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Chapter 1: What is the significance of AI in the current economy?
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This is Planet Money from NPR.
Hey, everyone. For the past couple weeks, the Planet Money team has been on the road on Book Tour. Tonight, live from New York, the Planet Money book launch.
I'm in San Francisco. What's going on?
So excited to be in Boston.
Hello, everyone. Thank you so much.
We say hello, Seattle. Is that a thing we get to do on Book Tour? Yes.
We have been crisscrossing America doing live shows to help promote the new Planet Money book. We've been in New York, D.C., Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles. And this is a rare thing that we don't get to do very often. We don't get to meet and talk with so many of you. In DC, we played this game with the audience to demonstrate a concept known as the wisdom of the crowds.
This is the idea that if you ask a large group of people to guess the price of something, like a piece of art, the average will actually be pretty close to correct.
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Chapter 2: How does Jack Clark envision the future of AI and work?
Oh wow, that's good.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erika Barris. In every city on the tour, we've been doing these interviews with special guests. They've been Planet Money regulars like economists Raj Shetty and Emily Oster and some people in the news like the co-founder of Anthropic, Jack Clark.
By April 2027, AI systems should be able to do tasks that might take a person 150 hours. Now, what is that? That's almost a month's worth of work, which requires strange things to happen in the economy. Yeah, but like what task is it doing? Like what task are you thinking of?
What's the last bit of work that took you a month? Writing these questions for you took more time than I wanted. Yeah, yeah.
And also people like economist Daryl Fairweather, who's trying to help regular people understand the massively complex economy. housing market.
So I think a good metaphor for the housing market is musical chairs. Like the people who already own houses are sitting in their chairs. And whenever there's a new spring housing market, some people get up and they move and they select a new chair. And if you're not adding more chairs in, you can't get first time homebuyers into the market so easily.
Today on the show, two stops from our live book tour, San Francisco and Seattle, where we'll talk about AI anxiety and how you, yes, you could be the key to fixing the housing crisis. So first stop, San Francisco, where we got to talk with the co-founder of Anthropic, Jack Clark.
As you know, Anthropic and their AI models, Claude and now Claude Mythos, are raising all sorts of thorny questions about what AI can do and what it can't. And we were, of course, going to ask Jack about all of that.
But we wanted to start with some writing he published online several years before starting Anthropic, a series of short stories that give some perspective into how he thinks about the future. Here he is with Planet Money host, Kenny Malone.
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Chapter 3: What role does housing play in the economic landscape?
It's a good question. So I think if AI goes as far as people think, you actually need to reconceptualize how capitalism in the largest possible sense works. I think if you end up in a world where you have a closed loop production system with just machine to machine to machine to machine and then people buy stuff, people need money. It's well established. That is the thing. Yep.
So you need to tax the robots and AI companies significantly and you need to somehow find a way to reallocate money from this machine economy to the human economy.
Okay.
One of the things that occurred to me in reading this book is, can people get this, by the way?
Is this like a thing? You can get it for free online at jackclark.net, but I haven't figured out how to sell the book yet. Each time I try and make an actual book to sell, I get sidetracked, and the last time was... when I was starting Anthropic and then I got busy.
Surely someone will publish your book, Jack. It's on my list. It plagues me.
I have a Google Doc that I stare at on my free moments.
Having gone through a series of reporting on books and how they get made, I suspect you'd be an attractive candidate to a publisher. One of the things that did occur to me in reading your book is that science fiction writers, by definition, are imagining a future. They're predicting a future. But you may be genuinely the only one that I can think of who is simultaneously shaping the future.
And we are all living in the world that your technology is creating. And so I do genuinely wonder if that changes how I should read this book. Like, should I think of your writing as a blueprint, as instructions, as a warning, as advice on how to live in Jack Clark's future.
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Chapter 4: How can zoning laws impact housing availability?
This was a very funny interaction. So, Jack, I met Jack briefly early today. And this is the greatest reason to run out of room. He's like, I must run and make some predictions. And I was like, what is happening?
Yeah.
And you paused to briefly explain that you had made a series of predictions, essentially, that would come true in 2026 of September. And they had done very well. And you had to go make another set. So what were your predictions? Share them with us now. If we see any of these on Polymarket, though, we know where they came from.
Well, one, I think, again, if you do the time thing, it doesn't seem wild that by April 2027, AI systems should be able to do tasks that might take a person 150 hours. No, what is that? That's almost a month's worth of work, which requires strange things to happen in the economy. Yeah, but what task is it doing? What task are you thinking of? What's the last bit of work that took you a month?
Writing these questions for you took more time than I wanted. Yeah.
Yeah, so tasks like this Yeah, um, no, I mean tasks that might take a person a really really long time might be Designing a complicated piece of circuitry doing a very very involved research project involving reading and cross-referencing many things building a piece of software the kinds of tasks which we currently pay
extremely talented people, large amounts of money to do are exactly the type of tasks which AI systems are kind of creeping into. So that has some implications. Yeah. The other prediction we made was, you know, we've talked about how the majority of the code at Anthropic is written by AI systems like Claude.
Well, all of us in the room thought by April, maybe 100% of the code is, which led to us say, what are we doing? And I think that we invented a guild system where we would sit around analyzing and critiquing the code that Claude writes and verifying that it's correct. And I can't work out if this is like a really fun country club style job or if it paints some different picture. Right.
You're going to tell me.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of AI on job automation?
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.
Yeah.
I want to shift gears from your writing for a second because you made a lot of news lately, yeah? I mean, you know, it was exciting. I mean, you've made a lot of news lately, but most recently there's a new AI model called Mythos. Please correct me if I get any of this wrong. So Mythos, and that seems to be really good at hacking. if someone wanted to use it for that.
And so you have not made this model public yet. You've given it to something like 40 or 50 companies to, I guess, gird themselves from the tool that you made. Yes. Okay. So that's companies like Apple and Google and Amazon. And as far as we can tell, the only financial institution that I've seen reported is JP Morgan maybe has it to test.
But I believe Treasury Secretary Scott Besant has called you asking for this. So question one is, how have these phone calls been?
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. And it's really good at hacking. Claude turns out to be good at hacking now as well.
Cool, that's cool. Look, we contain multitudes. We can be optimistic and terrified at the same time.
But what it means is there will be many systems like this, and the world is going to adapt to this. We have a chance to use it to make much of the world much more secure. But at the same time, we now have these new capabilities in the world we have to contend with.
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Chapter 6: How does the housing market reflect economic principles?
But there is this feeling in the back of my mind, like you have invented both the weapon and the shield. And so what happens when you want to charge for this? It does feel a little bit like, hey, you know, shame if something happens to that company of yours if you don't pay for our product.
Yeah, we think that business strategies which tend more towards mafia than anything else are probably not long-term resilient, so we won't be doing that. I do think that the shape of this in the future is parts of AI need to become actually a true utility where you would expect things like,
cyber defense capabilities to be something that you provide at cost, or it costs you to provide you with no margin. I'm sorry if my financial officer is listening to me say that. But it's the shape of where you end up in the future, where there are all these capabilities that matter for society.
You need to proliferate those into society without charging society for it, or you end up in a really bad incentive structure.
Okay.
You now have two children. You just got back from parental leave. So you're imagining a future for them as well. And so I am wondering, what is the future you're imagining for them? How do you think they will fit into the world that you are creating? And what skills will you prioritize for them?
I mean, I imagine, if we get this right... a better future where people get to spend more time with one another and less time being kind of atomized and driven away from their families and friends. This requires you to actually solve the distribution problem. Me, personally? Yes, you. Congratulations. We're solving economics together.
But how you get there, along with the advocacy I've talked about, is actually thinking you're gonna need to completely rethink education and sort of upend it. You're gonna need to upend how education works in pretty fundamental ways. And you're going to have to teach people to be much more curious. I am struck by how my child constantly asks me questions.
It's obviously sometimes very enraging when you get asked the same question 50 times a day. But sometimes it's amazing, like, you know, why are camels, why do they have humps or anything like this?
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Chapter 7: What strategies are being proposed to address housing shortages?
In it, C.S. Lewis does write about noise writ large as a distraction to man. It was in a different private letter that he talked about the downsides of gadgetry, including the wireless radio. After the break, what it's like to be a behavioral economist for Amazon. Welcome back. We have another interview from the tour I'm going to play you part of. It's with Daryl Fairweather.
Daryl is a behavioral economist and author of the book Hate the Game, Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love and Work. She's also quoted many times in our book, especially on the topic of housing.
Check the index. She's in there a lot. Yeah.
So please welcome Daryl Fairweather. Daryl's currently the chief economist at Redfin, the realty company. And she used to be a senior economist at Amazon in Seattle, which is where she joined us. Here she is talking with host Kenny Malone and the main author of the Planet Money book, Alex Mayasi, about how the work of economists is baked into so much of our daily lives.
I think your career demonstrates something that I've found quite interesting, which is I think my standard image of an economist was I was kind of a professor and they do research. But when you went to work at Amazon, was your job title behavioral economist?
Yes. They hired me specifically to be behavioral economist because they didn't want people at the part of the company that I was working at to get too nervous that they were hiring some economist in who was going to cut roles or make things harder for people. So they wanted people to know that I had a softer touch. And my training is in behavioral economist and
I think that is a signal to people that I think about things a bit more holistically than maybe the typical economist.
Why did Amazon need a behavioral economist?
Well, this was when they were getting a lot of bad press for the way that they were treating their employees. There was this big New York Times expose about it.
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Chapter 8: How can empathy influence economic policies in housing?
Yeah, I think a famous one is rideshare apps. How, I mean, it used to be that you would just call a cab and the price you would pay was just whatever was on the meter. And then economists got the idea to have dynamic pricing that was set by whatever demand was in that moment and supply was in that moment. And a lot of people don't like that because it feels a little bit unfair.
And now it's moving even into grocery stores, this dynamic pricing. I know there's a lot of pushback towards that as well.
I do see those little price tags that can change. And I wonder, like two seconds ago, was it less? Like is that what's happening?
Yeah, this is even true on Amazon. I was tracking the price of my book and my book is now cheaper than it was. a couple of weeks ago so you can get a deal because of that dynamic pricing.
I think this event will push it back.
Yeah. If you buy enough, then your friends will have to pay more.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. I mean, and so I think we're talking specifically with Rideshare about like surge pricing.
Yes, yes. That demand, if there is more demand, that should in theory push up price because if it doesn't, what you can have are shortages, right? And shortages are worse than paying more because then there are people who might be willing to pay a higher price who just don't get the option to. But I think there's, I feel like there's kind of a backlash to that now.
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