The Ezra Klein Show: How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's your day to play.
It's your morning to make the most of.
It's your way to love.
It's your climate to consider.
It's your answer to what should I watch? It's your money to save.
It's your song to analyze line by line. It's your 10 ways to find a little calm. It's your world to understand.
The New York Times. Find out more at nytimes.com slash your world.
Hello, Hard Fork listeners. We hope you're having a great week. We're going to be really honest with you. We have nothing left to give. We are spent, we're exhausted, and we're taking the danged week off.
Yeah, we are on vacation this week for our spring break, but we are not leaving you empty-handed. Because we would never do that to you. We wanted to share an episode of The Ezra Klein Show with you. A little artisanal podcast you may have heard about.
If you haven't heard of Ezra Klein, he's an up-and-coming interviewer, policy wonk, and friend of humanity. And he has a podcast that'll knock your socks off. And recently, he was joined by Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic and its current head of policy. In fact, after this episode was published, it was announced that Jack would be leading something called the Anthropic Institute, which will draw on research from across Anthropic to, quote, provide information that other researchers and the public can use during our transition to a world containing much more powerful AI systems. So how's that for ominous?
Yeah, and Jack is a great thinker and talker. He writes the great newsletter, Import AI. He's also a former journalist. Many are calling him the only former journalist who's ever made a good career decision. And he and Ezra had a great in-depth conversation about all of what's going on in the economy right now, the rise of AI agents and coding tools, the future of work, basically just a lot of things that we thought our listeners would be interested in hearing more about.
Jack also has a sonorous British accent that I think you will find to be incredible company as you go for a run or do your laundry today.
Yeah. It's amazing how just having a British accent adds like 15 IQ points.
It's very soothing, which is important when you're talking about existential threats to humanity.
So here's Ezra and Jack. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.
If you're lucky.
The thing about covering AI over the past few years is that we're typically talking about the future. Every new model, impressive as it was, seemed like proof of concept for the models that would be coming soon. The models that could actually do useful work on their own reliably. The models that would actually make jobs obsolete or new things possible. What would those models mean for labor markets, for our kids, for our politics, for our world? I think that period in which we're always talking about the future, I think it's over now. Those models we were waiting for, the sci-fi sounding models that could program on their own and do so faster and better than most coders, the models that could begin writing their own code to improve themselves, those models are here now.
They're here in Cloud Code from Anthropic. They're here in Codex from OpenAI. They are shaking the stock market. The S&P 500 Software Industry Index has fallen by 20%, wiping billions of dollars in value out. Excellent engineers, people I've known for years, people who are quite skeptical of AI hype, they're emailing me now to say they don't see how their job will possibly exist in a year or two. We are at a new stage of AI development. Not just development, we are at a new stage of AI products. I thought the way Sequoia, the venture capital firm, put it was actually pretty helpful. The AI applications of 2023 and 2024 were talkers. Some were very sophisticated conversationalists, but their impact was limited.
The AI applications of 2026 and 2027 will be doers. Or to put it differently, something that's been predicted for a long time has now happened. We are moving from chatbots to agents, from systems that talk to you to systems that act for you.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–33:41
2
What are A.I. agents and how do they differ from chatbots?
33:41–36:53
3
How did Claude Code demonstrate multi-agent programming in Jack Clark’s species simulation?
36:53–57:01
4
What technical breakthroughs let agents detect and correct their own mistakes?
57:01–1:42:41
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Hard Fork
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