Ben Thomas

My Progress Conference take: this is the "you can just do things *well*" crowd. (The progress studies et al community) Not just "you can just do things", but actually you can do things with taste, craft, and thoughtfulness. Regulation could make sense. Housing and energy could be abundant. AI can make our lives better. CX with government could be 10/10. Very energizing to be around so many people who believe we can solve problems to build a future that I want my grandkids to be in.

@AlecStapp Andy Masley

@rSanti97 Exciting!! Anthropic is lucky to have you.

Some professional news: I'm joining Anthropic's editorial team! I'll be leading the team's work on economics and policy, and working closely with the Anthropic Institute (about which more here: x.com/AnthropicAI/st…). Dramatic AI progress is coming in the next two years, and researchers+policymakers+the public alike will need the best information available about that shift. It's a big new challenge, and I can’t wait to get started. [Some important housekeeping: I’ll keep running Statecraft at @IFP as a Nonresident Senior Fellow! And will remain on the board at Recoding America/ as a journalist-in-residence at @johnshopkins School of Government and Policy. I start at Anthropic in a few weeks.] The move from frontier think tank to frontier lab is bittersweet. I’ve been at IFP for three years, and it’s been the most formative professional experience of my life. In a short period of time, IFP has become one of the most effective institutions in DC, generating a truly shocking amount of counterfactual policy impact (not all of it public). Being on this team has permanently raised my ambitions. I'm very grateful.

Forget too cheap to meter; how about too cheap to need a grid! Cool new project from @AsteraInstitute

Just have kids. You can be a kid again, but in a socially productive way.

Step changes in how and how much I use AI: 1. gpt-4 2. claude code 3. iMessage to claude code running free on a spare laptop

A few people asked me to make an image of how much irrigated farmland would use the same water required for ALL ChatGPT usage, including every part of the process. I did a botec and my best guess right now is that inference uses about as much water as training, and power generation uses ~5x as much water as the data centers themselves, so it looks something like this. The water cost of manufacturing chips is marginal compared to how much water they use over their lifetimes.

Starting to see "it's not a __ it's a __" as a run-on sentence to imply not-AI writing.

Each frontier AI model seems to use a little under a year's worth of a square mile of farmland's water to train. I think about this as the country having 4 square miles of farmland sectioned off to grow some of the most popular consumer products in history.

@KelseyTuoc @esterdiol @brazen__head Yes! And it's literally our *grandparents* and their parents, not "ancestors" in some abstract sense. 45% of US housing lacked complete plumbing in 1940. Our table stakes were our grandparents luxuries. census.gov/data/tables/ti…

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages. The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse. I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee. There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true. But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.

I doubt that anyone I know steals from Whole Foods, but the milieu that the article depicted, where it's normal for perfectly well-off people to steal things because why not, was really upsetting to read about, so I actually want to try to earnestly explain why you shouldn't do this just in case there's someone out there who has never had it explained to them. When a business opens - or really, as soon as a business starts making plans to open - a defining question for the business is how it will collect payment for the goods or services it provides. If you trust the people you sell to, you can be pretty relaxed about this; send people an invoice, most of them will pay it on time, any who don't will pay it a bit late. You have to think about convenience and mistakes but not about people trying to cheat you. This saves you so, so much defensive planning to make sure you get paid. It's so much easier. But if you're selling to the general public, you do have to think about people trying to cheat you. You have to structure the physical store so that it's hard for them to steal. You have to not carry some items that you'd like to sell, because they'd also be attractive targets to steal. If people swap price tags between items, you can't use stickers. If people put things on in the dressing room and wear them out, you need to pay someone a full time salary to monitor the dressing room. The world that we all live in is much poorer than the world we'd live in if people didn't steal. The stores don't carry things that they could carry if people didn't steal. They don't use pricing and inventory systems that would be way easier and more convenient if people didn't steal. But it could be much worse! If I walk down to my local Whole Foods today, items on the shelves won't be locked behind sheafs of plastic - that is only worth it when the background rate of stealing is much higher than it is at my local Whole Foods. When more people steal, businesses have to further intensify security, or go out of business. When you shoplift, you directly and unambiguously impoverish your community. You make prices higher for everybody else, you make stores less usable for everybody else, or you make businesses not viable that would otherwise be viable. The direct impact each time is small, but it's a lot larger than the direct impact of taking some trash out of the trash can to throw on the ground, or pouring just a tiny bit of poison into your local river, and most people have a deep, instinctive abhorrence of antisocially wrecking your community like that. So don't steal. The other thing that it seems possible some people might not understand is that while you might have a social circle that is incredibly nihilistic and cynical and thinks that everybody steals, in fact this is not true. Most people do not steal. Most people, if they learn that you steal, will lose more respect for you than you had to lose. I don't know anyone who has shoplifted except 'as a kid/teenager'. It is not always the case that virtue is rewarded and vice is punished but even before you bring the legal system into it, the risk-reward tradeoff of having everybody you know know that you steal things sometimes is absolutely terrible. Who would hire someone who steals things? Who would trust them around a vulnerable person? Who would want to live in a society with someone who will delightedly and routinely wreck it for the slightest personal benefit? I hope that "Gina" turns her life around. I hope that Gina realizes that she needs to. And if you have been told that it's just a corporation or that having ethics is lame or that if you think about it, other bad things happen too, like wage theft, so that means stealing is okay, I hope you really, actually, think about whether you'd accept any of those as excuses for anything else.

"Complete plumbing" just means (1) hot and cold piped water, (2) a flush toilet, and (3) a bath OR shower. nchh.org/resource-libra…

Yes! And it's literally our *grandparents* and their parents, not "ancestors" in some abstract sense. 45% of US housing lacked complete plumbing in 1940. Our table stakes were our grandparents luxuries. census.gov/data/tables/ti…

Frankly hard to believe they made me do laptop work before Claude Code / Codex.

@Afinetheorem Diaper change? That's what I was thinking of. Or do you mean like babysitting a 5yo not a baby?

@Ben_Thomas_o7 I mean, the fine motor control of a 14 year old is much much much less fine that any industrial robot, no? But let's say "can keep the child from going outside if they wake up and can call if there is an emergency"?

A thought experiment based on a convo today: AI -> robotics -> there is a robot a household could buy which can safely watch a baby at the level of a 14 year old babysitter. How many people use it? What does this do to labor supply? Curious for the variance in what folks think...

@alexolegimas Agree, though to be fair this interview was first published 9 months ago

This is a skills issue. Part of using AI effectively is knowing what you want to just look up (eg you need an answer to a query) vs what you want to *learn*. Learning is not just a function of seeing the information, it’s a function of spending time with it. Getting stuck, failing, looking back to something you missed is how information turns into skill. This isn’t new. Remember spark notes? You weren’t supposed to use them as substitute for reading the original text. After you read it closely, sparknotes were great to look up random details. AI summaries are similar. But that’s not to say AI can’t be used for learning effectively. I have now seen several scaffolds that prompt user to stop and think, to read original text before asking questions, etc. Claude teaching mode is one example. There’s a lot of promise in using AI to improve learning, but just getting summaries instead of reading text ain’t it.

@omzidar @SIEPR Yeah this was excellent.

⁦@SIEPR⁩ this looks fun- is there a video?

Interesting dialogue between Emmanuel Saez and @joshrauh on the CA wealth tax proposal, moderated by @RichardRubinDC Rubin: Has the wealth tax proposal already driven net revenue loss? Saez: It will depend on whether or not the tax becomes permanent.

Lip-Bu Tan -- not exactly known for hyperbole -- says he believes by 2028 or 2029 Intel will fab high end chips in the US at volume. Unlike historically TSMC can't meet all chip demand right now anyway. Fabs have supply problem not demand problem. @SIEPR Economic Summit.

@CJHandmer Dry rivers are a skill issue!

Make more water.