Jack Clark

A hundred years ago, C.S.

Lewis wrote a book called The Screwtape Letters, which is about a demon in hell whose job is writing letters to their boss, a senior demon, a manager demon, about their attempts to corrupt a person on Earth.

And they have a letter where they say, wonderful news, my human has just got an invention called the telephone.

LAUGHTER

And the telephone means that whenever my person is alone and would otherwise introspect on themselves and be drawn closer to God, they will instead pick up the phone and call their friends, which brings them closer to hell.

Now, what does that get right and wrong?

What it gets right is that things like phones actually massively changed how people relate to one another.

Yes.

But I don't think that we're all like doomed to hell because we have phones.

Well.

Well.

I realize now I picked the wrong example, but it gets at the shape of this, right?

We are going to experience immense change, and we're looking at it, and we're trying to think through what it means for how we relate to us as people, and it will change how we relate to one another.

I have a high tolerance for weird phone calls at this point in time.

I think the nature of the conversations we're having is, we have been saying for years that AI systems would get better, and they would keep getting better until they got better than people at most tasks, and it started encoding last year.

don't be surprised when they get better at other tasks as well.

And that doesn't go down super well on the calls, so then you frame it as, well, what do we do about this?

And I think the challenge is, this isn't a special model.

This is representative of... This isn't your hacking model, as I get it.

It's our regular Claude.