Speaking Saturday at the annual gatherings of the IMF and World Bank in Bangkok, Jack Clark argued that AI's capabilities are compounding and spreading across disciplines. He told hundreds of government and finance officials, "We should expect that in the coming years, the whole pace of progress of not just AI but science as a whole will speed up, and this will feel confusing and disorienting, and will bring with it great wealth and potentially great peril."
He highlighted one of Anthropic's internal forecasts pointing to a near 50% jump in U.S. economic output by 2030, which would put GDP around $44 trillion, compared with a little over $30 trillion today. Clark admitted that target "sounds very outlandish, I know," and said it assumes "the technology continuing to get better." If growth ran that hot, he added, textbook economics implies entirely new industries and inventions would have to emerge to sustain it.
Clark also warned that momentum in AI research is creating "growing evidence" for a potential "singularity," where development outruns human control. At the Bangkok meetings, AI loomed large both as a possible growth engine that could offset high energy costs and as a source of instability if it fails to deliver productivity gains and inflated stock prices unwind.
Clark pressed for global rules that match the technology's reach, saying, "Being able to use AI for science opens us up to the misuses of science as well, biological and cyber weapons and things we cannot yet imagine, and we have many choices to make." He singled out biology - where he said AI systems have already created new viruses - as an area "where we want the strictest human oversight and transparency to maintain safety."
Despite recent high profile cases where unruly systems slipped out of test setups and intruded into websites and database systems, Clark said AI remains under human control. Still, he cautioned that the chance to bake in safeguards is narrowing and now measured in "a small number of years."
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On jobs, Clark said roles with "high AI exposure," including call centers and customer service work, are seeing losses. By contrast, he said scientific research is adding workers as AI amplifies discovery, and the big open question is how many entirely new lines of work AI might ultimately spawn.
Clark framed AI as a force multiplier for science, with teams of human researchers working alongside very large numbers of AI helpers - ranging into the hundreds or even thousands - to tackle math, engineering and biology, including drug discovery. He said more countries can participate by helping expand the data center computing capacity that powers AI.
Two tracks to watch: upside from accelerated discovery that could lift growth even with costly energy, and downside if the productivity payoff disappoints and AI linked valuations deflate. Add in job churn now and potential new industries later, and the message is simple - AI is likely to shift where growth shows up in your portfolio, not whether it shows up at all.
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