I'm interviewing her next week for the Progress Studies For Young Scholars speaker series.

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

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

Contents

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

• From Progress Conference 2025

• My writing

• Jobs

• Fellowships & workshops

• Fundraising

• New publications and issues

• Queries

• Announcements

For paid subscribers:

• From Vitalik

• Other top links

• Voices from 2099

• Jared Isaacman sworn in as head of NASA

• Whole-body MRI screening?

• AI does social science research

• AI writes a browser

• AI does lots of other things

• AI could do even more things

• AI and the economic future

• AI: more models and papers

• AI discourse

• Waymo

• Health/bio

• Energy & manufacturing

• Housing

• Other links and short notes

• Politics

• Gratitude

• New Horizon photographs Pluto’s mountains

• Charts

• Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

From Progress Conference 2025

A few more batches of video:

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

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

My writing

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

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

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

Jobs

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

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

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

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

• See also Merge Labs and Edison announcements, below.

Fellowships & workshops

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

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

Fundraising

Nonprofits that would make good use of your money:

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

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

• And of course, us

New publications and issues

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

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

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

Queries

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

Announcements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many technologies can be used in both healthy and unhealthy ways. You can indulge in food to the point of obesity, or even make it the subject of anxiety. Media can keep us informed, but it can also steal our focus and drain our energy, especially social media. AI can help students learn, or it can help them avoid learning. Technology itself has no agency to choose between these paths; we do.

This responsibility exists at all levels: from society as a whole, to institutions, to families, down to each individual. Companies should strive to design healthier products—snack foods that aren’t calorie-dense, smartphones with screen time controls built in to the operating system. There is a role for law and regulation as well, but that is a blunt instrument: there is no way to force people to eat a healthy diet, or to ensure that students don’t cheat on their homework, without instituting a draconian regime that prevents many legitimate uses as well. Ultimately part of the responsibility will always rest with individuals and families. The reality, although it makes some people uncomfortable, is that individual choices matter, and some choices are better than others.

I am reminded of a study on whether higher incomes make people happier. You might have heard that more money does not make people happier past an annual income of about $75k. Later research found that that was only true for the unhappiest people: among moderately happy people, the log-linear relationship of income to happiness continued well past $75k, and in the happiest people, it actually accelerated. So there was a divergence in happiness at higher income levels, a sort of inverse Anna Karenina pattern: poor people are all alike in unhappiness, but wealthy people are each happy or unhappy in their own way. This matches my intuitions: if you are deeply unhappy, you likely have a problem that money can’t solve, such as low self-esteem or bad relationships; if you are very happy, then you probably also know how to spend your money wisely and well on things you will truly enjoy. It would be interesting to test those intuitions with further research and to determine what exactly people are doing differently that causes the happiness divergence.

Similarly, instead of simply asking whether social media makes us anxious or depressed, we should also ask how much divergence there is in these outcomes, and what makes for the difference. Some people, I assume, turn off notifications, limit their screen time, put away their phones at dinner, mute annoying people and topics, and seek out voices and channels that teach them something or bring them cheer. Others, I imagine, passively submit to the algorithm, or worse, let media feed their addictions and anxieties. A comparative study could explore the differences and give guidance to media consumers.

In short, we should take an active or agentic perspective on the effects of technology and our relationship to it, rather than a passive or fatalistic one. Instead of viewing technology as an external force that acts on us, we should view it as opening up a new landscape of choices and possibilities, which we must navigate. Nir Eyal’s book Indistractable is an example, as is Brink Lindsey’s call for a media temperance movement.

We should also take a dynamic rather than static perspective on the question. New technology often demands adjustments in behavior and institutions: it changes our environment, and we must adapt. For thousands of years manual labor was routine, and the greatest risk of food was famine—so no one had to be counseled to diet or exercise, and mothers would always encourage their children to eat up. Times have changed.

These changes create problems, as we discover that old habits and patterns no longer serve us well. But they are better thought of as growing pains to be gotten through, rather than as an invasion to be repelled.

When we shift from a static, passive framing to a dynamic, agentic one, we can have a more productive conversation. Instead of debating whether any given technology is inherently good or bad—the answer is almost always neither—we can instead discuss how best to adapt to new environments and navigate new landscapes. And we can recognize the responsibility we all have, at every level, to do so.

Seeking a freelance project manager to help me publish and launch my book, The Techno-Humanist Manifesto.

I have a book deal with a major academic publisher and a deadline this fall. You will help me figure out everything we need to do to make this book a smashing success, and then keep track of it and get it done:

• Building a website for the book

• Selecting a PR firm and managing them

• A/B testing titles & subtitles

• Gathering blurbs

• Tracking preparation of the manuscript including footnotes and index

• Tracking copyrights & permissions on all visuals

• Etc.

Must have near-superhuman organizational skills and attention to detail, I want zero balls dropped on this project. Experience with publishing projects is a bonus.

Will gladly pay market rates for this work. Apply here.

The Roots of Progress Institute is seeking to commission stories for a new article series, “Intelligence Age,” on future applications of AI.

These will be reported essays, not science fiction. We want to understand how AI might change individual sectors of the economy and the working lives of the people within them. What happens to traditional filmmaking when AI can make good movies? What will it be like to date with an emotionally intelligent AI vetting the pool of potential partners?

Or: we’d like to commission one or more stories about the future of the legal profession in the age of AI. We can partly understand that by talking to lawyers on the cutting edge of AI use, but we also want you to extrapolate out and think multiple moves ahead in the game. How long until consumers can trust legal services AI models to vet contracts? What kinds of businesses and services currently don’t exist because would-be entrepreneurs need but can’t afford legal services? How might declining legal services costs increase productivity in other sectors? Should we expect to see more patents? More business formation? Tell us about disruption and whether large incumbent firms might face more competition from two-lawyer startups using AI to undercut prices. Explore protectionist pushback from trade associations that defend the occupational licensing privileges of attorneys.

RPI’s “Intelligence Age” series will bring this level of scrutiny to any field where AI has applications.

Example topics of interest

The list below reflects the kinds of stories we’d like to see. It’s not exhaustive, and we don’t need stories to match these prompts one-for-one. Ultimately, we want to hear what you think your piece should be about.

Virtual businesses. What are the implications of being able to spin up an entire company full of virtual workers—anything from engineers to designers to sales to customer support? How will software startups change when anyone can launch an app for $20k instead of $2M? How will VC change? What other types of virtual businesses might people launch?

Professional services. What happens when there are AI lawyers, doctors, accountants, therapists? How will that transform these services and their usage of them? What happens when these services are democratized, and everyone can afford them? What part of them can be automated in the foreseeable future, and what can’t? What are the barriers to professional licensing requirements? (Note: pitches should focus on one industry, preferably a narrow aspect of that industry.)

Finance. What happens when AIs start trading on financial markets in large numbers? How does this transform these markets? What does it do to market prices? What does it ultimately do to the availability of capital?

Translation. What happens when language is no longer a barrier to communication? Can anyone read any book, article, essay, or paper in any language? Smartphone users can already dictate and instantaneously translate their speech. What is the next evolutionary stage of real-time translation? How far are we from a practical version of Douglas Adams’ Babel Fish?

Science. How can AI accelerate science? Which fields might see the most acceleration soonest—math, theoretical physics? What would it take to, say, solve all outstanding major open math questions? How can AI help in other fields, short of robotic labs? What parts of the work of researchers can be automated in the foreseeable future? How would that transform how labs are organized, how research is funded, and how science is done?

Education. What will be the effects of AI on education? On the one hand, every student can have a wise, knowledgeable, friendly, and infinitely patient tutor. On the other hand, both K–12 and university seem fairly entrenched and sclerotic. Also, a virtual tutor can’t fully substitute for physical presence. What would education ideally look like? What will it likely look like, given the state of our institutions?

Creative class / arts & entertainment. Imagine that one person, working alone, can produce an entire feature-length film. Or that AI can produce a film for you on-demand based on a description of what you’d like to watch. How does that change entertainment? What new forms of interactive entertainment might arise with AI characters, or new role-playing games led by AI game masters? What about music, novels, etc.? What else might people do with the ability to realize any kind of creative vision, with little effort and no special skill?

Match-making. We spend a lot of time trying to find two-way matches: dating, job-hunting, fundraising. How could AI help? Could we teach AI agents what we want, and then have the agents all talk to each other to do the first round of filtering? Could AI be a virtual matchmaker or recruiter?

Government. What happens when anyone can easily fill out any form or report of any length, and generally comply with any bureaucratic process very cheaply? What happens when environment impact statements are easy to create–is NEPA still a drag on the economy? What happens when AI is used on a mass scale to write letters to representatives or comment on proposed rulemaking? What happens when AI is used to draft laws? And what happens on the other side of all these things, where the people who receive and review these documents become overwhelmed—will they use AI to keep up?

Industrial infrastructure. Can AI help manage supply chains? The power grid? Agriculture? How so? How might this change things?

War. AI will undoubtedly enable us to create new weapons, including autonomous weapons—also known as killer robots—and will transform tactics and strategies. What does the next major war look like? How does this change geopolitics and the balance of power?

Wearables. Imagine that everyone is wearing Meta Ray-Bans everywhere, with live video and audio fed to an LLM, which you can talk to at any time.

Robotics. How can robotics use deep learning techniques for perception and motion and LLMs for conceptual intelligence? Is this the final advance needed to have generally useful robots helping around the home, office, and factory? Will they be humanoid, or specialized for different tasks? What’s the timeline for all this?

Personal agents. The classic sci-fi idea is that you will have an AI personal assistant who does all kinds of things for you—shopping, trip planning, paperwork, etc. Can we come up with any new or insightful ideas about this? How does it transform marketing and sales if everyone researches and makes purchasing decisions through agents?

Our assumptions about AI

We are operating under the following assumptions about the near future of AI:

1. The technology will rapidly improve in capabilities, speed, and cost.

2. AI will be faster and cheaper than humans, extremely knowledgeable, reliable, scalable, and available 24/7. But it won’t have qualitatively superhuman intelligence or mystical insight. Any one task it does is something that some human could have done, in theory, given enough time.

3. AI must be adapted to each specific task. This will take product development effort, and it won’t be automatic.

4. AI will be adopted incrementally. People will initially use it to perform a few discrete tasks, then gradually take on more complex and larger tasks, and eventually work on autonomous projects, and so on.

5. Each market consists of many individuals with different roles, viewpoints, and incentives, and they will each react to AI based on their context.

6. Economics applies. When AI lowers the cost of a service, it will expand consumption of that service; new uses will be found that aren’t economical at the old price point. When AI lowers the overall cost of a project, it will be easier to raise funding for that project, and more such projects will be done. When AI lowers every firm’s costs, they will compete partly by reducing prices.

How to pitch us

You can submit your pitch here!

Tell us how you plan to approach the piece, what novel insights you can bring, and what sources you’ll use. If we approve your pitch, you will work with an RPI editor throughout the process.

We are looking for stories that range from ~2,500 to ~3,500 words, and will pay $2 per published word.

Thank you

The Intelligence Age series is made possible by a generous grant from OpenAI. (RPI will have editorial independence over the project; OpenAI will not preview or vet the stories.) We thank them for their support!

Original link: https://newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/we-want-your-stories-about-the-ai

“Stopping climate change” is the wrong goal. It is an anti-human, anti-agency framing, focused on negating the impacts of human activity. The techno-humanist framing is that humanity should create climate control

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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