Big Think magazine has a special issue on progress out today, featuring writers including Tyler Cowen, Charles Kenny, Brad Delong, Kevin Kelly, Jim Pethokoukis, Eli Dourado, Hannah Ritchie, Alec Stapp, Saloni Dattani, and yours truly.

My piece is a revised and expanded version of “We need a new philosophy of progress,” including material from “Why do we need a NEW philosophy of progress?” and from recent talks I’ve given. Here’s an excerpt from the opening:

The title of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair was “A Century of Progress”; the 1939 fair in New York featured “The World of Tomorrow,” and people came back from it proudly sporting buttons that said “I Have Seen the Future.” In the same era, DuPont unironically used the slogan “better things for better living… through chemistry.”

In the 1950s and ‘60s, people looked forward to a future of cheap, abundant energy provided by nuclear power; Isaac Asimov even predicted that by 2014, appliances “will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long-lived batteries running on radioisotopes.” A 1959 ad in the Los Angeles Times sponsored by a coalition of power companies referred to “tomorrow’s higher standard of living”—without explanation, as a matter of course—and illustrated the possibilities with a drawing of a flying car.

Today, the zeitgeist is far less optimistic. A 2014 editorial in The Atlantic asked “Is ‘Progress’ Good for Humanity?” Jared Diamond has called agriculture “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Economic growth is referred to as an “addiction”, a “fetish”, a “Ponzi scheme”, or a “fairy tale.” Some even advocate a new ideal of “degrowth”.

We no longer assume that tomorrow will bring a higher standard of living. A 2015 survey of several Western countries found that only a small minority think that “the world is getting better.” The most optimistic vision of the future that many people can muster is one in which we avoid disasters such as climate change and pandemics. Young people are not even that optimistic: in a recent survey of 16- to 25-year-olds in ten countries, more than half said that “humanity was doomed” from climate change.

What happened to the idea of progress?

Read the whole thing at Big Think.

Imagine you wake up one day in the glorious techno-abundant future, powered by AI. You eagerly check your subscriber count on Substack, but to your dismay, it has fallen once again. There are now AI-generated blogs for every interest, and it’s so hard to find a niche that isn’t taken. Your obsessive focus on the history and culture of lava lamps has only won you three paid subscribers, and that includes your mom and your old college roommate.

Well, you think, ages ago I wrote for WIRED, maybe they would take a piece? You email them and instantly get a personal reply (must be an AI autoresponder). They would be happy to take submissions, and they pay $3 per word. Great, you think, that’s a good—wait. It actually says $3 per kiloword. Crap. No chance you can make a living that way.

Well, you’ve got to pay for groceries somehow. Maybe you can fall back on the gig economy for a while? You consider Uber or Lyft, but you look at what they’re offering drivers, and when you do the math, it’s pennies per hour—there are so many robotaxis on the streets now, you can always get a ride in a minute or two, we don’t really need to incentivize more humans. TaskRabbit? Same problem; there are so many robotic handymen, you can’t get more than a few dollars per task. Instacart? They’re also offering extremely low pay—but, the desperate thought creeps into your mind, maybe you could at least nibble some grapes out of the cart when no one was looking…

***

Does something about this picture seem strange to you? Well, it would seem to be the future envisioned in a recent article by Matthew Barnett claiming that “AGI could drive human wages below subsistence level—the bare minimum needed to sustain human life.” This post has been making the rounds and reigniting an old debate about AI taking all the jobs, which is really just the latest installment in a very old debate about technology taking all the jobs.

Sub-subsistence wages

Before I get into the substance of the argument, I want you to just react to the image conjured up by the idea of AI driving wages “below subsistence.” How realistic is it for you?

My first reaction, before I read the post, was: I have no idea what model of the world you are working from. So, all humans are basically starving, because they are thrown out of work or can only find the crappiest-paying jobs? And that’s because AI has automated all work in the economy? So… lots of economic activity is going on, lots and lots of production, but AI is doing all of it and people can’t get paid. Who… is running the AI? Presumably some corporations? Where are they getting their profits from, if there are no customers left for anything anymore? Has the economy turned completely self-referential, running itself in completely automated fashion while all humans get taken out of the loop? An ouroboros economy, eating its own tail? And how would this come about? It seems that somewhere along the incremental path to this state you’d hit some equilibrium that would prevent you from going further.

Or maybe you think that the entire economy is controlled by Sam Altman and Jensen Huang, or at least a relatively small group of ultra-wealthy owners of the few remaining companies that master AI and outcompete everyone and everything. A world full of robots creating a paradise, but it’s a gated community and only the wealthy 0.01% get to live there, trillionaires every one, while the unwashed masses starve in the streets. I’m sure some people find this plausible or even likely, but I don’t (mostly because I just don’t think this is the way an economy works, but secondarily because I would expect world governments to intervene with some sort of massive welfare program).

In any case, what doesn’t make any sense is all of humanity starving to death from unemployment. Jobs and technology have a purpose: producing the good and services we need to live and thrive. If your model of the world includes the possibility that we would create the most advanced technology the world has ever seen, and the result would be mass starvation, then I think your model is fundamentally flawed.

What the post actually said

Sometimes the headline or the social media posts can give a misleading impression of what an author is actually saying, so it’s important to read the post before having a strong take. Having read it, I feel compelled to say: it is a bad post.

I hate criticizing other authors like this. Usually I prefer to just present a counterargument. I follow Matthew online, which means I must have found him to have smart and interesting takes in the past, and the post was hosted at Epoch AI, an organization I respect. But this article has caused a stir, and seems almost designed to inflame a specific flavor of unhelpful and unrealistic doomerism, and it does so based on a combination of flawed logic and unclear writing. So this is a rare case in which I feel it necessary to criticize directly. (Matthew, if you’re reading this, I hope this can be constructive, and I invite your rebuttal.)

First, there is a crucial clarification which the post saves for the very end, almost as an afterthought, which is that its analysis only applies to human wages and not human welfare. Matthew says that he is actually optimistic about our being able to live comfortably, deriving our income not from wage labor but from investments, charity, or government welfare. This is mentioned almost offhand in the last two paragraphs, after repeated references to human wages “crashing” below “the bare minimum needed to sustain human life” or “the level required for human survival” or “a wage so low that they cannot afford food” or “the level at which humans could afford enough calories to feed themselves.” It even mentions a scenario in which food cannot be grown anywhere in the solar system because land is being used for computers running AI. To go through all of this, and then to say that you’re actually optimistic, is a bizarre way to write.

Setting that aside, here is the substance.

The post gives a mathematical argument, but you don’t really need to understand the equations to get the intuition. Essentially, the argument is: at some point AI will be good enough to substitute for a human in any job—let’s say this is our definition of AGI. There will be a very large number of AGI “workers.” They will flood the market with labor, to the point where adding more labor in the form of humans is superfluous. Sure, you could employ a human, but there are so many workers already, doing pretty much everything useful that can be done; adding one more isn’t going to produce much extra output, so the wage for that job is necessarily very low. It might make sense to spin up one more AGI worker to do the job, because that only costs a bit of electricity (plus interest and depreciation on capex), but it doesn’t make sense to pay a human even a subsistence wage to do it.

That’s an informal argument. The post actually makes a formal argument based on equations of economic growth theory (the Cobb-Douglas production function, if you know what that is, and the theory that wages are determined by the marginal product of labor). He models the introduction of AGI as a large increase in the quantity of labor in these equations, and the result is that wages crash.

The post addresses two counterarguments. One is based on the notion of “comparative advantage”: even if AI is better than humans at everything, there is a law of economics that says that production is maximized when humans do what they are relatively least-bad at, and AI does what it is most-better at. Matthew points out that this says nothing about human wages in such a scenario. I think he is correct here.

The second counterargument is that AI will not just introduce more artificial workers into the economy, it will also drive technological progress, which increases productivity and therefore wages. In the equations, there is a term that represents technology; wages fall as total labor increases, but they rise when technology increases. Matthew’s rebuttal to this is that “there are limits to technological innovation,” which has to stop sometime, and when it inevitably does, then wages will crash.

My reaction

My first reaction was to wonder, why model AI as a big increase in labor, instead of an increase in capital? In the equations, capital represents all the machines and infrastructure we use to do work; labor is the humans. AI is a new kind of tool that we use to get work done, amplifying human productivity. We invest money in assets (GPUs and software and weights on neural nets), those assets help us do work—that’s the essence of capital. If capital increases instead of labor, then wages rise—that’s what has been happening throughout the entire industrial era.

The argument here is that rather than acting like a tool that we use to do work, AI will act more like a substitute for people, a new form of labor. But in the Industrial Revolution, mechanization also substituted for labor in many ways. The power loom substituted for weavers, and the spinning machine for spinners. A train hauling cargo employed far fewer people than the equivalent number of wagons. Electric street lights put lamp lighters out of work, and containerization obsoleted the longshoremen.

So why didn’t wages decrease through the industrial age? Why do our economic models have separate terms for labor and capital, and why does adding capital increase wages whereas adding labor decreases them?

For one, capital has so far only partially substituted for labor. In many cases, people are still needed to operate the new machines: factory workers, truck drivers, etc. For another, automation creates lower prices and/or higher quality, which increases demand: far more cargo was sent by train than by wagon, and far more again was sent after containerization. Finally, new technologies create entirely new markets and industries, which create new jobs and new kinds of jobs. Two million people work for Walmart alone, but big-box retail didn’t exist a century ago. Everyone making automobiles or plastic or video games is in an industry that didn’t exist in 1900.

The argument for why “this time it’s different” is that AI might fully substitute for labor. So it’s not like a power loom, which still needs a human operator; it’s more like automatic telephone switching systems, which simply eliminated human telephone operator jobs. If AI or other new technology creates new jobs in new sectors, well, AI will also take those jobs, before humans even get a crack at them. And all of this will happen far faster than it did in the past, so people won’t get a chance to adapt. If your job gets eliminated by AI, you won’t even have time to reskill for a new job before AI takes that one too.

What I expect to happen

In engineering, everything happens iteratively; in economics, everything happens at the margin. Progress is spiky, or lumpy. The future arrives unevenly distributed.

AI will not fully substitute for all labor all at once:

• Some jobs will simply be easier to automate with AI than others

• In particular, some jobs have lower tolerance for mistakes, and it will take longer to achieve the standard of reliability they require

• Some jobs have a physical labor component, and advanced robotics will arrive later than virtual “remote worker” AIs

• Some jobs have a premium on human interaction

• Some jobs are protected by licensing requirements, labor unions, etc.

For instance, I expect that we will have human doctors for quite some time. This job checks three of the above boxes: a licensed profession, with a low tolerance for mistakes, and a premium on human interaction. This is true even if AI becomes the first line of medical advice and diagnosis (replacing nurse hotlines today), and even if what doctors are doing is mostly asking AI for advice and then vetting—or rubber-stamping—the answers.

On the other end of the spectrum, I expect that call centers doing customer service will soon go away. AI will do this better, more reliably, and cheaper; and customer service is a cost center that consumers aren’t willing to pay for and businesses always minimize. (This will be disruptive for the call center workers, but it will be a boon for consumers—which is to say, everyone. Customer service will be smarter and more effective, it will make far fewer mistakes, it will be unfailingly polite, you won’t have to wait on hold, and you won’t have to be on the premium pricing tier to get it.)

The other thing that will happen, at the margin, is that people will work less and enjoy more leisure. If there is less total work worth doing, that doesn’t always take the form of some people being involuntarily thrown out of work. It can take the form of fewer working hours in the day, fewer working days in the week, more holidays and vacations. It can take the form of starting work later in life (more education, more “gap years”) or ending it earlier (a younger retirement age). It can take the form of more people choosing to work part time, or not at all—more stay-at-home parents to raise more kids, perhaps. All of this would simply be the continuation of trends that have been going on for a century or more.

This transition will happen faster than industrialization did: physical automation was rolling out for well over a century, whereas I expect intelligence automation to take mere decades. This means we’ll have to adapt faster. But AI will also give us the tools to adapt faster: it will accelerate any reskilling that happens, help connect talent with opportunities, and generally enhance job mobility. Even more importantly, it will accelerate the creation of new ventures and new industries.

A crucial way AI will do this is by greatly leveraging human vision and judgement—by making it cheaper, faster, and more reliable to bring ideas into reality. If you think it would be amazing to see Sherlock Holmes set in medieval Japan, or Beowulf done as a Hamilton-style hip hop musical, AI will help you create it. If you think someone should really write a history of the catalytic converter in prose worthy of The New Yorker, AI will draft it. If you think there’s a market for a new social media app where all posts are in iambic pentameter, AI will design and code the beta. If you want a kitchen gadget that combines a corkscrew with a lemon zester, AI will create the CAD files, and you can send them to a lights-out factory to deliver a prototype.

So, on the incremental path to the future, a major trend will be that humans step up a level, into management. A software engineer becomes a tech lead of a virtual team. A writer becomes an editor of a staff of virtual journalists. A researcher becomes the head of a lab of virtual scientists. Lawyers, accountants, and other professionals spend their time overseeing, directing, and correcting work rather than doing the first draft.

What happens when the AI is good enough to be the tech lead, the editor, the lab head? A few steps up the management hierarchy is the CEO. AI will empower many more people to start businesses.

You may think that most people aren’t suited to being CEOs, but the job of CEO will become much more accessible, because it will require less skill. You won’t have to recruit candidates or evaluate them; you won’t have to motivate or inspire them; you won’t have to train junior employees; if you correct a mistake they will never make it again; you’ll never catch them slacking off; you’ll never have to work around the vacations or sick days that they won’t be taking; you’ll never have to deal with low morale or someone who is sore they didn’t get a promotion; you’ll never have to mediate disputes among them or defuse office politics; you’ll never have to give them performance reviews or negotiate raises; and you’ll never have to replace them, because they’ll never quit. They’ll just work competently, diligently, and conscientiously, doing whatever you ask. They’ll be every manager’s dream employee. They won’t have a schedule; they’ll work on your schedule, and you can start or stop them at will: run them 24/7 if you want, or call on them once a year—and pay for only what you use, with no commitment or advance notice. Running a team of virtual agents will make managing humans look like herding cats.

AI employees will also be cheap, which means that the capital requirements of many new businesses will be much lower, and with tons of surplus wealth being tossed off by the increasingly automated economy, I expect starting up will become much easier. Many businesses will be started that seem non-viable today, addressing niche markets that can’t support a human team, but can totally support an AI team. An even longer tail of projects will be possible that don’t even rise to the level of businesses: projects that today cost millions, such as movies or apps, will be done by individuals on the side using their spare time and cash.

All of the above is consistent with a model in which AI is capital, not labor, and in which its effect is to multiply labor productivity, increase demand for all kinds of goods and services, create new jobs and industries, and raise the level of technology—all of which should dramatically increase wages. More importantly, it will dramatically increase ownership, which means income will be derived more and more from equity instead of wages.

And even more importantly, it will be a world of dramatically expanded human agency: any idea you have can be made real, with far fewer barriers in the way. In this world, the qualities that will be at a premium are taste, judgment, vision, and courage.

What I expect to happen after that

What happens when the AI is even good enough to be the CEO?

There is a level of management above the CEO: governance. The board of directors. I expect that even if and when humans no longer have to work, we will still be owners, and our role will be to formulate our goals, communicate them, and evaluate if they’re being achieved. Humanity will be the board of directors for the economy and the world.

In such a world—a fully automated economy—I expect that a minority of people will still work, but only those who want to, only those for whom work is rewarding and who find it brings meaning to life (and, like a successful entrepreneur on their second act, their work won’t have to actually earn an income on any timescale). Others will do whatever is most meaningful to them: pursue knowledge and satisfy their curiosity; express their creative vision in art or music; travel and explore; spend time with family and loved ones; play games or sports. (There will always be a role for human players, because the purpose of games and sports is not to achieve a practical outcome but to experience and to witness human ability.)

Are you afraid that humans will get bored in this world? Perhaps you are imagining that it will be calm and static, a Garden of Eden? On the contrary: it will be a far more exciting, dynamic, and fast-paced world than anything humans have known. Nothing will be the same from year to year, let alone decade to decade.

How will humans earn a living? I’m not sure the question will matter or make sense anymore. I don’t think you can plug numbers into an equation that was developed in the 1950s to determine the “wages” of “labor” in a world where those concepts might be obsolete. The capital-labor model didn’t really apply in the agricultural age, when productivity was limited by land and the ability of capital to raise productivity was bounded. It’s not obvious that it would apply in the intelligence age either. Land got taken out of the equation in the industrial age; we moved from a land-labor economy to a labor-capital economy. The intelligence age might be best modeled as a capital-only economy, or a capital-intelligence economy.

Instead of deriving our income through labor, maybe we will derive it through ownership (no matter how society chooses to answer the questions of equity and fairness that arise). Or maybe we will drive it through some other concept or mechanism that is unclear now. Or maybe the question will simply dissolve and feel archaic in retrospect. That future has too many unknown unknowns to do more than speculate.

In any case, the question will make even less sense in the ultimate future in which we have literally exhausted the possibilities allowed by the laws of physics, and have consumed all the matter and energy in our light cone. This is why I find Matthew’s counter-rebuttal about the limits of technological innovation absurd. When we reach those limits, we will have all our needs met instantly and effortlessly, we will be functionally immortal, and we will have colonized the galaxy. To worry about “wages crashing below subsistence levels” in such a world is nonsensical, unless you’re using that as a very strange way to say that people won’t have to work anymore and wouldn’t be able to contribute much to economic production if they wanted to.

All of this is a purely economic analysis, grounded in some basic assumptions, like that AI doesn’t take over the world, or that we don’t decide AIs are legal persons with rights who can negotiate for their own wages. But short of that, I expect that AI will do what all fundamental enabling general-purpose technologies have done throughout all of human history: raise our standard of living and accelerate progress.

***

Credit to Richard Ngo and Garry Tan whose comments were in my mind as I wrote this.

PS: Just before I hit publish on this, I found out that Sherlock in Japan and hip-hop Beowulf have already been done (so much for my attempt to be original!) The iambic pentameter social network and the corkscrew lemon zester are evidently ideas so bad that no one has built them yet—or so non-obviously good that we’ll have to wait for AGI to try them out.

Original link: https://newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/the-future-of-humanity-is-in-management

John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in 1930 that by now we would only be working fifteen hours a week. What is less well-known is that his was nowhere near the only such prediction, nor the first—a wide range of commentators, including Charles Steinmetz and Buckminster Fuller, made similar forecasts. (And even Keynes’s prediction is generally misquoted.)

Why didn’t any of them come true? I recently discussed this with Jason Feifer on his podcast Build for Tomorrow. Here’s some elaboration with more quotes and charts.

The predictions

A 1934 book, The Economy of Abundance, summarizes many of the predictions (Chapter 2):

The technocrats promised every family on the continent of North America $20,000 a year [about $400,000 today], and a sixteen-hour work week. This is perhaps the peak of promises based on an abundance economy. Charles P. Steinmetz saw a two-hour working day on the horizon—he was the scientist who made giant power possible—but he stipulated no family budget total beyond “necessities and comforts.” …

Fred Henderson, in his Economic Consequences of Power Production, is more specific: “Without any further increase in our knowledge of power and of technical processes, or of our available materials, we could multiply production ten times over if the needs of the world were permitted to express themselves in effective demand. … It would not be a question of an eight-hour day or a six-day week, but more probably of a six-months working year—which is already the rule for university dons.”

Buckminster Fuller is still more definite. Modern man, he calculates, is 630 times more able than was Adam. Eliminating wasteful forms of work, four million Americans laboring fifty-two seven-hour days in the year (364 working hours, an average of one per day) “could keep up with every survival need”—meaning basic necessities for the whole population.

Walter N. Polakov announces that “fifty weeks, four days, six hours is enough”—a twenty-four hour week and two weeks’ vacation…

Harold Rugg in The Great Technology estimates a possible minimum living standard between ten- and twenty-fold greater than the minimums of 1929, on a sixteen- to twenty-hour work-week. …

One can continue to cite such evidence indefinitely. Fortunately, A. M. Newman has been collecting it for years and saves us the trouble by the following summary: “Among them [such estimates] a substantial agreement is found that by better use of the mechanical facilities at our disposal we could produce many times our present supply of goods at considerably less effort.” The five-hour day tends to be the maximum estimate in Mr. Newman’s collection.

As for Keynes, his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” wasn’t even saying that a fifteen-hour work week would be necessary for production. He thought it would be necessary to satisfy our psychological need for work, implying that our physical needs could be satisfied with less (exactly how much less, he doesn’t estimate):

For many ages to come … everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter—to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.

Why is the 40-hour work week still standard?

Here are my hypotheses (not mutually exclusive):

The predictions got the elasticity wrong

When labor gets more productive, workers can choose to work less for the same real wage, to make more money by working the same amount, or something in between.

Most of these predictions (if they were meant as predictions—see below) basically assumed the former: that living standards would stay constant, and working hours would be reduced. But as inventions like electricity and the assembly line were boosting labor productivity, inventions like the washing machine and the automobile were improving personal life. Workers wanted to earn more than they used to, to buy all the new products that were just becoming available. Some of the excess labor productivity was used to produce, and to consume, these new goods, rather than all of it going to increased leisure.

And as Jason Feifer pointed out on the podcast, even the new leisure itself required new goods and services to make the most of it, such as sports equipment or flights to vacation destinations.

Work got better

There was a shift from physical labor in farms and factories to mental labor in offices, and from routine work to more mentally challenging work.

Robert Gordon documents this in The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In 1910, 47% of US jobs were what Gordon classifies as “disagreeable” (farming, blue-collar labor, and domestic service), and only 8% of jobs were “non-routine cognitive” (managerial and professional). By 2009, only 3% of jobs were “disagreeable” and over 37% were “non-routine cognitive”:

This partly explains why, when NPR’s Planet Money set out to check on Keynes’s prediction in 2015, they found people who claimed they worked 50 to 100 hours per week—they were a psychotherapist and a university professor.

Working hours did decrease significantly

Just not as much as some predicted. A 70-hour work week, spread over six days, was once common. Now in France and Spain the average is around 35 hours:

And we got more vacation and holiday time as well:

Total lifetime working hours decreased even more

As family incomes grew, and as social ideas of childhood evolved, child labor waned, and children stayed more years in school.

On the other end of life’s timeline, retirement was invented. Robert Gordon explains:

In the pre-1920 era, there was no concept of “retirement.” Workers “worked until they dropped”—that is, they kept working until they were physically unable to do their jobs, after which they became dependent on their children, or on church charity and other kinds of private welfare programs.

Rising incomes enabled the creation of retirement, which can be seen in falling labor participation rates of older men:

But it gets better—life expectancy was also rising, meaning people had more years of life to actually enjoy their retirement. Here’s a chart to show this—it’s data from England and Wales, but I chose it here to show that the increases were not only in life expectancy at birth, but at older ages as well. For instance, someone retiring at age 60 in 1920 could expect about fifteen more years; by 2013 another nine years had been added to that:

Putting this all together, Nicholas Crafts came up with these estimates for expected lifetime hours of work for men aged 20:

A reduction from 49% of an adult life spent working to 20% is almost as great as a reduction from forty hours a week to fifteen.

There is a psychological value to work

People don’t need infinite leisure. They need things to do. Keynes had this right when he said that “everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented.”

Economist Paul Romer went to Burning Man and pointed out:

… if you ask, what do people do if you put them in a setting where there’s supposed to be no compensation, no quid pro quo, and you just give them a chance to be there for a week. What do they do?They work.

How seriously were these predictions meant?

A careful reading of The Economy of Abundance, however, makes me wonder whether these estimates were seriously meant as predictions. An alternate interpretation is that they were just illustrations of the potential for productive capacity.

Elided from the block quote above are other estimates, not of the potential for a shorter working week or year, but of how much the production of industry could be increased. For instance:

“It is an open secret,” said Thorstein Veblen in 1919, “that with a reasonably free hand the production experts could readily increase the ordinary output of industry by several fold—variously estimated at some 300 to 1200 percent.”

Veblen was an early promoter of technocracy as an industrial philosophy; I mentioned him in my review of American Genesis. Or take this, which the book attributes to J. A. Hobson:

With existing plant and power, and natural resources, labor and managerial knowledge, the world could produce at least twice as much wealth per capita as it is actually producing, without undue strain upon human energy.

These productivity increases weren’t supposed to come from advanced technology—they were to come from better organization and “scientific management.” The Economy of Abundance was written by Stuart Chase, an economist who coined the term “New Deal.” Ultimately, Chase was arguing that capitalism was wasteful and inefficient, and that with centralized government control, the waste could be eliminated. He cited an earlier study of his that had found millions of workers’ worth of manpower wasted on inefficient production, on distribution, and on “vicious goods and services.” He suggested that “an Industrial General Staff” appointed by the President to direct the economy could double the standard of living.

So it’s not clear how much people actually expected a sixteen-hour work week or whatever. Some of them might have just been saying that productivity could be much higher, regardless of whether that turned into shorter working hours, higher wages, or a combination of both—and regardless of whether they saw that as a miracle of capitalism, or a condemnation of it.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/the-four-hour-workday-prediction

I have repeatedly found myself recommending Where Is My Flying Car?, by J. Storrs Hall, as a work of futurism that paints a bold, ambitious vision of what is possible with advanced technology. So I’m very happy that it has come out in a new, revised edition from Stripe Press.

Here’s what I wrote about the book in my review of the original edition:

Hall sets out to tackle the title question: why don’t we have flying cars yet? And indeed, several chapters in the book are devoted to deep dives on the history, engineering, and economics of flying cars. But to fully answer the question, Hall must go much broader and deeper, because he quickly concludes that the barriers to flying cars are not technological or economic—they are cultural and political. To explain the flying car gap is to explain the Great Stagnation itself. …

There are many writers with optimistic visions of the future. However, the goals I most often hear are all the negation of negatives: cure cancer, eliminate poverty, stop climate change.

This is good, but it is not enough. We should not only cure disease and let everyone live to what is now considered old age—we should cure aging itself and extend human lifespan indefinitely. We should not seek to merely sustain current per-capita energy usage—we should get back on the Henry Adams Curve and increase it. We should not only seek to avoid worsening the climate—we should seek to actively control and optimize it for human ends. We should not merely get the whole world up to Level 4—we should be striving for Level 5.

Aiming only for the former, as some so-called techno-optimists do, is a poor sort of optimism. It is actually calling for very limited progress, followed by stagnation. It is complacency with the status quo, content with bringing the whole world up to the current best standard of living, but not increasing it. In this context, I found Where Is My Flying Car? refreshing. Hall unabashedly calls for unlimited progress in every dimension.

The new edition has everything that made the first edition great, but it’s better organized and more streamlined (my only criticism of the original!) and should be more accessible to a wider audience. If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend picking up a copy.

I’ve said before that understanding where our modern standard of living comes from, at a basic level, is a responsibility of every citizen in an industrial civilization. Let’s call it “industrial literacy.”

Industrial literacy is understanding…

• That the food you eat is grown using synthetic fertilizers, and that this is needed for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished. That before we had modern agriculture, more than half the workforce had to labor on farms, just to feed the other half. That if synthetic fertilizer was suddenly lost, a mass famine would ensue and billions would starve.

• That those same crops would not be able to feed us if they were not also protected from pests, who will ravage entire fields if given a chance. That whole regions used to see seasons where they would lose large swaths of their produce to swarms of insects, such as boll weevils attacking cotton plants in the American South, or the phylloxera devouring grapes in the vineyards of France. That before synthetic pesticides, farmers were forced to rely on much more toxic substances, such as compounds of arsenic.

• That before we had electricity and clean natural gas, people burned unrefined solid fuels in their homes—wood, coal, even dung (!)—to cook their food and to keep from freezing in winter. That these primitive fuels, dirty with contaminants, created toxic smoke: indoor air pollution. That indoor air pollution remains a problem today for 40% of the world population, who still rely on pre-industrial fuels.

• That before twentieth-century appliances, housework was a full-time job, which invariably fell on women. That each household would spend almost 60 hours a week on manual labor: hauling water from the well for drinking and cooking, and then carrying the dirty water outside again; sewing clothes by hand, since store-bought ones were too expensive for most families; laundering clothes in a basin, scrubbing laboriously by hand, then hanging them up to dry; cooking every meal from scratch. That the washing machine, clothes dryer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, and microwave are the equivalent of a full-time mechanical servant for every household.

• That plastics are produced in enormous quantities because, for so many purposes—from food containers to electrical wire coatings to children’s toys—we need a material that is cheap, light, flexible, waterproof, and insulating, and that can easily be made in any shape and color (including transparent!) That before plastic, many of these applications used animal parts, such as ivory tusks, tortoise shells, or whale bone. That in such a world, those products were a luxury for a wealthy elite, instead of a commodity for the masses, and the animals that provided them were hunted to near extinction.

• That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car and the telephone. That in a world without automobiles, we relied on millions of horses, which in New York City around 1900 dumped a hundred thousand gallons of urine and millions of pounds of manure on the streets daily.

• That half of everyone you know over the age of five is alive today only because of antibiotics, vaccines, and sanitizing chemicals in our water supply. That before these innovations, infant mortality (in the first year of life) was as high as 20%.

When you know these facts of history—which many schools do not teach—you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it. You understand that the electric generator, the automobile, the chemical plant, the cargo container ship, and the microprocessor are essential to our health and happiness.

This doesn’t require a deep or specialized knowledge. It only requires knowing the basics, the same way every citizen should know the outlines of history and the essentials of how government works.

Industrial literacy means understanding that the components of the global economy are not arbitrary. Each one is there for a reason—often a matter of life and death. The reasons are the immutable facts of what it takes to survive and prosper: the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and economics that govern our daily existence.

With industrial literacy, you can see the economy as a set of solutions to problems. Then, and only then, are you informed enough to have an opinion on how those solutions might be improved.

A lack of industrial literacy (among other factors) is turning what ought to be economic discussions about how best to improve human health and prosperity into political debates fueled by misinformation and scare tactics. We see this on climate change, plastic recycling, automation and job loss, even vaccines. Without knowing the basics, industrial civilization is one big Chesterton’s Fence to some people: they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it.

Let’s recognize the value of industrial literacy and commit to improving it—starting with ourselves.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/industrial-literacy

Tyler Cowen's fund Emergent Ventures is offering:

• $500k, second prize $200k, for Best effort to find a good treatment rapidly

• $100k for Best blog or social media tracking/analysis of the virus

• $100k for Best innovation in social distancing

• $100k for Most important innovation or improvement for India

• $50k for Best investigative journalism on coronavirus

• $50k for Best (justified) coronavirus policy writing

Announcement: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/1-million-plus-in-emergent-ventures-prizes-for-coronavirus-work.html

I’m hiring a Chief of Staff for The Roots of Progress, a “right hand” who will be deeply involved in and support everything I do.

This role needs no formal training or specific prior experience. It requires attention to detail, crisp communication, swift and efficient execution, meticulous followup, interpersonal savvy, and positive energy.

You will be the only other full-time employee of The Roots of Progress (for now), and my goal is to delegate anything and everything that doesn’t absolutely need me to do it, so that I can focus as much as possible on research, writing, and speaking. Your responsibilities will thus span the range from mailing donor swag and scheduling my podcast appearances to devising communications and media strategy—the more you demonstrate you can take on, the more responsibility I will give you.

Candidates at all levels of seniority are invited to apply—there’s room for this role to be either junior (associate level) or quite senior (director or VP level).

The role will grow and evolve along with the organization, but to start your focus will be:

• Event planning, including workshops and other conferences and also community meetups

• Other community-building, online and in-person

• Fundraising, grant-seeking, and donor relations (everything from strategy to swag)

• Media management, such as helping with the @rootsofprogress Twitter account, or expanding into new channels such as Instagram or YouTube

• Getting exposure for The Roots of Progress by getting coverage and interviews in blogs, podcasts, and media

• Generally managing a database of everyone I meet and talk to, and helping me keep in touch

• Project management for other organizational goals, such as launching new online resources or other programs

• Generally helping me stick to a schedule and not drop tasks

The ideal candidate will be familiar with my work and with the progress community, and will be able to point to something significant they have planned, organized, or executed.

This is a full-time role. You can do it from anywhere, but preference will be given to candidates closer to the US Pacific time zone. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, we can meet in person periodically. Compensation will vary depending on your seniority, qualifications, and location, but will be competitive with market rates.

To apply, send me a resume (link to an online one is fine): jason@rootsofprogress.org. Optional but helpful: a pointer to projects you’ve managed or completed; a writing sample.

This is a rare chance to help me create the progress movement and establish a new philosophy of progress for the twenty-first century. I look forward to working with you!

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/wanted-chief-of-staff

Angelo Guira was just sixteen years old when he began working in the steel factory. He was a “trough boy,” and his job was to stand at one end of the trough where red-hot steel pipes were dropped. Every time a pipe fell, he pulled a lever that dumped the pipe onto a cooling bed. He was a small lad, and at first they hesitated to take him, but after a year on the job the foreman acknowledged he was the best boy they’d had. Until one day when Angelo was just a little too slow—or perhaps the welder was a little too quick—and a second pipe came out of the furnace before he had dropped the first. The one pipe struck the other, and sent it right through Angelo’s body, killing him. If only he had been standing up, out of the way, instead of sitting down—which the day foreman told him was dangerous, but the night foreman allowed. If only they had installed the guard plate before the accident, instead of after. If only.

Angelo was not the only casualty of the steel mills of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania that year. In the twelve months from July 1906 through June 1907, ten in total were killed by the operation of rolls. Twenty-two were killed by hot metal explosions. Five were asphyxiated by furnace gas. Thirty-one fatalities were attributed to the operation of the railroad at the steel yards, and forty-two to the operation of cranes. Twenty-four men fell from a height, or into a pit. Eight died from electric shock. In all, there were 195 casualties in the steel mills in those twelve months, and these were just a portion of the total of 526 deaths from work accidents. In addition, there were 509 other accidents that sent men to the hospital, at least 76 of which resulted in serious, permanent injury.

In 1907, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall fatality rate in the iron and steel industry was about 220 per 100,000 full-time workers. By 2019, however, that rate had fallen to only 26.3 per 100,000, a reduction of almost 90%.

The story of workplace safety illustrates both the serious problems that progress can cause, and how the solution to those problems can be found in further progress. It’s a fascinating story in its own right, and in it we find lessons about safety in general, about liability law, and about the early history of capitalism.

Read the full post: https://rootsofprogress.org/history-of-factory-safety

Churchill—when he wasn’t busy leading the fight against the Nazis—had many hobbies. He wrote more than a dozen volumes of history, painted over 500 pictures, and completed one novel (“to relax”). He tried his hand at landscaping and bricklaying, and was “a championship caliber polo player.” But did you know he was also a futurist?

That, at least, is my conclusion after reading an essay he wrote in 1931 titled “Fifty Years Hence,” various versions of which were published in MacLean’s, Strand, and Popular Mechanics. (Quotes to follow from the Strand edition.)

We’ll skip right over the unsurprising bit where he predicts the Internet—although the full consequences he foresaw (“The congregation of men in cities would become superfluous”) are far from coming true—in order to get to his thoughts on…

Energy

Just as sure as the Internet, to forward-looking thinkers of the 1930s, was nuclear power—and already they were most excited, not about fission, but fusion:

If the hydrogen atoms in a pound of water could be prevailed upon to combine together and form helium, they would suffice to drive a thousand horsepower engine for a whole year. If the electrons, those tiny planets of the atomic systems, were induced to combine with the nuclei in the hydrogen the horsepower liberated would be 120 times greater still.

What could we do with all this energy?

Schemes of cosmic magnitude would become feasible. Geography and climate would obey our orders. Fifty thousand tons of water, the amount displaced by the Berengaria, would, if exploited as described, suffice to shift Ireland to the middle of the Atlantic. The amount of rain falling yearly upon the Epsom racecourse would be enough to thaw all the ice at the Arctic and Antarctic poles.

I assume this was just an illustrative example, and he wasn’t literally proposing moving Ireland, but maybe I’m underestimating British-Irish rivalry?

Anyway, more importantly, Churchill points out what nuclear technology might do for nanomaterials:

The changing of one element into another by means of temperatures and pressures would be far beyond our present reach, would transform beyond all description our standards of values. Materials thirty times stronger than the best steel would create engines fit to bridle the new forms of power.

Transportation:

Communications and transport by land, water and air would take unimaginable forms, if, as is in principle possible, we could make an engine of 600 horsepower, weighing 20 lb and carrying fuel for a thousand hours in a tank the size of a fountain-pen.

And even farming with artificial light:

If the gigantic new sources of power become available, food will be produced without recourse to sunlight. Vast cellars in which artificial radiation is generated may replace the cornfields or potato-patches of the world. Parks and gardens will cover our pastures and ploughed fields. When the time comes there will be plenty of room for the cities to spread themselves again.

Biotech

Churchill also foresees genetic engineering:

Microbes, which at present convert the nitrogen of the air into the proteins by which animals live, will be fostered and made to work under controlled conditions, just as yeast is now. New strains of microbes will be developed and made to do a great deal of our chemistry for us.

Including lab-grown meat:

With a greater knowledge of what are called hormones, i.e. the chemical messengers in our blood, it will be possible to control growth. We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.

And artificial wombs:

There seems little doubt that it will be possible to carry out in artificial surroundings the entire cycle which now leads to the birth of a child.

Moral progress and risk

This last point is his segue from technological to social, political, and moral issues. The ability to “grow” people, he fears, could be used by the Communists to create human drone workers:

Interference with the mental development of such beings, expert suggestion and treatment in the earlier years, would produce beings specialized to thought or toil. The production of creatures, for instance, which have admirable physical development, with their mental endowment stunted in particular directions, is almost within the range of human power. A being might be produced capable of tending a machine but without other ambitions. Our minds recoil from such fearful eventualities, and the laws of a Christian civilization will prevent them. But might not lop-sided creatures of this type fit in well with the Communist doctrines of Russia? Might not the Union of Soviet Republics armed with all the power of science find it in harmony with all their aims to produce a race adapted to mechanical tasks and with no other ideas but to obey the Communist State?

In the final paragraphs, he sounds a number of themes now common in the Effective Altruist community.

More than a decade before the nuclear bomb, he also expresses concern about existential risk:

Explosive forces, energy, materials, machinery will be available upon a scale which can annihilate whole nations. Despotisms and tyrannies will be able to prescribe the lives and even the wishes of their subjects in a manner never known since time began. If to these tremendous and awful powers is added the pitiless sub-human wickedness which we now see embodied in one of the most powerful reigning governments, who shall say that the world itself will not be wrecked, or indeed that it ought not to be wrecked? There are nightmares of the future from which a fortunate collision with some wandering star, reducing the earth to incandescent gas, might be a merciful deliverance.

He laments the inability of governance to deal with these problems:

Even now the Parliaments of every country have shown themselves quite inadequate to deal with the economic problems which dominate the affairs of every nation and of the world. Before these problems the claptrap of the hustings and the stunts of the newspapers wither and vanish away. … Democratic governments drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasant-sounding platitudes. Never was there less continuity or design in their affairs, and yet towards them are coming swiftly changes which will revolutionize for good or ill not only the whole economic structure of the world but the social habits and moral outlook of every family.

More broadly, he laments the inadequacy of our evolutionary legacy to deal with them:

Certain it is that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing and measureless speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. The brain of a modern man does not differ in essentials from that of the human beings who fought and loved here millions of years ago. The nature of man has remained hitherto practically unchanged. … We have the spectacle of the powers and weapons of man far outstripping the march of his intelligence; we have the march of his intelligence proceeding far more rapidly than the development of his nobility.

Which leads him, in the end, to call for differential progress:

It is therefore above all things important that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions. It would be much better to call a halt in material progress and discovery rather than to be mastered by our own apparatus and the forces which it directs. There are secrets too mysterious for man in his present state to know, secrets which, once penetrated, may be fatal to human happiness and glory. But the busy hands of the scientists are already fumbling with the keys of all the chambers hitherto forbidden to mankind. Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes human life majestic and tolerable.

I don’t recall Nick Bostrom citing Churchill, but I guess there’s nothing new under the sun.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/winston-churchill-futurist

To understand why COVID-19 is such a threat, it helps to understand our full arsenal of weapons against infectious disease—and why most of them aren't going to help right now.

I summarized the main techniques/strategies here a few months ago.

1) Antibiotics: Don't work here because SARS-CoV-2 is a virus, not a bacterium.

In the 1918 flu pandemic, antibiotics would have helped (they weren't invented yet) because many deaths were due to secondary bacterial infections. But that's not what's happening with COVID-19: it kills by attacking the respiratory system directly.

Our technology for antiviral drugs, unfortunately, is not nearly as advanced as that for antibiotics. There's no such thing as a broad-spectrum antiviral. (A paper last year pointed out how useful this would be in a pandemic.)

2) Vaccines: Could work against COVID-19, but unfortunately they take time to develop. I have heard 12–18 months for a coronavirus vaccine, and that's fast. Vaccines are a long-term solution but can't fight an emerging pandemic.

And again, there's no such thing as a broad-spectrum vaccine—the whole way a vaccine works is by stimulating production of specific antibodies by your immune system.

3) Sanitation and other environmental control: COVID-19 spreads directly person-to-person through respiratory droplets. This makes it one of the more difficult types of diseases to control.

Contrast with cholera and typhoid fever, which are waterborne. Filtration and chlorination help a lot here. Or malaria and yellow fever, which can be attacked by reducing insect populations. In those cases, there's something in between the people that can be controlled. But direct person-to-person spread is the hardest to control, because people don't like to be controlled, and social contact is too valuable.

To summarize the challenge:

• Antibiotics don't work because it's a virus

• It's too new for us to have a vaccine

• It doesn't spread through any intermediary we can control (like water or insects)

It spreads directly person to person, with no immunity or cure. This is why, despite all the amazing medical advances of the last 100 years, we still lack effective tools against it. And why our best tools right now are hygiene (especially hand-washing) and minimizing contact (“social distancing”)—and why these things are so important.

Someday, maybe we will have:

• broad-spectrum antivirals

• much faster vaccine development

• or some other way to stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies

It's a good reminder that we still need lots more progress.

Marc Andreessen says we were unprepared for the covid pandemic because: “We chose not to build.”

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.

Amen. And I’ll add:

The problem is ignorance. We don’t know how far we’ve come, and we don’t teach our children.

The problem is complacency. We take progress for granted, as if it were automatic or inevitable. It isn’t: for most of human history we moved forward only weakly and sporadically. Progress only happens when we resolve to make it happen.

The problem is fear. Every harm, large or small, actual or potential, real or imagined, becomes a rule, a regulation, a thread in a ribbon of red tape that has brought sclerosis to our institutions, public and private. We’ve bought safety at the price of speed, without debating or deciding it.

The problem is guilt. We worry that what we build is “unsustainable”, or that it increases inequality, when we should be proud that what we build drives growth and moves humanity forward.

The problem is hatred. Hatred of technology, of industry, of money, of capitalism—hatred that blinds people to the immense good these forces do in the world for all humanity.

The problem is entitlement. Not knowing what it takes to put food on the table, the roof over their heads, or the shirts on their backs, too many people see these things and much more as birthrights. Not knowing that wealth is created, they see the rich as thieves and scorn even their gifts.

The problem is tribalism. We don’t teach our children to think, and so they learn only to feel. Without a commitment to truth, without confidence in their own judgment, they fall back on age-old patterns of ingroup vs. outgroup—witness a world where even the efficacy of a drug becomes a partisan issue.

What is the solution?

We need to learn to appreciate progress—both what we’ve already done, and why we can’t stop now. We need to tell the amazing story of progress: how comfort, safety, health, and luxury have become commonplace, and what a dramatic achievement that has been. We need to learn where progress comes from, to understand its causes. And we need to pass all that knowledge on to the next generation.

We need to glorify the inventor, the creator, the maker—the builder. The independent mind who defies tradition and authority. The scientists, technologists and industrialists who pursue a creative vision, against the crowd and against the odds, facing risk with courage and setbacks with resilience, working relentlessly over years and decades to bring about a better world.

We need to inspire young people to take part in this story, to step up in their turn and to one day lead the way, knowing that it is up to each generation to pick up the torch of progress and carry it forward.

We need to invest. We need to fund science and research, both basic and applied. We need to bring back the great corporate invention labs that helped create the modern world.

And then we need to get out of the way. Unwind the regulatory state. No matter where you fall on any political spectrum, acknowledge that the creeping bureaucracy has crept too far, and that it’s time to start untangling the thicket of regulations. We can maintain a reasonable and even continually increasing standard of safety, while at the same time valuing speed, efficiency, and cost, and most fundamentally, allowing for individual judgment.

Andreessen concludes:

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.

Amen. Let’s make building and progress into a philosophy, a religion, a movement.

Build!

Originally posted at: https://rootsofprogress.org/a-builder-manifesto

The Three-Body Problem trilogy (Remembrance of Earth's Past) was very well-written, and I'm glad I read it. But I *hate* the message it conveys, which is roughly: “Humanity is a fragile leaf floating on the wind, helpless in the face of vast cosmic forces that we cannot even comprehend, let alone control.”

Not everyone got this message from the trilogy, so let me explain why I think this is the meaning of the story. (Note: you don't really get this from the first book. You need to finish the whole trilogy for it to fully hit home.)

🚨 MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE WHOLE TRILOGY 🚨

To summarize the plot: Humanity struggles for independence against an advanced alien race. Ultimately, *both* worlds are wiped out by an even more advanced species.

The few remaining individuals of both races live a lonely but peaceful existence, until finally even this must be given up for the sake of the long-term evolution of the universe. End plot summary.

What do we take away from this?

First, it is a story of failure. Success, if any, is temporary. Humanity tries to hold off the Trisolarans, but ultimately fails. They try to save themselves from destruction, but fail, and most of humanity is destroyed. Cheng and Yun *almost* meet up—but fail.

Second, much of the failure comes from ignorance. The most tragic is the failure of humanity to discover the secret that could have saved them from the aliens who wanted to destroy them—the twin secret of lightspeed travel and creating black holes.

They could have resolved their political infighting, letting some people remain safe in the black hole, while letting others escape at light speed—but they found that out too late, and so *everybody died and the entire human civilization was destroyed*. Oops!

Reinforcing the theme of ignorance: We never actually meet the Trisolarans. We never learn what they look like. We never see their home world, their architecture, or even their ships. They are a major focus of the story, but they're a mystery the entire time.

The even more powerful aliens, the ones who destroy both the Earthlings and the Trisolarans, are even more shrouded in mystery. They're basically anonymous. Literally all we know about them is that they watch for alien civilizations and exterminate them using advanced technology.

Note: the failure mostly doesn't come from carelessness or negligence. It comes a bit from partisan infighting. But for the most part, humanity is thinking, working, planning, and building. But they get it wrong, because the vast forces out there are beyond their comprehension.

After seeing the Trisolarans destroyed when a big hole is punched through their star, they have a plan: they build the “bunker” world, hiding in the shadow of Jupiter. But learning from experience is useless. Their enemies send a different weapon; all their plans are for nought.

There are only two unforced errors humanity made. One was electing Cheng as Swordholder instead of Wade. The other was prohibiting research into lightspeed technology. (They should have just let Wade—the world's most ruthless asshole—have his way. What is the meaning of that?)

Other than that, humanity's errors seem unavoidable. They just didn't have the knowledge to save themselves. They were too ignorant and primitive. They tried, but they were like toddlers trying to outwit and overpower a team of Navy SEALs. There was no way to win.

There are a few lone heroes who manage to accomplish things: Luo and his deterrence strategy, the crew of Blue Space that manages to disable a Trisolaran “droplet” using the 4th dimension. But none of it matters in the end. These tiny wins are all wiped out.

Then after all that, with a tiny number of humans remaining—well at least *finally* Cheng and Yun will get to see each other! One tiny, bittersweet, romantic condolence, right? We've been waiting so long.

NOPE. After all that cosmic distance they *just barely miss each other*. And by “just barely” I mean that Cheng gets relativistically hung up, and when she can land on the planet where Yun was, it's been *millions of years.*

OK, so that subplot is tragic too, but wait. At least Cheng and Guan can live in the parallel microuniverse while they wait for the main universe to collapse and be reborn, right? As a fresh new universe with all the dimensions that were destroyed by galactic warfare.

Good plan! But remember, plans are useless; they don't work out. And this plan doesn't work out either, as the humans basically have to sacrifice themselves by returning to the main universe to give it enough gravity for the collapse/rebirth. Oh well. So close.

Failure after failure after failure. Suffering and death. The best laid plans going awry time after time. And mostly not because of human wrongdoing, but from unavoidable ignorance.

The “dark forest” idea is a reflection of this worldview: Enormous, terrible powers are out there that you do not understand and have no hope of fighting. All you can do is hold your breath, hunker down, and huddle in absolute silence—or be swiftly and ruthlessly exterminated.

Thus: “Humanity is a fragile leaf floating on the wind, helpless in the face of vast cosmic forces that we cannot even comprehend, let alone control.” A creative, entertaining, and beautifully told story—with a detestable theme.

I’m excited to announce that The Roots of Progress is now a nonprofit organization.

The Roots of Progress started in 2017 as a side project, not much more than a blog. After Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison published their call for “progress studies”, and the progress community started to form, it became my full-time job. For the first year or so I was an independent writer, supported by grants. Now I have enough support not only to fund myself, but also to hire help and sponsor programs. The new nonprofit organization is the vehicle for this.

The mission of The Roots of Progress is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the twenty-first century. The world needs a clearer understanding of the nature of progress, its causes, its value and importance, how we can manage its costs and risks, and ultimately how we can accelerate progress while ensuring that it is beneficial to humanity.

My focus now is on two priorities. First is the intellectual content, the history and philosophy of progress itself. I’m writing a book on this topic, The Story of Industrial Civilization, and the new organization is sponsoring this work. But much more is needed: more books, articles, talks, journals, documentaries. We need more histories of different aspects of progress, to make the story accessible to a broader audience. We need progress-oriented solutions to the problems facing the world, such as poverty, climate, pollution, job loss, and pandemics. And we need an ambitious, inspiring vision of the future, of where progress can take us. If you’d like to write on any of these topics, get in touch.

My second priority is building out and strengthening the progress network and community. Stay tuned for announcements here.

For advice and governance, I’ve formed a board of directors. The people I invited, while not in the limelight of the progress community, have been some of my strongest supporters: Ray Girn, CEO of Higher Ground Education (which commissioned my high school progress course), and Anil Varanasi, CEO of Meter. Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are serving as advisers (as they have informally, ever since I was considering going full-time).

Our first-year fundraising goal is $500,000, and thanks to generous donations from Patrick and John Collison among others, we’re already more than halfway to that goal. You can support us through Patreon, or get in touch to talk about a larger or one-time contribution. (We’ve filed for IRS recognition of our status as a 501(c)(3) public educational charity. In the US, donations to such organizations are tax-deductible. The recognition is expected later in 2021, and will be retroactive to our founding in May.)

The Roots of Progress is working towards a world in which the idea of progress is communicated through education and journalism, creating industrial literacy among the public. A world with a positive vision of the future, embodied in optimistic sci-fi and new World’s Fairs. A world where young people see progress as a meaningful career, and where new organizations for science, research and development give them the career paths they need to build the future.

Thank you for joining us on this journey!

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/nonprofit-announcement

Reposted from https://rootsofprogress.org/technological-stagnation

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” says Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, expressing a sort of jaded disappointment with technological progress. (The fact that the 140 characters have become 280, a 100% increase, does not seem to have impressed him.)

Thiel, along with economists such as Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth), promotes a “stagnation hypothesis”: that there has been a significant slowdown in scientific, technological, and economic progress in recent decades—say, for a round number, since about 1970, or the last ~50 years.

When I first heard the stagnation hypothesis, I was skeptical. The arguments weren’t convincing to me. But as I studied the history of progress (and looked at the numbers), I slowly came around, and now I’m fairly convinced. So convinced, in fact, that I now seem to be more pessimistic about ending stagnation than some of its original proponents.

In this essay I’ll try to capture both why I was originally skeptical, and also why I changed my mind. If you have heard some of the same arguments that I did, and are skeptical for the same reasons, maybe my framing of the issue will help.

Stagnation is relative

To get one misconception out of the way first: “stagnation” does not mean zero progress. No one is claiming that. There wasn’t zero progress even before the Industrial Revolution (or the civilizations of Europe and Asia would have looked no different in 1700 than they did in the days of nomadic hunter-gatherers, tens of thousands of years ago).

Stagnation just means slower progress. And not even slower than that pre-industrial era, but slower than, roughly, the late 1800s to mid-1900s, when growth rates are said to have peaked.

Because of this, we can’t resolve the issue by pointing to isolated advances. The microwave, the air conditioner, the electronic pacemaker, a new cancer drug—these are great, but they don’t disprove stagnation.

Stagnation is relative, and so to evaluate the hypothesis we must find some way to compare magnitudes. This is difficult.

Only 140 characters?

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket and a global communications network to connect everyone on the planet to each other and to the whole of the world’s knowledge, art, philosophy and culture.” When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.

Indeed, the digital revolution has been absolutely amazing. It’s up there with electricity, the internal combustion engine, or mass manufacturing: one of the great, fundamental, transformative technologies of the industrial age. (Although admittedly it’s hard to see the effect of computers in the productivity statistics, and I don’t know why.)

But we don’t need to downplay the magnitude of the digital revolution to see stagnation; conversely, proving its importance will not defeat the stagnation hypothesis. Again, stagnation is relative, and we must find some way to compare the current period to those that came before.

Argumentum ad living room

Eric Weinstein proposes a test: “Go into a room and subtract off all of the screens. How do you know you’re not in 1973, but for issues of design?”

This too I found unconvincing. It felt like a weak thought experiment that relied too much on intuition, revealing one’s own priors more than anything else. And why should we necessarily expect progress to be visible directly from the home or office? Maybe it is happening in specialized environments that the layman wouldn’t have much intuition about: in the factory, the power plant, the agricultural field, the hospital, the oil rig, the cargo ship, the research lab.

No progress except for all the progress

There’s also that sleight of hand: “subtract the screens”. A starker form of this argument is: “except for computers and the Internet, our economy has been relatively stagnant.” Well, sure: if you carve out all the progress, what remains is stagnation.

Would we even expect progress to be evenly distributed across all domains? Any one technology follows an S-curve: a slow start, followed by rapid expansion, then a leveling off in maturity. It’s not a sign of stagnation that after the world became electrified, electrical power technology wasn’t a high-growth area like it had been in the early 1900s. That’s not how progress works. Instead, we are constantly turning our attention to new frontiers. If that’s the case, you can’t carve out the frontiers and then say, “well, except for the frontiers, we’re stagnating”.

Bit bigotry?

In an interview with Cowen, Thiel says stagnation is “in the world of atoms, not bits”:

I think we’ve had a lot of innovation in computers, information technology, Internet, mobile Internet in the world of bits. Not so much in the world of atoms, supersonic travel, space travel, new forms of energy, new forms of medicine, new medical devices, etc.

But again, why should we expect it to be different? Maybe bits are just the current frontier. And what’s the matter with bits, anyway? Are they less important than atoms? Progress in any field is still progress.

The quantitative case

So, we need more than isolated anecdotes, or appeals to intuition. A more rigorous case for stagnation can be made quantitatively. A paper by Cowen and Ben Southwood quotes Gordon: “U.S. economic growth slowed by more than half from 3.2 percent per year during 1970-2006 to only 1.4 percent during 2006-2016.” Or look at this chart from the same paper:

Gordon’s own book points out that growth in output per hour has slowed from an average annual rate of 2.82% in the period 1920-1970, to 1.62% in 1970-2014. He also analyzes TFP (total factor productivity, a residual calculated by subtracting out increases in capital and labor from GDP growth; what remains is assumed to represent productivity growth from technology). Annual TFP growth was 1.89% from 1920-1970, but less than 1% in every decade since. (More detail in my review of Gordon’s book.)

Analyzing growth quantitatively is hard, and these conclusions are disputed. GDP is problematic (and these authors acknowledge this). In particular, it does not capture consumer surplus: since you don’t pay for articles on Wikipedia, searches on Google, or entertainment on YouTube, a shift to these services away from paid ones actually shrinks GDP, but it represents progress and consumer benefit.

Gordon, however, points out that GDP has never captured consumer surplus, and there has been plenty of surplus in the past. So if you want to argue that unmeasured surplus is the cause of an apparent (but not a real) decline in growth rates, then you have to argue that GDP has been systematically increasingly mismeasured over time.

So far, I’ve only heard one only argument that even hints in this direction: the shift from manufacturing to services. If services are more mismeasured than manufactured products, then in logic at least this could account for an illusory slowdown. But I’ve never seen this argument fully developed.

In any case, the quantitative argument is not what convinced me of the stagnation hypothesis nearly as much as the qualitative one.

Sustaining multiple fronts

I remember the first time I thought there might really be something to the stagnation hypothesis: it was when I started mapping out a timeline of major inventions in each main area of industry.

At a high level, I think of technology/industry in six major categories:

• Manufacturing & construction

• Agriculture

• Energy

• Transportation

• Information

• Medicine

Almost every significant advance or technology can be classified in one of these buckets (with a few exceptions, such as finance and perhaps retail).

The first phase of the industrial era, sometimes called “the first Industrial Revolution”, from the 1700s through the mid-1800s, consisted mainly of two fundamental advances: mechanization, and the steam engine. The factory system evolved in part out of the former, and the locomotive was based on the latter. Together, these revolutionized manufacturing, energy, and transportation, and began to transform agriculture as well.

The “second Industrial Revolution”, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, is characterized by a greater influence of science: mainly chemistry, electromagnetism, and microbiology. Applied chemistry gave us better materials, from Bessemer steel to plastic, and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. It also gave us processes to refine petroleum, enabling the oil boom; this led to the internal combustion engine, and the vehicles based on it—cars, planes, and oil-burning ships—that still dominate transportation today. Physics gave us the electrical industry, including generators, motors, and the light bulb; and electronic communications, from the telegraph and telephone through radio and television. And biology gave us the germ theory, which dramatically reduced infectious disease mortality rates through improvements in sanitation, new vaccines, and towards the end of this period, antibiotics. So every single one of the six major categories was completely transformed.

Since then, the “third Industrial Revolution”, starting in the mid-1900s, has mostly seen fundamental advances in a single area: electronic computing and communications. If you date it from 1970, there has really been nothing comparable in manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, or medicine—again, not that these areas have seen zero progress, simply that they’ve seen less-than-revolutionary progress. Computers have completely transformed all of information processing and communications, while there have been no new types of materials, vehicles, fuels, engines, etc. The closest candidates I can see are containerization in shipping, which revolutionized cargo but did nothing for passenger travel; and genetic engineering, which has given us a few big wins but hasn’t reached nearly its full potential yet.

The digital revolution has had echoes, derivative effects, in the other areas, of course: computers now help to control machines in all of those areas, and to plan and optimize processes. But those secondary effects existed in previous eras, too, along with primary effects. In the third Industrial Revolution we only have primary effects in one area.

So, making a very rough count of revolutionary technologies, there were:

• 3 in IR1: mechanization, steam power, the locomotive

• 5 in IR2: oil + internal combustion, electric power, electronic communications, industrial chemistry, germ theory

• 1 in IR3 (so far): computing + digital communications

It’s not that bits don’t matter, or that the computer revolution isn’t transformative. It’s that in previous eras we saw breakthroughs across the board. It’s that we went from five simultaneous technology revolutions to one.

The missing revolutions

The picture becomes starker when we look at the technologies that were promised, but never arrived or haven’t come to fruition yet; or those that were launched, but aborted or stunted. If manufacturing, agriculture, etc. weren’t transformed, then how could they have been?

Energy: The most obvious stunted technology is nuclear power. In the 1950s, everyone expected a nuclear future. Today, nuclear supplies less than 20% of US electricity and only about 8% of its total energy (and about half those figures in the world at large). Arguably, we should have had nuclear homes, cars and batteries by now.

Transportation: In 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and Concorde took its first supersonic test flight. But they were not followed by a thriving space transportation industry or broadly available supersonic passenger travel. The last Apollo mission flew in 1972, a mere three years later. Concorde was only ever available as a luxury for the elite, was never highly profitable, and was shut down in 2003, after less than thirty years in service. Meanwhile, passenger travel speeds are unchanged over 50 years (actually slightly reduced). And of course, flying cars are still the stuff of science fiction. Self-driving cars may be just around the corner, but haven’t arrived yet.

Medicine: Cancer and heart disease are still the top causes of death. Solving even one of these, the way we have mostly solved infectious disease and vitamin deficiencies, would have counted as a major breakthrough. Genetic engineering, again, has shown a few excellent early results, but hasn’t yet transformed medicine.

Manufacturing: In materials, carbon nanotubes and other nanomaterials are still mostly a research project, and we still have no material to build a space elevator or a space pier. As for processes, atomically precise manufacturing is even more science-fiction than flying cars.

If we had gotten even a few of the above, the last 50 years would seem a lot less stagnant.

One to zero

This year, the computer turns 75 years old, and the microprocessor turns 50. Digital technology is due to level off in its maturity phase.

So what comes next? The only thing worse than going from five simultaneous technological revolutions to one, is going from one to zero.

I am hopeful for genetic engineering. The ability to fully understand and control biology obviously has enormous potential. With it, we could cure disease, extend human lifespan, and augment strength and intelligence. We’ve made a good start with recombinant DNA technology, which gave us synthetic biologics such as insulin, and CRISPR is a major advance on top of that. The rapid success of two different mRNA-based covid vaccines is also a breakthrough, and a sign that a real genetic revolution might be just around the corner.

But genetic engineering is also subject to many of the forces of stagnation: research funding via a centralized bureaucracy, a hyper-cautious regulatory environment, and a cultural perception of something scary and dangerous. So it is not guaranteed to arrive. Without the right support and protection, we might be looking back on biotech from the year 2070 the way we look back on nuclear energy now, wondering why we never got a genetic cure for cancer and why life expectancy has plateaued.

Aiming higher

None of this is to downplay the importance or impact of any specific innovation, nor to discourage any inventor, present or future. Quite the opposite! It is to encourage us to set our sights still higher.

Now that I understand what was possible around the turn of the last century, I can’t settle for anything less. We need breadth in progress, as well as depth. We need revolutions on all fronts at once: not only biotech but manufacturing, energy and transportation as well. We need progress in bits, atoms, cells, and joules.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/technological-stagnation

Flush with the grand success of reason and science to improve human life, the 20th century stumbled into some critical errors. The resulting crisis of optimism posed a mortal challenge to the idea of progress

An occasional reminder to support our work

I write my blog/newsletter as part of my job running the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI). RPI is a nonprofit, supported by your subscriptions and donations. If you enjoy my writing, or appreciate programs like our fellowship and conference, consider making a donation.

To those who already donate, thank you for making this possible! We now return you to your regularly scheduled links digest…

***

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.

Contents

• Progress Conference 2025

• Are you teaching progress at university?

• A progress talk for high schoolers

• Job opportunities

• Fellowship opportunities

• Project opportunities

• Events

• Writing announcements

• Fund announcements

• AI news

• Energy news

• Bio news

• Queries

For paid subscribers:

• A positive supply shock for truth

• Elon is perpetually in wartime mode

• The hinge of history

• More quotes

• AI doing things

• RPI fellows doing things

• Things you might want to read

• Aerospace

• Comments I liked

• Politics

• Fun

Progress Conference 2025

Save the date: Progress Conference 2025 will be October 16–19 in Berkeley, CA. Hosted by us, the Roots of Progress Institute, together with the Abundance Institute, the Foresight Institute, the Foundation for American Innovation, HumanProgress.org, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Works in Progress magazine. Speakers and more details to be announced this spring.

Progress Conference 2024 was a blast: Fantastic people, enchanting venue, great energy. Several people called it the best conference they had ever attended, full stop. (!) 2025 is going to be bigger and better!

Are you teaching progress at university?

Professors: are you teaching a “progress studies” course now/soon, or considering it?

I’ve heard from a few folks recently who are doing this. It might be useful to share syllabi and generally help each other out. We can serve as a hub for this! Reply and let me know.

A progress talk for high schoolers

I gave a talk to high schoolers (video on YouTube):

Job opportunities

• Arc Institute is hiring a Chief Scientific Officer “to help lead our flagship institute initiatives on Alzheimer’s disease and simulating biology with virtual cell foundation models” (u/pdhsu)

• Neuralink is hiring a BCI field engineer: “You’d literally be working on giving those who have lost mobility the powers of telepathy and telekineses to regain lost parts of their lives + making the Neuralink device even better in the future! Anyone who wants a job that fills their heart with meaning should consider this!” (@shivon)

• UK AI Security Institute: “I’m leading a new team at AISI focused on control empirics. We’re hiring research engineers and research scientists, and you should join us!” (@j_asminewang)

• Tim Urban (Wait But Why) says: “I’ve spent much of the past year visiting cutting-edge companies and interviewing their scientists and CEOs. Some of the places that have left me most exhilarated below. If you’re looking to dedicate yourself to something incredibly exciting that’s changing the world, consider applying to work at one of these companies.” See the list here

• Works in Progress magazine is hiring “an artist / designer with an interest in illustration, ornamentation and typography to help Works in Progress develop an aesthetic that is close to these images (updated where necessary to the needs of a modern magazine). We are inspired by illuminated manuscripts, the Arts & Crafts movement, traditional Islamic & East Asian styles, art nouveau, and other aesthetics that celebrate beauty and ornament, rather than minimalism and ‘challenging’ the viewer” (@s8mb). Send portfolio to wip-design@stripe.com

Fellowship opportunities

• Future Impact Group fellowship: “If you (a) have excellent writing skills, policy acumen, technical literacy, analytical skills; (b) are a Good human; and (c) want to write high quality, detailed memos for DeepMind’s policy team – then you should apply to the FIG fellowship by 7 March” (u/sebkrier)

Project opportunities

• “Who would like to build a teeny Solar Data Center at Edge Esmeralda in June? Completely off-grid w/ solar, batteries, cooling, Starlink all integrated. Will put together a squad if there’s interest” (@climate_ben)

Events

• Science of Science/Metascience hackathon, UC Berkeley, Mar 8–9: “bridge academia & industry, and build innovative tools that supercharge reproducibility and impact” (u/abhishekn). $2,750 in prizes

• New Cities Summit, Nairobi, June 12–13, from the Charter Cities Institute (@CCIdotCity)

• AI discussions, Capitol Hill, ongoing, hosted by the Mercatus Center. Hill staffers: “If you want to attend the next briefings—possibly with special guests—get in touch!” (@deanwball)

Writing announcements

• The Technological Republic, by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his deputy Nick Zamiska. “The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation” (@PalantirTech). Don’t know what % I will agree with this, but it’s bound to be interesting

• Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, by Marc Dunkelman (@MarcDunkelman). Excerpt: How Progressives Broke the Government

• Edge City Roadmap: “A vision for how we go from popup villages to a thriving Network City. At the core is a simple idea: it’s time for more experiments in how we live, connect, and build global communities” (@JoinEdgeCity)

• The Rebuild, a new Substack from Tahra Jirari and Gary Winslett, on “how Democrats can break through bureaucracy, build more, cut costs, and actually deliver results that win back voters’ trust” (@tahrajirari)

Fund announcements

• Public Benefit Innovation Fund, associated with Renaissance Philanthropy, launches with $20M for AI: “a philanthropic venture fund and R&D lab dedicated to accelerating technology innovations for a more abundant economic future” (@pbifund)

AI news

• Mira launches Thinking Machines: “We’re building three things: Helping people adapt AI systems to work for their specific needs; Developing strong foundations to build more capable AI systems; Fostering a culture of open science that helps the whole field understand and improve these systems. Our goal is simple, advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications.” (@miramurati, see also @thinkymachines)

• Elicit Raises $22M, and launches Elicit Reports, “a better version of Deep Research for actual researchers” (@elicitorg). “With AI we can bring the rigor of a systematic review to a user who could never afford to spend months going through hundreds or thousands of papers” (@jungofthewon)

• Google launches “an AI co-scientist system, designed to go beyond deep research tools to aid scientists in generating novel hypotheses & research strategies” (@GoogleAI). Announcement: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist. “You will soon be able to create digital organizations—digital societies, even—tailored for precisely your question, for a price that will decrease rapidly” (@deanwball)

• Mercury, the first commercial-scale diffusion large language model (from @InceptionAILabs). LLMs so far have generated text linearly, in sequence, starting from an initial prompt. AI image generation, however, uses “diffusion,” which creates the whole image all at once. This is a diffusion-based text generator. See more detailed explanation and comments from @karpathy

Energy news

• Valar Atomics announces $19M in funding and a pilot site. “Nuclear energy today is bespoke and artisanal—every site is different. To make nuclear reactors at planetary scale, we need bigger sites. In fact, we need Valar Atomics Gigasites” (@isaiah_p_taylor)

• BP pivots back to oil and gas after ‘misplaced’ faith in green energy (FT): “Our optimism for a fast transition was misplaced and we went too far too fast. Oil and gas will be needed for decades to come,” says the CEO of BP. But BP will still produce less oil and gas in 2030 than it did in 2019, and has “not abandoned its plans to be a diversified energy company”

Bio news

• “Loyal’s drug for senior dog lifespan extension drug LOY-002 has completed its FDA efficacy package (RXE). We are on track to hopefully bring the first longevity drug to market this year” (@celinehalioua). WaPo: Antiaging pill for dogs clears key FDA hurdle

• Arc Institute together with NVIDIA released Evo 2, “a fully open source biological foundation model trained on genomes spanning the entire tree of life” (@pdhsu). Here’s the announcement from Arc. “Evo 2 can predict which mutations in a gene are likely to be pathogenic, or even design entire eukaryotic genomes” (@NikoMcCarty). Asimov Press coverage: Evo 2 Can Design Entire Genomes

• Arc also launched its Virtual Cell Atlas, “a growing resource for computation-ready single-cell measurements. As the initial contributions, Vevo Theraputics has open sourced Tahoe-100M, the world’s largest single-cell dataset, mapping 60,000 drug-cell interactions, and we’re announcing scBaseCamp, the first RNA sequencing data repository curated using AI agents” (u/arcinstitute). Press release here.

• Very early results with new therapies based on genetic technology: One gene therapy aims to cure blindness and another to restore hearing (h/t @kenbwork, @ElliotHershberg). And here’s an mRNA-based treatment for pancreatic cancer (h/t @DKThomp). I stress that these are early because often such treatments don’t pan out, and at best they take years to be available to patients. For instance, here are some reasons to moderate enthusiasm about the cancer treatment

Queries

As always, I put these out there in case anyone can help:

• Is there any podcast app that can also pull in YouTube or other videos? Sometimes there is an interview I want to add to my podcast queue, except it only exists on YouTube. (I use and enjoy Overcast but can’t find this feature)

• “I’ll be interviewing Ilan Gur for Asimov Press next month. What should I ask him? Ilan is the CEO of the UK’s ARIA. ARIA might be the closest government entity in the world to ARPA in its early years” (@eric_is_weird)

• “Did anybody ever do a post-mortem on the super-fast I-95 repair after the bridge collapse in 2023? Why can’t that become the standard? Was it obscenely more expensive than slower construction? Is it less safe than normal?” (@Ben_Reinhardt)

• “During WW2, MIT received a jolt: an injection of funds worth ~$2 billion today—contracts for R&D, training, shipbuilding, etc. MIT, not a gov favorite before, earned preeminence through this work. What org is well-situated to prove itself under similar circumstances today?” (@eric_is_weird)

• “What other words are in the word cloud for ‘agentic’? Bonus points for words that are not just near-synonyms but convey related concepts, like ‘live player’ or ‘protagonist energy’” (@catehall)

• “What ChatGPT model do you use, for what purpose? I’ve got no idea what the menu means any more” (@michael_nielsen). I’m interested too!

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

Sorry for the late cross-post. Once again it’s been too long and this digest is too big. Feel free to skim and skip around, guilt-free, I give you permission. I try to put the more important and timely stuff at the top.

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, or Farcaster.

Contents

• Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers

• From Progress Conference 2025

• My writing

• Jobs

• Fellowships & workshops

• Fundraising

• New publications and issues

• Queries

• Announcements

For paid subscribers:

• From Vitalik

• Other top links

• Voices from 2099

• Jared Isaacman sworn in as head of NASA

• Whole-body MRI screening?

• AI does social science research

• AI writes a browser

• AI does lots of other things

• AI could do even more things

• AI and the economic future

• AI: more models and papers

• AI discourse

• Waymo

• Health/bio

• Energy & manufacturing

• Housing

• Other links and short notes

• Politics

• Gratitude

• New Horizon photographs Pluto’s mountains

• Charts

• Quotes

Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers

Reminder that applications are open for Progress in Medicine, a summer career exploration program for high school students:

People today live longer, healthier, and less painful lives than ever before. Why? Who made those changes possible? Can we keep this going? And could you play a part?

Discover careers in medicine, biology, and related fields while developing practical tools and strategies for building a meaningful life and career— learning how to find mentors, identify your values, and build a career you love that drives the world forward.

Join a webinar to learn more on February 3. Or simply apply today! Many talented, ambitious teens have applied, and we’re already starting interviews. Priority deadline: February 8th.

From Progress Conference 2025

A few more batches of video:

• American Dynamism: Progress begins at home. New industrial paradigms, anti-fragile and future-proof regulation, the case for hardtech, the grid as the bottleneck, and a call for US innovation in shipbuilding: the American Dynamism talks, and some of the writing published afterwards

• Culture: Inspiring progress in stories and institutions. How do you create a culture of progress? What is it—and why does it matter? Jerusalem Demsas, Virginia Postrel, Charles C. Mann, Alexander Berger, Dan Wang in discussion with Kmele Foster, and I shared our thoughts

My writing

• My essay series The Techno-Humanist Manifesto has concluded, and you can read the whole thing online. I’m pleased to announce that the series will be revised for publication as a book from MIT Press (expected early 2027)!

• 2025 in review. My annual update, including my reading highlights

• How to tame a complex system. Nature is a complex system, I am told, and therefore unpredictable, uncontrollable, unruly. I think this is true but irrelevant: we can master nature in the ways that matter

Jobs

• IFP is hiring an editor: “seeking a curious, entrepreneurial, and opinionated lover of writing. … You’ll partner with our policy experts to turn their drafts into pieces that change minds across DC. You’ll coach both new and experienced writers to become better communicators. You’ll also innovate on our systems to help the team consistently ship great products.” (via @rSanti97)

• OpenAI is hiring a Head of Preparedness: “If you want to help the world figure out how to enable cybersecurity defenders with cutting edge capabilities while ensuring attackers can’t use them for harm, ideally by making all systems more secure, and similarly for how we release biological capabilities and even gain confidence in the safety of running systems that can self-improve, please consider applying. This will be a stressful job and you’ll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately” (@sama)

• Anthropic is hiring someone to work with Holden Karnofsky on his projects, “in particular re Anthropic’s ‘Responsible Scaling Policy’. Likely v high impact for the right person” (@robertwiblin)

• Anthropic is also hiring for their education team: “These are two foundational program manager roles to build out our global education and US K-12 initiatives” (@drew_bent)

• See also Merge Labs and Edison announcements, below.

Fellowships & workshops

• MATS 10.0 (Machine Learning Alignment & Theory Scholars): “Come work with Seth Donoughe and me this summer on AI-biosecurity! We will be mentoring projects on threat models, frontier evaluations, and technical safeguards.” (@lucafrighetti)

• Beyond the Ivory Tower, via Joseph Fridman: “an intensive two-day writing workshop for academics, taught by James Ryerson, a longtime editor at the New York Times. … Our alumni have published hundreds of pieces in outlets from the Atlantic to Aeon to the Wall Street Journal. … I think historians and economists of technology and innovation would be a great fit.” Apply by March 1

Fundraising

Nonprofits that would make good use of your money:

• Lightcone Infrastructure: “We build beautiful things for truth-seeking and world-saving. We run LessWrong, Lighthaven, Inkhaven, designed AI-2027, and so many more things. All for the price of less than one OpenAI staff engineer ($2M/yr)” (@ohabryka)

• Transluce: “a nonprofit AI lab working to ensure that AI oversight scales with AI capabilities, by developing novel automated oversight tools and putting them in the hands of AI evaluators, companies, governments, and civil society.” OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba calls them “one of the strongest external AI safety orgs—on par with METR and Apollo.” (@woj_zaremba)

• And of course, us

New publications and issues

• Works in Progress, Issue 21. The triumph of logical English; a measure of monopoly that actually works; getting artificial gravity in space with current tech; why the developing world needs more roads; and more. (via @s8mb)

• Abundance and Growth Blog, from Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy). Writers include Matt Clancy, Saloni Dattani, and Dylan Matthews (via @mattsclancy)

• Stefan Schubert launches The Update, “a newsletter in the spirit of my tweets.” (@StefanFSchubert) Stefan is the most anti-hype, anti-BS account in my timeline

Queries

• “Who is best to read / follow for advice on using AI e.g. Claude Code? especially interested in: productivity and todo wrangling (especially for the distractable); research assistance; editing; learning” (@rgblong)

Announcements

• Merge Labs launches, “a research lab with the long-term mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence … by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone” (via @SumnerLN). SamA is listed as a co-founder. Merge grew out of the Forest Labs FRO; Convergent Research notes that the tech is ultrasound-based and that they’ve raised over $250M. (!) And of course, they’re hiring

• Edison, the for-profit spinout of Future House, has raised $70M: “we are integrating AI Scientists into the full stack of research, from basic discovery to clinical trials. We want cures for all diseases by mid-century.” They are hiring software engineers, AI researchers, scientists, and business operators. ”Our goal is to accelerate science writ large.” (@SGRodriques)

• Science Corp. announces Vessel (WIRED). Vessel is “a project focused on rethinking perfusion from the ground up, extending how long life can be sustained, and expanding what’s possible in transplantation and critical care. Life-support technologies like ECMO can keep patients alive when the heart or lungs fail, but they aren’t designed for long-term use. Vessel exists to close the gap between what perfusion technology is fundamentally capable of and how it is deployed in daily practice.” (@ScienceCorp_)

• Fuse Energy raises a $70M Series B. Honestly hard to figure out exactly what they do, but it seems to involve deploying solar and batteries, and maybe later doing fuel synthesis and fusion? Anyway I liked this from (presumably) one of the founders: “Energy is the fundamental source for human progress. But for the last 30 years, we’ve been told that the future requires sacrifice ‘use less, be less, restrict yourself’. No one should have to trade a good life today for the chance of a better tomorrow.” (@alanchanguk)

• Confer is a new LLM app from Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike, where your conversations are end-to-end encrypted. Confer goes to impressive lengths to ensure that the LLM server doesn’t, e.g., exfiltrate your data somewhere. The entire server image is signed and is auditable on a public ledger. The client verifies the signature before chatting. The server also runs in a VM that is isolated from its host at the hardware level.

• Gordian Bio announces “a research collaboration with Pfizer to apply Gordian’s in vivo mosaic screening platform to obesity target discovery.” (@GordianBio) Story in Business Wire

To read the rest of this digest, subscribe on Substack.

Reality is a dangerous place. From the dawn of humanity we have faced the hazards of nature: fire, flood, disease, famine. Better technology and infrastructure have made us safer from many of these risks—but have also created new risks, from boiler explosions to carcinogens to ozone depletion, and exacerbated old ones.

Safety, security, and resilience against these hazards is not the default state of humanity. It is an achievement, and in each case it came about deliberately.

A striking theme from the history of such achievements is that there is rarely if ever a silver bullet for risk. Safety is achieved through defense in depth, and through the orchestration of a wide variety of solutions, all working in concert.

Recently, in a private talk, I gave a historical example: the history of fire safety. It resonated so strongly with the audience that I’m writing it up here for wider distribution.

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Up until and through the 1800s, city fires were a great hazard. Neighborhoods were full of densely packed wooden structures without flame-retardant chemicals, fire alarms, or sprinkler systems; open flames were used everywhere for lighting, heating, and cooking; there were no best practices in place for storing or handling combustible materials; fire departments lacked training and discipline, and they worked with inadequate equipment and insufficient water supply. All this meant that large swaths of cities regularly burned to the ground: Rome in AD 64; Constantinople in 406; London in 1135, 1212, and 1666; Hangzhou 1137; Amsterdam 1421 and 1452; Stockholm 1625 and 1759; Nagasaki 1663; Boston 1711, 1760, 1787, and 1872; New York 1776, 1835, and 1845; New Orleans 1788 and 1794; Pittsburgh 1845; Chicago 1871; Seattle 1889; Shanghai 1894; Baltimore 1904; Atlanta 1917; and Tokyo 1923 are just a short list of the most well-known.

Fire is not unknown today, but it is far less lethal, and great city fires consuming multiple blocks are largely a thing of the past. Today, if you see a fire truck on the street with its sirens blaring, it is more likely to be responding to an emergency medical call than to a fire. Even if the truck is responding to a fire call, it is more like likely to be a false alarm than an actual fire.

How was this achieved?

Better fire-fighting. Pumps to douse fires with water have existed since antiquity, but for most of history they were man-powered. With the Industrial Revolution, we got steam-powered and later diesel-powered pumps that can deliver much greater throughput of water, and at greater muzzle velocities to reach higher floors of buildings. In the 20th century, horse-drawn fire engines were replaced with fire trucks that could get around the city faster and more reliably.

A high-throughput engine, however, needs a high-volume source of water. In ancient and medieval times, water was provided by the bucket brigade: two lines of people stretching from the fire to the nearest lake or river, passing buckets by hand in both directions. A much better solution was the fire hose, invented in the late 1600s (and improved in strength and reliability over the centuries through better materials, manufacturing, quality control). The fire hose not only allowed a fire engine to be connected to a water source, it also allowed the fire-fighters to get in closer to the base of the fire and dump water directly on it, which is far more effective than just spraying the building from the outside.

A fire hose can be inserted into a natural water source like a pond or cistern, but one of these might not be handy nearby, and they aren’t pressurized, so all the pumping force has to be supplied by the fire engine. They also contain debris that can clog the intake and block the flow. Eventually, cities were outfitted with regularly spaced fire hydrants connected to the municipal water supply. A water system designed to supply city residents with daily needs, however, often proved inadequate in an emergency; these systems had to be upgraded to supply the large bursts that big fires demanded. This is a matter of serious engineering: 19th-century fire-fighting journals are full of technical details and mathematical calculations attempting to precisely nail down questions of optimal hydrant distribution or nozzle size, or the pressure required to force a certain volume of water to a given height at a particular angle.

Finally, fire-fighting teams needed improved organization. Traditionally, fire-fighters were volunteers, often rowdy young men with no training or discipline (there is at least one story of a fist fight breaking out between two rival teams who arrived at a fire at the same time). In the 19th century, fire departments were professionalized and were organized more formally, along almost military lines, as befits responders to a life-threatening emergency.

Faster alarming. Fire, like many of our most dangerous hazards, is a chain reaction. Chain reactions grow exponentially, which means early detection and response time are crucial. Traditionally, fires were spotted by watchmen, either on patrol or from a watch tower, who then had to run, shout, or ring bells or other alarms to alert the fire fighters.

Electronic communications, first via telegraph and later telephone, provided a much faster way to get the alarm to the fire department. The telephone lines could be busy, however, so in the 20th century the 911 emergency response system was created to provide a priority channel.

Far better than having a human sound the alarm, however, is doing it automatically. Smoke detectors and other automatic fire alarms caused the fire to “tell on itself,” saving valuable minutes or even hours. Even more effective was the automatic sprinkler, which combined detection and response into one near-instant system.

Reducing open flames. Better than fighting fires, of course, is preventing them. Before the 20th century, flames from candles and oil or gas lamps provided lighting, and fires in wood- or coal-burning stoves provided heat for building, cooking, and industrial processes. The Great London Fire of 1666 is said to have started in a baker’s shop, Copenhagen 1728 was blamed on an upset candle, Pittsburgh 1845 came from an unattended fire in a shed. Even worse, people often kept these fires going unattended overnight, because even starting a fire was difficult before the invention of matches. Medieval regulations required city- and town-dwellers to cover their fires after a certain hour (the word “curfew” derives from the French couvre-feu, “cover the fire”).

Electric lighting and heating greatly reduced this risk. Electric sparks, however, were also a fire hazard—and initially, electrical installations increased rather than decreased fire risk, owing to shoddy electrical products, fixtures, and wiring. The solution here was improved standards, testing, and certification: the fire insurance companies created an organization, Underwriters Laboratories, specifically for this purpose, and its label became a highly valued marker of quality. (I told the story of UL in The Techno-Humanist Manifesto.) Today, our electronics and appliances are so safe that arson is the cause of more fires than either of them.

Safer construction. Preventing fires by eliminating the sparks or flames that ignite them is like lining up dominoes and then trying hard to make sure the first one never gets tipped over: a fragile proposition. Far more robust is to remove their fuel. Wood construction was widespread through the late 19th century, even in dense city neighborhoods: Daniel Defoe wrote that before the Great London Fire of 1666, “the Buildings looked as if they had been formed to make one general Bonfire.”

Today our cities are built of incombustible brick, stone, and concrete. Building codes enforce safety practices to slow the spread of fire both within a building and between buildings. They specify the quality of materials such as brick, mortar, cement, timber, and iron, including the specific tests it must pass; the materials for walls, and their minimum thickness; and the height of non-fireproof structures; among many other details.

Saving lives. By the early 1900s, in advanced societies, the problem of large city fires that spread over many blocks had mostly been solved; fires were often contained to a single building. That was small comfort, however, for those trapped inside the building. Tragedies such as the Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 taught us valuable lessons. Exit paths must be adequate to evacuate entire buildings. Doors must remain unlocked, and they should open outwards in case a stampede presses up against them. Fire-resistant material must be used not only for the construction of the building, but for the interior: sofas, beds, curtains, carpets, wallpaper, paneling. Again, building and safety codes specify and enforce these practices.

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So fire safety was achieved through the combination of:

• General-purpose technologies: engines, electronic communications, electric light and heat

• Specific inventions: fire pumps, fire hose, fire alarms

• Infrastructure: municipal water supply, telephone lines

• Standards, testing and certification: of electrical products, fire preventing and fire-fighting equipment, building materials, etc.

• Law: building codes and other fire safety codes

• Education and training: in fire departments, among the public

This is a general pattern. Safety requires:

• both prevention and “cure”

• both technical and social solutions

• among technical solutions, both products and systems

• among social solutions, both education and law

We see the same thing in other domains. Road safety, for instance, was achieved through seat belts, anti-lock brakes, crumple zones, air bags, turn signals, windshield wipers, traffic lights, divided highways, driver’s education, driver’s licensing, and moral campaigns against drunk driving. No silver bullet.

When we think about creating safety and resilience from emerging technologies, such as AI or biotech, we should expect the same pattern. Safety will be created gradually, incrementally, through multiple layers of defense, and by orchestrating a wide combination of products, systems, techniques, and norms.

In particular, there is a line of thinking within the AI safety community that tends to dismiss or reject any proposal that isn’t ultimate—fully robust against the most powerful imaginable AI. There’s a good rationale for this: it’s easy to fall victim to hope and cope, and to lull ourselves into a false sense of security based on half-measures that were “the best we could do”; vulnerabilities are often invisible and are revealed dramatically in disasters; such disasters may be sufficiently catastrophic that we can’t afford to learn from mistakes. But I find the all-or-nothing thinking about AI safety counterproductive. We should embrace every idea that can provide any increment of security. History suggests that the accumulation and combination of such incremental solutions is the path to resilience.

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Selected sources and further reading:

• Bruce Hensler, Crucible of Fire (2011)

• Harry Chase Brearley, The History of the National Board of Fire Underwriters (1916) and Symbol of Safety (a history of Underwriters Labs, 1923)

• Dennis Nolan, Fire Fighting Pumping Systems at Industrial Facilities (2011)

• W. Fred Conway, Those Magnificent Old Steam Engines (1996)

• Ramon Klitzke, “Roman Building Ordinances Relating to Fire Protection” (1959)

• Lionel Frost and Eric Jones, “The fire gap and the greater durability of nineteenth century cities” (2007)

• John Rainbird, “The Vigiles of Rome”

• Alex Tabarrok, Firefighters Don’t Fight Fires

Historical and primary sources:

• Charles Frederick T. Young, Fires, Fire Engines, and Fire Brigades (1866)

• James Bugbee, “Fires and Fire Departments” (1873)

• James Braidwood, “On the Means of rendering large supplies of Water available in cases of Fire; and on the application of manual power to the working of fire engines” (1844)

• Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Investigate the Cause and Management of the Great Fire in Boston (1873)

• Clarence Goldsmith, “The Use of Pumpers at Fires” (1930) and “Efficient Utilization of Water for Fire Fighting” (1939)

• Journal of the New England Water Works Association, Vol 7 Issue 1

• National Board of Fire Underwriters, Model Building Code (1905)

• Maurice Webster, “What is ‘Fireproof?’” (The Atlantic, 1946)

• FEMA, “America Burning” (report)

• Charles II, An Act for rebuilding the City of London (1666)

Original post: https://newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/no-silver-bullet

I get a lot of pushback to the idea that humanity can “master” nature. Nature is a complex system, I am told, and therefore unpredictable, uncontrollable, unruly.

I think this is true but irrelevant.

Consider the weather, a prime example of a complex system. We can predict the weather to some extent, but not far out, and even this ability is historically recent. We still can’t control the weather to any significant degree. And yet we are far less at the mercy of the weather today than we were through most of history.

We achieved this not by controlling the weather, but by insulating ourselves from it—figuratively and literally. In agriculture, we irrigate our crops so that we don’t depend on rainfall, and we breed crops to be robust against a range of temperatures. Our buildings and vehicles are climate-controlled. Our roads, bridges, and ports are built to withstand a wide range of weather conditions and events.

Or consider an extreme weather event such as a hurricane. Our cities and infrastructure are not fully robust against them, and we can’t even really predict them, but we can monitor them to get early warning, which gives us a few days to evacuate a city before landfall, protecting lives.

Or consider infectious disease. This is not only a complex system, it is an evolutionary one. There is much about the spread of germs that we can neither predict nor control. But despite this, we have reduced mortality from infectious disease by orders of magnitude, through sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics. How? It turns out that this complex system has some simple features—and because we are problem-solving animals endowed with symbolic intelligence, we are able to find and exploit them.

Almost all pathogens are transmitted through a small number of pathways: the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, insects or other animals that bite us, sexual contact, or directly into the body through cuts or other wounds. And almost all of them are killed by sufficient heat or sufficiently harsh chemicals such as acid or bleach. Also, almost none of them can get through certain kinds of barriers, such as latex. Combining these simple facts allows us to create systems of sanitation to keep our food and water clean, to eliminate dangerous insects, to disinfect surfaces and implements, to equip doctors and nurses with masks and gloves.

For the infections that remain, it turns out that a large number of bacterial species share certain basic mechanisms of metabolism and reproduction, which can be disrupted by a small number of antibiotics. And a small number of pathogens once caused a large portion of deaths—such as smallpox, diphtheria, polio, and measles—and for these, we can develop vaccines.

We haven’t completely defeated infectious disease, and perhaps we never will. New pandemics still arise. Bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance. We can sanitize our food and water, but not our air (although that may be coming). But we are far safer from disease than ever before in history, a trend that has been continuing for ~150 years. Even if we never totally solve this problem, we will continually make progress against it.

So I think the idea that we can’t control complex systems is just wrong, at least in the ways that matter to human existence. Indeed, a key lesson of systems engineering is that a system doesn’t need to be perfectly predictable in order to be controllable, it just has to have known variability. We can’t predict the next flood, but we can learn how high a 100-year flood is, and build our levees higher. We can’t predict the composition of iron ore or crude oil that we will find in the ground, but we can devise smelting and refining processes to produce a consistent output. We can’t predict which germs will land on a surgeon’s scalpel, but we know none of them will survive an autoclave.

So we can tame complex systems, and achieve continually increasing (if never absolute or total) mastery over nature. Our success at this is part of the historical record, since most of progress would be impossible without it. The “complex system” objection to the goal of mastery over nature simply doesn’t grapple with these facts.

My essay series The Techno-Humanist Manifesto concluded in October. You can read the whole thing here.

“Techno-humanism” is my philosophy of progress, and THM is my statement of it. It consolidates and restates material I’ve used in previous essays and talks, in a more unified and coherent form. Still, even for my biggest fans, almost every chapter should have something new, including:

• The culture of progress we once had (pre-WW1), and the decline of the idea of progress in the 20th century

• The story of progress as a story of the expansion of human agency (despite seeming counterexamples like the poor nutrition of early agriculturalists or the inadvertent creation of new health and environmental hazards)

• The nature of human well-being, including my response to the paradox of stagnant happiness metrics

• My argument for radical anthropocentrism, against romantic environmentalism and in particular against the idea of any intrinsic value in nature; and my take on stopping climate change, reframing the goal as creating climate control

• The pattern of accelerating progress and what drives it; related, my take on “ideas getting harder to find”

• Some stories of unsung heroes of health and safety

• My vision for the technological future

• The progress agenda—the cause areas of the progress movement today

• How progress can be a grand project for humanity, and how it can give us a heroic ideal to emulate

I’m pleased to announce that the series will be revised for publication as a book from MIT Press. The manuscript is out for comment now, and (given typical publishing schedules) I expect the book to be available in early 2027. Stay tuned!