There Is No Antimemetics Division

Tyler Cowen: What's a book you think more and more about these days?

Jack Clark: There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, which is this book about a government agency that is dealing with antimemes, ideas that erase themselves from your memory after you've dealt with them but are themselves important. It's about creating a bureaucracy that can handle ideas which are themselves dangerous and self-erasing because I think it gets at some of the problems that we're experiencing.

The other book that I think about a lot and might be especially relevant to you is, a historian and economist called Fernand Braudel wrote a book called Capitalism and Material Life.

Tyler Cowen: Oh, I love those. Three volumes — they're incredible.

Jack Clark: Yes. I read it in university, and I returned to it recently because it makes this point that you can look at how people's lives change through just the things they had available, like cutlery or whatever, or basic tools. I think about AI through that lens. How is AI going to actually change my material life?

It comes to why I'm skeptical about some of the more ambitious forms of change is, the actual change in our day-to-day lives has been very, very, very slow even with these advances. But if you read those books, it seems like the most significant things stem from changes in everyone's material day-to-day.

Tyler Cowen: They're reissuing the antimimetic book, by the way.