Jack Clark

speaker

541 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 27 Mar

Jack Clark’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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Hard Fork · The Ezra Klein Show: How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy? · 27 Mar 2026 podcast

Our general principle as we talk about things to also make ourselves culpable, this is an area where we're going to have to say more.

I came back from paternity leave and my two big projects this year are better information about AI and the economy that we will release publicly and generating much better information and systems of knowing information internally about the extent to which we are automating aspects of AI development.

I think right now it's happening in a very peripheral way.

Researchers are being sped up, different experiments are being run by the AI system.

It would be extremely important to know if you're fully closing that loop.

And I think that we actually have some technical work to do to build ways of instrumenting our internal development environment so that we can see trends over time.

Am I worried?

I have read the same things that you have read, and this is the pivotal point in the story when things begin to go awry, if things do.

We will...

cool out this trend as we have better data on it.

And I think that this is an area to tread with like extraordinary caution because it's very easy to see how you delegate so many things to the system that if the system goes wrong, the wrongness compounds very quickly and gets away from you.

Well, maybe I have something of an answer here.

Today, our systems and the other systems from other companies are tested by third parties, including parts of government, for national security properties, biological weapons, cyber offense, other things.

It's clearly a problem area where the world needs to know if this is happening.

And you almost certainly, I think, if you polled any person on the street and said, do you think AI companies should be allowed to do recursive self-improvement after explaining what that was, without checking with anyone, they would say, no, that sounds pretty risky.

I would like there to be some form of regulation.

I wrote a research paper in 2021 called How and Why Governments Should Monitor AI Development with my co-author Jess Whittleston in England.

And I think I'm not attributing a causal factor here, but within two years of that paper, we had the AI safety institutes in the US and UK testing things from the labs, roughly monitoring some of these things.

So we can do this hard thing.

It has already happened in one domain.

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