Jack Clark on AI's Uneven Impact
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2025
⏱️ 63 minutes
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Summary
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 enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded March 28th, 2025.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:13.5 | Learn more at Mercadis.org. |
| 0:15.7 | For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, |
| 0:20.4 | visit Conversationswith with Tyler.com. |
| 0:25.2 | Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:29.0 | Today, I am at Anthropic with Jack Clark. |
| 0:32.3 | As you may know, there is now an anthropic economic index, which is measuring the effect of advanced AI on the U.S. |
| 0:39.5 | economy. There are two associated reports as of March 2025, and soon more to come. Jack, of course, |
| 0:47.0 | is the co-founder of Anthropic. Before that was the policy director at OpenAI, a reporter at Bloomberg, |
| 0:53.4 | and originally has his background in the |
| 0:55.3 | humanities, and he comes from Brighton, England. Jack, welcome. |
| 0:58.8 | Well, thanks for having me, Tyler. Pleasure to be here. |
| 1:01.6 | Where is it in our economy that AGI will affect last in a significant manner? |
| 1:07.3 | Oh, I'd hazard a guess that it's going to be things that are the trades and the most artisanal parts of them. |
| 1:13.9 | So you might think of trades as having things like electricians or plumbing or also things like gardening. |
| 1:19.8 | 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, |
| 1:28.6 | but because of their notoriety and sometimes an aesthetic quality. I think that my take might be |
| 1:34.2 | gardening, actually. And they won't use AGI to help design the garden or just the human front will |
| 1:41.4 | never disappear. I think the human front will never disappear and people will |
| 1:46.2 | purchase certain things because of the taste of the person, even if that taste looks like certain |
| 1:53.2 | types of modern art production where the artist actually backs on to thousands of people that work |
... |
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