Jack Clark: preference

Transcript context

…In the same sense, you might need, say, a generous welfare state to have free trade. 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. I believe that all people, have a desire for meaning and salience to what they do on a day-to-day basis. My worry with what you describe — it might not feel like it has 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 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. Hasn’t this succeeded in academia pre-AI? Most academic jobs are not that meaningful. The research people do — it’s not read by anyone. Maybe they’re decent teachers, but people take great pride in their research. They put a lot of effort into it. It’s meaningless. It seems we solved 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.…

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