My excellent Conversation with Jack Clark

This was great fun and I learned a lot, here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

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.

An excerpt:

COWEN: Say 10 years out, what’s your best estimate of the economic growth rate in the United States?

CLARK: The economic growth rate now is on the order of 1 percent to 2 percent.

COWEN: There’s a chance at the moment, we’re entering a recession, but at average, 2.2 percent, so let’s say it’s 2.2.

CLARK: I think my bear case on all of this is 3 percent, and my bull case is something like 5 percent. I think that you probably hear higher numbers from lots of other people.

COWEN: 20 and 30, I hear all the time. To me, it’s absurd.

CLARK: 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. It may be growing its share over time, but it’s growing from a small base. Then there are large parts of the economy, like healthcare or other things, which are naturally slow-moving, and may be 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, automating and building factories and things like this.

Even then, I’m skeptical because every time the AI community has tried to cross the chasm from the digital world to the real world, they’ve run into 10,000 problems that they thought were paper cuts but, in sum, add up to you losing all the blood in your body. 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 60 percent success rate. If I have my baby, and I give her a robot butler that has a 60 percent accuracy rate at holding things, including the baby, I’m not buying the butler. Or my wife is incredibly unhappy that I bought it and makes me send it back.

As a community, we tend to underestimate that. I may be proved to be an unrealistic pessimist here. I think that’s what many of my colleagues would say, but I think we overestimate the ease with which we get into a physical world.

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. What’s your scenario where there’s no growth improvement? 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?

Interesting throughout, definitely recommended.