload it, and the AI just reads the other AI report and the person never sees it. And it tells you when you should swipe in the correct way.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know if that's so bad. I met my wife on on OkCupid where you, I don't know if you recall this, it was an online dating site where you like would fill out a survey.

• 16:34Tyler Cowen?

  Of course, match.com for me.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:36Tyler Cowen?

  Where I met my wife, yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  And then I met her and we, oh, non-AI but like automated system. It said, you guys might get along. So we'd met each other that way. So I don't know that this is so different to previous things we've used.

• 16:48Tyler Cowen?

  But that's information you're putting in voluntarily, right? As opposed to it watching you all the time.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  I just think that this is an area where we're going to figure out the new norms of this technology and what seems appropriate and not appropriate. And some of that is just going to be solved through the logic of business and other things through usage.

• 17:07Tyler Cowen?

  What will the economics of media look like? If you can read a digest of everything that is probably better than the original, or certainly not worse, or more synthetic? Who gets paid for what?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that this is one of the toughest questions in front of us. As you know, I'm a former journalist, right? And so I grew up as a professional during the period when online ad market changes were altering the business model of journalism because they were switching from what you might think of as value that you derive through quality, through subscriptions or people buying your stuff, to value that you derive from just large scale attention, because that became a lot of the model for for funding this stuff. And as a consequence, you saw the need to cross subsidize journalists with journalists that got loads of eyeballs and journalists like me who would write about databases

• 18:00Speaker 01

  got less eyeballs. So we were cross subsidized by the people that wrote about Justin Bieber or what have you. I think for media, it's going to be really challenging to think through how the economics of this work. And I think that it'll it'll change in a couple of ways. One, you might move to some of these kind of larger scale publishing house style models for certain types of fictional universes, which have subsidy and cross subsidy within them.

• 18:27Tyler Cowen?

  But where does the cross subsidy come from? Like Bloomberg, we know how that works, right? But if AGI is truly general and it's based on what's out there already, it should be able to do better than media on all dimensions.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  I think some things you want to have come from a person for reasons that are based on the fact that we're people. And I think people will preferentially select for media, which is fronted by other people, even if they're making it using other means. I also think you want a kernel of humanity in a load of this stuff. And then there'll be another type of of media, which is maybe attached to these subscription models, which is just on tap permutations of anything and everything. So there might be two markets that emerge.

• 19:12Tyler Cowen?

  But even the things we want to come from humans, so say we want Dan Landers,

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:16Tyler Cowen?

  the advice columnist to come from an actual Dan Landers. The Dan Landers of the world, they're using AIs, maybe surreptitiously. But the the value of that has been down because anyone can do that for the price of energy. Right? So we don't really end up with this one part of the revenue generating sector that can cross subsidize the other parts. Just if intelligence is pretty cheap, that hits all of media.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  It hits all of media and you will end up wanting to, I think, pay individuals. I think that happens even in even in the world we're in today. People want to subsidize individual creators who may be using a whole bunch of this stuff.

• 19:56Tyler Cowen?

  So it's like Substack world.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  It's Substack Patreon world for a large chunk of people, some of which will be incredibly successful. And then I think there's also going to be universe world for certain universes, which are like very large and rich, which are being extended by AI systems.

• 20:12Tyler Cowen?

  You mean like a Lord of the Rings universe?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, or Warhammer forty K to show my my nerd credentials, but.

• 20:18Tyler Cowen?

  But they'll publish fictional news, right?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:21Tyler Cowen?

  And real news will come from Substack or?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Real.

• 20:26Tyler Cowen?

  Substack is not an obvious cross subsidy. There might be within the Substack company, but.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Real news, I genuinely don't know. I think some real news comes from analysis of publicly available facts and it being composed together in a way that shows you insights that didn't exist. Semi-analysis on on Substack is a good example of this. A lot of public stuff leading to interesting conclusions. But news in the moment that has loads of context was subsidized by previous business models, which mostly no longer work. And I genuinely don't know what happens to it.

• 21:01Tyler Cowen?

  If we think about what we now call L L Ms, five or 10 years from now, that kind of AI. How concentrated or how competitive do you think the sector will be? I don't know if number of firms is exactly the right measure, but how do you see it evolving? Because right now there's at least six firms, depending how you count China, there's some complications, but there's a bunch of firms, right? Lot of competition.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  I would expect that there will be for quite some time, many, many years.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Areas where there are slightly different specialisms on all of these things. They'll be like concentric circles that have got massively large in terms of the space that they cover and they'll have edges which are slightly differentiated. But in those edges will be where the kind of frontier of of certain types of like human value stacks on top of AI value to lead to people choosing one or the other.

• 21:56Tyler Cowen?

  So Claude's more poetic, for instance.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  A bad example due to the economics of poetry aren't particularly great. You know, coding might be a better example, or there could be cases for things like certain types of scientific experimentation where actually taste might come to matter a lot for composing experiments. I expect we enter a world though where you have a single digit number of these like very, very large scale models which are servicing like a much larger set of wrappers on top of them that change the form factor by which they get integrated into your life and which have a load of helper functions or knowledge probably built by those AIs in partnership with some kind of other specialized AI system or expert knowledge from that domain to chain it in.

• 22:45Tyler Cowen?

  Here's a worry I have, and my former colleague Vernon Smith once wrote a paper on this. He argued that as you approach six competitors or more, that a sector essentially behaves like perfect competition, even if it's not exactly perfectly competitive. So if that's the case, how is it that AI or indeed any other companies can behave ethically above and beyond what they need to do to stay in the market and earn profit? Like, what room is there to be better than the next company?

• 23:13Speaker 01

  I think right now it's like we're car companies and we are mostly selling cars to teenagers who say, how fast is it and can I get it in red? And we're beginning to find businesses that operate fleets of cars and say, what seatbelts does it have? What is your accident rate? What are all of these other properties that the teenager has never asked us about, but these businesses do because it ties to their business model or to liability or to other things? I think therefore. There are technologies to be built that look like the safety equivalents that we have in cars or other things, which will change the logic of competition. So we're in competition right now.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  That competition will change as we unlock different markets that have different properties that they need to be present in the AI system. And those properties will often ladder up to certain types of safety technology.

• 24:08Tyler Cowen?

  So the price of insurance is carrying the mechanism, so to speak?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  I believe that this will be like one of the ways that it helps. Yeah.

• 24:14Tyler Cowen?

  How do we need to change or improve liability law for the price of insurance to actually carry that? Because right now liabilities from AI of all sorts, it's highly unclear.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that I have thought less about liability and more about information that should be made available by the companies. But I think these have like an interplay where today there isn't really a common labeling or disclosure standard about what what are like in these AI systems or the industrial practices you've used when like making them. And I think that this is ultimately an area where you can do interventions to get some common level of transparency and that'll interplay with both liability and also things like negligence, which will change the behavior of these companies over time. So there's some level of common information we can start providing about these systems, which will also change corporate behavior.

• 25:10Tyler Cowen?

  But the the information part worries me though. I'm more inclined to be an accelerationist and, you know, hope the benefits outpace the costs, which I definitely think they will. But information only picks up the private value. So the social cost to the decision you make, the information doesn't change what you do very much.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:28Tyler Cowen?

  So people know a lot about global warming. Some people eat less than me, but for the most part they don't, right?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things that you do is you create information which becomes truly common. I mean, the economic index work we've done is from one single firm, but ultimately you might want to generalize that to all firms, but then link it to large scale data gathering that governments might do. And I think if that became the case, you would have a higher chance of tying it to actual policy responses that would be larger in scope. I also think on climate change, just by measuring things like parts per million, stuff like that has helped catalyze large scale amounts of capital to get remobilized around the economy in different areas to deal with this perceived negative impact that that has.

• 26:20Tyler Cowen?

  Do you agree with my view that we will not have meaningful international agreements on the hard parts of AI, maybe on the simple parts?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Ninety percent agreement. I think there is a chance of something that looks like a nonproliferation agreement between states, including the US and China in the limit.

• 26:38Tyler Cowen?

  And the US and China enforce it and we become vaguely allied with them in this one crusade?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I think it might be deciding that certain things, certain capabilities of AI systems might be so potentially destabilizing that you don't want them broadly available, while recognizing that each government may be privately developing them, but you might have some common standard for what's available to everyone where you've decided, oh, this would lead to just like all kinds of chaos in in our countries as well as in other countries as well.

• 27:09Tyler Cowen?

  And it would be enforced by the UN or by America or just international norms, sanctions?

• 27:17Speaker 01

  My assumption is a lot of this gets enforced by checking and then throwing policy punches at each other on things like tariffs or exports or other issues. I don't know that there's global governance bodies that will be be formed. Some people feel optimistic about stuff like IAEA style models for this, but I think things that require like mutual inspection regimes end up being very, very hard to do under certain certain like rivalrous dynamics.

• 27:44Tyler Cowen?

  I worry we're in a world where NAFTA has not stuck.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:48Tyler Cowen?

  And NAFTA is one of the easiest agreements.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  NAFTA should have been easy.

• 27:51Tyler Cowen?

  Should have been easy, and it's not, to say the least. So say ten, ten years out, what's your best estimate of the economic growth rate in the United States?

• 28:01Speaker 01

  I mean, the economic growth rate now is on the order of one to two percent.

• 28:06Tyler Cowen?

  There's a chance at the moment we're entering a recession, but it would average two point two percent. So let's say it's two point two.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  I think my bear case on all of this is three percent. And my bull case is something like five. I think that you probably hear like higher numbers from lots of other.

• 28:24Tyler Cowen?

  Twenty and thirty I hear all the time. To me, it's absurd, but.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the reason that my numbers are more conservative is I think that we will enter into a world where there will be an incredibly fast moving, high growth part of the economy. But it is a relatively small part of the economy and it may be growing its share over time, but it's growing from like a small base. And remember, a large parts of the economy like healthcare or other things which are naturally slow moving and maybe slow in adoption of this. I think that the things that would make me wrong are if AI systems could meaningfully unlock productive capacity in the physical world at a really surprisingly high compounding growth rate, you know, automating and and building factories and things like this.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  But even then I'm skeptical because every time the AI community has tried to cross the chasm from like the digital world to the real world. They've run into like ten thousand problems that they thought were paper cuts, but in some add up to you losing like all the blood in your body. And I think we've seen this with self-driving cars where very, very promising growth rate and then an incredibly grinding, slow pace at getting it to scale. I just read a paper two days ago about trying to train human-like hands on industrial robots using reinforcement learning. Doesn't work. The best they had was a sixty percent success rate. So if I have my my baby

• 29:50Speaker 01

  and I give her like a robot butler that has a sixty percent accuracy rate at holding things, including the baby. I'm not buying the butler. Like it's like incredible. Or my wife is incredibly happy unhappy that I bought it and makes me send it back. So I think as a community, we tend to we tend to underestimate that. And I may be proved to be an unrealistic pessimist here. I think that's what many of my colleagues would say. But I I think we overestimate the ease with which we get into the physical world.

• 30:21Tyler Cowen?

  As I said in print, my best estimate is we get half a percentage point of growth a year. Five percent would be my upper bound.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:29Tyler Cowen?

  What's your scenario where there's no growth improvement? Or if it's not yours, say there's a smart person somewhere in anthropic, you don't agree with them. But what would they say?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  I think one is something that you touched on earlier, where we could get the politics of this really wrong, and the technology could just get put in a relatively small box that does some economic good somewhere, but at a very, very small constrained amount. That's the kind of like nuclear power failure mode story, where we do some kind of large scale regulatory scheme, we make it hard to do this stuff. It ceases to have much of an effect. Maybe it has an effect elsewhere. The other case I'd give would be, well, it's very hard for me to give like a naught percent case, because we know today it's incredibly useful for coding. And if you just stopped all of it today, all further progress, I think the coding

• 31:22Speaker 01

  use case alone is going to be incredibly useful, because it grows the ability to digitize parts of the economy, which we know drives like faster loops in different parts of the economy, but generates value. So I think naught percent is basically sub one percent chance of happening.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  And if it did, it would be a Luddite thing, or something that looked like war with Taiwan, leading to everything else looking different as well.

• 31:48Tyler Cowen?

  In the five percent scenario, put aside San Francisco, which is special. But do cities become more or less important? Clearly, this city might become more important. But say, Chicago, Atlanta. What happens?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  I think that dense agglomerations of humans have significant amounts of value. And I would expect that a lot of the effects of AI are going to be, for a while, massively increasing the superstar effect in different industries. So I don't know if it's all cities, but I think any city which has something like a specialism, like high frequency trading in Chicago, or certain types of finance in New York, will continue to see some dividend from sets of professionals that gather together in dense quantities to swap ideas.

• 32:33Tyler Cowen?

  But could it just be easier to stay at home and more fun? So I find I'm an outlier, but my use of AI, I either want to go somewhere very distant and use the AI there to learn about, say, the birds of a region. Or I want to stay at home. So it's a barbells effect. And the idea of driving thirty five minutes to Washington DC, that seems less appealing than it used to be.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe I just have a different personality. I feel like, or maybe it's that I work in a really, really confusing domain and I need to go and talk to other people who work in the confusing domain to to get remotely oriented. I think their revealed preference from stuff like COVID is that they have a greater desire for certain types of social thing that they may have thought, and now they're bouncing back to it. But it's going to interplay slightly differently with cities.

• 33:19Tyler Cowen?

  If so much of labor and capital is going to be revalued, is quality land the best investment? Because I don't know which firms will benefit the most, right? So you might bet on AI firms that sure, that's kind of easy, though it'll be priced in. But the other firms, who knows? So, you know, buy land in Los Angeles, say.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  I think that electricity and the production of electricity is going to be of tremendous value and.

• 33:47Tyler Cowen?

  But what's the thing you would buy?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I think you buy components that go into things like gas turbines and other things which are the like base of the technology tree for generating electricity, of which you know people are going to want to do lots of. And you could buy a basket of different components here. I would expect that to be of durable, meaningful value.

• 34:08Tyler Cowen?

  Let's say it's ten years from now, GPUs are their successor. They're not that scarce. There's a lot of idle capacity just sitting around. What do you, and let's say it's very cheap. What do you have it do in its spare time?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Oh, that's fun. I mean, I think one of the things is you might just pay AI systems by giving them access to compute, right? You could imagine some kind of Barter economy. Now, there are a range of bone chilling safety problems with what I just said. But let's like put that aside and assume that those are mostly dealt with. I think there'll be some form of trade with powerful AI systems or agents that work on people's behalf. And you may want to trade with them in the form of compute because agents may be able to use compute for themselves as well. So that's some of it. I think the other part is generating interesting permutations of stuff that you find kind of valuable or interesting.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  I also suspect that there are going to be very weird things we can't anticipate, but look like a form of entertainment that looks like parallel history generation or parallel future generation. I think people are going to, people are always fascinated by what ifs and rollouts of what ifs.

• 35:19Tyler Cowen?

  And fanfiction, I think, will grow immensely.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think large amounts of compute get used to generate alternate realities. But some of the alternate realities will be sliding door versions of today, where it's a very accurate portrayal, but with one difference.

• 35:33Tyler Cowen?

  And just what would you do personally? I'm not saying the world, but just you, Jack Clark. You have all this free compute. Will you have a try to write another play by Shakespeare or something else? Or how Brighton might have developed differently from year 1830? Or what are you going to do with it?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  The thing which I currently do with Claude Code is I'm trying to write a really detailed, good paperclip factory simulator, partly because of the inherent comedy of it, but also because I find these like very complex simulation games incredibly fun and engaging. And I also think there's a massive space in which you can create them, of which we've only created a tiny subset. And one of the things that we haven't ever really done is, because it's computationally so unbelievably expensive, is actually put AIs as agents inside the games. Really early attempts are actually Demis of Deep Mind. Before he did Deep Mind, he did a game called Black and White,

• 36:29Speaker 01

  which had actual, like, very primitive reinforcement learning driven agents playing in the game. I think there's tons of stuff you can do there, which would be amazingly interesting.

• 36:39Tyler Cowen?

  Speaking of agents, how should the law deal with agents that are not owned? Maybe they're generated in a way that's anonymously.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:48Tyler Cowen?

  Or maybe a philanthropist builds them and then disavows ownership or sends them to a country where in essence there's not much law. And I'm not talking about terrorism, that's a separate, but just someone sends an agent to Africa. 98% of what it does helps people. But as with every charity, some things go wrong, right? There's some problems. Can someone sue the agent or how is it capitalized? Does it have a legal identity?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  I will partially contradict myself where earlier I talked about maybe you're going to be paying agents. I think that the pressure of the world is towards agents having some level of independence or like trading ability, but from a policy standpoint, I'm reminded of that early thing that IBM said, which was a computer cannot be accountable to a decision, only humans can. And I think it got at something quite important where if you create agents that are wholly independent from people, but are making decisions that affect people, you've introduced a really difficult problem for the policy and legal system to deal with. So I'm dodging your question because I don't have an answer to it. I think it's a big problem question.

• 37:55Tyler Cowen?

  My guess is we should have law for the agents and maybe the AIs write that law and they have their own system. I worry that if you trace it all back to humans, someone could sue Anthropic, you know, 30 years from now. Oh, well, someone's agent was an offshoot of one of your systems. Well, it was mediated through Chinese Manus, but that in turn may have been built upon things that you did. And I don't think you should be at all liable for that. So I see liability getting out of control in so many cases. I want to choke it off and isolate it somewhat from the mainstream legal system. And if need be, you require that an independent agent is either somewhat capitalized or it gets hunted down and shut off.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it might be that along with what you said, having means to control and change the resources that agents use could be some of the path here because it's the ultimate disincentive. Although I will note that this involves pretty tricky questions of moral patienthood where we're working on some notions around how to get clearer on that at Anthropic. And if you actually believe that these AI agents are moral patients, then turning them off introduces like pretty significant ethical issues potentially. So you need to reconcile these two things.

• 39:11Tyler Cowen?

  I was not too long ago at an event with some highly prestigious people. This was in New York, of course, not San Francisco.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  That's where prestigious people hang out.

• 39:19Tyler Cowen?

  Well, and I used the phrase AGI.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:21Tyler Cowen?

  And not one of the five even knew what I meant. I don't mean they were skeptical in the deep sense, which maybe one should be, but they just literally didn't know what I meant. What's your model of why so many people are still in a fog?

• 39:34Speaker 01

  I am a technological pessimist who sort of became an optimist through repeated beatings over the head of of scale. And what I mean by this is I've consistently underestimated AI progress. You know, maybe I am today in this conversation when I talk about three to five percent growth rates. And what has happened is I have just endlessly seen the AI system get to where I thought it couldn't or thought would take a long time much faster than I than I thought. And so I've had to internalize this repeatedly. Nonetheless, we ourselves find it surprising. I mean, last year here, people were saying, oh, well,

• 40:15Speaker 01

  soon Claude is going to be doing most of the coding at Anthropic. We're now on the way to that where Claude Code and other things are writing tons of code here. And it still felt surprising internally, even though we have docs from last year predicting it would happen about now. So most people outside of the AI labs have no experience of pre-registering their predictions about AI and it getting proved wrong to them repeatedly. Because why would you do this unless you unless you work here? And I've found that the only way to like break through is to take their domain and show them what AI can do directly in the domain which they can evaluate it within, which is an expensive process.

• 40:57Tyler Cowen?

  If Silicon Valley up until now has been age of the nerds, do you feel that time is over? And it's now era of the, I don't know, humanities majors or the charismatic people?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  It's my time, Tyler.

• 41:09Tyler Cowen?

  Your time.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  I think it's actually going to be the era of the manager nerds now, where I think being able to manage fleets of AI agents and orchestrate them is going to make people incredibly powerful. And I think we already see this today with startups that are emerging that have very small numbers of employees relative to what they used to have because they have lots of coding agents.

• 41:34Tyler Cowen?

  Like mid journey, right?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:36Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Incredibly incredibly like efficient startup in terms of in terms of the people.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  So we're going to see this rise of the, yeah, the nerd turned manager who, who has, has their people, but their people are actually instances of AI agents doing large amounts of work for them.

• 41:53Tyler Cowen?

  So it's still like the Bill Gates model.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:56Tyler Cowen?

  Or the Patrick Collison model.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:58Tyler Cowen?

  So it's not that different.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  People that played lots of Factorio model. Yeah.

• 42:03Tyler Cowen?

  Will the English major rise or fall in status?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  I suspect that the humanities majors might rise in status while being given impossible problems. Sort of, you know, I'm a, I'm a humanities major originally and I'm being given problems like, solve the economic, the policy challenges implied by technologically driven like unemployment. Well, that's.

• 42:28Tyler Cowen?

  That's easy, right?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Easy, right? Or, or some people are saying, yeah, like, what should we do about moral patienthood? And what should the policy, the policy situation be? So I think there's going to be a recognition and we see this today, but there are other skills needed, but the problems that those skills are needed for are often problems which have proved to be impossible for humans to adequately solve for thousands of years. So there's lots of work, I guess.

• 42:54Tyler Cowen?

  What do you think will be the life expectancy of your child? Accidents aside, just normal life.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  I, I feel like a hundred and thirty is sort of, a hundred and thirty to fifty is not, I wouldn't find surprising. I, I often, you know, good because I feel like that we are discovering that there's tons and tons of stuff that we're learning about the body and about things like, you know, gene therapies and other things, which seem like there's a load of interventions you can do that might stack on one another to actually durably extend life, life, healthy lifespans for some period of time. And I was going to say a hundred and ten and then I tried to be a technological optimist. So I added a couple of decades on top, which I'm assuming comes from magic AI driven advances that I have underestimated in this response.

• 43:41Tyler Cowen?

  I think the brain is very hard to fix. If you just wanted to keep someone alive, literally,

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 43:47Tyler Cowen?

  perhaps a hundred and thirty, but for them to be the same person.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:50Tyler Cowen?

  I think I, I'm stuck at a hundred for most people.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 43:53Tyler Cowen?

  It's just hard to replace the brain without killing someone. You can replace all the other organs, right?

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think, I mean, here I subscribe to the idea that there's a ton we don't understand about the brain and AI is going to help us understand loads more. And there might be things that can be done here, which have eluded us because they are so unbelievably complicated. We needed AI mediated tools to help us figure out the experiments and approaches.

• 44:20Tyler Cowen?

  When Geoffrey Hinton says that right now the AIs are conscious, which I think is what he says, I believe he's crazy. What do you think?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  I think that he's.

• 44:31Tyler Cowen?

  You can be more polite than I am. That's fine.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Well, no, I'm the how I would phrase this is that I agonize about this. And, you know, you read my newsletter, I write fictional stories in it often, which are me grappling with this question. I I worry that we are going to be bystanders to what in the future will seem like a great crime, which is something about these things being determined to be conscious and us taking actions which you think are are bad to have taken against conscious entities. Internally, I say, there's a difference between doing experiments on potatoes and on monkeys. I think we're still in the potato regime, but I think that there is actually a clear line by which these things become, you know, monkeys and then beyond in terms

• 45:16Speaker 01

  of your your moral relationship to them. To Hinton's point, I think that these things are conscious in the sense that a tongue without a brain is conscious, right? Like it it takes actions in response to stimuli that are really, really, really complicated. And in a moment, it is has like a sense impression of the world and is responding. But does it have a sense of like self? I would sort of wager, no, it doesn't seem like it does. These AI systems, we instantiate them and they live in a kind of infinite now where they may perceive and they may have some awareness within a context window, but there's no memory or permanence. So to me, it feels like they're on a trajectory heading towards consciousness.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  And if they're conscious today, it's in a form that we would recognize as like truly alien consciousness, not not human consciousness.

• 46:05Tyler Cowen?

  And what year do you think you'll be able to speak directly to a dolphin? And it will talk back with a translator, of course.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  I think twenty thirty or sooner. I think that one's coming soon.

• 46:16Tyler Cowen?

  And what will you ask the dolphin? Because you'll be in a position, you'll be early in the queue to ask, right?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  I think.

• 46:21Tyler Cowen?

  What do you want to know?

• 46:22Speaker 01

  How do you have fun? Dolphins seem to have fun, like they're almost a famously fun having species. I think you'd ask that. I think you'd ask them if they dream. I think you'd ask them if they had a notion of grief. I think you'd also ask them like, what is mysterious to them about their world? Besides the fact you're talking to them, which hopefully they'd find somewhat surprising. I also think that you can talk to dogs as well, but that'll be, I think those conversations would be comedically like unsurprising. We're like, what do you want to do? And I'll say walk. And I was like, okay, well, we, we didn't need a translator for this one.

• 46:56Tyler Cowen?

  What book you think more and more about these days?

• 47:00Speaker 01

  There is no anti-memetics division by Q N T M, which is this, this book about a government agency that is dealing with anti-memes, ideas that erase themselves from your memory after you've dealt with them, but are themselves important. And it's about creating a bureaucracy that can handle ideas which are themselves dangerous and self-erasing. Because I think it gets at some of the problems that we're experiencing. And the other book that I think about a lot and might be especially relevant to you is a historian and economist called Fernand Braudel wrote a book called Capitalism and Material.

• 47:33Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, I love those three volumes. They're incredible.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  And I read it, I read it in university and I returned to it recently because it makes this point that you can look at how people's lives change through just the things they had available, like, you know, cutlery or whatever, or basic tools. And I think about AI through that lens. How is AI going to actually change my material life? And it comes to why I'm skeptical about some of the more ambitious forms of change is the actual change in our, in our day to day lives has been very, very, very slow, even with these advances. But if you read those books, it seems like the most significant things stem from changes in everyone's like material day to day.

• 48:12Tyler Cowen?

  They're reissuing the anti-memetic book, by the way.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  It is.

• 48:15Tyler Cowen?

  At a much higher price. But what would be an anti-meme today? Or maybe you can't remember them.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  I mean, a self erasing idea or uh. Well, what's a good example?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  I think that.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Maybe it's more that the the challenge of policy is you're building a bureaucracy for an alien that arrives at some point in the future that you don't know the the shape of and which may upon be a moment of its arrival be far smarter and more capable than you. So you don't know if this is just an insane exercise to do. And I oscillate between being a hey, we should build all of these institutions so that we can measure stuff and see what happens and be able to take responses to a like cyberpunk accelerationist, where actually we just need like companies to create benefits as quickly as possible. And then the system will figure out how to deal with that.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  And I find this to be a crazy making thing I'm trapped inside.

• 49:20Tyler Cowen?

  I suspect we're stuck with the latter, even if we don't prefer it.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  No one loves that, though. Well, a small number of people, some in San Francisco love that. But if you say to politicians, you're like, what we'll do is we'll create really fast moving companies that completely break conventions and change everything and you'll have to figure it out. It's a hard pill to swallow and it may be what actually naturally happens.

• 49:41Tyler Cowen?

  They say they don't love it, and I believe they're sincere, but they don't take quick action to be on the other course. So in in that sense, they accept it.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, by revealed preference, it's what they accept.

• 49:52Tyler Cowen?

  The system is not well geared to respond in any case, right?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the system is a big, slow moving cog, and we have a really fast moving cog here, and we have none of the gears between them that translate the movement from one into the other.

• 50:06Tyler Cowen?

  What will happen to a lot of national governments? So let's say I'm the government of Peru and I turn my education system over to AIs, which are probably American, right? And then, well, my social security system, my national defense, just keep on adding to the stack. And all of a sudden. Most of Peru is run by, in a sense, not run by, but American AI companies. So I mean, what is the government of Peru in that scenario?

• 50:31Speaker 01

  What is the government of Peru in a world with Google and Facebook? Is it the same?

• 50:37Tyler Cowen?

  Or? They don't make better decisions in Peruvian government than the current Peruvian government. So Peruvian bureaucrats may Google things, but that's a, just add it on top to current Peruvian government. But if for all their decisions are a lot of the big decisions, the kids are taught by AI. AI drones and detection systems. It's all AI, some of it's L L Ms. What's the Peruvian part in there?

• 51:01Speaker 01

  We did some work on this called collective constitutional AI at Anthropic where, you know, Claude has a constitution. And then we did this exercise of looking across America to find additional constitutional principles that might need to be included in it. And we looked for ones with high agreement and also ones of low agreement. I think governments will have some role of making sure that things reflect the normative preferences of their populations, which are going to continue to be varied, although perhaps AI means a certain homogenization takes place over time. But a lot of the role of government, I think, has always been to represent and encode the like revealed values of a certain population. And I think that that work is not going away.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  You're going to need to adapt these systems and inject certain values into them for the people that are using them and customers of them.

• 51:52Tyler Cowen?

  A lot of that could be fig leaves though. So maybe the AIs, they speak with Peruvian accents. There's the Peruvian flag on all the smartphones or their successor devices.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Go to the like AI break room and take it all off or something.

• 52:06Tyler Cowen?

  And just act like AIs and do the right thing. I mean, to me, it seems that world actually is better. I'm not sure people want it.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  But that's the world where now with, you know, certain forms of capital and capitalism, you'll say like stakeholder capitalism. And there'll be a very small amount of stuff like what you just described. And then the actual thing is just like capital making decisions.

• 52:24Tyler Cowen?

  Right. If Manus and DeepSeek are to some extent built upon American models, does that mean we've won the soft power war? That these models have a kind of soul, the soul of Claude, soul of GPT and China, if it embraces them. I wouldn't say surrendering, but the CCP over time loses control.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  I think the former might be true and the latter is probably not true. So the former is the values of the most widely used systems will have some kind of cultural export effect, just like media today, where so much of Hollywood defined a cultural imprint from which many, many other forms of media stemmed from. The same will be true of AI systems. I don't think that this is going to particularly change how well positioned the CCP or other governments are because just as they did with media, they recognize AI is a technology, but it also has a media technology property and they will very carefully work on that.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  And it's notable that if you look at DeepSeek, the one form of safety training they did do was about adherence to certain parts of CCP ideology. It's one of the only.

• 53:34Tyler Cowen?

  It won't talk about Taiwan in various ways.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Quite careful, yeah.

• 53:37Tyler Cowen?

  But in terms of its soul, isn't it still rather cosmopolitan, rather friendly, of good humor? And the CCP ends up imbibing that soul and slowly but surely, a funny case where non-alignment is what you want.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:50Tyler Cowen?

  The CCP no longer being the smartest entity in China, in essence, is turning over the keys to the shop.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  I think that's a very positive vision and I also think that it's something that it would be obvious to everyone, including people in the CCP today. So I sort of imagine that there is going to be a pushback against what you described and an attempt to create very powerful AI systems with radically different values.

• 54:15Tyler Cowen?

  I think there's also a chance they just try to shut the whole thing down.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:18Tyler Cowen?

  As they gave up on a navy much earlier in their history in China.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 54:22Tyler Cowen?

  Do you think there'll be many countries that just refuse? I mean, AI is a loosely defined term, but you know what, they just refuse AI and strong L L Ms.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  I think there'll be a small, very small minority of countries that do this. I think that over time, most countries have been integrated into this kind of global capital system, partly through strong incentives and they may have preferences but are different, but it hasn't often held.

• 54:49Tyler Cowen?

  But it will be a much bigger change than just having smartphones, right?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Some of this will appear as more minor than smartphones or as riders on top of the smartphone. I think that there might be countries that choose how fully to alter themselves or life around this technology. And there will be some countries where you get it as like an add on or it's a tool you occasionally use and other countries where you're much more immersed in it.

• 55:15Tyler Cowen?

  How do you think about the aesthetics of the Anthropic office where we are right now? It looks a certain way, why?

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Well, some of it is that we inherited it and it was slightly cheap, so it wasn't fully, fully changed over. It was partly, it partly reflects our kind of brand, which is oriented around trying to be, you know, tasteful and thoughtful and also not too, not too flashy. There's a certain kind of cheerful blankness to it, which I quite like. I'm very sorry to any of our designers that may see this section of a podcast, but we have to keep it in, in the spirit of being epistemically honest. I think that one thing we do though is we chose to have these kind of human illustrations of our systems. And that was an early intentional choice.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  I, I, I and others looked at some of the earlier designs and there were designs that were very tech focused and also brand identities which involved like collage and other things. But we went for these kind of human, human drawings because we are going to forever be trying to describe an increasingly complicated world that we are also creating. And I think in the limit, like a lot of what Anthropic is actually going to be doing as a company, is telling the story of what an increasingly automated AI Anthropic has done. So some of the brand like links through to what I think will ultimately be where we spend most of our time.

• 56:39Tyler Cowen?

  For the ongoing AI revolution, what's the worst age to be?

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 56:44Tyler Cowen?

  So say the best age is just to have been born, if you're going to live to maybe a hundred and thirty. And if you're very old and retired, it probably isn't going to make you any worse off. It'll help you in some ways.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  I feel like people who worked on AI for many years and are now in their sixties might be feeling very short changed because they're like, I love this technology. I really wanted to make this technology real, but technology is now becoming real. And I'm going to like, maybe miss some of the most interesting parts of it as it makes its way into the world. I think that could be kind of galling.

• 57:16Tyler Cowen?

  But they can retire, right? So say I'm forty and I did something upper middle class, but fairly routine. It feels a bit old to easily retrain. My guess is people who are forty are the worst off in relative terms, even though they might live longer.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  You could be right. I also think that there's some chance that the worst age to be is to maybe be

• 57:41Speaker 01

  ten or so, because you are now computer literate, you're sophisticated, you're going into an education system that is needing to react to this technology. You will be using the technology in a way completely different to your education system, and it might just feel violently confusing. That could also be, I see, being a really difficult time.

• 58:04Tyler Cowen?

  Let's say you're flown into Washington, put aside any idiosyncrasies of the current administration, and you're asked for advice. What do we do with these government agencies to get them ready for AGI? What do you tell them?

• 58:16Speaker 01

  One of the things is just try to deploy AI right now and discover all of the things that makes it incredibly difficult and then sort of.

• 58:25Tyler Cowen?

  But what does deploy AI mean? So people are reluctant to send legal queries to Anthropic, to OpenAI. So they're not going to do that just yet, even if it might make sense. What should they actually do now?

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Well, concretely, it's you work back from what does it take to get it on every single computer of every single person? And then you discover some of the concerns. Some of the concerns might be like, where does the data go or other things? Well, then you you work out if that's a problem you care about or not. If you don't care about it, you ignore the problem and consciously do. If you do care about it, you turn that into a very small number of prescriptions that the companies need to follow. But you need to attach that probably to a market signal. Or you do a project of trying to take some of the open weight models, some of which are very good, and just get them on computers. And then once they're on computers, you can work out, hey, maybe we want to buy this. What are the requirements? But I think you start from the most ambitious possible goal, which is it being

• 59:22Speaker 01

  available to every single person and you work back from that.

• 59:26Tyler Cowen?

  Is the UK going to become an important AI hub?

• 59:29Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 59:30Tyler Cowen?

  But will they? And what should they do?

• 59:32Speaker 01

  I think they have a chance of it. We have a memorandum of understanding of the UK government, which we signed, which is about trying to see if we can find ways this can be helpful. I think the onus is really on governments to figure out where they're willing to take like big swings. The UK has digitized huge amounts of its data. It also has gov.uk, which is a similar, almost to like Estonia, a highly digitized front end to many different UK government surfaces. That's the kind of thing where surely AI can be used to make a difference. So try and use it. Also, if you have a load of post-industrial areas where you provision loads of power that is no longer being used, try to see if you can allocate that for compute. I think thinking about the economics of this is important. I, I feel

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  like the economics of inference are going to become important and there might be something we want to think about on taxing inference differently according to where it happens, but could present an opportunity as well.

• 1:00:31Tyler Cowen?

  Will it be cost effective for Singapore to build its own quality AI systems? Because they have money, but they're small, right?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  It'll be cost effective for Singapore to build things that make large scale AI systems built by outside of Singapore work in a Singaporean context. But I think it's going to be very difficult for them to build, say, a foundation model that is going to cater to their needs better than the ones that are, that are offered by the large companies in the US and, and perhaps China today.

• 1:01:00Tyler Cowen?

  So they'll take open source, but make it Singaporean?

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  They will also probably do that as well.

• 1:01:05Tyler Cowen?

  Or the, the major companies will somehow allow governments to custom design systems?

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think today you have fine tuning services which are offered and you could imagine fine tuning AI systems into a sovereign AI system, which is then has some governance arrangement attached to it, but Singapore has. That doesn't seem out of the realms of possibility.

• 1:01:25Tyler Cowen?

  Very last question. What is it you hope to learn about next?

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Hmm. I mean, there are two things that I'm spending a lot of time on. One is

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Just theory of mind, how do we actually figure out how things are thinking? And also maybe ways to test the theory of mind? I'm reading a lot of the literature on that. And the other thing, which is a lot more mundane, is I'm learning to juggle. I go on long walks and I'm trying to juggle while going on these walks, which I think looks completely crazy person behavior, but I find it very centering.

• 1:01:57Tyler Cowen?

  And how good are you at juggling?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Very bad right now, but that's good. It gives me something that I can derive meaning from as we head into an increasingly AI-driven age.

• 1:02:06Tyler Cowen?

  Jack Clark, thank you very much.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Thanks very much.

• 1:02:11Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.