Whether intentional or not, Marc Andreessen’s latest piece is the canon of the e/acc (effective accelerationist) movement. The visual that comes to mind for me is “the world if” meme made real. The desire to build, to expand energy production, increase population growth, and generally innovate our way out of problems (which has been the story of human civilization since we first stood on two legs).
To help readers less fluent in the language of human technological progress and the broader “accelerationist” movement, I put together an annotated list of clips with references to...
Just because we set an objective doesn’t mean we’ll reach it. At least not in the specific form we imagine.
When we do finally reach a destination that’s descriptively similar to the objective we thought we were after (artificial intelligence, augmented reality, flight, fusion, et al), it will look wildly different in practice than we thought.
Once we achieve a breakthrough innovation, along the path of stepping stones — the series of building blocks we must pass through to get us there — we’ve made hundreds of additional observations on the journey that change what...
Kevin Kelly argues that utopias and dystopias are each popular in cultural imagination, but both are unlikely to play out. In the case of utopia, literally unattainable. Dystopia is possible, but the Mad Max or Escape from New York depictions we’re familiar with aren’t what would likely happen. Real dystopias do exist, but they look like the Soviet Union or Gaddafi’s Libya: strangling, tyrannical bureaucracies that completely capture societal rewards.
I love his idea of “Protopia” — the realistic state we should be collectively pursuing:
I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia...
Online magazine BigThink has just published a full issue dedicated to progress studies. Lots of great stuff here from noteworthy folks like Tyler Cowen, Hannah Ritchie, Kevin Kelly, and many more.
Jason Crawford lays out a theory for why technocracy (the idea that a technical elite can lead a nation to technological progress if given the top-down control of economic and scientific policy) fizzled out around the 1970s:
In the early 1970s, a perfect storm of events conspired to discredit the technocratic idea, including Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil shocks. By 1973 it was clear that our leaders were unfit to govern, in terms of either competence or ethics: they could not handle affairs at home or abroad, neither the economy nor foreign policy, and they were plagued...
Vicki Boykis on the impossibility of true breadth and depth of technical expertise:
What used to distinguish senior people from junior people was the depth of knowledge they had about any given programming language and operating system.
What distinguishes them now is breadth and, I think, the ability to discern patterns and carry them across multiple parts of a stack, multiple stacks, and multiple jobs working in multiple industries. We are all junior, now, in some part of the software stack. The real trick...
Vannevar Bush’s seminal report to President Truman, making the case for government support for foundational scientific research (and pushing to create the NSF).
Jason Crawford is maintaining this list on Roots of Progress, an archive of inventions that seemingly could’ve been uncovered earlier than they were, based on what precursor knowledge would’ve been required. This one about stirrups is wild:
It’s fascinating how there aren’t even clear explanations of why these took the time that they did to discover. It points to the random, serendipitous, evolutionary nature of...
One of the key insights coming out of the progress studies movement seems like a simple idea on the surface, but it’s an important core thesis: that progress is not an inevitability. We don’t see new inventions, innovations, and improvements to quality of life by accident. It’s the result of deliberate effort by people in searching for new life improvements. Using names like “Moore’s Law” perhaps makes it sound like computer chip improvements “just happen,” but researchers at Intel or TSMC would beg to differ on how automatic those developments were.
Historian Anton Howes on the push/pull dynamics between monarchs and parliaments, and the gradual building of state capacity in 16th century Britain.
It’s easy to imagine that governments were always as bureaucratic as they are today. Certain policies, like the widespread granting of monopolies in the seventeenth century, or the presence of a powerful landed aristocracy, seem like archaic products of a past that was simply more corrupt. The fact that governments rarely got involved with healthcare or education before the mid-nineteenth century seems the product of a lack of imagination, or perhaps yet another product of our ancestors’...
Corporate research was a big deal in the mid-20th century. In this piece, Ben Southwood inspects why we no longer have modern equivalents to research centers like Xerox PARC or Bell Labs.
An interesting point here on what might be demotivating large organizations to invest too much in deep research:
Another possible answer is that non-policy developments have steadily made spillovers happen faster and more easily. Technology means faster communication and much more access to information. An interconnected and richer world doing more research means more competitors. And while all of these are clearly good, they reduce the technology...
This conversation with José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente on Erik Torenberg’s podcast was an expansive cover of more topics than I think I’ve ever heard discussed on a single podcast. A brief sampling of the subjects touched: scientific progress, economics, GDP growth, health care, regulations, longevity research.
Also see José’s blog for more in-depth coverage on his research topics.
On private emotions being thrown into the public sphere:
People escape the Dunbar world for obvious reasons: life there appears prosaic and uninspiring. They find a digital interface and, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, enter a new realm that glitters with infinite possibilities. Suddenly, you can flicker like a spark between the digital and the real. The exhilarating sensation is that you have been taken to a high place and shown all the kingdoms of the world: “These can be yours, if. . . .” If your video goes viral. If...
Mark Andreessen’s piece from a couple months back drove a flood of response, both in support and disagreement.
This piece from Tanner Greer agrees with Andreessen’s sentiments in general, but more interestingly dives into why American progress has slowed so dramatically, tying the root causes to change in the culture of ownership, self-reliance, and self-organization.
We live in a culture today of management hierarchy, bureaucratic approvals, designs-by-committee, taking little risk without consensus, and regulatory restriction (and, just...
This is the second episode of the “Torch of Progress” series that the Progress Studies for Young Scholars program is putting on, hosted by Jason Crawford. Tyler Cowen is unbelievably prolific in projects he’s got going on, so it’s great to see him making the time for things like this.
Read more here from last year on the progress studies movement.
Jason Crawford on Roots of Progress’s new program for high school students:
Progress Studies for Young Scholars launches in June as a summer program, with daily online learning activities for 6 weeks. We’ll be covering the history of technology and invention: the challenges of life and work and how we solved them, leading to the amazing increase in living standards over the last few centuries. Topics will include the advances in materials; automation of manufacturing and agriculture; the progression of energy from steam to oil to electricity; how railroads, cars and airplanes shrank the world;...
In this piece from a few years ago, historian Anton Howes wrote about about what drives innovation. Is it part of human nature to pursue innovation? Or is it not a naturally occurring phenomenon? He makes the case that innovation is not inevitable:
The more I study the lives of British innovators, the more convinced I am that innovation is not in human nature, but is instead received. People innovate because they are inspired to do so — it is an idea that is transmitted. And when people do not...
Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should think of bolder proposals than sensible but long-proposed tweaks to R&D policies, re-training programs and STEM education.
What the U.S. really needs to do is reconstitute its communities of engineering practice. That will require treating manufacturing work, even in low-margin goods, as fundamentally valuable. Technological sophisticates in Silicon Valley would be wise to...
I really enjoyed this post from Jerry Neumann exploring the structure of how technological and scientific progress happens.
Referencing the well known work of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, he demonstrates how technological change falls into a power-law distribution in its frequency-to-impact ratio. Kuhn’s argument was that progress happens in either small, incremental improvements, or massive, revolutionary leaps:
Kuhn looked at the history of scientific progress and saw that Popper’s heroic scientific machinery was rarely how science happened in the real world. Kuhn’s theory was descriptive: it explained why science...
Martin Gurri in response to Marc Andreessen’s “It’s Time to Build” essay:
So how do we get from here to build? To demand that our current institutions make that leap would be like asking the Great Pyramid to win the Indianapolis 500. It won’t happen. As a precursor to Andreessen’s building spree, our institutions—certainly government at every level, including the regulatory and scientific agencies—must crack open their industrial-age cocoons and join the rest of us in the digital dispensation. At a minimum, they must be able to move as fast as information does today....
The topic of funding has been kicking around with the coronavirus. Fastgrants launched a few weeks ago and has already awarded grants to 97 different research proposals.
Roots of Progress breaks down various funding methods that have powered scientific research.
Daniel Gross has a good list of things that will change post-coronavirus lockdown — patterns of lifesytle, businesses, real estate, and others:
A few notable ones:
The (temporary) end of cities. We might see a temporary exodus to the suburbs until there’s a vaccine. A few realtors have told me interest in SF apartments is down while suburban homes are up.
Trust. Suddenly all humans are suspect of carrying biological weapons. How do you feel when you see a stranger on the street today? The virus increases trust between smaller groups, decreases it towards strangers.
Alex Tabarrok linked to this detailed deck from Alon Levy picking apart the possible reasoning for why NYC subway construction is so much more than other urban centers around the world.
Levy is to be lauded for his pioneering work on this issue yet isn’t it weird that a Patreon supported blogger has done the best work on comparative construction costs mostly using data from newspapers and trade publications? New York plans to spend billions on railway and subway expansion. If better research could cut construction costs by 1%, it would be worth spending tens of...
An interesting idea for looking at data. Rather than the typical negative, dour news you read daily, this site presents data demonstrating positive progress.
Bloomberg has been publishing this video series on future technologies called “Giant Leap.” It’s well-done and a nice use of YouTube as a medium.
This one explores a number of new companies doing R&D in microgravity manufacturing — from biological organ “printing” to creation of high-quality fiber optic materials. There are still some challenges ahead to unlock growth of space as a manufacturing environment, but it feels like we’re on the cusp of a new platform for industrial growth in the near future.
Some top-notch baseball geekery, with Jason Snell comparing the graphics overlays from Fox, MLB Network, and ESPN’s telecasts. I’ve thought about this, too, but have to give it to the ESPN one, with Fox right up there.
Scott Alexander’s review is an excellent in-depth look at this book on meditation. I’m still making my way through it, but it’s definitely a fantastic soup-to-nuts guide so far.
Why does it take so long for new technologies with seemingly-obvious positive benefits to get adopted? This example on the speed with which the polio vaccine was adopted and administered are incredible, but an outlier:
The polio vaccine is an outlier in the history of new technology because of the speed at which it was adopted. It is perhaps the lone exception to the rule that new technology has to suffer years of ignorance before people take it seriously. I don’t know of anything else like it.
You might think it was quickly adopted because it saved lives. But...
I’m a historian of innovation. I write mostly about the causes of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, focusing on the lives of the individual innovators who made it happen. I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers. My research explores why they became innovators, and the institutions they created to promote innovation even further.
This connects nicely with the recent “progress studies” movement.
This is another great one from last year on Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress project, in which he dives into advancements in human progress. In this post he covers a brief background on cement, one of the oldest of mankind’s technological discoveries:
Stone would be ideal. It is tough enough for the job, and rocks are plentiful in nature. But like everything else in nature, we find them in an inconvenient form. Rocks don’t come in the shape of houses, let alone temples. We could maybe pile or stack them up, if...
A few weeks back, Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison co-authored this piece for The Atlantic calling for research into the study of progress1. From the thesis of the piece:
Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal...
Another interesting post from Roots of Progress, following up from the previous one, which asked why it took so long to invent the bicycle.
This question on invention is an interesting one. My first reaction is to agree with Jason in general that the leisure time and latitude permitted by times of plenty gives us more room for study and experimentation — the steps that lead to incremental discovery. However there have been many breakthrough discoveries happened upon by accident.
Often times progress is spurred forward by intentional inventions leading...
This is a new notes app from Brett Terpstra (creator of nvALT) and Fletcher Penney (creator of MultiMarkdown). I used nvALT for years for note taking on my Mac. This new version looks like a slick reboot of that with some more power features. In private beta right now, but hopefully dropping soon.
Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed...
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