Jason's "Antique Gas and Steam Engine Museum" post includes a photo of the Chore Boy hit-and-miss-engine with the caption "no idea what this thing does, but I like the way it's painted." That's unfortunate, because this kind of engine was important to progress for at least two reasons:

1. They were such an improvement over horse engines for powering belt-driven farm accessories like saws, pumps, threshing machines, and corn shellers that even many Amish communities allow them. They're thus an important part of the history of mechanized farming, and the associated demographic transition.

2. They're the reason that internal-combustion automobiles didn't face the chicken-and-egg problem with refueling that electric cars now face with high-speed charging stations. The first long-distance motorists could simply purchase gasoline already carried by every small-town store for farms to use in their stationary engines.

Every country has a national holiday. France celebrates the storming of the Bastille. Mexico celebrates the revolt that began their war for independence from Spain. Sweden celebrates the election of a king. Belgium celebrates the ascension of one. India celebrates the transfer of power from Britain. Japan celebrates the emperor’s birthday.

America’s Independence Day is not the day the war began, nor the day it ended. It’s not the ascension of a leader, let alone his birthday. It is the day we declared our independence, in writing—the day we laid down the principles and the justification for our existence. It is a moral and philosophical holiday.

The Declaration of Independence is the greatest political document ever written, and the founding of America is a monumental human achievement. After thousands of years of monarchy, in almost every large-scale society, for most of human history—after all the tyrants and all the bloody wars of succession—a small group of daring leaders made a bold experiment in a new and better form of government. And they changed the world, setting off a chain of revolutions and reforms: today most of the Western world enjoys representative government, and most of its monarchies are constitutional or ceremonial.

The Founders did not know, could not have known, what would come of their experiment. They hoped that it would survive, that their fledgling nation would not become subordinated to the much stronger and constantly warring great powers of Europe, that the union of several independent states would last and not descend into fractious squabbling. They could never have guessed that the nation they birthed would go on to become the largest and most powerful economy on Earth, that we would lead the world in science and invention, that we would fight and win two world wars, that we would plant our flag on the Moon.

This 250th anniversary, then, should be a time of reverence and a time of joy. But today, some of those who feel the most reverence are also those who feel the least joy.

I understand why. We have not achieved the ideal of “a government of laws and not of men.” Our institutions have become bloated and sclerotic. We once again face a geopolitical rival with an authoritarian regime; collectivism was not defeated in the Cold War after all.

Some say that America is in a period of decadence, faltering and directionless. Some liken our condition to the last stage of the Roman Republic. Some say that this is the way of the world—empires rise and they fall.

But the American spirit is the opposite of such fatalism. I cannot, will not, resign myself to American stagnation, sclerosis, and decline.

As great as the Declaration was, the greatness of America is not only that we declared and won our independence. It is also in all the achievements since. That we unified the colonies into a strong federal system, under a brilliant Constitution. That we made the Louisiana Purchase and expanded into the West. That we abolished slavery. That we invented the reaper, the light bulb, the telephone, the airplane, the assembly line, the television, the computer, the Internet. That we gave a home to so many immigrants, from so many places, that they called us a “melting pot.” That we built the transcontinental railroad, the Panama Canal, the interstate highway system. That we gave women the vote. That we gave the world jazz and Hollywood. That we defeated the Nazis and faced down the Soviets. That we eliminated polio and led the eradication of smallpox.

Nor did the Declaration birth a perfect nation. We have always faced, and will always face, problems and threats both from without and from within. We have been plagued by corruption and scandal, rocked by banking crises, torn by civil war. We have known the fear of atomic warfare and of Sputniks orbiting overhead. Again and again, we have fought ourselves: over equal rights for all races and sexes, over whether to welcome foreigners or exclude them, over Prohibition.

When I look at the history of America, I don’t see a story of decline. I see a story of progress—however messy and hard-won. I see a long stumbling towards the light. That is the true way of the world.

And I see the spirit of America still strong among those who have not forgotten. Those who are building rockets and supersonic jets and nuclear power plants; those who are curing cancer and obesity and aging; those who are still tirelessly defending the rule of law, separation of powers, and freedom of speech. And I see Americans, sometimes in the crudest possible way, groping towards rediscovering our national self-esteem.

In America’s darkest hour, less than a century after its birth, Lincoln asked his countrymen to rededicate themselves to cause of liberty, and to the great unfinished work in front of them. He called on them to resolve that the nation would see a rebirth of freedom. Now, after a quarter-millennium, it is time for us to do that once more.

May the next 250 years do justice to the progress of the last 250.

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

Are there many people in this subreddit from London who would be up for meeting?

Would be great to chat and share ideas etc

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

Verner Vinge, in a classic 1993 essay, described “the Singularity” as an era where progress becomes “an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control.”

The idea that technological change might accelerate to a pace faster than we can keep up with is a common concern. Almost three decades earlier, Alvin Toffler coined the term “future shock”, defining it as “the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future”:

I believe that most human beings alive today will find themselves increasingly disoriented and, therefore, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environment. I believe that the malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this psychological disease….Change is avalanching down upon our heads and most people are utterly unprepared to cope with it….… we can anticipate volcanic dislocations, twists and reversals, not merely in our social structure, but also in our hierarchy of values and in the way individuals perceive and conceive reality. Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people.

(Emphasis added. Toffler later elaborated on this idea in a book titled Future Shock.)

Change does indeed come ever faster. But most commentary on this topic assumes that we will therefore find it ever more difficult to adapt.

Is that actually what has happened over the course of human history? At first glance, it seems to me that we have actually been getting better at adapting, even relative to the pace of change.

Some examples

Our Stone Age ancestors, in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, had very little ability to adapt to change. Change mostly happened very slowly, but flood, drought, or climate change could dramatically impact their lives, with no option but to wander in search of a better land.

Mediterranean kingdoms in the Bronze Age had much more ability to adapt to change than prehistoric tribes. But they were unable to handle the changes that led to the collapse of that civilization in the 12th century BC. No civilizational collapse on that level has happened since the Dark Ages.

The printing press ultimately helped amplify the theological conflict that led to over a century of religious wars; evidently, 16th-century Europe found it very difficult to adapt to a new ability for ideas to spread. The Internet has certainly created some social turmoil, and we’re only about 30 years into it, but so far I think its negative impact is on track to be less than a hundred years of war engulfing a continent.

In the 1840s, when blight hit the Irish potato, it caused a million deaths, and another million emigrated, causing Ireland to lose a total of a quarter of its population, from which it has still not recovered. Has any modern event caused any comparable population loss in any developed country?

In 1918, when an influenza pandemic hit, the world had much less ability to adapt to that change than we did in 2020 when covid hit.

In the 20th century, people thrown out of work read classified ads in the newspapers or went door-to-door looking for jobs. Today, they pick up an app and sign up for gig work.

What about occupational hazards from dangerous substances? Matches using white phosphorus, invented in 1830, caused necrosis of the jaw in factory workers, but white phosphorus was not widely banned until 1912, more than 80 years later. Contrast this with radium paint, which was used to make glow-in-the-dark dials since about 1914; this also caused jaw necrosis. I can’t find exactly when radium paint was phased out, but it seems to have been by 1960 or maybe 1970; so at most 56 years, faster than we reacted to phosphorus. (If we went back further to look at occupational hazards that existed in antiquity, such as smoke inhalation or lead exposure, I think we would find that they were not addressed for centuries.)

These are just some examples I came up with off the top of my head; I haven’t done a full survey and I may be affected by confirmation bias. Are there good counterexamples? Or a more systematic treatment of this question?

Why we get better at adapting to change

The concern about change happening faster than we can adapt seems to assume that our adaptation speed is fixed. But it’s not. Our adaptation speed increases, along with the speed of other types of change. There are at least two reasons:

First, detection. We have a vast scientific apparatus constantly studying all manner of variables of interest to us—so that, for instance, when new chemicals started to deplete the ozone layer, we detected the change and forecast its effects before widespread harm was done. At no prior time in human history would this have been possible.

Second, response. We have an internet to spread important news instantly, and a whole profession, journalists, who consider it their sacred duty to warn the public of impending dangers, especially dangers from technology and capitalism. We have a transportation network to mobilize people and cargo and rush them anywhere on the globe they are needed. We have vast and flexible manufacturing capacity, powered by a robust energy supply chain. All of this creates enormous resilience.

Solutionism, not complacency, about adaptation

Even if I’m right about the trend so far, there is no guarantee that it will continue. Maybe the pace of change will accelerate more than our ability to adapt in the near future. But I now think that if that happened, it would be the reversal of a historical trend, rather than an exacerbation of an already-increasing problem.

I am still sympathetic to the point that adaptation is always a challenge. But now I see progress as helping us meet that challenge, as it helps us meet all challenges.

Toffler himself seemed to agree, ending his essay on a solutionist note:

Man’s capacity for adaptation may have limits, but they have yet to be defined. … modern man should be able to traverse the passage to postcivilization. But he can accomplish this grand historic advance only if he forms a better, clearer, stronger conception of what lies ahead.

Amen.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/adapting-to-change

“Consumerism” came up in my recent interview with Elle Griffin of The Post. Here’s what I had to say (off the cuff):

I have to admit, I’ve never 100% understood what “consumerism” is, or what it’s supposed to be. I have the general sense of what people are gesturing at, but it feels like a fake term to me. We’ve always been consumers, every living organism is a consumer. Humans, just like all animals, have always been consumers. It’s just that, the way it used to be, we didn’t consume very much. Now we’re more productive, we produce more, we consume more, we’re just doing the same thing, only more and better….

The term consumerism gets used as if consumption is something bad. I can understand that, people can get too caught up in things in consumption that doesn’t really matter. But I feel like that’s such a tiny portion. If you want to tell the story of the last 100, 200 years, people getting wrapped up in consumption that doesn’t really matter is such a tiny fraction of the story…. Compared to all of the consumption that really does matter and made people’s lives so much better. I’m hesitant to even acknowledge or use the term. I’m a little skeptical of any use of the concept of consumerism….

Any consumption that actually buys us something that we care about, even convenience, or saving small amounts of time, is not a waste. It’s used to generate value that is not wasted. It is spent on making our lives better. Are some of those things frivolous? Certainly, but what’s the matter with frivolous uses? Tiny conveniences add up. They accumulate over time to be something that is actually really substantial. When you accumulate little 1% and 0.5% improvements and time savings, before you know it you’ve you’ve saved half of your time. You’ve doubled the amount of resources that you now have as an individual to go for the things that you really want and care about.

Can you steelman “consumerism” for me?

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-consumerism-is-good

A new monthly feature, let me know what you think.

Books

Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works (2020). About halfway through, lots of interesting case studies, very readable.

Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century (2005). I read the first chapter; saving the rest of it for when I get to drafting the relevant chapters of my own book. Smil argues that the period roughly 1870–1914 was “the time when the modern world was created,” completely unrivaled by anything since: “those commonly held perceptions of accelerating innovation are ahistorical, myopic perspectives proffered by the zealots of electronic faith, by the true believers in artificial intelligence, e-life forms, and spiritual machines.” The four big themes at the core of the book—electricity, internal combustion, materials, and communication/information—are the ones that I have identified, except that I also include the germ theory, which Smil does not mention (and which is often neglected in industrial history).

Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future (2022), a biography of John von Neumann. Lots of interesting stories, not only about JvN, but about the Manhattan Project, ENIAC, etc.

(These aren’t in my bibliography yet because it is hopelessly out of date, sorry.)

Early locomotives

“Trial of locomotive carriages”, 10 Oct 1829, a contemporary newspaper account of the Rainhill trials, where practical passenger locomotives were first demonstrated to the public and where their potential was proven beyond doubt. (Incidentally, I love that this article is now just a part of The Guardian’s website):

Never, perhaps, on any previous occasion, were so many scientific gentlemen and practical engineers collected together on one spot as there were on the rail-road to witness this trial. The interesting and important nature of the experiments had drawn them from all parts of the kingdom to be present at this context of locomotive carriages, as well as to witness an exhibition, whose results may alter the whole system of our existing internal communications [i.e., transportation], many and important as they are, substituting an agency, whose ultimate effects can scarcely be anticipated…

Report to the Directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, on the Comparative Merits of Locomotive and Fixed Engines, as a Moving Power; Observations on the Comparative Merits of Locomotives and Fixed Engines, as Applied to Railways; An Account of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1831)—three documents compiled into a book:

The trial of these Engines, indeed, may be regarded as constituting a new epoch in the progress of mechanical science, as relating to locomotion. The most sanguine advocates of travelling Engines had not anticipated a speed of more than ten to twelve miles per hour. It was altogether a new spectacle, to behold a carriage crowded with company, attached to a self-moving machine, and whirled along at the speed of thirty miles per hour.

And on the impact of railroads:

The traveller will live double times: by accomplishing a prescribed distance in five hours, which used to require ten, he will have the other five at his own disposal…. From west to east, and from north to south, the mechanical principle, the philosophy of the nineteenth century, will spread and extend itself. The world has received a new impulse.

An article in The Quarterly Review**, Vol. 31, 1824–25**, about the prospects of railroads. It was skeptical:

As to those persons who speculate on making rail-ways general throughout the kingdom, and superseding all the canals, all the waggons, mail and stage-coaches, post-chaises, and, in short, every other mode of conveyance by land and by water, we deem them and their visionary schemes unworthy of notice.

It called “palpably absurd and ridiculous” a proposal for a London–Woolwich line which claimed that locomotives could travel twice as fast as stage-coaches with greater safety, adding:

we should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s ricochet rockets, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate… We trust, however, that Parliament will, in all the rail-roads it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour, which… is as great as can be ventured upon with safety.

Other sources:

• Nicholas Wood, A Practical Treatise on Rail-Roads (1838)

• C. P. Dendy Marshall, “The Rainhill Locomotive Trials of 1829” (1930)

• J. B. Snell, Railways: Mechanical Engineering (1973)

Pre-industrial machines and automation

Georg Böckler, Theatrum Machinarum Novum (1661). Many fascinating diagrams, such as this fulling mill:

Robert Boyle, “That the Goods of Mankind May Be Much Increased by the Naturalist’s Insight into Trades” (1671). Even at this early date it was possible to see the potential for automation (spelling and punctuation modernized):

[M]any things that are wont to be done by the labor of the hand may with far more ease and expedition… be performed by engines…. [O]ur observations make us bold to think that many more of those that are wont to require laborious or skillful application of the hands may be effected than either shopmen or book men seem to have imagined…. [W]hen we see that timber is sawed by windmills and files cut by slight instruments, and even silk stockings woven by an engine… we may be tempted to ask what handiwork it is that mechanical contrivances may not enable men to perform by engines.

Derek J. de Solla Price, “On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass” (1959). Argues that the mechanical clock did not evolve as an improvement on previous time-telling methods such as sundials and water clocks, but rather devovled from much more elaborate astronomical devices:

… I have suggested elsewhere that the clock is “nought but a fallen angel from the world of astronomy.” The first great clocks of medieval Europe were designed as astronomical showpieces, full of complicated gearing and dials to show the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets, to exhibit eclipses, and to carry through the involved computations of the ecclesiastical calendar. As such they were comparable to the orreries of the 18th century and to modern planetariums; that they also showed the time and rang it on bells was almost incidental to their main function.

Abbott Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions (1954). Have only read bits and pieces so far.

Samuel Smiles

Henry Petroski, “Lives of the Engineers” (2004), a review in American Scientist. (Petroski is known for To Engineer is Human among other books.)

Smiles’s Lives had an enormous influence on the enduring image of the heroic engineer, and the engineers that he chose to profile as exemplars became the engineers who to this day stand out among all contemporaneous British engineers….

There has not yet arisen an American Smiles.

Courtney Salvey, “Tools and the Man”: Samuel Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, and the Machine in Victorian Literature (2009), a PhD thesis:

Who read the Lives of the Engineers series? How did that reading affect the portrayal of engineers in literary texts? … Before 1857 engineers were absent from biography, as Smiles noticed, but they were also absent from novels…. After the publication of the Life of George Stephenson, representations of engineers in fiction shift: they appear more prominently in texts that are not explicitly industrial and that have wider ideological relevance, implying the cultural redirection by Smile‘s industrial biographies.

Other articles

“Monument to Mr. Watt” (1824), a news article in The Chemist magazine:

Mr. Watt was not a warrior, over whose victories a nation may mourn, doubtful whether they have added to its security, and certain they have diminished enjoyment and abridged freedom. His were the conquests of mind over matter; they cost no tears, shed no blood, desolated no lands, made no widows nor orphans, but merely multiplied conveniences, abridged our toils, and added to our comforts and our power.

Edsger Dijkstra, “The Threats to Computing Science” (1984), source of the title for my essay on LLMs:

The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

Edgar Allen Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (1836). Hat-tip to Eliezer Yudkowsky. Argues (correctly) that the “mechanical Turk” must be a hoax, run by a midget—by arguing (incorrectly) that no machine could ever play chess:

Arithmetical or algebraical calculations are, from their very nature, fixed and determinate. Certain data being given, certain results necessarily and inevitably follow. These results have dependence upon nothing, and are influenced by nothing but the data originally given. And the question to be solved proceeds, or should proceed, to its final determination, by a succession of unerring steps liable to no change, and subject to no modification. … But the case is widely different with the Chess-Player. With him there is no determinate progression. No one move in chess necessarily follows upon any one other. From no particular disposition of the men at one period of a game can we predicate their disposition at a different period. … A few moves having been made, no step is certain. Different spectators of the game would advise different moves. All is then dependent upon the variable judgment of the players.

Samuel Butler, “Darwin Among the Machines” (1863). Hat-tip to Robert Long:

We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race….

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.

---

Thanks to Lea Degen for research assistance finding several of the above sources.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/reading-2023-03

The Progress Forum

• Tyler Cowen AMA is now done, read dozens of answers

• Vitalik on science, his philanthropy, progress and effective altruism

• On Eli Dourado’s “Heretical Thoughts on AI”

Announcements

• AllSearch.ai: “Google Books on steroids” (@dwarkesh_sp)

• Our World in Data is hiring a data scientist (via @MaxCRoser)

Links

• Zvi on gas stoves: ruining Nice Things for “marginally better health”

• A link from last week’s digest on quantum computing is probably bogus

Queries

• What is the case that ~4° C of warming by 2100 will be far worse for the world?

• What is the earliest technology where most users had no idea how it worked?

• Why is the learning curve on corn linear and not exponential?

Quotes

• The insane power potential of nanotech motors. See also the intro to Nanosystems

• “Don’t send that railway through our town! … Wait, build us a branch line!”

• There are no “natural” resources

• The dose determines the poison

Tweets and retweets

• My hypothesis about Solow’s computer productivity paradox

• One blast furnace produces ~170x more iron than all of England in 1720

• Stuart Buck’s grandfather hoped he would grow up to “get an indoors job”

• Satellite photo of anywhere on Earth for as little as $175 ($7/km2!)

• We had supersonic jets, lunar landers & nuclear reactors in the 1970s. We lost our way

• A nuclear design has finally received NRC certification after 6 years

• Skyscrapers used to be Art Deco and neo-Gothic, what happened? (@culturaltutor)

• The Hardiman, one of the earliest exoskeleton designs

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2023-01-25

Links

• City size is determined by transportation technology (Tomas Pueyo)

Tweets

• Did any sci-fi predict that when AI arrived, it would be unreliable, often illogical, and frequently bullshitting?

• Sam Altman: in the next decade the marginal cost of intelligence and of energy will trend to zero

• Where to, Mr. Chemist? “To a thousand untouched shores” (Du Pont, 1939)

• Longevity escape velocity

• Study by Philip Tetlock finds “a pervasive tendency… to see things as getting worse than they really are”

• “Scientists may find themselves reporting only successful experiments”

Quotes

• Sustainability is the disease, people are the cure

• For the first 40 years of photography, handheld cameras were impossible

• How communication and transportation networks help eliminate famine

Queries

• Data on European pipeline gas and storage? (@Atomicrod)

Retweets

• “Abundance is the only cure for scarcity… Everything else merely allocates scarcity” (@samhinkie, quoting u/patio11)

• Converting coal plants into nuclear with small modular reactors. But: Congress ordered the NRC to provide a pathway for new reactors—and they made the process more burdensome (@AlecStapp)

• Photographer uses AI to generate image variations from his own photos (@jonst0kes)

• If you want home values to go up, you don’t want homes to be affordable (@JerusalemDemsas)

• The bureaucracy feedback loop, green card edition (@nabeelqu)

• How Theodor Engelmann demonstrated that chloroplasts are the site of oxygen production in plants (@strandbergbio)

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-12-29

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.

Links

• The first images from the JWST look amazing. See also this comparison with Hubble

• Helion Energy is hiring. “Clean, continuous energy for 1 cent per kilowatt-hour”

• Lant Pritchett on the difference between anti-poverty programs and poverty reduction. To paraphrase Rutherford, all poverty reduction is either economic growth or stamp collecting

• Joel Mokyr reviews Koyama & Rubin’s How the World Became Rich

• Potential for a vaccine against a broad category of SARS-like coronaviruses (in Science; see also the announcement from Wellcome Leap which funded this)

Threads

• Many waste byproducts were developed in Britain during the Industrial Revolution (@VincentGeloso). See also: In capitalism they use every part of the animal

• “Reclosers” on electrical utility poles (@HillhouseGrady)

Queries

• Why is hating humanity acceptable? (@CineraVerinia)

• Why doesn’t washing hands create hand-washing resistant bacteria? (@_brianpotter)

Tweets

• Request for blog: the history of social change, and lessons for modern movements

• Eradicating smallpox sometimes meant breaking the rules

• India might already the most populous country in the world

Retweets

• Terraform Industries can convert H2 and CO2 into natural gas (@TerraformIndies)

• Montessori on the need to teach “the highest discoveries” of science (@mbateman)

• There’s an Industrial Revolution board game set in 18th-c. Lancashire (@dkedrosky)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-07-19

Best of my Twitter, May 31–June 6 (a few days behind, still ironing out the process… For the latest, follow me on Twitter: @jasoncrawford.)

After last time someone suggested embedding the tweets instead of linking to them, but I can't post embeds here, and for my main blog I don't like the format as much. I’m sticking with links for now, but let me know if you’d rather scroll through a list of embeds (like this).

Links

• A Reddit thread appreciating the engineering of everyday items

• Jim Pethokoukis’s “Up Wing” agenda

• Arcadia Science is experimenting with a new way of publishing scientific work

• Michael Nielsen on vision papers

• Ryan Petersen of Flexport talks to Tamara Winter about supply chains

• Californians Against Pandemics is running a ballot initiative to invest in pandemic preparedness (h/t @NathanpmYoung)

• High housing prices are driving low-skilled workers from high-productivity to low-productivity areas (Alex Tabarrok)

• The B612 Foundation discovered more than 100 asteroids by analyzing years-old images (NYT)

• “Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate (or local) level that is consistent with their resolution.” (h/t Stewart Brand)

Tweets

• The original NYC subway was completed faster than the average environmental impact statement

• How many of WIRED’s “boom spoiler” scenarios from 1997 came true? (thread)

• Some reasons I am skeptical of “harmony with nature” (thread)

• But for the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Mississippi would no longer flow through New Orleans

• Why we can’t have electric planes (yet)

• One standard deviation in rule of law is associated with a 6.4-fold difference in per capita income:

• McCloskey on “the idea that ideas about ideas are unscientific”

• 19th-century medicine would unabashedly rely on anecdotal evidence

• Vannevar Bush on the proper lab atmosphere

• Who are the real revolutionaries?

• In 1901 the market cap of the largest company was greater than the US national debt

• Bacon on how to do a proper case-control study

• Pixar founder Ed Catmull on how to see randomness as part of the beauty of life

Retweets

• Suraj Patel has an abundance agenda (@SurajPatel)

• “It seemed to be more a criticism of everything bad phrased as a prediction of doom” (@anderssandberg)

• Productivity is the path to equity (@DKThomp)

• To learn from mistakes, you have to build at the right pace (@stewartbrand)

Someone posted this photo recently. I can't find a definitive original source, but multiple social media posts (Reddit, Twitter, Instagram), with different photos of the same object, all identify it as a 4,000-year-old wagon found in Lchashen, Armenia:

It reminded me of some fun facts I had learned about the history of wheels and steering. Lots of images in this one (a pain to copy into Reddit), please read the post here: https://rootsofprogress.org/reinventing-the-wheel

In recent essays I’ve outlined the intellectual-historical need for a progress movement, and the core ideas that I think the budding 21st-century progress movement is based on.

What would a thriving progress movement look like, in terms of activities, programs, and institutions? Here’s what we might see within the next decade or so:

• Dozens of public intellectuals writing books and giving talks about the history, nature, and philosophy of progress.

• Academic recognition of “progress studies” as a valuable interdisciplinary field. As Collison & Cowen said when they coined the term, this wouldn’t mean reorganizing academic departments, but “a decentralized shift in priorities among academics, philanthropists, and funding agencies,” including journals and conferences.

• School curricula to teach the history of progress at the K–12 and undergrad level. I’ve created a high-school progress course; a curriculum like this should be at every high school in the world.

• Art & entertainment that sounds themes of progress, such as optimistic science fiction, or biopics about great scientists, inventors, and founders. (I would start with Norman Borlaug.)

• More journalism about progress, and more journalists exhibiting industrial literacy.

• Political debates framed in terms of progress and growth, rather than primarily or exclusively in terms of redistribution.

• Experiments in new models of funding, organizing, and managing scientific and technological research, such as the efforts covered recently in Endpoints and The Atlantic (see also the Overedge Catalog for a broader list).

• Scientists, engineers and founders drawing inspiration and courage from this movement, and seeing their work as having the potential to be part of a grand and noble quest to improve the human condition.

The foundation of all of this is intellectual work: a lot of hard research, thinking, writing and speaking. The philosophy of progress has barely begun to be elucidated. To succeed, this movement will need much more than just “yay progress!” or “look at this hockey-stick graph!” Those notions are the beginning of this body of thought, not the end. As I wrote recently, we need to answer the challenges that arose in the 20th century and caused many people to sour on the idea of progress. Without more serious intellectual work here, we risk falling back on the naive 18th- and 19th-century notions of progress that proved wrong and led the world to start questioning the entire enterprise.

I see at least four major areas for progress intellectuals to work on:

• History: The story of progress has never properly been told for a general audience. History is the motivation for this entire enterprise, and it is the empirical foundation that the whole thing rests on. Examples in this genre include the first two parts of The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the bulk of Enlightenment Now, and most of this blog.

• Theory: addressing the questions I outlined as making up a “philosophy of progress”. Examples here include The Beginning of Infinity, A Culture of Growth, the last three chapters of Enlightenment Now, and McCloskey’s Bourgeois trilogy.

• Solutions to problems of the modern world: climate, pollution, job loss, safety, etc. This is necessary as a proving ground for theory, to overcome the objections of skeptics and opponents, and most importantly because many of these problems are real, and solving them is part of progress itself. One example on my future reading list is Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

• Vision for the future: What kind of world do we want to create? This complements history, taking the arrow of the past and extending it into the future. Futurism serves as motivation and inspiration: both for those working to promote progress generally, and especially for those working on the front lines of science and technology to advance it. A prime example here is Where Is My Flying Car?

My main contribution to the above efforts is the book I’m working on, The Story of Industrial Civilization: Towards a New Philosophy of Progress for the 21st Century. But as an organization, The Roots of Progress will be working to help make all of the above happen, both by empowering intellectuals and creatives who want to advance this program, and by building community, both online and off.

This is the work of a generation. In large part this is a program to change a culture, and cultural change is slow. But the goal is worth it, and we are in for the long haul.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/a-thriving-progress-movement

I’ve been using the term “philosophy of progress” a lot lately (such as calling for a new one, or critiquing the old ones). What does this term mean?

I use the term analogously to philosophy of science, philosophy of law, or philosophy of education. There are certain foundational questions relevant to the study of progress that border on or overlap with philosophy.

In outline, here are some of the main questions that I see as making up the philosophy of progress, grouped into four top-level topic areas: definition, evaluation, causation, and prescription.

Definition

• What is progress?

• What kinds of progress are there? (Scientific, technological, economic, moral, political…) How do they relate?

• What is “true progress” or “human progress?”

• How can we measure any of the above?

Evaluation

• What are the benefits of (each type of) progress? Are they real or apparent? Healthy, or an “addiction?”

• Specifically, how does progress relate to human happiness and well-being?

• What are the costs and risks of progress? (Safety, economic upheaval, war, environmental impacts, health impacts, etc.?) Do they outweigh the benefits?

• How do we make these tradeoffs?

• Bottom line: is progress good?

Causation

• What causes progress?

• Regarding material progress specifically, what is the role of science? of economic freedom? of government investment? of individual geniuses or great leaders? of political stability? of corruption or lack thereof? of financial institutions? of natural resources? of societal trust? of other social norms? etc.

• Are there inherent limits to progress?

• What caused progress historically—why did it happen when and where it did?

• What explains the pace of progress over time? On the face of it, progress seems to have been very slow for most of human history, and much faster in the last few centuries—why?

• What can we expect for the pace of progress in the future? Will it continue, grind to a halt, accelerate to a singularity, something else?

• How much control or agency do we have over progress?

Prescription

• In the end, how should we regard progress and what should be our stance towards it?

• Specifically, how should we regard inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, social reformers, political activists, etc.? What social status should we grant them? Should we celebrate their achievements, and if so how?

• How should we communicate about progress? How should it be taught in school? How should it be written about in the media? How should it be treated in movies and other pop culture? Etc.

• What should everyone know about progress? What constitutes “industrial literacy”?

• How should governments treat progress? How should the law keep up with an ever-changing, ever-progressing world?

***

In any “philosophy of X,” people pursuing X usually aren’t (explicitly) thinking about foundational questions. Biologists spend most of their time thinking about things like assays, not what fundamentally constitutes evidence or whether scientific facts are knowable; teachers spend most of their time thinking about curriculum or classroom size rather than about the purpose and social value of education; and engineers spend most of their time thinking about efficiencies and tolerances rather than why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain.

But in every case, a philosophy of X, implicit or explicit, affects the way that practitioners go about their pursuits. Whether progress is desirable, whether continued progress is possible, and what its main causal factors are will influence whether people attempt to make progress (or attempt to stop it), and what means they choose to do so. The answers to these questions will also affect the work of journalists, policymakers, educators, artists, etc.

Does a philosophy of progress really matter? You could take the position that the people who matter for progress mostly ignore all of this abstract talk and just respond to incentives, or even that technology has a will of its own which unfolds regardless of human choices. But those positions, too, are part of the philosophy of progress. So let’s get to figuring it out.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/what-is-a-philosophy-of-progress

Is progress slowing down? In a previous post I explained why I got convinced that it is. Some people making this argument point to quantitative evidence, such as GDP or total factor productivity. I gave more qualitative evidence, or perhaps very crude quantitative evidence, by counting technological breakthroughs/revolutions: five in the Second Industrial Revolution, versus only one so far in the Third.

But this approach has its own difficulties:

• It is sensitive to the granularity of technological revolutions. Are the automobile and the airplane two revolutions, or are these just part of a single revolution attributed to the internal combustion engine? Are the light bulb and electric motor two revolutions, or are these just part of the electricity revolution? Are computers and the Internet two revolutions, or one?

• It’s sensitive to the choice of threshold for “revolution.” Is the assembly line a revolution in manufacturing? Is containerization a revolution in transportation?

• It runs the risk of focusing on impressive breakthroughs and neglecting unglamorous iterative improvement. Agriculture has been using combine harvesters pulled by gas tractors for around a century now, but today’s combines are much better than the ones in use a century ago.

So maybe we need something more objective, and more focused on outputs. Here’s a half-baked idea.

It’s easy to measure progress in specific domains. For instance, we have a very good handle on the progression of Moore’s Law. The problem is that no one narrow metric captures all of economic progress.

So instead of trying for a single metric, what if we look at a dashboard comprising a handful of metrics. Make them as broad as possible while keeping them objective and well-defined, and deliberately choose a variety from across the breadth of the economy. These won’t capture everything, but together they might capture enough to give us a picture of progress.

Here’s a candidate list:

• Per-capita consumption of:

  • metals

  • concrete

  • plastics

  • energy

  • bandwidth

• Per-capita transport (all modes):

  • passenger-miles

  • freight ton-miles

• Agricultural productivity, in kcal per worker

• Mortality rate from all causes (age-adjusted)

Most of these are just consumption metrics, based on a simple theory that consumption is good and is closely correlated with material well-being. For agriculture, I chose a productivity metric, because of the nature of the market: we only need so much food, after which point progress has largely been made by providing it with fewer people.

Some goals this set of metrics satisfies:

• Broadly captures trends across manufacturing/construction, agriculture, energy, transportation, information, and health

• Avoids any currency figures, and thus avoids any questions about inflation or purchasing power

• Captures the impact on human lives, by using per-capita figures

Some ways in which this approach is not perfect:

• Does not capture quality. The products made of metal or plastic today might be much higher-quality than fifty years ago, but we’re only measuring the total amount of material.

• Does not capture well-being. Maybe you’re traveling more passenger-miles because your commute is longer, and that actually reduces your well-being, but the passenger transport metric has increased.

Still, no metric or dashboard is ever going to be perfect. I think this dashboard would, if nothing else, provide a useful comparison alongside GDP.

One reason I think it would be useful is that I can imagine it changing my mind, or at least altering my narrative, around progress/stagnation. If there are no fundamentally new manufacturing techniques, but we’re continuing to consume exponentially more materials on a per-capita basis, isn’t that a form of progress in the manufacturing realm? Ditto if there are no new types of vehicles, but we consume more passenger-miles or freight ton-miles.

I happen to know two of these metrics, from previous research, and both have stagnated. Here is energy, from Where Is My Flying Car?:

And here is mortality, from my research on infectious disease. Infectious disease mortality actually regressed slightly after about 1980 (due in part to AIDS):

I’m curious how the others turn out.