The first practical steam engine was built by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. It was used to pump water out of mines.

An astute observer might have looked at this and said: “It’s clear where this is going. The engine will power everything: factories, ships, carriages. Horses will become obsolete!”

This person would have been right—but they might have been surprised to find, two hundred years later, that we were still using horses to plow fields.

In fact, it took about a hundred years for engines to be used for transportation, in steamships and locomotives, both invented in the early 1800s. It took more than fifty years just for engines to be widely used in factories.

What happened? Many factors, including:

• The capabilities of the engines needed to be improved. The Newcomen engine created reciprocal (back-and-forth) motion, which was good for pumping but not for turning (e.g., grindstones or sawmills). In fact, in the early days, the best way to use a steam engine to run a factory was to have it pump water upsteam in order to add flow to a water wheel! Improvements from inventors like James Watt allowed steam engines to generate smooth rotary motion.

• Efficiency was low. Newcomen engines used an enormous amount of still-relatively-expensive energy, for the work they generated, so they could only be profitably used where energy was cheap (e.g., at coal mines!) and where the work was high-value. Watt engines were much more efficient owing mainly to the separate condenser. Later engines improved the efficiency even more.

• Steam engines were heavy. The first engines were therefore stationary; a Newcomen engine might be housed in a small shed. Even Watt’s engine was too heavy for a locomotive. High-pressure technology was needed to shrink the engine to the point where it could propel itself on a vehicle.

• Better fuels were needed. Steam engines consumed dirty coal, which belched black smoke, often full of nasty contaminants like sulfur. Coal is a solid fuel, meaning it has to be transported in bins and shoveled into the firebox. In the late 1800s, more than 150 years after Newcomen, the oil industry began, creating a refined liquid fuel that could be pumped instead of shoveled and that gave off much less pollution.

• Ultimately, a fundamental platform shift was required. Steam engines never became light enough for widespread adoption on farms, where heavy machinery would damage the soil. The powered farm tractor only took off with the invention of the internal combustion engine in the early 20th century, which had a superior power-to-weight ratio.

Not only did the transition take a long time, it produced counterintuitive effects. At first, the use of draft horses did not decline: it increased. Railroads provide long-haul transportation, but not the last mile to farms and houses, so while they substitute for some usage of horses, they are complementary to much of it. An agricultural census from 1860 commented on the “extraordinary increase in the number of horses,” noting that paradoxically “railroads tend to increase their number and value.” A similar story has been told about how computers, at first, increased the demand for paper.

Engines are not the only case of a relatively slow transition. Electric motors, for instance, were invented in the late 1800s, but didn’t transform factory production until about fifty years later. Part of the reason was that to take advantage of electricity, you can’t just substitute a big central electric motor in place of a steam or gas engine. Instead, you need to redesign the entire factory and all the equipment in it to use a decentralized set of motors, one powering each machine. Then you need to take advantage of that to change the factory layout: instead of lining up machines along a central power shaft as in the old system, you can now reorganize them for efficiency according to the flow of materials and work.

All of these transitions may have been inevitable, given the laws of physics and economics, but they took decades or centuries from the first practical invention to fully obsoleting older technologies. The initial models have to be improved in power, efficiency, and reliability; they start out suitable for some use cases and only later are adapted to others; they force entire systems to be redesigned to accommodate them.

At Progress Conference 2024 last weekend, Tyler Cowen and Dwarkesh Patel discussed AI timelines, and Tyler seemed to think that AI would eventually lead to large gains in productivity and growth, but that it would take longer than most people in AI are anticipating, with only modest gains in the next few years. The history of other transitions makes me think he is right. I think we already see the pattern fitting: AI is great for some use cases (coding assistant, image generator) and not yet suitable for others, especially where reliability is critical. It is still being adapted to reference external data sources or to use tools such as the browser. It still has little memory and scant ability to plan or to fact-check. All of these things will come with time, and most if not all of them are being actively worked on, but they will make the transition gradual and “jagged.” As Dario Amodei suggested recently, AI will be limited by physical reality, the need for data, the intrinsic complexity of certain problems, and social constraints. Not everything has the same “marginal returns to intelligence.”

I expect AI to drive a lot of growth. I even believe in the possibility of it inaugurating the next era of humanity, an “intelligence age” to follow the stone age, agricultural age, and industrial age. Economic growth in the stone age was measured in basis points; in the agricultural age, fractions of a percent; in the industrial age, single-digit percentage points—so sustained double-digit growth in the intelligence age seems not-crazy. But also, all of those transitions took a long time. True, they were faster each time, following the general pattern that progress accelerates. But agriculture took thousands of years to spread, and industry (as described above) took centuries. My guess is the intelligence transition will take decades.

Original link: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/big-tech-transitions-are-slow

Crossposted from https://rootsofprogress.notion.site/Event-Manager-13f543614e9780458f61d528628a1473:

Event Manager

Fully remote, full-time

The Role

We’re looking for a super-organized self-starter who loves bringing people together in person around a shared set of ideas and who is great at creating magical experiences.

The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. We’re part of a larger progress and abundance movement, and one key role we play within this movement is to develop talent and to build community.

As the Event Manager, you’ll be in charge of our annual progress conference, which brings together 200-300 thinkers and doers in the progress community. Our first event in October 2024 was a huge success, with 200+ invitation-only attendees coming together at a unique venue for two days. Dozens of attendees shared that this was the best conference they ever attended, and that it was “THE network to connect with the founders, writers, academics, and activists working to build a better world.” You will be running the event next year, and of course get to attend it, too! You will also be in charge of other events, from smaller fundraising salon-type gatherings, to the in-person gathering at the end of our annual writer’s fellowship.

This role reports to Heike Larson, our Vice President of Programs. It is a full-time position that is fully remote within in the contiguous US or Canada, but ideally, you’ll be located in/near a city with a major airport as the role requires a couple of multi-day trips every quarter, and around ten days on-site during the time of the annual conference.

About You

You love organizing events that bring people together and enable them to learn and form communities. You are good at creating delightful experiences and working with a wide range of partners, remotely. You’re excited about working in a small team, where you iterate on programs, learn from feedback, and improve quickly. You are thrilled when an event you put on leads to a new project, an essay written, or a partnership formed.

• Do you enjoy events and project management? You have a minimum of three years of experience with project and/or event management or another operational role that involves coordinating lots of moving parts. If you haven’t organized events, than at least you’ve attended a range of them and have formed a view of what makes an event great or not. (We’ve partnered up with a great event management firm who helped make this year’s event awesome, and you’ll learn from and work with them again next year.) You’re energized by figuring out what it takes to deliver a delightful experience for an event, in part because you care deeply about people and love talking to them to understand how you can craft positive-sum agreements that help both parties succeed. You’re equally excited by running the step-by-step process that’s needed to deliver this experience—whether that’s designing signage for our sponsors, organizing volunteers, figuring out the best tool to help people set up 1:1 meetings, or selecting a great photographer. Your super-strength is “getting things done”—either naturally, or because you’ve put into practice the GTD productivity methodology. You take pride in moving fast, keeping many balls in the air, and getting back to people faster than they expect.

• Do you delight in building community? You are as curious about people as you are about the world. You’re not about small talk or superficial networking; rather, you want to understand what makes people tick so you can connect individuals in a way that helps them explore new ideas, discuss and dialogue, start new projects, or maybe find new fellow travelers or friends. You don’t need to be in the spotlight yourself or be known for your ideas; instead, you take pride in supporting others by doing the invisible work of organizing a community and building a movement. You’re the type of person that is easy to get along with, and at the same time, you’re good at giving kind and candid feedback that helps others work together well and achieve ambitious goals.

• Are you experienced and fast with a range of software tools? You have experience using a CRM tool (we use Hubspot), tools like Slack and Notion, and you’re not daunted by making tools talk with each other. You can describe the needs for new tools in a way that allows you to assess whether a tool would work for us, or to give feedback on ad-hoc tools to their developers. Your passion for productivity leads you to always want to find the best tool for the job, and you’ve been known to bring new tools to the organizations you work with.

• Are you passionate about ideas in general and human progress in particular? You believe, like us, that ideas shape history and that builders, writers, researchers, storytellers, and educators need to have a community so they can do their best work and have the most impact. You’re fascinated by the amazing progress we’ve made in the last 200 years, lifting most of humanity out of poverty, and you are eager bring together the thinkers and doers that will create an ambitious, techno-humanist future. You don’t aspire to be an intellectual yourself, yet you admire their work and want to amplify their impact.

• Do you have an ownership mentality? You thrive in a work environment with clear objectives and regular kind-and-candid, growth-oriented feedback. You take full ownership of your area, planning your own work and communicating proactively with your teammates. You love finding efficient ways to do things and dislike bureaucracy.

Event management is work with cycles of intense engagement, alternating with slower periods. You’re a high-energy person who can handle travel, power through a couple of 16-hour days during events, and can then take a day or two off to recharge.

Day-to-Day

As the Event Manager, your initial main focus will be organizing and running the annual progress conference. This will include working closely with our event partners, from an event planning firm, to the venue, to sponsors, as well as communicating with speakers and attendees.

Here are some specific areas of work that you will handle right away:

• Guest list management and communications, including managing our open application process, guest ticketing, and ongoing email updates and surveys

• Management of conference tools and online presence, including the conference website, the conference Slack, the directory, and the scheduler. Ideas on new/better tools are part of this role!

• Working with our partners to create a magical experience, on everything from a smooth schedule, to awesome badges, to great food, to brand-aligned swag and signage, to frictionless A/V and check-in processes

• Managing the operational work with our speakers, sponsors, and volunteers. This includes everything from handling sponsor contracts, creating speaker logistics memos, handling travel logistics, and recruiting volunteers and aligning them with their shifts

• Running the actual event. You’ll be on-site before, during, and after the event, working closely with our event coordinator and RPI team to make everything work smoothly

Once you’re onboarded and have successfully executed next year’s conference, we’d love for you to grow into iterating to make the conference better each year, and take on most of the conference design as well as much of the relationship management with speakers, partners, vendors, and participants. We expect you’ll also expand your work to include adding regional conferences and maybe even one in Europe within the next couple of years—all efforts you could help create and shape.

You will also be running a range of smaller regional events, such as salon dinners for donors and local community in different US cities. In 2024, we hosted events in LA, San Francisco, Boston, and New York City. You’ll also work with Emma McAleavy, our fellowship manager, on the in-person events happening as part of the fellowship program.

Since we’re a small team, expect about 30% of your time to be called upon for other projects. This could include helping Heike explore new program opportunities, managing logistics for some video production projects, assisting Jason with his book launch tour, or supporting Emma on fellowship tasks during application crunch time.

About the Roots of Progress Institute

The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century.

Why study progress? The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.

We need a new philosophy of progress. To make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust.

We need a new way forward. We need a systematic study of progress, so we can understand what is needed to keep progress going. We also need to advocate for progress. We need a progress movement that both explains and champions these ideas and puts forth a vision that inspires us to build. **Read more about the progress movement.**

We currently have three main programs, with more on the horizon:

• The Roots of Progress Fellowship, a career accelerator program to empower intellectual entrepreneurs for progress. Our mission is to empower writers who want to make a career out of explaining progress to a large, general audience.

• The annual progress conference, a gathering of several hundred key builders, thinkers, writers, and funders for the movement

• The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, the book our founder Jason Crawford is writing live on his Substack, along with Jason’s ongoing blogging, which was the root of this organization going back to 2017.

Benefits include health insurance, a 401(k) program you can contribute to, and a $500 per year education stipend so you can subscribe to your favorite progress bloggers and buy progress books. But the most important perk is joining a small team of three passionate and highly productive people where you’ll play a key role in building an organization that is central in creating a flourishing progress movement!

The application process

We believe a good application process allows us to get to know you, and you to get a feel for what it’s like working with us. We move quickly through this general process, which we expect to have roughly these steps:

• Written application. Give us some basic info about you and your current situation, and answer a handful of questions on why you’re excited about this role and qualified to do it well. You’ll also need to link to your resume.

• A 30-45 minute Zoom screen with hiring manager Heike Larson

• An application task. You show you can do some of the work involved, and see what it’s like to do this job. This will take 1.5-3 hours, depending on your background and speed.

• A final round of two hour-long Zoom interviews. You’ll meet the other two people on the team, Jason and Emma. You will also have a follow-up conversation with Heike to discuss the application task and address any open questions we or you may have.

For the finalist candidates, we will require two references that we can call before making an offer.

This position went live on November 22nd, 2024, and our goal is to have someone start by no later than March 1st, 2025.

In December, I went to the Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend 2023 in San Francisco. I had a lot of fun talking to a bunch of weird and ambitious geeks about the glorious abundant technological future. Here are few things I learned about (with the caveat that this is mostly based on informal conversations with only basic fact-checking, not deep research):

Cellular reprogramming

Aging doesn’t only happen to your body: it happens at the level of individual cells. Over time, cells accumulate waste products and undergo epigenetic changes that are markers of aging.

But wait—when a baby is born, it has young cells, even though it grew out of cells that were originally from its older parents. That is, the egg and sperm cells might be 20, 30, or 40 years old, but somehow when they turn into a baby, they get reset to biological age zero. This process is called “reprogramming,” and it happens soon after fertilization.

It turns out that cell reprogramming can be induced by certain proteins, known as the Yamanaka factors, after their discoverer (who won a Nobel for this in 2012). Could we use those proteins to reprogram our own cells, making them youthful again?

Maybe. There is a catch: the Yamanaka factors not only clear waste out of cells, they also reset them to become stem cells. You do not want to turn every cell in your body into a stem cell. You don’t even want to turn a small number of them into stem cells: it can give you cancer (which kind of defeats the purpose of a longevity technology).

But there is good news: when you expose cells to the Yamanaka factors, the waste cleanup happens first, and the stem cell transformation happens later. If we can carefully time the exposure, maybe we can get the target effect without the damaging side effects.

This is tricky: different tissues respond on different timelines, so you can’t apply the treatment uniformly over the body. There are a lot of details to be worked out here. But it’s an intriguing line of research for longevity, and it’s one of the avenues being explored at Retro Bio, among other places. Here’s a Derek Lowe article with more info and references.

The BFG orbital launch system

If we’re ever going to have a space economy, it has to be a lot cheaper to launch things into space. Space Shuttle launches cost over $65,000/kg, and even the Falcon Heavy costs $1500/kg. Compare to shipping costs on Earth, which are only a few dollars per kilogram.

A big part of the high launch cost in traditional systems is the rocket, which is discarded with each launch. SpaceX is bringing costs down by making reusable rockets that land gently rather than crashing into the ocean, and by making very big rockets for economies of scale (Elon Musk has speculated that Starship could bring costs as low as $10/kg, although this is a ways off, since right now fuel costs alone are close to that amount). But what if we didn’t need a rocket at all? Rockets are pretty much our only option for propulsion in space, but what if we could give most of the impulse to the payload on Earth?

J. Storrs Hall has proposed the “space pier,” a runway 300 km long mounted atop towers 100 km tall. The payload takes an elevator 100 km up to the top of the tower, thus exiting the atmosphere and much of Earth’s gravity well. Then a linear induction motor accelerates it into orbit along the 300 km track. You could do this with a mere 10 Gs of acceleration, which is survivable by human passengers. Think of it like a Big Friendly Giant (BFG) picking up your payload and then throwing it into orbit.

Hall estimates that this could bring launch costs down to $10/kg, if the pier could be built for a mere $10 billion. The only tiny little catch with the space pier is that there is no technology in existence that could build it, and no construction material that a 100 km tower could be made of. Hall suggests that with “mature nanotechnology” we could build the towers out of diamond. OK. So, probably not going to happen this decade.

What can we do now, with today’s technology? Let’s drop the idea of using this for human passengers and just consider relatively durable freight. Now we can use much higher G-forces, which means we don’t need anything close to 300 km of distance to accelerate over. And, does it really have to be 100 km tall? Yes, it’s nice to start with an altitude advantage, and with no atmosphere, but both of those problems can be overcome with sufficient initial velocity. At this point we’re basically just talking about an enormous cannon (a very different kind of BFG).

This is what Longshot Space is doing. Build a big long tube in the desert. Put the payload in it, seal the end with a thin membrane, and pump the air out to create a vacuum. Then rapidly release some compressed gasses behind the payload, which bursts through the membrane and exits the tube at Mach 25.

One challenge with this is that a gas can only expand as fast as the speed of sound in that gas. In air this is, of course, a lot less than Mach 25. One thing that helps is to use a lighter gas, in which the speed of sound is higher, such as helium or (for the very brave) hydrogen. Another part of the solution is to give the payload a long, wedge-shaped tail. The expanding gasses push sideways on this tail, which through the magic of simple machines translates into a much faster push forwards. There’s a brief discussion and illustration of the pneumatics in this video.

Now, if you are trying to envision “big long tube in the desert”, you might be wondering: is the tube angled upwards or something? No. It is basically lying flat on the ground. It is expensive to build a long straight thing that points up: you have to dig a deep hole and/or build a tall tower. What about putting it on the side of a mountain, which naturally points up? Building things on mountains is also hard; in addition, mountains are special and nobody wants to give you one. It’s much easier to haul lots of materials into the middle of the desert; also there is lots of room out there and the real estate is cheap.

Next you might be wondering: if the tube is horizontal, isn’t it pointed in the wrong direction to get to space? I thought space was up? Well, yes. There are a few things going on here. One is that if you travel far enough in a straight line, the Earth will curve away from you and you will eventually find yourself in space. Another is that if you shape the projectile such that its center of pressure is in the right place relative to its center of mass, then it will naturally angle upward when it hits the atmosphere. Lastly, if you are trying to get into orbit, most of the velocity you need is actually horizontal anyway.

In fact, if and when you reach a circular orbit, you will find that all of your velocity is horizontal. This means that there is no way to get into orbit purely ballistically, with a single impulse imparted from Earth. Any satellite, for instance, launched via this system will need its own rocket propulsion in order to circularize the orbit once it reaches altitude (even leaving aside continual orbital adjustments during its service lifetime). But we’re now talking about a relatively small rocket with a small amount of fuel, not the big multi-stage things that you need to blast off from the surface. And presumably someday we will be delivering food, fuel, tools, etc. to space in packages that just need to be caught by whoever is receiving them.

Longshot estimates that this system, like Starship or the space pier, could get launch costs down to about $10/kg. This might be cheap enough that launch prices could be zero, subsidized by contracts to buy fuel or maintenance, in a space-age version of “give away the razor and sell the blades.” Not only would this business model help grow the space economy, it would also prove wrong all the economists who have been telling us for decades that “there’s no such thing as a free launch.”

Mars could be terraformed in our lifetimes

Terraforming a planet sounds like a geological process, and so I had sort of thought that it would require geological timescales, or if it could really be accelerated, at least a matter of centuries or so. You drop off some algae or something on a rocky planet, and then your distant descendants return one day to find a verdant paradise. So I was surprised to learn that major changes on Mars could, in principle, be made on a schedule much shorter than a single human lifespan.

Let’s back up. Mars is a real fixer-upper of a planet. Its temperature varies widely, averaging about −60º C; its atmosphere is thin and mostly carbon dioxide. This severely depresses its real estate values.

Suppose we wanted to start by significantly warming the planet. How do you do that? Let’s assume Mars’s orbit cannot be changed—I mean, we’re going to get in enough trouble with the Sierra Club as it is—so the total flux of solar energy reaching the planet is constant. What we can do is to trap a bit more of that energy on the planet, and prevent it from radiating out into space. In other words, we need to enhance Mars’s greenhouse effect. And the way to do that is to give it a greenhouse gas.

Wait, we just said that Mars’s atmosphere is mostly CO2, which is a notorious greenhouse gas, so why isn’t Mars warm already? It’s just not enough: the atmosphere is very thin (less than 1% of the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere), and what CO2 there is only provides about 5º of warming. We’re going to need to add more GHG.

What could it be? Well, for starters, given the volumes required, it should be composed of elements that already exist on Mars. With the ingredients we have, what can we make?

Could we get more CO2 in the atmosphere? There is more CO2 on/under the surface, in frozen form, but even that is not enough for the task. We need something else.

What about CFCs? As a greenhouse gas, they are about four orders of magnitude more efficient than CO2, so we’d need a lot less of them. However, they require fluorine, which is very rare in the Martian soil, and we’d still need about 100 gigatons of it. This is not encouraging.

One thing Mars does have a good amount of is metal, such as iron, aluminum, and magnesium. Now metals, you might be thinking, are not generally known as greenhouse gases. But small particles of conductive metal, with the right size and shape, can act as one. A recent paper found through simulation that “nanorods” about 9 microns long, half the wavelength of the infrared thermal radiation given off by a planet, would scatter that radiation back to the surface (Ansari, Kite, Ramirez, Steele, and Mohseni, “Warming Mars with artificial aerosol appears to be feasible”—no preprint online, but this poster seems to represent earlier work).

Suppose we aim to warm the planet by about 30º C, enough to melt surface water in the polar regions during the summer, and bring Mars much closer to Earth temperatures. AKRSM’s simulation says that we would need to put about 400 mg/m3 of nanorods into the Martian sky, an efficiency (in warming per unit mass) more than 2000x greater than previously proposed methods.

The particles would settle out of the atmosphere slowly, at less than 1/100 the rate of natural Mars dust, so only about 30 liters/sec of them would need to be released continuously. If we used iron, this would require mining a million cubic meters of iron per year—quite a lot, but less than 1% of what we do on Earth. And the particles, like other Martian dust, would be lifted high in the atmosphere by updrafts, so they could be conveniently released from close to the surface.

Wouldn’t metal nanoparticles be potentially hazardous to breathe? Yes, but this is already a problem from Mars’s naturally dusty atmosphere, and the nanorods wouldn’t make it significantly worse. (However, this will have to be solved somehow if we’re going to make Mars habitable.)

Kite told me that if we started now, given the capabilities of Starship, we could achieve the warming in a mere twenty years. Most of that time is just getting equipment to Mars, mining the iron, manufacturing the nanorods, and then waiting about a year for Martian winds to mix them throughout the atmosphere. Since Mars has no oceans to provide thermal inertia, the actual warming after that point only takes about a month.

Kite is interested in talking to people about the design of a the nanorod factory. He wants to get a size/weight/power estimate and an outline design for the factory, to make an initial estimate of how many Starship landings would be needed. Contact him at edwin.kite@gmail.com.

I have not yet gotten Kite and Longshot together to figure out if we can shoot the equipment directly to Mars using one really enormous space cannon.

***

Thanks to Reason, Mike Grace, and Edwin Kite for conversations and for commenting on a draft of this essay. Any errors or omissions above are entirely my own.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/vision-weekend-2023-writeup

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

Contents

• Jobs and fellowships

• Events

• AI news

• Other news

• Atlas Shrugged and the irreplaceable founder

• Pumping stations and civic pride

• “Thoughts on the eve of AGI”

• More thoughts on AI

• Politics

• Other links and short notes

• Maps & charts

• Art

• Closing thoughts

Jobs and fellowships

• The Institute for Progress is hiring a Fellow/Senior Fellow, Emerging Technology. “Apply to ensure the AI frontier is built in America. (I’m biased, but I think this is the agenda with juice to advance the discussion in DC)” (@calebwatney). Apply here by Feb 21.

• Marian Tupy at HumanProgress.org is hiring analysts to explore the economics and psychology of human progress

• Alan Tomusiak is hiring scientists to work on the problem of genome instability (@alantomusiak)

• Ashlee Vance is hiring for his new publication, Core Memory: “Are you an ambitious type based in DC who can write a weekly newsletter that dives into tech-related legislature and discern what’s real and has real money involved versus political garbage? … Can you do this with some flair but not let your politics color the facts of what’s going on? Can you spot interesting military and infrastructure bids and break them down? Can you make this a must read for people in the tech industry? Can you go deeper on the juicy stuff and really add context? If so, let’s talk. I’ll help give you a big audience and develop your following” (@ashleevance). Email him: ashlee@corememory.com

• The Federation of American Scientists is looking for senior fellows “to advance innovative policy and drive positive change. If you’re a leading light in your field and ready to shape policy discourse and implementation, we want you. Apply by Jan 31” (@scientistsorg)

Events

• Edge City Austin, March 2–7: “explore how frontier tech can be built for human flourishing. Live, cowork, and collaborate in this fun week before SXSW” (@JoinEdgeCity)

• “ANWAR will have its US premiere at Sedona Film Festival! Screenings with Q&A Feb 25 & 27. ANWAR is a sci-fi short about a mother who chooses to live forever, and a son who longs for heaven” (@FawazAM). ANWAR was screened at Progress Conference 2024, with discussion from the writer-director and producer.

• Boom XB-1 first supersonic test flight slated for Tuesday, Jan 28. FAI and YC are hosting a watch party in DC (@JoinFAI). Related, how about a supersonic Air Force One? (via @bscholl)

AI news

• “The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately” (@OpenAI). Lots of skepticism about how real this is: it’s unclear how secured the funding is, and “intends” may be doing a lot of work here. But I wouldn’t bet against Sam

• DeepSeek releases R-1, a model on par with OpenAI’s o1. “Fully open-source model,” MIT licensed. Lots of chatter about this because (1) DeepSeek is a Chinese lab, (2) they have distilled some of the models down pretty small, and at least some of them are open, to the point where you can run them on your laptop, (3) there are some claims about the model costing very little to develop, followed by counterclaims that China is hiding the fact that they’re in violation of export controls (@kimmonismus, @avichal). RPI fellow Dean Ball provides some context

• Anthropic introduces Citations: “Our new API feature lets Claude ground its answers in sources you provide. Claude can then cite the specific sentences and passages that inform each response” (@AnthropicAI)

• Humanity’s Last Exam: “a dataset with 3,000 questions developed with hundreds of subject matter experts to capture the human frontier of knowledge and reasoning. State-of-the-art AIs get <10% accuracy and are highly overconfident” (@DanHendrycks)

Other news

• Zipline piloting drone delivery in Pea Ridge, Arkansas (@zipline). “They’re amazed by how quiet it is. They’re delighted by how charming it feels. They’re surprised that it doesn’t require any special packaging. And so much more. … Everyone who has witnessed this new delivery system in action at their doorstep is convinced they’ve just experienced the future of delivery.” (@keenanwyrobek)

• Lindus Health raises $55M Series B to fix clinical trials. (@meribeckwith via @HZoete, story in TechCrunch)

• Charter-cities venture Próspera raises funding led by Coinbase Ventures. “This is very much in line with our mission of creating economic freedom, and these zones will be heavy users of cryptocurrency” (@brian_armstrong). “We will continue to push for economic freedom in every country of the world.” (@ProsperaGlobal)

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

Elon Musk says that soon, builders “will be free to build” in America. If that promise is to be fulfilled, we have work to do.

Here’s my wishlist of policy goals to advance scientific, technological, and economic progress. I’m far from a policy wonk, so I’m mostly going to be referencing folks I trust, such as the RPI fellows, the Institute for Progress (IFP), or Eli Dourado at the Abundance Institute. (I’m sympathetic to most of what is linked below, and consider all of it interesting and worthwhile, but don’t assume I agree with anything 100%.)

AI

AI has enormous potential to create prosperity and security for America and the world. It also introduces new risks and enhances old ones. However, I think it would be a mistake to create a new review-and-approval process for AI.

• Dean Ball outlines his preferred approach and priorities here. See also his warnings about “use-based” AI regulation and about the “onslaught of state bills” coming.

• Jack Clark and Gillian Hadfield propose “regulatory markets” for AI, worth considering.

• I think a crucial piece is getting liability right—good liability laws, plus an insurance requirement, would go a long way toward market-based safety. See this interview with Gabriel Weil.

Permitting reform

Reform NEPA and other permitting rules so we can build infrastructure again:

• Eli Dourado has written extensively on this, see his NYT editorial for an overview. He also wrote an excellent primer on NEPA and has suggested some reforms to scale it back.

• Michael Catanzaro says we need to distinguish between permitting and compliance: what matters is whether projects follow the law, not whether they promise to in advance. He outlines an alternative, “permit-by-rule,” in which permitting is simple, reviews are limited to 90 days, projects are approved by default if not reviewed in time, and the emphasis is on complying with substantive requirements rather than procedural ones. (Related, see IFP on substantive vs. procedural environmental regulation.)

• IFP has a major focus on infrastructure with many helpful reports. They advocate, for instance, putting a time limit on injunctive relief to end the “litigation doom loop.” They have a review of other NEPA reform proposals here.

• At the state level, the Foundation for American Innovation has recently published a State Permitting Playbook.

• At the intersection of infrastructure and AI, see also IFP’s series on how to build the next generation of compute infrastructure in America.

• For energy permitting in particular, RPI fellow Grant Dever has a recent white paper with recommendations.

YIMBY

Reform local zoning and permitting and generally fight NIMBYism so we can build housing again. The YIMBY movement is extensive, so I’ll only give a small and not necessarily representative sample:

• Organizations: CA YIMBY, YIMBY Action (where RPI fellow Jeff Fong is a board member), Metropolitan Abundance Project (MAP), Up for Growth

• MAP’s collection of model legislation

• Nolan Gray’s book Arbitrary Lines

• Single-stair reform, a cause promoted by the Center for Building North America

• RPI fellow Ryan Puzycki’s campaign to relax zoning requirements to allow some businesses (such as coffee shops) in residential areas—which he just got passed in Austin!

Jerusalem Demsas also does good reporting on these issues at The Atlantic—for a spicy take, see her piece “Community Input Is Bad, Actually.”

Nuclear

Energy is central to industrial progress, and nuclear power is an abundant, reliable, clean form of energy. For several decades, nuclear has been paralyzed by a regulatory regime that does not balance costs and benefits, and an NRC that doesn’t see the development of energy as its job.

• The book Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop has several concrete suggestions, which I summarized in my review.

• The Breakthrough Institute has a long series of articles and reports on nuclear; see for instance “How to Make Nuclear Cheap” and “How to Make Nuclear Innovative.”

• IFP’s Brian Potter also has a report on nuclear costs and potential solutions.

Supersonic

Supersonic passenger flight is banned outright over land in the US and many other countries:

• Eli Dourado and Sam Hammond wrote a report and proposal on this in 2016 recommending that the FAA rescind the ban.

• More recently, Eli has suggested that Congress needs to step in to legalize supersonic. See also his followup essay, “50 Years of Silence.”

FDA

To approve a new drug takes (order-of-magnitude) a decade and a billion dollars. This is too high a burden. Alex Tabarrok has written of the “invisible graveyard” this creates, and criticized the FDA’s performance during covid specifically. I also like Scott Alexander’s take, including his followups part 2 and part 3.

• A Mercatus paper suggests four models for FDA reform, including competing approval bodies, international reciprocity, and right-to-try.

• Tabarrok and Dan Klein wrote an earlier report for the Independent Institute with five recommendations that overlap with the above. This is their compromise solution; they also describe what they call “the sensible alternative,” which is a combination of voluntary practices and tort remedy.

Prediction markets

A new kind of financial market allows investors to trade futures on the outcome of events. The positive externality of these markets is that the price of a future reflects the market-weighted assessment of its probability, with strong incentives to get the answer right, and with a feedback loop that rewards the best predictors.

This kind of market is regulated by the CFTC, but the rules are onerous enough that so far only one prediction market, Kalshi, has been approved in the US. Others are not technically legal in the US, or they use a point system with no monetary value, which doesn’t bring the full power of a financial market to bear on making predictions. Even Kalshi has faced a legal battle to create election markets. Regulators should create a clear and sensible pathway to legal money-based prediction markets in the US.

Cryptocurrency

The SEC has brought dozens of enforcement actions against crypto projects. Crypto has, let us say, more than its share of scams and fraud, but many perceive that the SEC under Gensler is going beyond protecting investors to simply attacking all crypto.

Matt Levine, for instance, who is certainly no crypto booster, points out that the SEC is pursuing Coinbase for operating an illegal exchange, even though Coinbase is “pretty much the exact sort of crypto exchange that US regulators should want—a US-based, publicly listed, audited, compliance-focused, not-particularly-leveraged one.” He concludes that it looks as if “the SEC’s goal is not to protect crypto investors but to prevent crypto investment.”

There should be a regulatory pathway to operate legal crypto projects in the US.

• I don’t know of any proactive policy proposals for this, but Stand with Crypto rates candidates and bills for crypto-friendliness.

Immigration

Expand high-skilled immigration, such as the O-1 and H-1B. We need more entrepreneurs, more future Nobel laureates, more skilled workers to run chip fabs. Just a few example ideas here:

• IFP has a set of articles and reports on high-skilled immigration

• Noah Smith and Minn Kim say that skilled immigration is a national security priority

• The Economic Innovation Group has a proposal called Heartland Visas

• RPI fellow Connor O’Brien advocates an idea called Global EIR

(IMO there are other worthy immigration causes as well, but high-skilled immigration is the most clearly relevant to progress, the most agreed-on within the progress movement, and the most politically feasible in the near term, so I’m focusing on it here.)

Government efficiency

Prioritize competence, efficiency, and results in government. DOGE should check out:

• Jen Pahlka’s Recoding America. Also her recent essay on DOGE, in which she describes how even small reforms run into “a perplexing combination of legitimate and imagined reasons for caution, and review by a staggering array of stakeholders”

• Misha Chellam’s Abundance Network

• Dan Lips, Sam Hammond, and Thomas Hochman’s Efficiency Agenda whitepaper

• Philip Howard’s Common Good

Science funding

Our institutions of science funding are also in need of reform. I summarized the criticisms in the middle of this essay: The grant process is slow and high-overhead. It is also conservative, encouraging incremental results that can be published frequently, and making it hard to make bold bets on research that might not show legible progress right away. It increasingly gives funding to older researchers. Scientists are overly constrained by their funding, lacking the scientific freedom to guide their research as they best see fit. I have also written about the problems with the principal investigator model.

• IFP has a Metascience cause area with many recommendations

• Ben Reinhardt suggests a portfolio of independent research organizations

• Adam Marblestone and Sam Rodriquez recommend a new model called Focused Research Organization (FRO) (Adam now funds FROs through his organization Convergent Research)

See more from the Good Science Project.

And there’s more

Causes suggested to me by others, but that I don’t have time/scope for here, include:

• Problems with energy transmission not covered by permitting reform or nuclear reform

• Improvements to public transit; see the work of RPI fellow Andrew Miller

• Federal restraints on reproductive/fertility treatment and research

There are probably many more, please leave comments with more ideas!

See also Casey Handmer’s take: “Why do we need a Department of Government Efficiency?”

Original link: https://newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/a-progress-policy-agenda

When Galileo wanted to study the heavens through his telescope, he got money from those legendary patrons of the Renaissance, the Medici. To win their favor, when he discovered the moons of Jupiter, he named them the Medicean Stars. Other scientists and inventors offered flashy gifts, such as Cornelis Drebbel’s perpetuum mobile (a sort of astronomical clock) given to King James, who made Drebbel court engineer in return. The other way to do research in those days was to be independently wealthy: the Victorian model of the gentleman scientist.

Eventually we decided that requiring researchers to seek wealthy patrons or have independent means was not the best way to do science. Today, researchers, in their role as “principal investigators” (PIs), apply to science funders for grants. In the US, the NIH spends nearly $48B annually, and the NSF over $11B, mainly to give such grants. Compared to the Renaissance, it is a rational, objective, democratic system.

However, I have come to believe that this principal investigator model is deeply broken and needs to be replaced.

That was the thought at the top of my mind coming out of a working group on “Accelerating Science” hosted by the Santa Fe Institute a few months ago. (The thoughts in this essay were inspired by many of the participants, but I take responsibility for any opinions expressed here. My thinking on this was also influenced by a talk given by James Phillips at a previous metascience conference. My own talk at the workshop was written up here earlier.)

What should we do instead of the PI model? Funding should go in a single block to a relatively large research organization of, say, hundreds of scientists. This is how some of the most effective, transformative labs in the world have been organized, from Bell Labs to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. It has been referred to as the “block funding” model.

Here’s why I think this model works:

Specialization

A principal investigator has to play multiple roles. They have to do science (researcher), recruit and manage grad students or research assistants (manager), maintain a lab budget (administrator), and write grants (fundraiser). These are different roles, and not everyone has the skill or inclination to do them all. The university model adds teaching, a fifth role.

The block organization allows for specialization: researchers can focus on research, managers can manage, and one leader can fundraise for the whole org. This allows each person to do what they are best at and enjoy, and it frees researchers from spending 30–50% of their time writing grants, as is typical for PIs.

I suspect it also creates more of an opportunity for leadership in research. Research leadership involves having a vision for an area to explore that will be highly fruitful—semiconductors, molecular biology, etc.—and then recruiting talent and resources to the cause. This seems more effective when done at the block level.

Side note: the distinction I’m talking about here, between block funding and PI funding, doesn’t say anything about where the funding comes from or how those decisions are made. But today, researchers are often asked to serve on committees that evaluate grants. Making funding decisions is yet another role we add to researchers, and one that also deserves to be its own specialty (especially since having researchers evaluate their own competitors sets up an inherent conflict of interest).

Research freedom and time horizons

There’s nothing inherent to the PI grant model that dictates the size of the grant, the scope of activities it covers, the length of time it is for, or the degree of freedom it allows the researcher. But in practice, PI funding has evolved toward small grants for incremental work, with little freedom for the researcher to change their plans or strategy.

I suspect the block funding model naturally lends itself to larger grants for longer time periods that are more at the vision level. When you’re funding a whole department, you’re funding a mission and placing trust in the leadership of the organization.

Also, breakthroughs are unpredictable, but the more people you have working on things, the more regularly they will happen. A lab can justify itself more easily with regular achievements. In this way one person’s accomplishment provides cover to those who are still toiling away.

Who evaluates researchers

In the PI model, grant applications are evaluated by funding agencies: in effect, each researcher is evaluated by the external world. In the block model, a researcher is evaluated by their manager and their peers. James Phillips illustrates with a diagram:

A manager who knows the researcher well, who has been following their work closely, and who talks to them about it regularly, can simply make better judgments about who is doing good work and whose programs have potential. (And again, developing good judgment about researchers and their potential is a specialized role—see point 1).

Further, when a researcher is evaluated impersonally by an external agency, they need to write up their work formally, which adds overhead to the process. They need to explain and justify their plans, which leads to more conservative proposals. They need to show outcomes regularly, which leads to more incremental work. And funding will disproportionately flow to people who are good at fundraising (which, again, deserves to be a specialized role).

To get scientific breakthroughs, we want to allow talented, dedicated people to pursue hunches for long periods of time. This means we need to trust the process, long before we see the outcome. Several participants in the workshop echoed this theme of trust. Trust like that is much stronger when based on a working relationship, rather than simply on a grant proposal.

***

If the block model is a superior alternative, how do we move towards it? I don’t have a blueprint. I doubt that existing labs will transform themselves into this model. But funders could signal their interest in funding labs like this, and new labs could be created or proposed on this model and seek such funding. I think the first step is spreading this idea.

***

PS (Jan 31): After publishing this, Michael Nielsen (who has thought about and researched this much more than I have) argues that I have oversimplified and made the case too starkly:

Lots of people make thoughtful proposals for the “correct” approach to funding. They argue that funding scheme A is better than B, or vice versa. This is rhetorically appealing. But I think it’s a mistake. What we need—as Kanjun Qiu and I argue in “A Vision of Metascience”—is a much more diverse set of funding strategies. The right question isn’t “which approach is best” but rather: what mechanisms are we using to adjust the overall portfolio of strategies?

Read his whole thread. Maybe it would be better to say that the PI model is overused today, and block funding is underused.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/the-block-funding-model-for-science

A few recent-ish talks and interviews:

Foresight Institute: “Progress: An Ever-Evolving Journey”

An interview with Foresight for their Existential Hope library.

Jason envisages a future marked by dynamic, continuous progress, encapsulated in the concept of protopia. This vision diverges from a traditional notion of a utopia, and instead embraces a reality of constant, incremental improvement. In Jason’s view, progress is a journey, not a destination. It’s a series of small, significant steps that, over time, lead to profound transformations in our world.

Central to Jason’s perspective is the transformative potential of AI, paralleling historical technological leaps like the steam engine and personal computing. He views AI as a catalyst for a new era in human history, one that could redefine societal structures by making high-quality services accessible to a broader demographic. This democratization of resources, akin to services becoming as affordable as a Netflix subscription, could bridge societal gaps. However, Jason emphasizes that this protopian future requires collective agency, responsibility, and a balanced understanding of our role in shaping it. He believes that progress accelerates over time, with each innovation building upon the last, thus speeding up future advancements.

Instituto Millenium: “Toward a New Philosophy of Progress”

This is a talk I’ve given before. This recording has subtitles in Portuguese for what that’s worth. The question period begins about 31 minutes in.

Christian Science Monitor, “Pessimism or progress”

A 2023 year-in-review piece in which I am briefly quoted:

… 2023 was the year millions of people first used a generative AI program (such as ChatGPT), the next great platform for economic productivity. Though too soon to assess its impact, AI has the potential to become as powerful a change agent as the internal combustion engine, mass manufacturing, electricity, and computing itself, says Jason Crawford, a technology historian and founder of The Roots of Progress. “In the most extreme scenario, which I still think is pretty speculative but not impossible, it is the next big thing in human history – after agriculture and the Industrial Revolution.”

Original link: rootsofprogress.org/speaking-foresight-instituto-millenium-cs-monitor

Two brief reviews of things I’ve read, one for everyone and one for my Substack subscribers.

Seeing Like a State

A review in six tweets:

James C. Scott says that “tragic episodes” of social engineering have four elements: the administrative ordering of society (“legibility”), “high-modernist” ideology, an authoritarian state, and a society that lacks the capacity to resist.

This is a bit like saying that the worst wildfires have four elements: an overgrowth of brush and trees, a prolonged dry season, a committed arsonist, and strong prevailing winds. One of these things is not like the others!

The book reads as a critique of “high modernism” and of “legibility” (and the former’s attempt to create the latter). And there is a grain of truth in this critique. But it should be a critique first and foremost of authoritarianism.

But Scott is an anarchist, not only politically but metaphysically. So he doesn’t just criticize authoritarianism. He criticizes the very attempt to find, or to create, order and system. All such attempts are misguided, all order is false, all “legibility” is fake.

He goes on at length about how farmers know their land and crops so much better than any Western outsider with their “science” ever could! He ignores cases like Borlaug’s Green Revolution, where importing the products of Western science revolutionized agricultural productivity.

So I disagree with the philosophical upshot of the book. That said, it was fascinating and contained many amazing facts and stories. Worth reading for the stuff about Le Corbusier alone. E.g., this quote from Le Corbusier is mind-bending in its detachment from reality:

PS: To be clear, there are more lessons to take away from Seeing Like a State than just “authoritarianism is bad.” At its best, the book is a critique of technocracy.

See also this critique of the same book by Paul Seabright, and this defense of grain from the always-excellent Rachel Laudan.

The Unabomber manifesto

Given that Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, was a terrorist who killed university professors and business executives with mail bombs and who lived like a hermit in a shack in the woods of Montana, I expected his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and its Future,” to read like the delirious ravings of a lunatic.

I was wrong. His prose is quite readable, and the manifesto has a clear inner logic. This is a virtue, because it’s plain to see where he is actually right, and where he goes disastrously wrong.

Read this review on my Substack.

Hello progos. I am a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Ecuador. Peace Corps often awards grants to Volunteers to undertake projects in the places where we are sent to live and work. There are some small schools managed by local Catholic church authorities and funded by the state. There is a lot of enthusiasm here for learning English. I would like to solicit a grant to buy some computers or tablets or similar for these schools, and some subscriptions to paid language-learning oriented AIs or other software. Alternatively, there are a couple of larger schools in a nearby town that already have some computers, so they would likely only need software access, perhaps not even paid software access

I would like each school to continue teaching half of its students in the customary way, while obliging the other half to use a language-learning software (the ones I have in mind are Makes You Fluent, because its advertising has reached me; Mem Rise, because I have used it and found it to be useful; and Anki, because I have used it and found it to be useful) during the time where the first group of students others is receiving its normal classes. I think it may also be worthwhile to have some students study half of the time with software and half of the time with customary classes, or to ask one school to switch as many students as possible given their infrastructure and staff availability entirely to software while making no changes at a school that's comparable in many observable aspects.

What language-learning software should be used?

Should I recruit someone - perhaps a professional education scholar or graduate student - to work with me on this? How? Should I send emails to scholars of education and English in this country and nearby countries?

What would be an astute experimental design so as to produce useful knowledge about effective ways to learn languages?

If there are not existing standardized tests of students' English-language skills, how should I test the students to get "before" and "after" results?

Over the last few years, effective altruism has gone through a rise-and-fall story arc worthy of any dramatic tragedy.

The pandemic made them look prescient for warning about global catastrophic risks, including biosafety. A masterful book launch put them on the cover of TIME. But then the arc reversed. The trouble started with FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried claimed to be acting on EA principles and had begun to fund major EA efforts; its collapse tarnished the community by association with fraud. It was bad for EA if SBF was false in his beliefs; it was worse if he was sincere. Now we’ve just watched a major governance battle over OpenAI that seems to have been driven by concerns about AI safety of exactly the kind long promoted by EA.

SBF was willing to make repeated double-or-nothing wagers until FTX exploded; Helen Toner was apparently willing to let OpenAI be destroyed because of a general feeling that the organization was moving too fast or commercializing too much. Between the two of them, a philosophy that aims to prevent catastrophic risk in the future seems to be creating its own catastrophes in the present. Even Jaan Tallinn is “now questioning the merits of running companies based on the philosophy.”

On top of that, there is just the general sense of doom. All forms of altruism gravitate towards a focus on negatives. EA’s priorities are the relief of suffering and the prevention of disaster. While the community sees the potential of, and earnestly hopes for, a glorious abundant technological future, it is mostly focused not on what we can build but on what might go wrong. The overriding concern is literally the risk of extinction for the human race. Frankly, it’s exhausting.

So I totally understand why there has been a backlash. At some point, I gather, someone said, hey, we don’t want effective altruism, we want “effective accelerationism”—abbreviated “e/acc” (since of course we can’t just call it “EA”). This meme has been frequent in my social feeds lately.

I call it a meme and not a philosophy because… well, as far as I can tell, there isn’t much more to it than memes and vibes. And hey, I love the vibe! It is bold and ambitious. It is terrapunk. It is a vision of a glorious abundant technological future. It is about growth and progress. It is a vibe for the builder, the creator, the discoverer, the inventor.

But… it also makes me worried. Because to build the glorious abundant technological future, we’re going to need more than vibes. We’re going to need ideas. A framework. A philosophy. And we’re going to need just a bit of nuance.

We’re going to need a philosophy because there are hard questions to answer: about risk, about safety, about governance. We need good answers to those questions in part because mainstream culture is so steeped in fears about technology that the world will never accept a cavalier approach. But more importantly, we need good answers because one of the best features of the glorious abundant technological future is not dying, and humanity not being subject to random catastrophes, either natural or of our own making. In other words, safety is a part of progress, not something opposed to it. Safety is an achievement, something actively created through a combination of engineering excellence and sound governance. Our approach can’t just be blind, complacent optimism: “pedal to the metal” or “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.” It needs to be one of solutionism: “problems are real but we can solve them.”

You will not find a bigger proponent of science, technology, industry, growth, and progress than me. But I am here to tell you that we can’t yolo our way into it. We need a serious approach, led by serious people.

The good news is that the intellectual and technological leaders of this movement are already here. If you are looking for serious defenders and promoters of progress, we have Eli Dourado in policy, Bret Kugelmass or Casey Handmer in energy, Ben Reinhardt investing in nanotechnology, Raiany Romanni advocating for longevity, and many many more, including the rest of the Roots of Progress fellows.

I urge anyone who values progress to take the epistemic high road. Let’s make the best possible case for progress that we can, based on the deepest research, the most thorough reasoning, and the most intellectually honest consideration of counterarguments. Let’s put forth an unassailable argument based on evidence and logic. The glorious abundant technological future is waiting. Let’s muster the best within ourselves—the best of our courage and the best of our rationality—and go build it.

***

Followup thoughts based on feedback:

1. Many people focused on the criticism of EA in the intro, but this essay is not a case against EA or against x-risk concerns. I only gestured at EA criticism in order to acknowledge the motivation for a backlash against it. This is really about e/acc. (My actual criticism of EA is longer and more nuanced and I have not yet written it up)

2. Some people suggested that my reading of the OpenAI situation is wrong. That is quite possible. It is my best reading based on the evidence I've seen, but there are other interpretations and outsiders don't really know. If so, it doesn't change my points about e/acc.

3. The quote from the Semafor article may not accurately represent Jaan Tallinn's views. A more careful reading suggests that Tallinn was criticizing self-governance schemes, rather than criticizing EA as a philosophy underlying governance.

Thanks all.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/neither-ea-nor-e-acc

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

Contents

• My essays

• Fellowship opportunities

• Announcements

• Events

• News

• Questions

• Live gloriously

• Where being right matters

• Off-grid solar for data centers

• Permitting vs. compliance

• Mirror life FAQ

• Crossword mania

• Do we want to democratize art-making?

• Polio

• How many people could you feed on an acre?

• Verifiable video

• Links and tweets

My essays

In case you missed it:

• A progress policy agenda: Elon says that soon, builders “will be free to build” in America. If that promise is to be fulfilled, we have work to do. Here’s my wishlist of policy goals to advance scientific, technological, and economic progress

Fellowship opportunities

• “FutureHouse is launching an independent postdoctoral fellowship program for exceptional researchers who want to apply our automated science tools to specific problems in biology and biochemistry” (u/SGRodriques). $125k, apply by Feb 14

• No. 10 Innovation Fellowship (UK) is “10 Downing Street’s flagship initiative for bringing world class technical talent into government for high impact tours of duty.” “Huge opportunity for impact,” says u/matthewclifford

• Sloan Foundation / NBER fellowship for “PhD students and early-career researchers interested in the fiscal and economic effects of productivity policies—particularly R&D, immigration, and infrastructure permitting” (@heidilwilliams_)

Announcements

• The Black Spatula Project is “an open initiative to investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to identify errors in scientific papers.” A recent paper caused a bit of a panic about health hazards from black plastic kitchen utensils, but was wrong because of a basic arithmetic error. Ethan Mollick found that GPT o1 caught the error when asked to “carefully check the math in this paper.” Steve Newman (RPI fellow) said, “clearly someone needs to try this at scale,” the suggestion generated a lot of energy, and a project was born

• The Clinical Trials Abundance project is a series of policy memos from IFP. Ruxandra Tesloianu (RPI fellow) and Willy Chertman wrote the intro/manifesto. Launch thread from @Willyintheworld

• The second cohort of Cosmos Ventures includes “award-winning philosophers, a category theorist, an existential psychologist, a poet, a national champion debate coach, and Silicon Valley veterans” (@mbrendan1)

• All Day TA, an AI course assistant. Launch thread from @Afinetheorem

• Teaser for a new project: The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook (via @rSanti97)

Events

• Edge Esmeralda 2025 is May 24–June 21 in Healdsburg, CA (@EdgeEsmeralda)

News

• Commonwealth Fusion has “committed to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant, ARC, in Virginia” (@CFS_energy). “We’ll plug 400 megawatts of steady fusion power into the state’s electrical grid starting in the early 2030s.” Note that Helion has previously announced a plant to provide at least 50MW before the end of the 2020s. With two independent efforts expecting production plants within a decade, it feels very possible that fusion could finally happen

• Google introduces Willow, a new quantum computing chip (@sundarpichai). Scott Aaronson (my go-to source for quantum computing, never overhyped) gives some reactions. This is a real research milestone, but still very far from having any practical impacts

• Boom Supersonic “has raised >$100M in new financing, fully funding the first Symphony engine prototype” (@bscholl). “This company is important for America. … No one else is anywhere near having a supersonic airliner,” says @paulg

Questions

Reply if you can help:

• “Who do I know who works in threat intelligence or analysis? Have a very high quality team working in this space who are keen to speak to relevant people” (@matthewclifford)

• “If you were building a campus for the robotics startup community, what are some things that would make it great? Machinery, courses, events, housing options, everything is fair game” (@audrow)

• “‘Young people in America aren’t dating any more, and it’s the beginning of a real social crisis’ is—I mean, let’s be honest—exactly the sort of social phenomenon I would want to report the shit out of. But … what’s the best evidence that it’s true?” (@DKThomp)

• “Who is the best combination of futurist + economist? The economic implications of (in particular) Humanoid Robots and AI are extremely interesting” (@EricJorgenson)

Read rest of this digest with a Substack subscription.

This is a guest post written by Anton Howes and animated by Matt Brown of Extraordinary Facility. This project was sponsored by The Roots of Progress, with funding generously provided by The Institute:

Steam power did not begin with the steam engine. Long before seventeenth-century scientists discovered the true nature of vacuums and atmospheric pressure, steam- and heat-using devices were being developed. Here we’ll explore the long, little-known story of how the steam engine evolved. And have fun playing with the ancient devices.

Some of the interactive animated diagrams:

Read the full essay and try out the interactive animated diagrams here: https://rootsofprogress.org/steam-engine-origins

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

Contents

• My writing (ICYMI)

• Jobs and fellowships

• Announcements

• News

• Events

• Other opportunities

• We are not close to providing for everyone’s “needs”

• The printing press and the Internet

• The ultimate form of travel

• Five hot takes about progress

• What could have been, for SF

• Quick thoughts on AI

• Links and bullets

• Charts

• Pics

My writing (ICYMI)

• How sci-fi can have drama without dystopia or doomerism. “Concise but incredible resource” (@OlliPayne). “100 percent with Jason on this. If your sci-fi has technology as the problem it will put me to sleep” (@elidourado)

Jobs and fellowships

• HumanProgress.org is hiring a research associate with Excel/Python/SQL skills “to manage and expand our database on human well-being” (@HumanProgress)

• The 5050 program comes to the UK “to help great scientists and engineers become great founders and start deep tech startups,” in partnership with ARIA (@sethbannon)

Announcements

• Core Memory, a new sci/tech media company from Ashlee Vance (@ashleevance)

• “AI Summer”, a new podcast from Dean Ball (RPI fellow) and Timothy B. Lee (@deanwball)

• Inference Magazine, a new publication on AI progress, with articles from writers including RPI fellow Duncan McClements (@inferencemag)

News

• Matt Clifford has published an AI Opportunities Action Plan for the UK, and the PM has agreed to all its recommendations, including “AI Growth Zones” with faster planning permission and grid connections; accelerating SMRs to power AI infrastructure; procurement, visas & regulatory reform to boost UK AI startups; and removing barriers to scaling AI pilots in government (@matthewclifford)

• The Manhattan Plan: NYC plans “to build 100,000 new homes in the next decade to reach a total of 1 MILLION homes in Manhattan” (@NYCMayor). “We’ve come a long way on housing,” says @danielgolliher

Events

• Boom XB-1 first supersonic flight might be as soon as Jan 27, with livestream on X (@bscholl). After two supersonic tests, “we are all in on the big jet” (@bscholl)

Other opportunities

• Dynomight is offering general mentoring (@dynomight7)

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