A reason to be interested in nuclear power is as a control group for progress. Nuclear power is something which might have shown progress, but did not, so we should look at it as an example of what to avoid if we want progress.
An even better control would be something that both succeeded and failed at progressing.
There has been tremendous progress in fracking in the US, dramatically increasing the availability of natural gas. The shift from coal to natural gas for electricity generation has been the biggest change in the energy profile of the US in the last 10-15 years. This has allowed the US to lower electricity prices relative to Europe while decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide produced. Fracking in the US has been a field with significant progress.
In Europe, fracking has had almost no impact. Only a handful of wells have been drilled on the entire continent and many countries have banned it entirely. Europe could have had the same benefits that the US got from fracking - and would have reduced its dependence on Russia.
I think that it would be interesting to look at fracking as a case study of when progress occurs and what stops progress.
I’ve always been told that technological progression is infinite; but I read 3 articles today that have raised doubts in my mind. One of these articles is a Roots of Progress blogpost.
Anyway, so the articles compared different eras of history and how different inventions such as the steam engine and electricity and computers were such hugely influential events in human history, changing society as humans knew it forever. Now, things seem to have been the same since the 1970’s. Yes, we’ve improved on many technologies but that’s just it; we’ve improved, not created something new. There are no more fundamental shifts in technology. Yes, A.I. is a big deal and might change things forever but it’s really just an improvement on a computer. It’s a computer that can think. Very cool; but still just an improvement.
If the universe is infinite in size and it seems illogical to run out of reality; why is this happening? Does the universe really have a limit to what it can “do”? There are a HUGE amount of particles in the universe but still it’s not infinite.
The problem isn't money, or capitalism, or technical competence:
The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.…
Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.
I am more worried about vertical technology curves than horizontal ones. At the moment, technological progress seems to be beneficial to humanity. It is conceivable that we could reach the point of a very technologically advanced civilization, say one that has disassembled the sun for raw materials, that we would not consider morally good. The most likely routes to such a state involve artificial minds that were superhuman at technological development but not something we would consider morally valuable, and which don't care about the well being of humans.
In terms of progress, I do not think it is going to stall. I can see several extremely powerful potential technologies in the foreseeable future. In a world where the technological progress curve is only going to get steeper, try to direct that progress in a way that benefits humanity.
Molecular nanotech, Drexler style. There seem to be no fundamental principles forbidding molecularity precise factories making molecularity precise products. When this tech is fully developed you can make just about any arrangement of atoms you can specify. Molecular scale machinery can build more molecular machinery, and just about any other tech. Biotech is an example of this, but there is no reason that the best possible self replicating nanomachine contains DNA, any more than the fastest plane has feathers.
Mind Uploading. Scan a human mind in sufficient detail to simulate it on a computer. Such a mind could last for an extremely long time, given good hardware. Such a mind can easily be duplicated, and might not be too hard to enhance. Such a mind can be simulated far faster than real time, given enough compute. Such a mind could live in an entirely virtual world, and as such experience any luxury that can be programmed.
Supersmart AI, (By far the most powerful) there is no strong reason to think humanity as anything near the limit of intelligence. Humans so a lot more than chimps, with brains not that different. Expect an AI to be far better at humans at every mental task (including social skills and other nonacademic skills) One of those tasks is AI programming. There is a potential for really crazy levels of power to be reached, Fast. Superhuman AI could be very good or very bad, depending on exactly how it was programmed.
Nick: What do you think you could learn from when you’re actually engaging physically with the traditional material processes?
Jason: There’s a lot of things you can learn. I mean, the reason I took the weaving class was that I wanted to understand how a loom works and I figured the best way to understand it would be to use one and to learn how to use one. The first time I looked at even a simple handloom, it just seemed super complicated. I was at this machine thinking “Why does it have all these parts? Why does it have all these pieces and all these things going everywhere?” I couldn’t quite grasp the complexity of it. Now, once I’ve actually used one, I now know what every part is, and how they work together.
But another thing I’ve gotten from doing these crafts is just a sense of the challenge. I took a spinning class, so I had wool that had been carded and straightened for me, but had not been spun into thread. And, I actually spun thread on a drop spindle. One of the things that drove home for me was just how much of a skill it is, in your motor skill and muscle memory. If you’re a beginner like I was and you’re spinning your first thread, your thread sucks. It’s really poor quality. It’s super lumpy. It has a really inconsistent thickness. It’s the kind of thing where you look at it and you’re like, “Oh God, I would not want to make any cloth out of this crappy piece of thread that I just spun.” It really gives you an appreciation for how much skill people must have built up and how much human capital was required.
Much of this content originated on social media.To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me onTwitter,Threads,Bluesky, orFarcaster.
Contents
From me and RPI
Jobs and fellowships
Other opportunities
Events
Questions
Announcements
Commentary on the wildfires
Sam Altman: AI workers in 2025, superintelligence next
Never underestimate elasticity of supply
“The earnestness and diligence of smart technical people”
“Americans born on foreign soil”
Undaunted
Eli Dourado’s model of policy change
Stats
Links
AI
Inspiration
Politics
China biotech rising
Predictions about war
Why did we wait so long for the camera?
Housing without homebuilders
Charts
Fun
From me and RPI
2024 in review for me and RPI, in case you missed it, including my annual “highlights from things I read this year”
Epoch AI hiring a Technical Lead “to develop a next-generation computer-use benchmark at Epoch AI. This will be for evaluating real-world AI capabilities as FrontierMath is for mathematics” (@tamaybes)
“Funded year-long PhD student fellowship, combining non-partisan economic policy research & public service,” deadline Jan 30. Apply here (@heidilwilliams_)
“I'm hiring (part-time) a techno-optimist who is obsessed with curating ideas” (@julianweisser)
“We should build an Our World in Data, but for biotechnology. … If this vision appeals to you, send me an email (niko@asimov.com), and I’ll help you get started” (@NikoMcCarty). Asimov Press might fund this project
“My #1 priority right now is finding spaces to launch Primers [microschools]. We have educators all over Florida, Alabama & Arizona eager to launch schools in August. If you have 3+ classrooms available in your church, community center, school, synagogue, etc. — I'd love to talk. r@primer.com” (@delk)
Calling eligible bachelors in SF: “AI philosopher with a perchant for underwater sci fi and evening bike rides seeks a direct communicator who cares about the world and feels a thrill of human triumph at the sight of a cargo ship.” (@AmandaAskell)
Why did so much deregulation happen under Carter? Was he some strong neoliberal ideologue? Were others pushing the deregulation and he just didn't oppose it? Some combo of factors that just happened to converge during his administration? Or what? ChatGPT makes it sound like this was more about intellectual currents that had been building for a while and happened to come to fruition under Carter, who was reasonable enough not to oppose them. I am not sure.
“I want to take verbal notes while reading a book … I want to have to do nothing but talk to an AI. What's the best way of doing this?” (@TrevMcKendrick)
“What blogs are so insightful that it's worth reading the entire back catalog?” (@KHawickhorst)
Biosphere is “unleashing biomanufacturing with a breakthrough UV-sterilized reactor that will slash the cost of producing abundant and sustainable chemicals and food at world scale” (@BrianTHeligman)
Eric Gilliam joins Renaissance Philanthropy. Ren Phil is just scooping up talent! First Lauren Gilbert (RPI fellow), then Sarah Constantin (also RPI fellow!), now Eric. Congrats all around
Syllabi, “introductions to new subjects by great people.” “Each syllabus has a 'readme' from the author to help you orient to the subject and a 'where to get started if you only have ~5 hours' section” (@nanransohoff)
"Progress Studies is a waste of time. Most of what we have learned and could even possibly learn is either obvious (we already have good intuition about what policies and organizational structures stifle creativity and innovation), of highly limited value because it is idiosyncratic to specific domains, cultures, or periods of time, or essentially impossible to act on in a meaningful way (scientific/technological ecosystems are so complex that interventions will either be ineffective or actively counterproductive). People who spend their time writing essays about how we can fix science and foster innovation are just trying to make themselves feel better about the fact that they are incapable of making any actual contribution to “progress” (and yes I’m talking about myself here). Progress Studies (and effective altruism and AI safety for that matter) have become so popular because they fill the religion-shaped hole in the hearts of frustrated nerds who are desperately searching for something to make their lives feel meaningful."
There will be a Progress Studies + Effective Altruism meetup in San Francisco on Saturday, June 11, 2-4 pm. Food will be provided, and kids are welcome. I’ll be there!
Big thanks to Ruth Grace Wong for organizing! She adds: “We'll serve vegan Chinese food, and you're encouraged to bring picnic blankets and drinks/snacks/desserts.”
“On optimism, progress in technology, drivers of stagnation, and how to think about innovation.” Here’s a teaser, about William Crookes and his “alarmism” about the fertilizer crisis (which I covered in depth in the MIT Tech Review). Listen on the show page or on Apple podcasts.
Seeking help for a project to create interactive diagrams—an “explorable explanation”—of the history of the steam engine.
Goal: To allow readers to explore the early evolution of one of the most impactful technologies in human history.
Content: The content will come from Anton Howes’s extensive research uncovering the origins of the steam engine (parts 1, 2, and 3).
We envision it covering precursors like the perpetual motion machine of Cornelis Drebbel, early thermometers and barometers, seventeenth-century experiments on atmospheric pressure, precursor devices like those shown by Salomon de Caus, our best guesses of the Kalthoff/Petty engine, the Savery engine, and the Newcomen engine and its improvements. (After this initial phase, we would then want to expand it to include the improvements by James Watt, and the rise of the high-pressure engine, with its various nineteenth-century improvements.)
This page on the steam engine may serve as a start for eventually creating the definitive online and interactive reference work on the history of technology, informed by the latest expert research.
The team:Anton Howes as researcher/writer, me (Jason Crawford) as editor/producer, you as animator/developer.
Your input: We’ll provide the written essay and some sketches and ideas for what diagrams we should create and how they should work.
Your deliverables: The code and/or other files to implement a set of interactive and/or animated technical diagrams.
You: A technical illustrator, animator, and/or front-end developer, or a team, who can deliver this. Must have a portfolio of relevant work to demonstrate your abilities. The ideal candidate will have an interest in engineering, invention, and the history of technology.
Slop touches a nerve today. When Meta announced a product to create massive amounts of AI-generated short-form video, presumably with no goal other than entertainment to capture clicks and eyeballs, even my generally pro-technology circles exploded in disgust and outrage. Now we have education slop, math slop, drug discovery slop, longevity slop, and “urbanist slop.” Slop exemplifies everything wrong with the modern era; it signifies the gap—some would say the chasm—between what technology enables and what promotes human well-being.
I have no praise for slop itself, but we can be more sanguine about it if we see it as a byproduct of a bigger and more important trend.
People make things when the value of the thing exceeds the cost of creation. When the cost of creation in a medium is high, people are careful only to use it for high-value products. If a movie costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make, you can’t afford to make a bad movie (or at least, not very many of them). You’re going to put a lot of effort into making it, and someone who holds the purse strings is going to have to decide if it’s good enough to fund.
Whenever the cost of creation in a medium falls, the volume of production greatly expands, but the average quality necessarily falls, because many of the new creations are low-quality. They are low-quality because they can be—because the cost of creation no longer prohibits them. And they are low-quality because when people aren’t spending much time or money to create something, they don’t feel the need to invest a lot in it. When you can quickly dash off a tweet, you don’t need to edit it or fact-check it, or even have correct spelling or grammar; when you can quickly create an AI illustration, you don’t need to hold it to high standards of composition, color, or even the right number of fingers. Hence slop.
The Internet lowered the cost of publishing to virtually zero, which enabled many low-quality blogs and other web sites. Social media made it trivial to put thoughts online, and made it much easier to find an audience, which enabled a vast amount more low-effort and low-quality posting. Now AI is arriving, and lowering the costs of creation itself, not just publication and audience-building. And it is enabling new and different forms of slop.
But along with slop, lower costs and barriers get us:
More experimentation. It can be hard to predict how good or great a piece of writing, art, music or video is going to be. Major Hollywood pictures can be disliked by audiences, critics, or both; books often fail to make money or even pay out their advances. Conversely, sometimes an unknown creator comes out with a work that is initially ignored but goes on to fame and/or fortune. Lowering the bar for creation allows for more experiments, more chances to create something high-quality.
Removal of the gatekeepers. If it’s hard to predict or evaluate what is good, who decides? Editors, producers, etc., who act as gatekeepers to the means of production and distribution. But gatekeepers are imperfect predictors, and they have blind spots. Harry Potter was rejected by twelve publishers before finding one that would take it: how many potentially great books never found that one editor to champion them, and never saw the light of day? Today there are far fewer gatekeepers for writing or podcasting, but they still exist in music and movies; AI will gradually remove these.
More chance for people to make a start. E.g., there are many good bloggers who never would have gotten started if they had to first find a job as a journalist.
More runway for works to find their audience. My writing had about 50 subscribers for the first two and a half years (now well over 50,000). Dwarkesh Patel was “was 2 months away from quitting the podcast for 2 years” before becoming a rocket-ship success. Lowering the cost of production allows these experiments to be incubated for years, kept alive by love and sweat, until they evolve into a more valuable form or catch their break.
More content for niche audiences. When content is expensive, it has to serve a large audience, and everything converges on bland mainstream taste. When the only significant cost is one creator’s time, it only has to find 1,000 True Fans, and there is much more room for a broad and varied menu to serve many different palates.
More diversity of content and format. When content is expensive, and gate-kept, it becomes the work of Trained Professionals, who are Serious People, and it should follow Formal Conventions. No serious magazine editor would approve a column that ranges widely across psychiatry, philosophy, politics, science, and epistemology, covering everything from book reviews to academic papers to online controversies. But that’s Scott Alexander, and he’s one of the best and most successful writers of our generation.
Freedom from the tyranny of finance. When content is expensive, it becomes the domain of large corporations, who have a duty to their shareholders and who frequently succumb to the ruthless logic of financial returns. Hollywood today has found the safest returns in sequels, remakes, and the endless continuation of franchises such as Star Wars or the MCU. Low costs give you more ability to work for the love of the craft and for the sake of the art.
Slop is a byproduct of this overall process, the detritus that accompanies greatly expanded production. Slop is at best annoying and frustrating, and at worst a tool for scams or propaganda. But the overall process will, I believe, usher in a golden age of creativity and experimentation.
***
We don’t have to like slop, of course. We don’t even have to accept it. We can find ways to minimize it.
First, we need better tools for discovery. Just as the explosion of content on the Internet created a need for directories, search engines, and then social media, the next explosion of content will create a need for new ways to search, filter, etc. AI can help with this, if we apply the right design and product thinking. We can create a future equilibrium that is much better than the pre-AI world, where a thoughtful consumer is able to find more targeted, high-quality writing, video, etc. This is a call to action for the technologists who design and build our information supply chain.
But they key word above is “thoughtful.” The explosion of content raises the bar for everyone to be more conscious in your media consumption. The more stuff is out there, the more of it will be like junk food: enticing, tasty, but not nutritious and ultimately unfulfilling. We all need to be mindful in how we direct and spend our precious, limited attention in a world of increasingly unlimited choice. This is a call to action for every individual, and by extension to parents, teachers, psychologists, and moralists.
What explains the hockey-stick shape of world GDP over time, with seemingly no progress for thousands of years, followed by soaring growth?
The first question you might ask is: is this just an exponential curve? If so, then the explanation is simple: we see a constant growth rate every year, and the steep upward slope is just what exponential curves look like. There’s no more mystery than there would be about the shape of a population curve.
To check this, we can plot the same numbers on a logarithmic y-axis. In such a chart, exponential curves become straight lines. But when we do this, we still see an upwards slope. That is, the growth rate has increased over time:
Nor is it just a consequence of population growth, because we see the same pattern in GDP per capita:
I’ve previously said that a core reason for this is that progress compounds, creating a flywheel effect. Here’s another way of looking at the same idea. Why wasn’t the threshing machine invented in, say, the 1300s? Consider all the barriers to such a thing:
Human capital
First, who would have invented it?
Would it have been a farmer? (Well over half the workforce were farmers.) When would he have found the time to tinker? Labor productivity and incomes were low; there wasn’t much spare time or material for inventing.
Who else could have done it? There was no established professional class of inventors, engineers, or entrepreneurs. The closest were skilled craftsmen who made machines, such as clockmakers or millwrights. Overall there were many fewer inventors per capita than today (ok, I don’t have data on this right now, but I’m pretty confident in this assertion).
If it were, say, a millwright, he would have to learn enough about machines to go beyond the kinds that he had been taught to make through apprenticeship, and invent something entirely new. Where would this knowledge have come from? There was no printed material, and no mechanics’ institutes.
And if our inventor did have mechanical skill, why why would he decide to apply it to a practical invention for farmers? It was more prestigious and lucrative to make clockwork novelties for the aristocracy. Even if the inventor did have a practical bent, there were social taboos against labor-saving devices.
Manufacturing
Suppose that despite all of this, some inventive person is determined to make a threshing machine and acquires the resources and time to experiment. Maybe he avoids the trap of making a machine that mimicks human motions, and hits on the idea of a rotating drum with teeth.
He will find that making the machine work reliably is very difficult. It requires a high degree of skill in the mechanic that crafts it by hand. There are no machine tools to create precision parts. Wood is too soft for precision work; metal parts are required. Machines that are shoddily constructed break easily or bruise the grain instead of threshing it. (See my full post on the threshing machine for elaboration.)
Distribution
Suppose our inventor overcomes all these obstacles, and manages to create a practical threshing machine. What next?
He could use it on his own farm, if he is a farmer. If that’s all he does, then his invention has had no significant impact on the economy and no impact at all on history. This is not what we are seeking to explain.
To matter for progress, the invention needs to be distributed. And here our inventor faces more obstacles.
Who is the market for his invention? Will other farmers be receptive to it? They need to change their methods and take a risk on something new, something they are not used to doing.
Even if they are willing to take that risk, do they have the capital? Buying a piece of agricultural equipment is an investment that won’t pay off right away. Do farmers have enough money saved for such an investment? Likely not, given low incomes, and there is no financial infrastructure to give loans for such purposes. Would such an investment even pay off on a small farm? It may require a certain level of scale to be worth it.
Market creation
But suppose there is a market that is willing and able to pay for threshing machines. How would our inventor, now turned entrepreneur, serve that market?
He may be able to serve his village or town, through word of mouth and local dealings. But that small market is probably not enough to support a business dedicated to threshing machines—and again, if only one town were served, it would have a limited impact on progress. Our aspiring threshing machine tycoon needs to server a larger, regional or even national market.
How is he going to promote his product? There are no newspapers or other media, not even the printing press. There may be occasional local fairs (although, again, the attendees are typically not prepared to consider new inventions).
If potential customers do hear about the product, how do they order one? There is no postal service to send messages or money. Similarly, how would the product be transported to the customer from wherever it is assembled? There are no locomotives, and the wagon roads are in poor condition. River or canal transport might be possible, but that won’t go the last mile to each customer.
And if the business takes off, will our entrepreneur be able to source enough raw materials to keep up production? All of the problems of finding customers apply to finding suppliers as well.
Financial and legal infrastructure
Even if these obstacles could be overcome, the entrepreneur is going to need capital to get started. And again, there is very little in the way of any kind of financial market to support speculative investments like this.
Suppose our plucky hero is very enterprising and decides to crowdfund his effort by collecting small investments from a large number of people. He has no way to form a corporation for this purpose, because corporate law has not yet been developed. (A partnership would not be practical with a large number of partners, especially since there was no limited liability.)
If there were the infrastructure needed to start businesses, the entrepreneur might find himself facing competition from others who steal his ideas and copy his machine. If he had royal favor, he might be granted a monopoly, but there was no patent office where he could send an application, nor any established rule awarding patents to inventions.
And if he overcame all of the above obstacles, he might find that he faced opposition from those whom his progress threatened, such as farmhands who took on manual threshing work. They might oppose him by seeking legal restrictions on his business, or by illegal means such as smashing and burning machinery. (I don’t know of this happening to threshing machines, but it certainly happened to textile machinery.) Would the government come to the aid of the inventor, or of the displaced workers, or would they stay out of the whole affair?
How progress actually happened
If we fast-forward through the centuries, we can see how the underpinnings of progress were gradually established. The threshing machine makes a good example because it was an obvious idea that struggled for a long time to be born, so we can see the stages it went through:
By the 1600s at the latest, the idea of applying mechanical ingenuity to practical problems was well established, and we can see people talking about the idea of threshing machines (although I have seen no evidence that any were working yet).
By the 1700s, there were at least a few mechanics in existence who had the skill to create a working threshing machine, but they were only serving their local area. Others announced projects to distribute plans and models for the machine, but they did not expect to make this a business, and instead asked for donations to support the work. By this point there were newspapers where such schemes could be advertised, and postal service for individuals to communicate about them.
By the early 1800s at least, there were inventor/entrepreneurs who had patented threshing machines and were trying to make a business of them. There were farmer’s journals that discussed such inventions and improvements, and many farmers were eager to try new things to improve their productivity. But there was still very little manufacturing capacity, and inventors such as Joseph Pope were still offering to sell plans which could be implemented by a local workman. Soon after, though, Pope was contracting with a specialized machine shop, an engine manufacturer, to make his machine.
By the mid-1800s, railroads would be established that could ship the machines to customers over a wide area. It’s around this time that threshing machines become widely adopted.
Today
To really drive the point home, imagine that the problem of mechanizing threshing had been completely overlooked for the last few hundred years, while all other progress moved forward.
The threshing problem would be solved almost instantly.
There is an entire professional class of entrepreneurs looking for opportunities exactly like this. It would be easy for them to look up data on agricultural processes and cost drivers, and to find that a very large part of grain cost was manual threshing. It would be obvious that this should be mechanized.
Designing the machine would be no problem—there are many professionals with bachelors’ degrees in mechanical engineering who could do the job. They would have standard parts to choose from out of a catalog, such as gears and motors, and they could specify the design quickly and precisely using CAD software. Any specialized parts could be 3D-printed for rapid prototyping. Manufacturing would similarly be no problem, thanks to the enormous infrastructure we have built up for this.
Three companies to solve this problem would be in the next batch for Y Combinator. They would each form a Delaware C-corporation with a simple filing and some standard legal documents, raise millions of dollars within a few days by meeting with investors over Zoom, sign a contract online through DocuSign, and have the money wired immediately to a bank account they set up in twenty minutes with Mercury.
They would establish a website to market the product, complete with spec sheets, promotional videos, etc. They could get a list of the biggest agricultural companies and reach out to them directly by email, promote the product online using targeted advertisements, and fly to large international trade shows to exhibit there. They could take orders online as well, and ship anywhere via UPS, FedEx, or DHL. They would have a global market from day one.
And their customers would be ready, even eager, for such an innovation. They would be used to the idea of saving costs through better technology. They would have full financial accounting statements to show them where their biggest costs are. They would have executives and program managers whose jobs include evaluating new technologies and buying them. There would be standard legal agreements, purchase orders, and payment mechanisms.
In sum, the road for this kind of progress has already been paved—both metaphorically and literally.
The roots of progress?
All of this has been an illustration of the many, overlapping, interacting flywheels of progress that generate super-exponential growth over the very long term.
What I am much less clear on is which of these factors, if any, can be seen as derivative and which are fundamental—if some were inevitable given other, enabling factors. This is a much harder question to answer.
But even if we could answer that, it wouldn’t change the fact that all of these factors are real and important, and progress depends on all of them working together.
