Jack Clark: prediction

Transcript context

…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? 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 nuclear-power-failure-mode story, where we do some kind of large-scale regulatory scheme. We make it hard to do this stuff, and it ceases to have much of an effect. Maybe it has an effect elsewhere. The other case I’d give would be . . . It’s very hard for me to give a 0 percent case because we know today it’s incredibly useful for coding. If you just stopped all of it today, all further progress, I think the coding use case alone is going to be incredibly useful because it grows the ability to digitize parts of the economy, which we know drives faster loops in different parts of the economy, but generates value. I think 0 percent is basically sub-1 percent chance of happening. 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. In the 5 percent 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?…

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