How will AI affect cities and travel?

COWEN: In the 5 percent [economic growth] scenario — put aside San Francisco, which is special — but do cities become more or less important? Clearly, this city might become more important. Say, Chicago, Atlanta, what happens?

CLARK: I think that dense agglomerations of humans have significant amounts of value. 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. 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.

COWEN: Could it just be easier to stay at home, and more fun? 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. It’s a barbell effect. The idea of driving 35 minutes to Washington, DC — that seems less appealing than it used to be.

That is from my Conversation with Jack Clark of Anthropic.