What’s going on in the world, and what matters right now? I’ll cover this in two parts: science/tech, and politics.

Read more

Like everyone else, I’ve gotten addicted to Claude Code. (It happens to be the tool I picked up first, but I’ve heard that OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Replit, etc. are all also quite good.) I’m exactly in the most susceptible demographic for it: a former software engineer, product manager, engineering manager, and tech startup co-founder who through circumstance has not had time to code, even for fun, in several years. In my case, it’s because I became a writer and nonprofit leader, and also a dad; but the same thing is happening to tech CEOs and others. All of us are intoxicated by the amazing newfound productivity of AI coding agents, which are now unlocking years-old backlogs of product ideas, bug fixes, and pet projects.

Subscribe now

Let’s step back and recap how we got here. The first GPTs were research prototypes, not yet products. GPT-2, launched in February 2019, struggled to produce coherent, logical text (see examples here). Progress came mainly came from scaling up training runs and model size, from hundreds of millions of parameters for GPT-1 to now hundreds of billions or maybe trillions of parameters in the most capable models.

What this created was not a full artificial intelligence but artificial intuition. It could “answer off the top of its head,” it had a superhuman recall for facts, and it could blurt out not just sentences but entire essays. But it was still blurting out all its answers, with no ability to “think” before “speaking,” check its work, or follow an explicit procedure—not even, say, long addition.

By 2022, this had become such a limitation that it was possible to dramatically improve GPT-3’s performance on mathematical reasoning problems simply by concluding the prompt with “Let’s think step-by-step,” which encouraged models to work through the problem explicitly rather than trying to blurt out an answer. Soon this approach was built into the product, in a new class of “reasoning” models, such as OpenAI’s o1, that were given the ability to “think”—that is, to talk to themselves in a scratchpad—before producing a response.

In parallel, the models’ coding ability was growing. At first, LLMs were built into the IDE (“integrated development environment,” kind of a text editor on steroids that software engineers use to write code), and they took the form of autocomplete: the developer would start to type code, and the LLM would complete it. This made it faster to write many routine functions. Later AI-assisted IDEs could write or modify an entire snippet of code from an English description, or answer questions about the code, or discuss it with the engineer. Then the AI got good enough that you could just tell it what to do next, and the output was reliable enough that you didn’t even really need to review it carefully, at least for low-stakes hobby projects—what Andrej Karpathy dubbed “vibe coding.”

The other thing that developed in parallel was the models’ ability to pursue goals, as autonomous agents. At the core, of course, an LLM is simply a statistical model of text that predicts the next token; since any predictor can be made into a generator, this allows it to take a prompt and generate a response. A text generator is not an agent and does not pursue goals—but it was clear from the beginning how an agent might be built from them. Just provide it with a small scratchpad and a few tools it can invoke. Then tell it a goal, and run it in a loop: given the goal, make a plan to achieve it, execute that plan, then check if the goal was achieved; if not, replan and begin again; continue until you succeed.

Early experiments with this (such as AutoGPT, March 2023) were toys: they didn’t have enough intelligence, large enough context windows, or coherence across long enough timescales to accomplish anything of note. But all of this has been improving. The models have been been trained in better tool use, and have been given tools including web search, file access, and code execution; they’ve been given larger context windows, now up to 1 million tokens; and they have steadily been increasing in long-term coherence. Indeed, the length of task (in human-equivalent minutes) that a model can perform has become a key metric of AI progress:

Put all of this together—the “reasoning” mode, better coding, and greater agency—and by late last year we had crossed a tipping point: Some software developers stopped writing code themselves, and started letting agents write 100% of it. The job of the engineer became planning, identification of tasks, directing the AI to specific goals, possibly giving high-level technical direction, testing the output, and (perhaps, depending on how fastidious you are) reviewing the code that is generated. That is, software engineers are becoming more like product managers, engineering managers, and tech leads—as I predicted, humanity stepping up into management. Andrej Karpathy says the term “vibecoding” no longer does justice to what’s possible: it’s now “agentic engineering.”

I felt this shift personally. In early 2025, I was able to use Cursor to write a Python script to analyze CSVs of my workout logs and make some charts of my exercise performance. AI sped me up a lot, especially since I wasn’t familiar with libraries for processing and charting data (like pandas or Matplotlib). The LLM saved me a lot of time reading docs and tinkering; I could focus on the core task I was trying to accomplish. But I was still directing the coding at a detailed level. By early 2026, I was able to act as the product manager, not the developer: to ask Claude Code to simply implement my ideas. Already I’ve built a personal todo app with web and mobile UIs that works offline; a site uptime monitor for the Roots of Progress’s various websites; and an iPad game for my preschool-age daughter to learn two-digit addition.

Part of why this is such a huge unlock is that writing code demands a level of focus I simply don’t have these days. It requires multi-hour blocks of uninterrupted time where you can get your head deep into the problem and the code. Between my day job, my parenting duties, and the need in my 40s to get regular sleep and exercise, that kind of hobby just isn’t possible. But directing coding agents is a different thing altogether: it can be done on “manager schedule” rather than “maker schedule.” Garry Tan describes it using the metaphor that it’s as if he used to be a competitive runner (i.e., engineer) who got a knee injury (went into management). But now he has a knee replacement (coding agents)—and it’s a bionic knee, better than before. Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke has been coding up a storm, and even used Claude to create a viewer for his MRI data.

Out of the box, coding agents lack training and professional maturity. They’re like junior engineers, very smart but fresh out of college and operating like cowboys. When I started my first app, I suggested to Claude Code that I write a product spec, from which it could create a tech design that I would review, before proceeding to implementation. Oh, that sounds like too much process, it told me, why don’t you just tell me your idea and I’ll whip it up? OK fine, we’ll try it your way, I thought. It worked well at first, but then as these things always do, the app started to get buggy. I soon realized Claude wasn’t even writing automated tests (a very basic practice). Over time, I’ve leveled up my Claudes with best practices from the software world: automated regression tests; “test-driven development,” in which you write the tests before the code to make sure the tests actually catch bugs; doing each change on a separate branch which gets reviewed and tested before it is merged into the main line; creating separate testing environments so as not to interfere with real production data; etc.

At first, I thought I would do this by writing one big practices document and having each agent review that at the beginning of each session. But it turns out there’s a better way: “skills”, which are brief documents describing one procedure or technique. These can range from how to use a particular app framework to general best practices the agent should always follow. Agents like Claude Code are able to ingest a large volume of skills, holding only brief, high-level descriptions of each in their context window, and searching for skills when they might be relevant, so the full text can be brought into context only when needed. People are publishing their skills, and there are entire skills marketplaces. I started with a set of basic engineering practices from Jesse Vincent, and then have been writing my own as I notice things Claude could do better. Well, of course, I haven’t been writing them: I’ve been having Claude draft them, and then I’ve been reviewing and commenting on them. The experience is much like having a highly trainable employee who takes feedback and earnestly attempts to improve.

When I started, I would delegate a task and then do something else for a little while until the agent was finished. But once I had 3–4 agents working in parallel across two or more projects, I found that I was fully occupied just reviewing their work and prioritizing next steps; it took all my focus just to keep them busy. What this means is that I’m now able to make progress on software development at the speed of my own review and decision-making—which is amazing.

Stepping back, I think a lot of progress since ~GPT-3 has been in taking the core intuitive faculty provided by statistical language models and adding layers of self-monitoring and self-control, such as reasoning and skills. I find it remarkable how much LLMs are aided by some of the same practices that help humans be more effective: working problems out on a scratchpad, planning before executing, and all of the structure and practices that human engineers, designers, and product managers put in place around software development. Elsewhere, Wilson Lin at Cursor reports on an experiment with getting a large team of agents to implement a web browser from scratch, a large undertaking (although one for which there is already a comprehensive set of formal specifications and acceptance criteria). Just getting a bunch of agents to work off of one big shared task list was too chaotic. What worked was having certain agents dedicated to planning—assessing status and figuring out what was needed next to reach the goal—while other agents acted as implementers, picking tasks off the plan and getting them done without worrying too much about the big picture. Again, systems of self-monitoring and self-control.

The biggest limitation on these systems right now, it seems to me, is memory. They start each session like Leonard Shelby from Memento, with no short-term memories, needing to review all their notes to get context. This is a very limited form of learning. An LLM can’t develop intuition or taste post-training—which, as Dwarkesh pointed out, means it can’t learn on the job the way a human does. Claude’s memory file generated from our chats is about 400 words, ChatGPT’s is not much over 100; a human assistant who had talked to me as much as they have would have a much deeper understanding of me. No doubt this limitation, too, will be removed sooner or later; I agree with Ethan Mollick when he suggests that this will be transformative.

In any case, to produce an acceptable app right now, even a simple one, requires me to act as the product manager and the tech lead. I’m giving direction about what to do; I’m training the agents in best practices and watching to make sure they follow them; I’m even exercising high-level oversight about technical decisions and making technical suggestions. I’m only capable of this because I spent almost twenty years in the tech world, doing these roles professionally across several teams and projects. I can only imagine that users without that experience would have a hard time creating an app of any size and complexity without getting bogged down in confusing product design, annoying bugs, and slow performance. But on the current trajectory, we’re only a year or so away from whole teams of agents that work together like a complete dev shop. A client could come to the process with only a vague, high-level idea of what they need. A product manager agent would interview them to discover requirements. The PM would write a product spec, and a design agent would create UI mockups, both of which the user could review and comment on. Once the spec and design were approved, an engineering agent would produce a tech design; perhaps a second agent with fresh context would review and revise it. A planner agent would turn it into a task list, and a team of implementer agents would execute the coding tasks in parallel, with reviewer agents examining the code for bugs, weaknesses, and best practices. The app would periodically be presented back to the client for user testing and feedback, for as many rounds of iteration as needed to leave the client fully satisfied. On the whole, it would be much like the process performed by humans, but it would take orders of magnitude less money and time.

This is going to change the nature of software. Already I notice a shift in my product thinking: instead of designing an app for a market, I can design it for myself. I don’t have to worry about any other user’s requirements, about competition and gaps, about user onboarding, or about pricing and payment. It simplifies a lot, compared to being a tech founder. I don’t think all software will be bespoke in the future, not even nearly all of it, but there will be a lot more custom software than before.

And it is not hard at all to envision how this will play out in other industries whose work essentially consists of talking to people and producing documents: law, accounting, graphic design, business consulting. Virtual service shops, doing in hours what used to take weeks, for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands.

It is now impossible not to see that this is going to change the world, indeed that the change has already begun and is underway in earnest.

Subscribe now

Thank you for having me—it’s great to be here. I’m the founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute, and we’re dedicated to building the progress movement.

There’s a lot of overlap between the progress movement and the abundance movement—a lot of shared vision and goals, and a lot of the same people are involved. So I was invited here to talk about progress and how it’s relevant to abundance.

I agreed to come, because I love abundance. I love it as a vision and a goal. And I love it as a direction for the Democratic party and for the political left.

The left styles itself the party of science. That’s good, because abundance needs science, in the long term. But it’s not enough: abundance also needs technology and economic growth.

Technology and growth are historically how we have created the abundance we already enjoy. Abundance, after all, is relative, and we have a lot compared to the past. We should always remember how lucky we are to live today instead of 200 years ago—when homes didn’t have electricity, refrigerators, or toilets; when almost no vaccines existed to protect us from disease; when a room like this would have been lit not with clean electric lights but with smelly, polluting oil lamps; when a gathering like this would in fact have been impossible, because to travel across the country was not a six-hour plane flight, but a six-month trek by horse and wagon, Oregon Trail style.

Just as we have abundance compared with the past, we should hope that the future can be just as abundant, compared to the present. Indeed, the recent book Abundance by and opens with a imagined scene from a technologically advanced future: energy from solar, nuclear, and geothermal; desalination using microbial membranes; indoor farms where food is grown with light from LEDs; lab-grown meat; drone deliveries; longevity drugs made in space-based pharmaceutical plants; supersonic passenger jets; artificial intelligence raising everyone’s productivity so we can all enjoy more leisure.

The historic pattern of increasing abundance over time, and the hope and promise of an even more abundant future, is what used to be commonly known as progress.

Progressives used to believe in progress. The old left was not just the party of science—it was a party of science, technology, and growth.

Take Teddy Roosevelt—a progressive if there ever was one. One of the signature achievements of his administration was the Panama Canal. This was a massive engineering project, a triumph of hydraulic engineering technology, celebrated at the time as the 13th Labor of Hercules. When FDR launched the New Deal, one of his signature projects was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which created hydroelectric dams to provide electricity for an entire region. And JFK, of course, is the president who called for putting a man on the Moon—one of the greatest technological achievements not just of its era, but of all time. When JFK gave his famous speech about the Apollo program (the one where he said “we choose to go to the Moon”), he put it in the context of the grand story of human progress. He invoked that narrative to inspire the people and justify his aims.

The Moon landing, in 1969, was a peak moment for America: literally the highest we had ever reached. But after that, something changed.

The children of the ‘60s were starting to see technology and growth as responsible for some of the worst problems of the 20th century, such as environmental damage and the horrors of war. Growth had created pollution and acid rain. Technology had created machine guns, chemical weapons, and the atomic bomb.

But instead of just being anti-pollution and anti-war, the new left decided to become anti-technology and anti-growth. And so a party of science, technology, and growth became just a party of science.

That was a mistake, a costly historical error that we should now correct.

What has 50 years of the anti-growth mindset gotten us? Stagnation and sclerosis. We can’t build anything in this country anymore. We can’t build the homes we need to make our cities affordable. We can’t build the transit we need to make those cities livable. We can’t build energy infrastructure, either generation or the power lines to connect it to the grid.

Without economic growth, we don’t have the engine that raises the standard of living for everyone and helps people lift themselves out of poverty. Without growth, people feel they are playing a zero-sum game—and they turn to exclusion. “No, you can’t move to my neighborhood, it’s too crowded.” “No, you can’t immigrate, you’re going to steal my job.” We want abundance thinking instead: “Yes, move to my neighborhood—we’ll build more homes!” “Yes, immigrate here—there’s so much work to be done, we need all the help we can get.”

I think people have grown weary of the anti-growth mindset, weary of stagnation and sclerosis. So I’m glad to see that abundance is now a politically winning issue. And I would love to see it be a new direction for the left.

But the right is also moving to embrace technology and growth—or rather, they’re doing that with one hand, while fighting those things with the other. On the one hand, they’ve embraced technologies like nuclear power, supersonic flight, and AI. On the other hand: They’re fighting vaccines, one of the greatest technologies ever invented. They’re defunding research into mRNA, one of the most promising genetic engineering techniques. They’ve disrupted research funding broadly. They’ve disrupted immigration, including high-skilled immigration, which is one of our best talent pipelines into R&D. And they’ve put tariffs on everything, which almost any economist will tell you is hurting affordability and slowing growth.

So the right has at best a mixed record on abundance. The left can still be the party of abundance, if it wants to be.

But it won’t be easy. It will be uncomfortable. Because to become the party of abundance requires truly embracing technology and growth—and the left has developed an allergic reaction to those things. So there’s some work to be done: some lessons to be unlearned, some old habits to be broken.

But I’m excited to help with that work, and I invite you to talk to me about it. I’m eager to see the party of science become once again a party of science, technology, and growth. And I look forward to the day when progressives once again believe in progress.

PS: I would also like to see the right become, more consistently, the party of abundance. I would like to see both parties competing to be the party of abundance! At some point I may write up an analogous “message to the right.”

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

How was this achieved?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So fire safety was achieved through the combination of:

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

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

• Infrastructure: municipal water supply, telephone lines

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

• Law: building codes and other fire safety codes

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

This is a general pattern. Safety requires:

• both prevention and “cure”

• both technical and social solutions

• among technical solutions, both products and systems

• among social solutions, both education and law

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

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

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

• Bruce Hensler, Crucible of Fire (2011)

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

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

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

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

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

• John Rainbird, “The Vigiles of Rome”

• Alex Tabarrok, Firefighters Don’t Fight Fires

Historical and primary sources:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• FEMA, “America Burning” (report)

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

I think this is true but irrelevant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I think the idea that we can’t control complex systems is just wrong, at least in the ways that matter to human existence. Indeed, a key lesson of systems engineering is that a system doesn’t need to be perfectly predictable in order to be controllable, it just has to have known variability.1 We can’t predict the next flood, but we can learn how high a 100-year flood is, and build our levees higher. We can’t predict the composition of iron ore or crude oil that we will find in the ground, but we can devise smelting and refining processes to produce a consistent output. We can’t predict which germs will land on a surgeon’s scalpel, but we know none of them will survive an autoclave.

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

We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” … The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats. People found it annoying, and people ate it up. … “AI Slop is Everywhere,” warned The Wall Street Journal, while admitting to enjoying some of those cats.

Slop touches a nerve today. When Meta announced a product to create massive amounts of AI-generated short-form video, presumably with no goal other than entertainment to capture clicks and eyeballs, even my generally pro-technology circles exploded in disgust and outrage. Now we have education slop, math slop, drug discovery slop, longevity slop, and “urbanist slop.” Slop exemplifies everything wrong with the modern era; it signifies the gap—some would say the chasm—between what technology enables and what promotes human well-being.

I have no praise for slop itself, but we can be more sanguine about it if we see it as a byproduct of a bigger and more important trend.

Subscribe now

People make things when the value of the thing exceeds the cost of creation. When the cost of creation in a medium is high, people are careful only to use it for high-value products. If a movie costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make, you can’t afford to make a bad movie (or at least, not very many of them). You’re going to put a lot of effort into making it, and someone who holds the purse strings is going to have to decide if it’s good enough to fund.

Whenever the cost of creation in a medium falls, the volume of production greatly expands, but the average quality necessarily falls, because many of the new creations are low-quality. They are low-quality because they can be—because the cost of creation no longer prohibits them. And they are low-quality because when people aren’t spending much time or money to create something, they don’t feel the need to invest a lot in it. When you can quickly dash off a tweet, you don’t need to edit it or fact-check it, or even have correct spelling or grammar; when you can quickly create an AI illustration, you don’t need to hold it to high standards of composition, color, or even the right number of fingers. Hence slop.

The Internet lowered the cost of publishing to virtually zero, which enabled many low-quality blogs and other web sites. Social media made it trivial to put thoughts online, and made it much easier to find an audience, which enabled a vast amount more low-effort and low-quality posting. Now AI is arriving, and lowering the costs of creation itself, not just publication and audience-building. And it is enabling new and different forms of slop.

But along with slop, lower costs and barriers get us:

• More experimentation. It can be hard to predict how good or great a piece of writing, art, music or video is going to be. Major Hollywood pictures can be disliked by audiences, critics, or both; books often fail to make money or even pay out their advances. Conversely, sometimes an unknown creator comes out with a work that is initially ignored but goes on to fame and/or fortune. Lowering the bar for creation allows for more experiments, more chances to create something high-quality.

• Removal of the gatekeepers. If it’s hard to predict or evaluate what is good, who decides? Editors, producers, etc., who act as gatekeepers to the means of production and distribution. But gatekeepers are imperfect predictors, and they have blind spots. Harry Potter was rejected by twelve publishers before finding one that would take it: how many potentially great books never found that one editor to champion them, and never saw the light of day? Today there are far fewer gatekeepers for writing or podcasting, but they still exist in music and movies; AI will gradually remove these.

• More chance for people to make a start. E.g., there are many good bloggers who never would have gotten started if they had to first find a job as a journalist.

• More runway for works to find their audience. My writing had about 50 subscribers for the first two and a half years (now well over 50,000). Dwarkesh Patel was “was 2 months away from quitting the podcast for 2 years” before becoming a rocket-ship success. Lowering the cost of production allows these experiments to be incubated for years, kept alive by love and sweat, until they evolve into a more valuable form or catch their break.

• More content for niche audiences. When content is expensive, it has to serve a large audience, and everything converges on bland mainstream taste. When the only significant cost is one creator’s time, it only has to find 1,000 True Fans, and there is much more room for a broad and varied menu to serve many different palates.

• More diversity of content and format. When content is expensive, and gate-kept, it becomes the work of Trained Professionals, who are Serious People, and it should follow Formal Conventions. No serious magazine editor would approve a column that ranges widely across psychiatry, philosophy, politics, science, and epistemology, covering everything from book reviews to academic papers to online controversies. But that’s Scott Alexander, and he’s one of the best and most successful writers of our generation.

• Freedom from the tyranny of finance. When content is expensive, it becomes the domain of large corporations, who have a duty to their shareholders and who frequently succumb to the ruthless logic of financial returns. Hollywood today has found the safest returns in sequels, remakes, and the endless continuation of franchises such as Star Wars or the MCU. Low costs give you more ability to work for the love of the craft and for the sake of the art.

Slop is a byproduct of this overall process, the detritus that accompanies greatly expanded production. Slop is at best annoying and frustrating, and at worst a tool for scams or propaganda. But the overall process will, I believe, usher in a golden age of creativity and experimentation.

Subscribe now

We don’t have to like slop, of course. We don’t even have to accept it. We can find ways to minimize it.

First, we need better tools for discovery. Just as the explosion of content on the Internet created a need for directories, search engines, and then social media, the next explosion of content will create a need for new ways to search, filter, etc. AI can help with this, if we apply the right design and product thinking. We can create a future equilibrium that is much better than the pre-AI world, where a thoughtful consumer is able to find more targeted, high-quality writing, video, etc. This is a call to action for the technologists who design and build our information supply chain.

But they key word above is “thoughtful.” The explosion of content raises the bar for everyone to be more conscious in your media consumption. The more stuff is out there, the more of it will be like junk food: enticing, tasty, but not nutritious and ultimately unfulfilling. We all need to be mindful in how we direct and spend our precious, limited attention in a world of increasingly unlimited choice. This is a call to action for every individual, and by extension to parents, teachers, psychologists, and moralists.

Short answer: They overlap 80–90%, and if you’re outside both of them you should probably think of them as variations on the same thing. If you look at the Abundance conference and the Progress Conference, for example, there’s a good amount of overlap in the speakers, attendees, and topics.

What are the differences?

• “Abundance” tends to be more wonkish, oriented towards DC and policy, and focuses on reforming regulations and institutions with a goal of efficiency and being able to build stuff again.

• “Progress” is interested in regulatory reform and efficiency, but it’s also interested in ambitious future technologies, from longevity to nanotech. It’s also more focused on ideas and culture, and on history, philosophy, and economics, in addition to just policy.

Again, just look at the conferences: Abundance is held in DC; Progress Conference in the San Francisco area.

In “The Progress Agenda” I sketched out three broad cause areas for the progress movement: regulatory reform, research institutions, and culture. To my mind, the “abundance agenda” is basically the first of those. So I think of the abundance movement as a part of the progress movement.

After this year’s Progress Conference, Charles Mann suggested: “Abundance wants to make sure everyone has a house. Progress wants to make those houses better.” But IMO, the progress movement is interested in both of those things, so that’s not how I think of the distinction.

Subscribe now

Some more background for those who are interested:

“Progress” took off in 2019 when Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen coined the term “progress studies” in The Atlantic. They proposed it as a field of study, but the article galvanized a movement. (The movement has taken off more than the field, so I tend to talk about the progress movement or progress community rather than “progress studies.”)

There were precursors. Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (2018), David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity (2011), and ’s The Future and Its Enemies (1998) all had progress as a central concept (two of those have “Progress” in the subtitle). Marian Tupy started HumanProgress.org back around 2012. Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen, and Robert Gordon were all talking about growth vs. stagnation in the 2010s, although they emphasized those concepts more than “progress.” Max Roser at Our World in Data since 2011, and Hans Rosling before him, worked to communicate the reality of progress, especially global development. Of course, the idea of progress has a history going back centuries at least.

Organizations and projects that put “progress” in the name include the Institute for Progress, Works in Progress magazine, the Human Progress project, and of course us, the Roots of Progress Institute.

“Abundance” was popularized by Derek Thompson, who coined the term “abundance agenda” in a 2022 Atlantic piece. It has since taken off politically, especially with Derek and Ezra Klein’s book titled Abundance that launched this year. Again, there were precursors, including Peter Diamandis’s book also titled Abundance from 2012.

Derek and Ezra credit the progress movement as one of their influences in this podcast.

Things with “abundance” in the name include the Abundance Institute, the Abundance Network, the Metropolitan Abundance Project, the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, and even for a while an Abundance Caucus, which got renamed to the Build America Caucus (because “abundance” has become a partisan term on Capitol Hill, owing to Derek and Ezra being Democrats).

Further reading: Ruy Teixeira captured some of the differences between the progress and abundance movements in his post on the Progress Conference; Steve Teles at Niskanen offers a different take on various factions who have adopted “abundance” ideas.

In “The Progress Agenda,” I mentioned children’s books. One in particular caught people’s attention: You Will Go to the Moon, from 1959 (h/t via her blog).

I’ve now heard from a few people who are buying used copies for their kids. Snag yours for Christmas before they’re all gone.

Here are a few more progress-related books I know of—some old and out of print, some quite recent; some I’ve read and can recommend, some I’m just intrigued by.

Up Goes the Skyscraper!

This one opens with a clear statement of human needs: “Thousands of people want to work and live on the empty city block. It is a small space for so many people. A skyscraper must be built.” And it concludes by saying “Look up at the skyscraper … it is beautiful.”

It goes through many details—I skip the smaller print for my 4-year-old. She loved learning about I-beams and H-beams, however, and she wondered why there were no G-beams or J-beams. (H/t for this one.)

Evidently there is an updated version of this book (I haven’t seen it yet), and it is only one of dozens of “Explore the World” books by the same author, including How a House is Built, Tool Book. and From Seed to Plant. I think my daughter will get some of these for Christmas.

John Deere, That’s Who!

The story of the invention of the polished steel plow. This is a story of industriousness and resilience: Deere is a hardworking blacksmith who has to find a new home after his workshop burns down. It’s also a story of inventiveness: when the farmers in his new town are having trouble plowing through the thick, sticky mud in their fields, Deere creates a slick, lightweight plow out of polished steel. (H/t .)

Magic Ramen: The Story of Momofuku Ando

The invention of instant ramen might seem an unlikely topic, but it’s actually a very well-told story that draws out the problem-solving process (in the way that Anton Howes talked about here).

Ando has a clear goal of creating a ready meal that people could make easily and quickly. He has to solve one problem after another, and he does it by tinkering and experimenting. First he has to find a good recipe for noodles that don’t stick or fall apart; then he has to figure out how to get the soup flavor into the noodles; and finally he has to figure out how to make it cook in just a few minutes using boiling water from a kettle, instead of cooking for several minutes on a stove. At each stage he doesn’t know what to do and tries many things that don’t work before finally hitting on the solution. A story of vision, drive and persistence, made tangible and real. (I confess to editorializing a bit by inserting at each stage, “and he was very frustrated, but he didn’t give up. He kept trying.”)

Working Boats: An Inside Look at Ten Amazing Watercraft

This one is beautifully illustrated and does not skimp on the detail. I didn’t realize there were so many specialized boats, seemingly one for every species of seafood, as well as tugboats, fire boats, and more. (H/t via Twitter.)

Note for parents: most of the books above are probably best for ~6- to 7-year-olds, but I was able to adapt them for my daughter when she was only 3 or 4 by simplifying the language and explaining some of the background concepts.

Le Livre des Progrès

This one is in French and I don’t know if there’s an English translation, but it’s so remarkable I had to mention it. It’s literally titled “The Book of Progress,” and every page shows how we used to do things, and how we do them now.

Here’s a sample page, headlined “From the plow to the tractor.” The page opposite is about construction machines:

Here’s another sample page, “From the broom to the washing machine”:

I’d love an English translation of this.

“We Were There”

“We Were There” is a series of chapter books for older kids, written in the 1950s and ‘60s, basically historical fiction meant to teach history. The books include We Were There at the First Airplane Flight (pictured above), We Were There at the Driving of the Golden Spike (about the completion of the transcontinental railroad), and We Were There at the Opening of the Erie Canal. I haven’t read these yet to evaluate them.

Those are the most remarkable I’ve found so far. What else is out there? Please suggest more in the comments (ideally not just science explainers, of which there are plenty, but stories of invention or discovery, or explainers about industrial civilization and infrastructure).

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. ’s book Indistractable is an example, as is ’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.

The bold, ambitious future is waiting for us. How do we pursue it?

We have the flywheel of progress on our side: progress is a self-reinforcing process. The bigger the world economy, the more resources we have to invest in research and new ventures, the more we will increase total factor productivity, and the more we will grow the economy, in an accelerating cycle.

But the cycle does not operate purely through technological and economic factors. It is mediated by institutions: universities and laboratories, VC and other finance, law and regulation. Institutions develop and allocate both human and financial capital. And institutions, along with all of our activities, are shaped by culture.

Over most of the long sweep of history, institutions and culture improved along with science and technology. In the last four centuries, we developed the scientific method, constitutional democracy, research universities, limited liability corporations, stock exchanges, venture capital. Many of these developments were motivated by progress; all of them helped accelerate it.

But in the 20th century, this loop of the flywheel broke down and even went into reverse. Our institutions today are saddled with the twin legacy of the 20th century: the legacy of technocracy, which left our institutions overly centralized and bureaucratized, and the legacy of the counterculture, which left us with an obstructionist vetocracy. And so, as I described in the introduction, we have deceleration in total factor productivity and per-capita GDP, fields such as manufacturing and transportation that are still using the same basic technologies as in the 1960s, rising costs in housing, education, and healthcare, and a general inability to build or to operate.

Our societal sclerosis is partly the result of deliberate sabotage, motivated by the romantic backlash against progress: the view of material progress as a “destructive engine” and the goal of controlling it, slowing it down, or stopping it altogether. And it is partly a result of natural causes, the institutional senescence that can be staved off only through eternal vigilance. That kind of vigilance requires that our most capable leaders are motivated to maintain institutional competence, and that the public still cares enough about progress to support their efforts. Those values are fostered by a positive and confident philosophy of progress; they disintegrate without one.

The progress agenda is thus one of institutional and cultural reform, in three main cause areas: our laws and regulation, the way we manage research, and the culture of progress itself.

Law & regulation

There are problems we don’t yet know how to solve: curing cancer, or building nanotech. For these, we need advances in science and technology. Then there are problems we know how to solve, but prevent ourselves from solving. These are social problems, and they need legal and regulatory reform.

Building enough housing, for instance, is technologically a solved problem. And yet, we don’t build enough housing to meet demand, and both home prices and rents continue to hit all-time highs. One major index of US home prices has risen over 4x since 1990. The median single-family home price is now 5x the median household income; a price-to-income ratio of 3 is generally considered affordable. In 1990, over 70 of the top 100 US metro areas were under this ratio; now almost all of them are over it.1 An influential essay in Works in Progress magazine titled “The Housing Theory of Everything” argues that, in addition to the direct cost, more expensive housing hurts productivity, since people can’t move to where better jobs are; slows innovation, which benefits from density of talent; and makes it harder for people to have as many children as they would like.2

Economists such as Ed Glaeser argue persuasively that the problem lies in land-use regulations that artificially restrict housing supply. Since the 1960s, he writes in a Brookings report, we “changed from a country in which landowners had relatively unfettered freedom to add density to a country in which veto rights over new projects are shared by a dizzying array of abutters and stakeholders.”3 In short, housing is a social problem. We have to get out of our own way, by reforming the zoning restrictions, permitting processes, and building codes that restrict supply.4

But the building problem is much broader than just housing. It affects any kind of infrastructure: transit, factories, power plants, electrical lines. As of the end of 2024, almost 1.6 TW of electrical generation capacity and over 1 TW of storage capacity was waiting in queues to connect to the grid.5 “There is more power in the queue than on the grid today. The average wait time in the interconnection queue is five years and growing, primarily due to permitting timelines. In addition, many projects are cancelled due to the prohibitive cost of interconnection.”6

The permitting problem is broad and varied, but one law at the core is NEPA (the National Environmental Protection Act). NEPA requires that all federal agencies, in any “major action” that will significantly affect “the human environment,” must produce a “detailed statement” on those effects, now known as an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). As Eli Dourado recounts, in the early days, an EIS was less than ten pages, and would go unchallenged. But activists learned to obstruct projects using litigation, by charging that an EIS failed to address some important detail. Every time they won, it raised the standard for how detailed an EIS had to be. Court rulings set precedents that “major action” actually means any action, and “human environment” actually means the entire environment. Over the decades, this process ratcheted up, until today, an average EIS runs several hundred pages (plus over a thousand pages of appendices!) and takes almost 5 years to complete. And if a federal action will not affect the environment, it requires yet another type of statement to confirm this—which now creates more paperwork than the EISes themselves.7

NEPA has now become a barrier to projects including housing, transmission lines, semiconductor manufacturing, congestion pricing, and even offshore wind.8 None of this was anticipated or intended by Congress or even by environmental activists, who now find even their own “green” projects stifled by the law. Dourado recommends four reforms to bring NEPA back to its original purpose: trust agencies to make findings of no impact without an assessment report; do not require public hearings or comment for every environmental review; raise the bar for judicial injunctions; and establish an exemption for decisions with a strong national interest.9

NEPA is a procedural law: it mandates a process to be followed, but doesn’t require any specific outcome. Alec Stapp and Brian Potter at the Institute for Progress contrast this with substantive environmental regulation, which mandates outcomes, such as limiting the amount of carbon monoxide that can be emitted from an automobile. Procedural laws are more flexible, but that very flexibility allows them to be weaponized by activists against growth. “We need a new era of environmentalism that learns from the successes and failures of the past,” they conclude. “Environmentalists rightly tout triumphs over acid rain, ozone depletion, DDT, and lead exposure. But these wins were not the result of preparing ever longer environmental impact statements for specific projects. They were the product of putting a price on pollution, via cap and trade programs, or outright banning a pollutant when necessary.”10 We could use a shift away from procedural and towards substantive regulation.

More broadly, Michael Catanzaro suggests that we have conflated permitting with compliance. Our processes emphasize obtaining approval, but what actually matters is following the rules. Instead of lengthy and burdensome permitting processes, he suggests, permitting should be made a simple matter of submitting information and certifying that a project will follow the law. Permits would be approved by default unless the information were incomplete or fraudulent, within a tight time window, say 90 days. Then, the enforcement focus could shift to compliance: auditing that a project is in fact following applicable regulations, such as pollution limits.11

Permitting affects all projects, but some industries get special treatment. Nuclear energy, for decades, has faced one of the most burdensome regulatory regimes, which make it slow and expensive to build nuclear plants, and ultimately make nuclear power uneconomical. NuScale Power, after going through its design certification with the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission), complained that they had been “required to evaluate events with frequencies orders of magnitude less than the Commission’s safety goals or the 10^–6 per reactor year limit the Commission has stated as a threshold of credibility, and in some cases even where no core damage would result.” The costs of the application exceeded half a billion dollars; NuScale states dryly that this level of effort “may not be repeatable for future reviews.”12

It doesn’t have to be this way: one analysis of worldwide nuclear construction since 2000 finds that in South Korea, India, China, and Japan, costs are about 4x lower than in the US or UK.13 France built enough nuclear plants in the 1980s and ‘90s that about two-thirds of its electricity is now nuclear (compared to about 20% in the US and only 10% worldwide).14 We could do the same. There are many credible proposals for reform,15 but fundamentally what we need is change in regulatory culture: a commitment to balance costs and benefits, and an NRC that sees the development of energy as its job.

Or take the FDA. To bring a new drug to market now takes around 12 years and over $1 billion,16 and the costs have grown over time, as noted in a well-known paper by Jack Scannell et al that coined the term “Eroom’s Law” for this phenomenon. The paper suggests four factors driving the cost of drugs; some of them are inevitable low-hanging fruit effects, but one of them is over-cautious regulation: “Each real or perceived sin by the industry, or genuine drug misfortune, leads to a tightening of the regulatory ratchet, and the ratchet is rarely loosened, even if it seems as though this could be achieved without causing significant risk to drug safety.”17 In many cases, the FDA has been too conservative in its approvals, adding needless delay that holds back treatments from patients. Omegaven, a nutritional fluid given to patients with digestive problems (often infants) that helped prevent liver disease, took fourteen years to clear FDA’s hurdles, despite dramatic evidence of efficacy early on, and in that time hundreds to thousands of babies died preventable deaths.18 A former FDA regulator has stated that in the 1980s, approval of the new drug application for human insulin was delayed despite compelling evidence of safety and effectiveness, because his boss said: “If anything goes wrong, think how bad it will look that we approved the drug so quickly.”19 One Bayesian analysis that modeled the tradeoff between approving bad drugs and failing to approve good drugs found that the FDA is much more conservative than optimal, especially for terminal illnesses with no existing therapies.20

The problem with regulatory agencies is not that the people working there are evil—they are not. The problem is the incentive structure: Regulators are blamed for anything that goes wrong. They are not blamed for preventing growth and progress. They are not credited when they approve things that lead to growth and progress. So all of the incentives point in a single direction: towards more stringent regulations. And when regulations are put in place, they become very hard to remove. So regulation ratchets upwards.

Nuclear and drugs, at least, were not outright banned. Supersonic flight was. Since 1973, FAA regulations have made it illegal to fly faster than the speed of sound over land in the US; several other countries followed suit.21 A 2025 executive order, which I trust will be faithfully implemented, has directed the FAA to repeal the speed limit and replace it with a noise limit instead.22

This is just an amuse-bouche of the issues involved. Summarizing the theme, Derek Thompson has called for an “abundance agenda” for America, and his book with Ezra Klein on this topic, Abundance, has made a splash in DC.23 Gavin Newsom has now endorsed an “Abundance Agenda” for California, and a bipartisan “Build America Caucus” has launched, inspired by the same ideas.24

We should take pains to prevent this agenda from succumbing to the tribalism of contemporary politics. Thompson has suggested that it could “take the best from several ideologies”:

It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great—such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth.25

Growth and progress should be a shared, cross-partisan goal. With progress as the standard to measure our efforts, all sides can then debate, using history, data, and logic, whose policies will actually achieve that goal. A world in which every party was competing to be the party of progress would be far healthier than one absorbed in redistribution and identity politics.

Research institutions

“By many measures, the biological and medical sciences are in a golden age. That fact, which we celebrate, makes it all the more difficult to acknowledge that the current system contains systemic flaws that are threatening its future.”

So begins a perspective piece published in 2014 by four biologists, including the founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard, a former president of Princeton, and a Nobel laureate who formerly directed the NIH.26 The paper laments that “biomedical scientists are spending far too much of their time writing and revising grant applications and far too little thinking about science and conducting experiments.” It also warns about “conservative, short-term thinking in applicants, reviewers, and funders”:

The system now favors those who can guarantee results rather than those with potentially path-breaking ideas that, by definition, cannot promise success. Young investigators are discouraged from departing too far from their postdoctoral work, when they should instead be posing new questions and inventing new approaches. Seasoned investigators are inclined to stick to their tried-and-true formulas for success rather than explore new fields.

Others sound a similar warning. In an editorial for the London School of Economics Business Review, Donald Braben and Rod Dowler write: “It is of vital importance right now to avoid suppressing genius in favour of apparent practicality.” They warn that “freedom of research has been severely curtailed”:

Current policies make sense for incremental or near-market research that may well lead to the creation of new technologies based on existing fundamental theories. The casualty of such policies, however, will be hard-to-predict radical discoveries … Uninhibited exploration of these fields would almost certainly reveal unimaginable opportunities for growth and enrichment. However, they are in danger of being strangled by bureaucratic processes that would have denied funding for many of the 20th century’s major discoveries.27

And Sydney Brenner, a medical professor at Cambridge and Nobel laureate, says:

The supporters now, the bureaucrats of science, do not wish to take any risks. So in order to get it supported, they want to know from the start that it will work. This means you have to have preliminary information, which means that you are bound to follow the straight and narrow.28

In an obituary for Fred Sanger, two-time Nobel laureate who pioneered the sequencing of both proteins and DNA, Brenner writes:

A Fred Sanger would not survive today’s world of science. With continuous reporting and appraisals, some committee would note that he published little of import between insulin in 1952 and his first paper on RNA sequencing in 1967 with another long gap until DNA sequencing in 1977. He would be labeled as unproductive, and his modest personal support would be denied. We no longer have a culture that allows individuals to embark on long-term—and what would be considered today extremely risky—projects.29

Similarly, Peter Higgs, whom the Higgs boson is named after, has said:

It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964. … Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.30

A threat to future scientific breakthroughs is a threat to progress. What has gone wrong?

Accounts differ; what follows is an opinionated and probably oversimplified narrative. In short, I blame two factors: First, the centralization of funding, which has come to be dominated by a small number of large agencies. Second, an increase in competition among researchers, which has created overoptimization for markers of performance that lead to jobs and grants but not necessarily to great science.

The dominance of a few federal agencies in research funding is a post-WW2 phenomenon. During the war, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, under the great Vannevar Bush, developed not only weapons but also peacetime technologies such as radar and penicillin.31 Motivated by these successes, both the scientific establishment and the government wanted to keep the collaboration going into peacetime. Bush famously wrote a report to the President, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” in which he advocated for federal funding of basic research as the means to American prosperity and security.32 Bush’s specific proposals were not adopted, but federal funding for science ramped up massively in the 1950s and ‘60s.33 For decades, US universities have gotten the majority of funding for science and engineering R&D from federal sources such as the NIH ($44B in 2024), the NSF ($7.4B), and DARPA ($4.1B).34

Even as the supply of funding grew, however, demand grew faster. The NIH, for example, received 9,199 grant applications in 1970, and made 3,264 awards; in 2024 it received 6 times as many applications, but only made 3 times as many awards. Thus while the success rate on NIH grants was 30–40% in the 1970s, for the last 20 years it has hovered around 20%.35 It doesn’t help that the NIH’s budget, adjusted for inflation, has not increased since 2003.36

Several consequences flow from all of this.

A key problem with centralization of funding is that any one funder, no matter how well-intentioned and wise, will have blind spots. Katalin Karikó, who shared the Nobel prize in 2023 for mRNA technology, was repeatedly denied grants for her work and was even demoted for failing to raise funds.37 Stanley Prusiner won a Nobel in 1997 for discovering prions, but his work was “treated as heretical,” he struggled to get funding from the NIH, he was dropped by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and he initially failed to get tenure at UCSF.38 Research that led to the breast cancer drug Herceptin was denied funding from NIH, and was ultimately supported by private sources including the cosmetics company Revlon.39 Similar stories are told about early work on biodegradable polymers, insulin manufacturing, neural networks, genome sequencing, and expansion microscopy—they are not the exception, but the rule.40

The creation of a virtual monopsony for research also allows funders to be insensitive to the needs and desires of researchers. Thus, the grant process has grown slow, cumbersome, and restrictive. One institute within the NIH advises: “Your overall process from planning to award may take as long as two years—even longer if you need to resubmit.”41 (Resubmission is common.)42 The process can be tripped up for trivial reasons, such as minor variations in font size on grant applications.43

Further, since grants come from taxpayer money, they face pressure for oversight and accountability. NIH grants require prior approval for any “change in the direction, aims, objectives, purposes, or type of research training,” including a change in animal model, a shift in emphasis to a new disease area, a change in assay or other new technology, any equipment purchase over $25,000, and any rebudgeting by more than 25% in any category.44 Accountability is an understandable goal—but it is directly at odds with the autonomy that scientists need to do great research.

Risk aversion may be exacerbated by the committee-based peer review of grants, a process used by the NIH and NSF. Committees tend to make consensus decisions, but scientific breakthroughs often challenge consensus. And when the committee is formed of experts in the field—essentially, the competitors of the researchers submitting the proposal!—there is a risk that a field converges on a consensus too quickly, prematurely pruning off branches of the search space. Some Alzheimer’s researchers, for instance, believe the field has suffered from an overfocus on amyloid proteins as the cause of the disease; one of the more emphatic has even claimed: “If it weren’t for the near-total dominance of the idea that amyloid is the only appropriate drug target, we would be 10 or 15 years ahead of where we are now.”45

To its credit, the NIH, at least, recognizes the problem. Starting in 2004, they created a series of new grant types “out of concerns that the traditional NIH peer review process had become overly conservative, and the belief that NIH required specific means to fund high-risk research.”46 The High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program (HRHR) now includes the Pioneer Award, for researchers pursuing groundbreaking new directions, the New Innovator Award, aimed at early-career scientists, the Early Independence Award, which helps junior scientists skip their postdoc and jump-start their lab career, and the Transformative Research Award, for “groundbreaking, unconventional research with the potential to create new scientific paradigms.”47

The HRHR program, however, is less than 0.5% of NIH’s budget.48 Whatever good these grants have done, they don’t seem to be enough to have reformed the culture of research. Indeed, when the foundation Open Philanthropy reviewed a number of the Transformative Research proposals, they found them to be “a bit on the conventional side.”49 Even when researchers are solicited for transformative ideas, they are still influenced by the entrenched culture of risk aversion.

Some of these problems would be alleviated simply by having a larger number of smaller funders. Patrick Collison, a tech CEO and science philanthropist, has suggested that we break up NIH and NSF “into 10+ bodies with fully independent approaches. Every 5-10 years, reassess their budgets.”50 There is precedent for a more decentralized funding approach: much of the progress in agricultural science and technology in the US was funded not at the federal level but at the state level, through the state agricultural experiment stations established in the 1880s.51 This decentralization was crucial in the story of hybrid corn, considered one of the greatest breeding successes of the 20th century: in 1905, work by Edward Murray East on this project was discontinued at the Illinois experiment station, and it survived only because East was invited to continue it at the Connecticut station.52

More broadly than diversification in funding sources, though, we need diversification in organizational structures. The dominance of NIH and NSF has also meant the dominance of a particular model of research: relatively small labs, each led by a principal investigator (PI) who not only runs the lab but also fundraises for it, mostly in the form of relatively small, short-term, project-based grants.

The PI model forces one person to play several roles: research, management, administration, and fundraising; at many universities, teaching is added, not to mention serving as a reviewer for journal papers or grant committees. More importantly, it means that each lab has to sell itself to the outside world, to funders who don’t know the researchers and aren’t working with them closely or talking to them daily. This pushes grants more towards “legible,” incremental work.

Consider, in contrast, the UK Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, where thirteen scientists won nine Nobel prizes—including Watson & Crick for the structure of DNA, the aforementioned Fred Sanger for protein and DNA sequencing, and Venki Ramakrishnan for the structure of the ribosome. LMB researchers don’t have to rely on external grants: the entire lab is funded as a unit, and research projects are funded out of the core budget. A profile of the LMB in Science reports that researchers are encouraged to tackle big, difficult questions, despite the risk that entails, and that researchers have autonomy and aren’t under pressure to constantly publish. In the words of one group leader: “There’s a tradition of trying to hire smart people and then basically leaving them to it.” Ramakrishnan says that having secure, long-term funding allowed him to focus on discovering the structure of the ribosome. He also says that the lab has a collaborative atmosphere, since the success of any one researcher helps the entire lab do well.53 In a different interview, Sydney Brenner, another one of the lab’s Nobel laureates, commented:

… we never let the committee assess individuals. … We asked them to review the work of the group as a whole. Because if they went down to individuals, they would say, this man is unproductive. He hasn’t published anything for the last five years. So you’ve got to have institutions that can not only allow this, but also protect the people that are engaged on very long term, and to the funders, extremely risky work.54

James Phillips, a neuroscientist and former Science and Technology Advisor to the Prime Minister of the UK, points out that many of these features of the LMB also apply to celebrated institutions such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. All these labs had “a transformative impact on the world; a widely reported unique culture distinct to the mainstream; minimal obstacles to research; ability to pursue work that defied consensus; and a highly collaborative environment.” All had a single major funding source, providing “hands-off” funding that is open to speculative work, on a multi-decade time horizon. All had shared lab resources, rather than each lab accumulating its own resources in its own little “empire.” All allowed researchers to focus on research instead of management, administration, and teaching. And all evaluated their researchers internally, which is possible only with single-source block funding. In contrast, the typical approach has “each researcher being pulled in a different direction by different external funding criteria, in an atomising and soloist manner preventing the emergence of a vibrant community of people pulling in the same direction.”55

A modern biology lab applying some of these lessons is the Arc Institute, based in Palo Alto and partnered with Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF. Investigators at Arc get their labs fully funded for renewable 8-year terms to pursue curiosity-driven research; institute co-founder Silvana Konermann says that they “want to take away the short-term demand to produce output.”56 This is made possible by $650 million in founding pledges, including from institute co-founder Patrick Collison. Although Arc was only founded in 2021, it has already announced the largest AI model trained on genomic data, which they have used to design an improved bacteriophage; a virtual cell model that they say is “to the best of our knowledge … the first model to consistently beat simple linear baselines;” and a new DNA editing technology that can make far more sophisticated edits than CRISPR.57

Another alternative to the principal investigator model is exemplified by DARPA. The DARPA model focuses on a program manager with a vision for an ambitious technological goal. The PM contracts out to labs to perform the work, but they control the vision and the budget. This model lends itself well to ambitious technological prototypes, and was the origin of the Internet and GPS.58 One privately-funded research organization based on this model is Speculative Technologies, which aims to unlock “big-if-true” technologies through “multi-year programs run by program managers with wide-ranging authority to coordinate several projects towards a single vision.”59 The newly-formed UK research agency ARIA also uses ARPA-style PMs.60

The PI model also doesn’t lend itself well to big scientific goals that require a large, coordinated team and a lot of funding: sequencing the human genome, or mapping the neural connections of the brain. An increasingly popular alternative is the Focused Research Organization (FRO), which is organized like a startup team with a CEO, but as a nonprofit with a goal to produce a public good such as an open scientific dataset.61 Convergent Research has now launched FROs for technologies including microorganisms for use in synthetic biology, software for proving mathematical theorems, ocean-based carbon dioxide removal, and brain-computer interfaces.62

Another problem caused by increased competition among researchers is the focus on the peer-reviewed journal paper as the measurable unit of work, with citations as the score. Academic career advancement, including tenure, has become closely tied to citation counts. Hyper-optimization around these metrics leads researchers to focus more on what they can publish than on good science. Seemay Chou, biologist and co-founder of the Astera Institute, writes: “In all my discussions with scientists across every sector, exactly zero think the journal system works well. … Scientists should probably be putting out shorter narratives, datasets, code, and models at a faster rate, with more visibility into their thinking, mistakes, and methods.” She calls journal publishing “fundamentally broken … one of the legacy systems that prevents science from meeting its true potential for society.” In a rare move, Astera refuses to fund journal articles, requiring that research they support “be released and reviewed more openly, comprehensively, and frequently than the status quo”—and not behind a paywall or with a restrictive license. The affiliated lab Arcadia Science prohibits its researchers from publishing in journals. When they made this change, Chou reports, it profoundly reshaped their science: “Our researchers began designing experiments differently from the start. They became more creative and collaborative. The goal shifted from telling polished stories to uncovering useful truths.”63

None of these models is a silver bullet. The point is that our ecosystem of research institutions has become dominated by a narrow set of organizational models. In “A Vision of Metascience,” Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu argue that the ecosystem is in “a state of near stasis, with strong barriers inhibiting the improvement of key social processes.” Someone “seeking to achieve a scalable improvement in the social processes of science”—such as the founders of the organizations mentioned above—they call a “metascience entrepreneur.” They even envision a “metascience accelerator” that could provide support to such efforts, with the ultimate goal of “a flourishing ecosystem of people with wildly imaginative and insightful ideas for new social processes; and for those ideas to be tested and the best ideas scaled out.”64 This vibrancy is what the ecosystem of science needs.

Culture

The deepest roots of institutional change are cultural. Cultural change is thus the most important pillar of the progress agenda.

This begins with what our children are taught in school. Today, they are not taught the history or nature of progress. History classes focus on wars and empires; science classes teach concepts and frameworks; the story of technology and economic growth falls between the cracks. Steven Johnson, popular author of dozens of books on the history of technology, reports that in “an otherwise excellent American history textbook” covering the last 150 years, “labor” was mentioned 226 times, and “civil rights” 134 times, but “antibiotics” and “vaccines” were not mentioned once. “Something is fundamentally distorted in the emphasis here.”65

As a result, students graduate with no understanding of or appreciation for the system that created and maintains their historically unprecedented standard of living. Author Charles Mann has suggested: “All high-school students should be required to take a course called How the System Works”; he envisioned a course focusing on the systems that provide us with food, water, energy, and sanitation. “The overall theme: these systems, which required decades to create, are triumphs of the human mind and spirit, and it is the task of all of us to ensure that they are passed down to the next generation and improved. It should not be possible for so many terrific young men and women not to know anything about the systems on which their lives depend.”66

A basic understanding of industrial civilization—how it works and why we need it—should be considered an essential outcome of an education. Call it “industrial literacy.”

Industrial literacy could start in grade school. Students could learn basic facts relevant to economic life: what crops need in order to grow, what farmers do, and how pests or disease can damage the harvest; what types of materials our world is made of, and how things like metal, glass, ceramic, and textiles are produced; different sources of energy, how to harness them, and how to direct forces using simple machines such as gears and levers. They could learn the stories of specific inventions and inventors: Edison and the light bulb, Stephenson and the locomotive, Bell and the telephone. They could learn basic facts about economic history: that people once lived without heating, air conditioning, plumbing, or electricity; that most people worked manual jobs, and mostly on farms; that severe disease was common, especially in childhood. They could engage in many hands-on activities to get first-hand knowledge of historical and modern processes: gardening, weaving, carpentry, paper-making and printing, navigation with a compass. They could try going a day eating only food they had grown themselves, wearing only clothes they had sewn, or using light only from candles they had dipped.

Children learn through books and other media as well. I’ve found a few relevant books for my young daughter, such as Up Goes the Skyscraper; John Deere, That’s Who!, about Deere’s steel plow; and Magic Ramen, about Momofuku Ando and his instant noodles—but I and other parents I know wish there were more.67 There used to be. Steven Pinker tells us: “When I was a boy, a popular literary genre for children was the heroic biography of a medical pioneer such as Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, William Osler, or Alexander Fleming.”68 (How many of those names do you recognize?) Another children’s book, from 1959, was titled You Will Go to the Moon; one blogger recounts: “My husband (aged 51), was profoundly changed by this story as a boy.”69 Another series from the 1950s–’60s, “We Were There,” includes among its titles not only the Battle of Gettysburg and the Mayflower Pilgrims, but also the first airplane flight with the Wright Brothers, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and the opening of the Erie Canal.70 Topics like these have fallen out of favor, leaving parents mostly with worn and yellowed books from decades ago. We need a new generation of children’s media, to retell these stories for today’s youth and to update them with heroes like Katalin Karikó and Steve Jobs.

By high school, students would be ready to grasp the concept of progress itself: they could see the advancement of science, technology and industry as part of a bigger, integrated historical narrative. They could learn how we solved the grand challenges of human existence: how we learned to feed the world, how we mechanized most labor, how we reduced mortality from infectious disease. They would be ready to approach economic history quantitatively, understanding the significance of crop yields, labor productivity, or energy usage per capita; they would learn key historical charts such as the “hockey stick” of world GDP growth, the dramatic declines in poverty and child mortality, the growth of literacy and democracy.

In university, “progress studies” could be an interdisciplinary field integrating ideas from economics, history, and philosophy.71 Students would deepen their understanding of these fields, and engage with the centuries-long conversation about the meaning and causes of progress. They would read historical texts like Bacon and Condorcet, contemporary perspectives from authors such as Julian Simon or Joel Mokyr, and critics of progress from Rousseau to Lewis Mumford. Some universities are already starting to offer such classes, such as the University of Toronto, where professor Kevin Bryan is giving a course starting Fall 2025 on “Progress: How to Get Big Things Done.”72

Students who graduated from such a curriculum would be cured of the “industrial amnesia” described in Chapter 1. They would not be “fish in water,” blind to technology and infrastructure all around them; they would see their world with wonder and gratitude. And rather than despair at inevitable doom for the world, they would have ambition to be a part of the story of human progress, to pursue our best opportunities and seek solutions to our biggest problems.

The great educator Maria Montessori saw progress as an essential part of the curriculum, for the purpose of moral development. Writing just after the World Wars, she felt acutely the need for human fraternity and unity—and she felt these were evident in the interconnectedness of society and the economy, and in the great discoveries and inventions made by those who came before us. Thus she wrote:

Children should be made to realise that all great achievements in culture and in the arts, all sciences and industries that have brought benefit to humanity, are due to the work of men who often struggled in obscurity and under conditions of great hardship; men driven by a profound passion, by an inner fire, to create with their research, with their work, new benefits not only for the people who lived in their times, but also for those of the future.73

When this was done in classrooms, she reports:

The children frequently asked to see the portraits of these heroes and delighted in relentlessly pursuing the near-miraculous significance of their work once they had a clear idea of the times in which they had lived, the degree of ignorance of their contemporaries with regard to their research and studies, and the dearth of means at their disposal.

A near-religious respect grew within them for these men who lived in such distant times and places, who belonged to such a diversity of social classes; in this way, they managed to thoroughly grasp, almost concretely, the universal unity for good achieved by the work of men the world over.

In another essay, she wrote:

The child will have the greater pleasure in all subjects, and find them easier to learn, if he were led to realize how these subjects first came to be studied and who studied them. We write and read, and the child can be taught who invented writing and the instruments wherewith we write, how printing came and books became so numerous. Every achievement has come by the sacrifice of someone now dead. Every map speaks eloquently of the work of explorers and pioneers, who underwent hardships and trials to find new places, rivers and lakes, and to make the world greater and richer for our dwelling.74

Art and entertainment, too, provide moral education. We should celebrate the work of scientists, inventors and founders in story and song. There should be far more major Hollywood biopics of these figures. Where is the life story of Norman Borlaug, and why isn’t he a household name? Why hasn’t there been a movie about Pasteur since 1936, in black and white? And when these stories are told, they too often focus on the “human drama”—Marie Curie’s love life, or Edison’s business feuds—that is easy to write but tells us nothing about their accomplishments.75 These films should highlight instead the drama of discovery and invention. There is conflict, suspense, and adventure there—if only more screenwriters would take an interest in it and learn how to make it accessible and engaging on the screen.

Science fiction, too, can help us visualize a future that we want to live in and are inspired to build. J. Storrs Hall writes:

Science fiction has a long and valuable history of providing us with visions of a better world. Verne, Wells, Burroughs, Gernsback—even Bellamy—much less Campbell, Doc Smith, van Vogt, Heinlein, Asimov, Garrett, Piper, Niven, and Pournelle, provided people with places and lives they could imagine and aspire to create. Science fiction since the Sixties has signally failed in that regard; we have been fed, by and large, a diet of Chicken Little soup in a pot of message, ladled out over leg of Frankenstein.76

An objection I often hear is: “You can’t have a story where everyone is happy and everything is perfect! Stories need conflict!” Of course they do—but there are many ways to write a compelling, exciting story without implying that technology makes the world worse or that its main feature is doom. You can tell a man vs. nature story, as in The Martian or Seveneves. You can tell a story of heroic builders vs. the villains who want to stop them, whether they are radical anti-human environmentalists like Ra’s al Ghul from DC Comics, or religious fanatics like the ones in Contact. You can tell a classic human story in a futuristic setting: a detective drama like The Quantum Thief or a political epic like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. You can have technology as both doom and savior: robots fighting robots, or a genetically engineered cure for a lab-leaked pandemic. You can create conflict over good vs. evil uses of technology: maybe there is a biotechnology that could cure disease and aging, but the villains want to steal it for a bioweapon. You can explore the social implications of technology, from the ethics of embryo selection (Gattaca) to human relationships with AI (Her). The future is not a bland, flawless utopia—it’s a dynamic “protopia,” with plenty of room for conflict and intrigue, heroes and villains.77

Music, too, can convey the grandeur of progress—such as the soundtracks for the Civilization game series by composer Christopher Tin. His album To Shiver the Sky glorifies flight and space travel, beginning with the words of da Vinci and ending with JFK’s call to the Moon, all set to choral and operatic music. His song “Live Gloriously,” written for Civilization VII, echoes “the game’s core narrative concept: that history is a global story of human achievement, and that the lessons of the past can still inspire our lives in the present.”78

Culture is also mediated by journalism and media. Reporters today can’t even cover medical advances without including concerns from hand-wringing “experts.” A NYT story on Loyal, a startup making longevity drugs for dogs, quotes a bioethicist wondering whether “it is in their best interest to live a little bit longer when there’s some risk to taking these drugs”; the story points out: “The dogs themselves cannot give consent.”79 “We have a media defined by cynicism,” says Arena Magazine in a manifesto titled “The New Needs Friends.” Arena defines itself as the opposite: a media company that is “on the side of the future and the people building it.”80 We need more journalism like this, or Freethink, or Ashlee Vance’s Core Memory, that covers technology news straightforwardly—not with uncritical boosterism, but without problematizing every new development.

We need more opinion writers who appreciate progress and are focused on how we get more of it—such as Derek Thompson, Ezra Klein, Jerusalem Demsas, Matt Yglesias, or Noah Smith (Klein is at the NYT; the rest are independent, but were formerly at places like The Atlantic, Bloomberg, and Vox). We need more data journalists with this focus too, such as John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times. We need entire magazines devoted to progress, like the excellent Works in Progress magazine, or the biology-focused Asimov Press.

We need more popularizations of the history of progress, like the American Innovations podcast from Steven Johnson, or his popular books such as The Ghost Map or How We Got to Now. We need more social media personalities to lend their weight to progress, like Isabelle Boemeke, a fashion model with over 50,000 Instagram followers who uses her platform to promote the value of nuclear energy.81

The zeitgeist has a lot of inertia. But with slow, steady pressure from multiple directions—from the classroom to the box office to the social feed—it can be turned.

“Society’s course will be changed only by a change in ideas,” Hayek is reported to have said. “First you must reach the intellectuals, the teachers and writers, with reasoned argument. It will be their influence on society which will prevail, and the politicians will follow.” Sounding the same note, Keynes famously wrote that “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.” Though archrivals in economics and policy, these two men agreed: ideas are upstream of politics. The progress movement, then, is a movement of ideas.

Ideas drive the world from two directions: top-down, by directly influencing a small set of leaders in each field, and bottom-up, by indirectly influencing popular opinion. Only a small minority of the population reads intellectual books or essays, or pays attention to long-form blogs and podcasts—but among the few who do are those who run the world. Ideas in these formats can raise the ambitions of scientists, engineers and founders; can direct the resources of VCs and philanthropists; can inform the policy goals of think tanks and Congressmen. Reaching this minority has outsized influence. But ideas also directly influence those who write textbooks for schools, screenplays for Hollywood, and articles for newspapers and magazines—which in turn influence the public at large, even the vast majority who don’t read books. Public opinion creates headwinds or tailwinds for any project, and not only in politics; if those winds are strong enough, they can make a project impossible, or inevitable. And it is from the public that the next generation of leaders is recruited—among the young are our best chances to inspire ambitious scientists, inventors, founders, funders, and policy reformers. This is the bottom-up influence.

The foundation of any intellectual movement, then, is a body of ideas, expressed primarily in long-form writing—essays, reports, white papers, and especially books. There is already a small progress canon of books, including Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, Klein and Thompson’s Abundance, and Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car? But we need far more. We need books on history, telling the story of progress, as it has never adequately been told and desperately deserves to be. We need books on philosophy, like this one, honing our conception of progress: its nature, definition, and measurement; its benefits, costs, and risks; its root causes and future prospects. We need books about solutions to our biggest challenges: AI safety, media addiction, obesity, climate, technological unemployment. We need books that paint visions of the future, the prospects for longevity or nanotech or space or energy. Think of how many books you would find in any library on environmental studies, religious studies, or gender studies—we need at least as many on progress studies.

Sensing this need back in 2017, I started what was then a tiny blog called The Roots of Progress. In 2019, an article in The Atlantic by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen coined the term “progress studies,” which galvanized the formation of a progress community. A few years later, with the community still active and growing, it was clear that some movement-building was needed. Building on the growing audience for my blog, I founded the Roots of Progress Institute, with the mission to build a culture of progress for the 21st century. Our strategy is threefold: lay the intellectual foundation for the movement, in long-form writing; build community around these ideas; and then spread them to the public through education, media and entertainment. You can learn about our programs, including our annual conference and our fellowship for progress writers, at rootsofprogress.org.

In this movement we are joined by many other organizations. There are new think tanks inspired by ideas of progress, including the Institute for Progress, the Abundance Institute, the Good Science Project, and the Inclusive Abundance Initiative. There are also older organizations that have joined the cause, such as the Foresight Institute, the Human Progress project at Cato, the Breakthrough Institute, the Foundation for American Innovation, and the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. Philanthropic foundations have started special funds, such as the $120M Abundance and Growth Fund launched by Open Philanthropy, or the science and technology initiatives of Renaissance Philanthropy.82

There is a role in the progress movement for every individual. If you are a scientist, engineer, or founder: you are already on the front lines of progress! Be ambitious in your work, and take courage and inspiration from the techno-humanist worldview. If you are a VC or philanthropist: make the progress agenda a funding priority. If you are in the humanities, especially history, economics, or philosophy: study progress and incorporate it into your thinking—these fields could benefit from more often adopting the progress lens. If you are an author, journalist, or teacher: communicate ideas of progress, and use this perspective to choose topics and angles on them. If you are a novelist, screenwriter, director, or other storyteller or artist: tell stories of progress, and aim to inspire humanity’s best efforts. If you work in law, regulation, or policy: think about how to remove roadblocks, and about the wisest ways to regulate emerging technologies.

If you are a voter: choose politicians who will support building, economic growth, technology, and science, and weigh in with your representatives when these issues come up. If you are a parent: educate your children about progress, don’t wait for the schools to do it. Tell them stories of discovery and invention, teach them to view industrial civilization with wonder, teach them to have gratitude for the brave souls who went before us and created this amazing world. And no matter who you are: educate yourself, spread the word, and support the efforts that make up this movement any way you can.

To turn the culture around, after the fear and skepticism that marked the end of the 20th century, is a herculean feat. It will require a large-scale cultural movement, on the scale of the environmentalist movement, the neoliberal movement, or the civil rights movement—and like them, it will take a generation to come to fruition.

Such a task may seem daunting. But Francis Bacon inspired generations after him with a vision of useful knowledge leading to practical improvements in human life—and he had only a handful of inventions to point to as examples to prove his case. Today, the case is far stronger: progress is not a theoretical possibility for the future, but the established reality of the past and the living present; its examples are literally all around us. And to communicate our vision, we have not only the printing press, but the internet. If Bacon did it, so can we.

The bold, ambitious future awaits. Let’s go build it.

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

We are creatures not only of flesh and blood, but of mind and spirit. We need more than a full belly, a shirt on one’s back, a roof over one’s head. We need meaning and purpose. We need a goal to strive for, a grand project to contribute to. We need a heroic archetype to look up to and to emulate. In short, we need to know what to do and who to be.

Conventional morality takes us only so far. It may counsel us on prudence and temperance, and help us to avoid temptation and self-destructive behaviors. It may advise us on charity, and help us save lives and relieve suffering. It may encourage us to tolerance, and help us refrain from cruelty or bigotry. These may make us better people, but they are not enough to feed a soul. They do not inspire or invigorate. We seek more.

We have energy. It must be directed. We have indomitable will. It needs a goal. We have fighting spirit. It needs an object. We have aspiration to greatness. It needs a form.

In the past, we glamorized the warrior, fighting bravely for king and country. Today we know that war is not glamorous, it is hell. The fighter is no longer admired, and a more peaceful world has less need of him, anyway. War has not been eliminated, and we still need fighters, but this is not, nor should it be, the main archetype for aspiring heroes today.

Once, we had the frontier. Exploring the unknown, expanding into new territory, taming the wilderness—these were challenges worthy of our best efforts. But the frontier on land was closed more than a century ago, and the frontier of space, after Apollo was canceled, seemed to have closed almost as soon as it had opened. As the meme goes: born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the stars… What are we just in time for? What is the new frontier?

The question is pressing. “The human society of the future desperately needs a frontier,” writes J. Storrs Hall: psychologically and ethically, we need a venue where “a majority of one’s efforts are not in competition with others but directly against nature,” otherwise we devolve into squabbling and status games.1 Similarly, Ross Douthat remarked that the closing of the frontier was a factor in “our era’s anxieties, in the sense of drift and stagnation and uncertainty,” and that the canceling of the Apollo program “coincided with a turning inward in the developed world, a crisis of confidence and an ebb of optimism and a loss of faith in institutions.” Douthat was writing about American “decadence,” by which he means not hedonism or luxury, but, quoting historian Jacques Barzun: “a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance.”2

This restlessness seems to be felt in Silicon Valley. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” lamented an early Facebook employee in 2011.3 “Silicon Valley has lost its way,” says the CEO of Palantir in a recent book: “the current generation of spectacularly talented engineering minds has become unmoored from any sense of national purpose or grander and more meaningful project.”4

Acutely feeling this lack, some propose a “retvrn” to a “traditional” past, to some allegedly lost wisdom of Christianity or of feudal peasants or of ancient Rome. This is a mistake. There are reasons we moved on from the past, and we don’t want to return to a world of constant warfare, or of racial bigotry, or one that deprives women of respect and autonomy. Like Chesterton’s wise reformer who would not tear down a fence until he understood the reason it had been erected in the first place, we should also not be hasty to replace fences without being clear on why they were removed.5 And if we are committed to progress, then we must be seeking to move forwards, not backwards—into an improved future, not a romanticized past.

In Chapter 4 I affirmed the human need for meaning and purpose, and argued that material progress empowers us to seek these non-material ends, but I left it to each individual to define that meaning for themselves. Now I will argue something more: that the idea of progress itself can provide meaning, that it can give us the grand project and the heroic archetypes that we need.

Progress is a grand project for humanity. It is a project with an illustrious past, one that stretches back millions of years—before the pyramids, before agriculture, before our own species; it is the legacy of the first hominin to improve the earliest stone tools. Improving upon tradition is our oldest tradition. And it is a project with a glorious future, one that extends as far in time and space as we can imagine, to the farthest reachable galaxies, on through the eons until we use up the last joule of free energy in the universe.

It is a project that produces marvelous artifacts, to inspire awe and wonder: from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Hoover Dam to the Millau Viaduct, from the sight of Starship lifting off into space to the majesty of a container ship heading into port, from the elegance of a jet turbine blade made from a single crystal of metal to the symmetrical geometry of the Large Hadron Collider. And it produces intellectual artifacts, too, that can inspire aesthetic sentiment: both Boltzmann and Dirac have physics equations on their memorial stones.6

It is a project for all of humanity. It does not seek to establish the supremacy of one nation or race, nor is it the exclusive property of one people. It is a project that all can contribute to and all benefit from. It is a cooperation much more than it is a competition, a project that gets better the bigger the team—thanks to the special nature of ideas, which can be shared infinitely without diminishment. Indeed, because of the expanding frontier of ideas, and the diminishing returns as we pluck the low-hanging fruit, it is a project that demands an ever-expanding team.7

It is a project that is justified, not by a faith or tradition that is meaningful only to one people, but by human nature, which requires an appeal only to reason and common sense. It is based on the needs of human life and well-being. And unlike conquest, it is purely constructive—as was said about James Watt’s achievements, it sheds no blood and makes no widows nor orphans.8

Unlike projects with humble aims such as the mere alleviation of suffering, it has an ambitious aim: to build an amazing world, to create marvels and wonders, to make magic and fantasy come true. To realize every dream of our ancestors: the never-empty cornucopia of food, light conjured from the darkness, immunity from disease, flight, creating life, exploring the stars, immortality. It is reaching for the full exercise of human capabilities and the full realization of our potential. The alleviation of suffering may speak to our compassion or pity, but to build an amazing future speaks to our sense of wonder, excitement, adventure, and romance.

If this then is humanity’s grand quest, who does it call for? The heroes of progress are the scientist, the inventor, and the founder.

These three play different roles: the scientist discovers new knowledge, the inventor creates new technology, the founder establishes a new business. But they have this in common: their challenge is to tackle Knightian uncertainty. They face a field of unknown unknowns, and no one can calculate the probability or predict the timing of their success. They stand alone against critics who say they’re idiotic or deluded, and they manifest unshakeable confidence that they will succeed, despite having no map of the path to their destination.

These roles deserve to be lionized. They should be glamorized as heroic archetypes. Children should look up to them and pretend to be them. Young adults should read their biographies and hang posters of them on the wall. Not because every individual scientist, inventor or founder is a hero—many are not—but because of the heroic potential in their work.

For one, it is the work that moves humanity forward. The scientist who discovers a material or a virus, the engineer who turns that into an engine or a cure, the founder who makes that available to the world, affordably, through a new business—those feats improve lives more than any charity.

But also, the work of science, engineering and business demands virtue. Ayn Rand wrote that all productive work “is the road of man’s unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character.”9 To push forward the frontiers of science, technology and industry, in particular, requires a certain energy, an ambition to not just coast doing comfortable work, but to do something new and important, even though that will be far more difficult. It requires the vision to see what to strive for, when no one else can. It requires independence of mind, to find your own vision instead of following the herd. It requires the courage to devote yourself to such an effort, with no guarantee that you will succeed and with no one believing in you but yourself. It requires the strict rationality and ruthless honesty to admit to yourself what is working and what is not, and which of your cherished ideas you must discard. It requires focus and dedication over many years of effort. It requires persistence and resilience in the face of setbacks. “All material production,” Rand concluded, “is an achievement of the spirit.”10

You in these fields should see your work imbued with moral meaning. You are engaged in a noble quest, continuing the grand project to better the human condition—no matter whether you are curing cancer or building virtual reality games—and your calling has never gotten its due.

Your work is lonely, difficult and uncertain—and you will get little support from society. Until you succeed, they will ignore and ridicule you. Once you succeed, they will fight and denounce you. And when you win, someone will try to steal the credit.

You will need to seek courage in difficult times. Seek it in the struggles and eventual triumphs of the great creators, from Archimedes to Pasteur to Steve Jobs. Seek it in the epic of human progress. Seek it in the moral meaning of your work.

All of this is not to praise your choices, but to inspire your efforts. This quest demands the best you have to offer: the best of your intellect, your conscience, and your spirit. You must remember your responsibility: to see that technology is used for good, to ensure that it is developed and deployed safely, to refuse to deliver it into the wrong hands. But if you show that courage and that integrity—then you may one day take your place among our greatest heroes.

Next: Chapter 11, The Progress Agenda

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

In part 1 of this chapter, we saw the deep belief in progress that existed in the late 19th century and in some forms through the mid-20th. What happened to that spirit?

The first thing we should realize is that this belief in progress was historically unique. In most places and times before the modern West, the concept of progress did not exist.1

Many ancient cultures viewed history as a cyclical pattern of ups and downs, or even as a story of decline: the past as a golden age, from which we have fallen. Europeans in the Middle Ages, looking upon the ruins of coliseums, aqueducts, and pyramids, understandably thought that their ancient ancestors must have been the greatest people ever to have lived. As they rediscovered ancient texts, some thought that those ancestors must have possessed all knowledge of consequence as well. They—the “moderns”—thought themselves unable to surpass those achievements or that learning. Economic historian Joel Mokyr, taking a phrase from historian Carl Becker, calls this “ancestor worship,” and it is the antithesis of the idea of progress.2

Ancestor worship in Europe, Mokyr says, began to weaken around the end of the 1400s, with the voyages of discovery. An entire continent was discovered that had never been mentioned in the classic texts: apparently the ancients had not possessed all knowledge of consequence. Those ancestors also didn’t know about the compass, gunpowder, or the printing press.3

Francis Bacon, for one, took inspiration from this: in Novum Organum, he wrote that “noble inventions may be lying at our very feet”—that is, if these possibilities lay undiscovered for so long, what else might be out there, just waiting to be found?4 From these early examples, Bacon and his contemporaries extrapolated out a vision of a scientific and industrial revolution—a vision that eventually came true, although its realization took centuries. He counseled courage, saying that “by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science” is “that men despair and think things impossible.”5

If by the late 1600s there was any doubt about the ancients vs. the moderns, Isaac Newton laid it to rest. His theory of universal gravitation and explanation of the solar system were so clearly superior to anything that had been offered before that there was no question left: the moderns had surpassed the ancients. The pattern of history was neither endless cycles nor a long decline: it was an upward trend. Progress was possible.6

In the era that followed, an unbridled optimism was expressed by leading intellectuals, such as the French Enlightenment thinker Nicolas de Condorcet. In 1794, he wrote a Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, in which he forecast virtually unlimited progress in every dimension—not only in science and technology, but in morality and society. He spoke of the equality of the sexes, and peace among nations. And he believed that all forms of progress went together, saying that prosperity naturally disposes people to “humanity, benevolence, and justice,” and that “nature has connected, by a chain which cannot be broken, truth, happiness, and virtue.”7

Amazingly, he wrote these words while hiding out from the French revolutionary government, which was hunting him down to execute him because he had dared to criticize the Constitution of 1793. Unfortunately, he could not hide out forever: he was captured, and soon died in jail.8 Evidently the moral perfection of mankind was slow in coming.

But technological progress was racing ahead. After the railroad, the telephone, and the light bulb, progress was no longer a possibility for philosophers to theorize about, but a reality being brought daily into the homes and lives of ordinary people. The flowering of the industrial age, and the fruit it bore for the average person, engendered the popular belief in progress that we have just seen. At the end of the 19th century, it seemed as if the optimism of the Enlightenment had been justified after all.

But, flush with the grand success of reason and science to improve human life, society stumbled into some critical errors. These errors would create a crisis of optimism, one that posed a mortal challenge to the idea of progress.

One of those errors arose out of an excess of enthusiasm for “scientific management,” the imposition of order and system by technical managers. This approach had achieved great success in the Ford assembly line and production system, and was championed by Frederick Taylor in his popular 1911 book Principles of Scientific Management. But Taylor and others decided that scientific management should be applied to everything—not just to factories, but to all of society. Taylor wrote that its principles “can be applied with equal force to all social activities” including the management of “our churches, our philanthropic institutions, our universities, and our government departments.” The Progressive party that Teddy Roosevelt ran under in 1912, writes historian Thomas Hughes, “was not content that experts bring order, control, system, and efficiency only to resources and work; they wanted social scientists—also ‘scientific experts—to direct their reforming zeal to city, state, and federal government.’” Even the conservationist movement of the time “advocated that decisions about conservation be made scientifically by experts. … This approach expressed a technological spirit spread by engineers, professional managers, and appliers of science, a belief that there was one best way.”9

This belief in the “one best way,” imposed top-down by “scientific management,” was called “high modernism” by James C. Scott.10 I will call it “technocracy”: rule by a technical elite.

The economist Thorstein Veblen took technocracy to the extreme: “the entire industrial system of the country,” he said, should be controlled by “industrial experts, skilled technologists, who may be called ‘production engineers.’” Veblen was widely read, he was covered in Vanity Fair, and for a short time around 1920 he became “required reading among intellectuals.”11 H. L. Mencken wrote, in a mocking essay, that there had been “Veblenists, Veblen clubs, Veblen remedies for all the sorrows of the world.”12 In the 1930s, writes Charles Mann, there was “a crusading effort to establish a government of all-knowing, hyper-logical engineers and scientists,” inspired in part by Veblen. “Rather than allowing economies to dance to the senseless, febrile beat of supply and demand, Technocrats wanted to organize them on the basis of a quantity controlled by the eternal laws of physics: energy. … The leader of the system, the Great Engineer, would oversee a new nation, the North American Technate, a merger of North America, Central America, Greenland, and the northern bits of South America.” The organization pushing this program was called Technocracy, Inc.13

The new technology of electrical power was seen by politicians and social theorists as a chance to remake industrial society—and to do it right this time. They looked at the industrial areas of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio and “blamed the growth of these congested, grim, and grimy regions on the lack of vision and effective leadership among social reformers during the first Industrial Revolution.” They “believed in the beneficial potential of modern technology,” but only “if it were kept under the control of planning and reforming social scientists supported by enlightened civic leaders rather than under the aegis of profit-motivated capitalists and industrialists.”14 Their visions were enacted in the 1930s under FDR and the New Deal, most notably in the Tennessee Valley Authority program to provide hydroelectric power from the Tennessee River.15

In the Soviet Union, the notion of centralized, top-down control reached a fuller expression in totalitarian communism. The Soviets were great fans of Fordism and Taylorism, and studied their works. The Communist Party translated and published Taylor’s book on scientific management; Ford’s autobiography went through at least four printings in the Soviet Union, and “was read with a zeal usually reserved for the study of Lenin.”16 In the 1920s, Stalin even named “American efficiency” as a characteristic feature of Leninism, praising it as an “indomitable force … without which serious constructive work is inconceivable.”17 The Soviets, naturally, sought to extract this industrial muscle from the individualism and capitalism of America and place it on a socialist foundation—which would not only, they believed, better benefit workers, but would be more efficient as well. (Of course, they were wrong: Communism never even came close to overtaking capitalism; indeed, millions died in famines, and the USSR eventually collapsed.)

A second grave mistake of the late 19th and very early 20th century was assuming that social progress would go hand-in-hand with material progress; that these would move almost in lockstep.

Condorcet had demonstrated an extreme commitment to optimism when he asserted, during the Reign of Terror, an unbreakable connection between truth and virtue. It was more plausible, however, to believe this in 1910. There had been four decades of relative peace since the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.18 Slavery had been ended in the West; democratic republics and representative government were gradually replacing monarchy.19

Further, the expansion of trade was increasing peaceful ties between nations, and new inventions such as the telegraph were connecting far-flung peoples. The growth of communication networks in particular was seen as a powerful force for international unity, understanding, and brotherhood. One contemporary observer wrote that the telegraph “joins the sundered hemispheres. It unites distant nations, making them feel that they are members of one great family.” An ocean cable is “a living, fleshy bond between severed portions of the human family, along which pulses of love and tenderness will run backward and forward forever.” Another said that the electric spark of the telegraph “is the true Promethean fire which is to kindle human hearts. Men then will learn that they are brethren, and that it is not less their interest than their duty to cultivate goodwill and peace throughout the earth.’’20

Progress, up through this era, was conceived of as a unity: material and social progress were advancing together, driven by fundamental causes. And if the scientific and technological progress prophesied by Bacon had finally arrived, perhaps the moral and social progress prophesied by Condorcet would soon come as well.

Some thinkers saw progress as not just possible but inevitable, the product of cosmic forces or divine will.21 Herbert Spencer saw moral progress as a form of natural evolution, writing in 1851 that “the ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain … Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity … surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear.”22 H. G. Wells also saw progress as driven by impersonal forces, and said in 1902 that (absent some asteroid impact or fatal pandemic): “Everything seems pointing to the belief that we are entering upon a progress that will go on, with an ever-widening and ever more confident stride, forever.”23

In particular, many at the time foresaw the end of war. A traditional, pessimistic view, in contrast, had held that war was inevitable, because all nations were driven to territorial expansion and profited by conquest. Norman Angell, in his 1910 book The Great Illusion, argued that this was no longer true in an industrialized society: when wealth is based on credit or contract, it can either be left to its owners or be destroyed, but it cannot be seized; and even enforcing morals or social institutions on a conquered people was impossible in the world of the printing press. Angell didn’t claim that the end of war was at hand, but by arguing that “[t]he warlike nations do not inherit the earth,” he showed how lasting peace was possible.24

Others who were even more optimistic dared to hope that world peace could in fact be achieved soon. Stanford president David Starr Jordan was reported to have said: “Future war is impossible because the nations cannot afford it.”25 Alfred Nobel, in 1893, wrote: “It could and should soon come to pass that all states pledge themselves collectively to attack an aggressor. That would make war impossible.”26 Andrew Carnegie, dedicating a new Peace Palace at the Hague in 1913, said that the end of war was “as certain to come, and come soon, as day follows night,”27 and as late as January 1914, he was “strong in the faith that International Peace is soon to prevail.”28

They were wrong.

The World Wars of the 20th century violently shattered those naive illusions. Technology and economic growth had not led to an end to war: they had made war all the more horrible and deadly. They had given us the machine gun, chemical weapons, and the atomic bomb—the most destructive weapon the world had ever seen, a product of modern science, technology, and industrial capacity.

Technology also wrought “creative destruction” in the economy, rendering entire professions obsolete, from blacksmiths to lamplighters. As early as the 1600s and continuing into the 1800s, angry groups of workers such as the Luddites smashed and burned machinery in protest.29 Further, technology and industry seemed to be concentrating wealth and power into a new elite: Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie. A country that just a few generations ago had fought a war to throw off monarchical rule was suspicious of what looked to many like a new aristocracy—especially as many city-dwellers were still living in cramped tenements, without even toilets or clean water. When the Great Depression hit, many decided that the management of the economy could no longer be trusted to these capitalists. Indeed, in the 1930s, there was a widespread belief that if the economy were run efficiently, the work week could be reduced to around 15 hours; economist Stuart Chase (who coined the term “New Deal”) claimed that the only thing preventing this was the “waste” produced by capitalism.30

Technology and industry also created new risks to health and safety. Large factories and plants, with heavy, powered machinery and high-temperature furnaces, led to an increasing scale of accidents; workers and their families were the ones who suffered.31 Other factories used chemicals that caused long-term health problems, such as necrosis of the jaw from the phosphorus used in matches.32 There were no standards for the handling of food and drink: meat packing plants were filthy, and milk was transported warm in open containers, literal breeding grounds for disease.33 There were no testing or safety standards for drugs, either, or even enforcement of truth in labeling, and patients suffered or died for it.34 Scientific discoveries sometimes held hidden dangers: x-rays were initially thought harmless, and were used at parties and carnivals as amusements; later they were found to cause radiation burns and sickness and even cancer.35

The change in sentiment after WW1 is stark. In a 1923 essay “Daedalus: or, Science and the Future,” biologist J. B. S. Haldane asked: “Has mankind released from the womb of matter a Demogorgon which is already beginning to turn against him, and may at any moment hurl him into the bottomless void?”36 And by 1935, historian Carl Becker was able to assert that “the fact of progress is disputed and the doctrine discredited,” and ask: “What, if anything, may be said on behalf of the human race? May we still, in whatever different fashion, believe in the progress of mankind?”37

Much of the rest of the 20th century can be understood as a response to this crisis. To be precise, two waves of responses.

The first response, in the mid-20th century, was to lean harder into technocracy. People still believed in progress—but felt it could no longer be trusted to the chaos of democracy and free markets. It had to be managed by a central authority.

In the 1920s, influential journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann wrote a number of books arguing that democracy was a “false ideal,” at least if it required an “omnicompetent, sovereign citizen” who was informed on and could judge all issues. “The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen.”38 And public opinion is too easily manipulated by the press and by political leaders, a process he called the “manufacture of consent.”39 Thus: “We must abandon the notion that the people govern … people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.”40 “Executive action is not for the public,” he posited, nor are the merits of specific questions; the public’s only role is to align itself behind one leader or another.41 Lippmann was part of a school of “democratic realists,” who believed, according to one contemporary scholar, that democracy “must be redefined as rule for the people but not by the people. Rule would be by informed and responsible ‘men of action.’”42

In the US, progress in the mid-20th century often took the form of large federal projects: the work programs of the New Deal, the industrial mobilization for WW2, the interstate highway system, the Apollo program. The success of military research during WW2 led to a massive ramp-up in federal funding for science starting in the 1950s; today large central funders like the NIH dominate funding for basic research.43 Builders like Robert Moses in New York were popular because they could figuratively and literally bulldoze through opposition. And when the public wept for joy at the polio vaccine in 1955, it was an expression not only of a belief in science and technology, but of trust in public health authorities and the scientific establishment.

The technocracy also tried to guard against the hazards of progress through new regulatory agencies and commissions that would exercise top-down oversight, from the FDA (1906) to the SEC (1934) to the FAA (1958).44 The Federal Register, an official publication of rules and regulations, ran 2,620 pages when it was first published in 1936, and had grown to over ten times that size by 1972.45

All of this made sense to the generation immediately after the wars, who still believed in progress. Many of the leaders of that era, including FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower, were born in the 19th century and came of age in the pre-war culture of optimism. But the generation that came next was raised in an atmosphere of fear and soul-searching, in a culture that was questioning the very idea of progress—and they decided to learn a very different lesson.

Progress had always had its critics. As early as 1750, Rousseau had declared that “the progress of the sciences and the arts has added nothing to our true happiness,” adding that “our souls have become corrupted to the extent that our sciences and our arts have advanced towards perfection” and that “luxury, dissolution, and slavery have in every age been the punishment for the arrogant efforts we have made in order to emerge from the happy ignorance where Eternal Wisdom had placed us.”46

Rousseau was only one of the earliest in a long line of such critics, stretching across centuries. Thomas Carlyle, in the mid-1800s, said that while the English had become wealthier, they were not happier, wiser, or better.47 He lamented the philosophic materialism of his age, the decline of the religious and the spiritual, complaining: “Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand.”48 He was criticizing not just literal machines but all of scientific and rational culture. Thoreau, writing around the same time, said that modern improvements were “an illusion” and that inventions were “pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things”; he warned that “men have become the tools of their tools.” He famously promoted a minimalist lifestyle of acquiring only the bare necessities, in order to achieve true freedom.49 Tolstoy asserted that “progress has not so far improved, but it has rather rendered worse, the position of the majority, that is to say, of the workingman”: it had given him railways and cheap cloth, but it has also “brought his condition very near to slavery”; it had created art, music, and theater, but left these inaccessible to him. He thus saw all of the professions of science, art, engineering, and medicine as a fraud: claiming that they have “aided in the forward march of mankind,” he wrote, is like claiming that “an unskilled banging of oars … is assisting the movement of the ship.”50 Authors and poets added their criticism, from Mary Shelley’s vision of science creating hideous monsters, to Wordsworth’s warnings that industry is a “false utilitarian lure” and that in pursuing science, “we murder to dissect.”51

Through the 19th and early 20th century, voices like these had been in the background; if the intellectuals knew them, the common man could barely hear them above the sound of the parades and the fireworks for new bridges and inventions. One analysis of word frequencies in English, French, and German books shows that in the early 1600s, words related to progress and the future were about as common as words related to caution, worry, and risk; in the late 1800s, the latter themes had not increased, but themes of progress and the future were four times more common.52

The problems of the 20th century, however, gave critics of progress a new opportunity to come to the fore. The second response to the crisis of optimism, then, was a growing strain of anti-establishment thinking that criticized both the techno-industrial capitalism that had created material progress and the supposedly enlightened technocratic leaders who claimed to be protecting us from the problems of progress.

Those leaders had not solved the problem of war. War was still around, and it had become increasingly mechanized and technical. Philosopher John McDermott, writing in 1969, saw the Vietnam bombing program as the perfect example of the meaning and results of technology, a program “able to suppress the humanity of its rank-and-file and to commit genocide as a by-product of its rationality.” Advanced management techniques and industrial capital, including “enormous stocks of rockets, bombs, shells and bullets, in addition to tens of thousands of technical specialists; pilots, bombardiers, navigators, radar operators, computer programmers, accountants, engineers, electronic and mechanical technicians,” all came together so that “the farmers may be bombed according to the most advanced statistical models.”53 Lewis Mumford stressed the mutual reinforcement of industry and war: not only do technology and industry make war more destructive; war also motivates technological advances and industrial economies of scale: “war has been perhaps the chief propagator of the machine.”54

Nor had technocratic leaders taken care of the environment. Pollution and health hazards were still with us, and new hazards were being created all the time. Resources seemed to be dwindling—recall the fears of overpopulation and the “limits to growth” discussed in Chapter 7. In the early 20th century, environmental issues had been addressed with a technocratic conservationist mindset that sought to wisely manage resources for human purposes: in 1913, “preservationist” John Muir, who wanted to protect nature for its own sake, lost the fight against Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite to conservationist Gifford Pinchot.55 But by mid-century, many more people believed in the intrinsic value of nature. Worries about pollution, health, and resources had melded into a general concern about “the environment,” a “mother nature” to be honored and obeyed.56 Stewart Brand says that the environmental movement has been driven by both romanticism and science;57 in the 20th century, the balance of power in the movement tipped to the romantics.

Further, the “scientific management” of the technocrats had become an oppressive, even authoritarian regime that robbed individuals and local communities of autonomy. As early as the 1910s, factory workers were affronted by Taylorism, which viewed them as simply parts of a machine. Taylor explicitly prioritized the system over the individual: “In the past, the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.” Workers protested, calling his time-and-motion studies “humiliating” and “un-American.” Samuel Gompers, the famous labor leader, once lambasted scientific management in a speech: “So, there you are, wage-workers in general, mere machines—considered industrially, of course. Hence, why should you not be standardized and your motion-power brought up to the highest possible perfection in all respects, including speeds? … Science would thus get the most out of you before you are sent to the junkpile.”

As anti-establishment thinking grew, it turned a skeptical eye on technocratic projects. Robert Moses, hero of New York, was criticized by Jane Jacobs and Robert Caro for overriding local control and the will of communities.58 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is remembered for warning of the dangers of pesticides such as DDT, but she was also criticizing the government programs that sprayed pesticides from airplanes on wide regions, even against local objections—literal top-down control.59

At the same time, the philosophers of the counterculture bemoaned the loss of what they called “freedom.” Herbert Marcuse “argued that the systems of production in modern capitalist and socialist societies repress the spirits and constrain the freedom of individuals”; Jacques Ellul “suggested that … the price we pay for a cornucopia of goods and services is slavery.” Charles Reich, in The Greening of America, wrote: “What we have is technology, organization, and administration out of control, running for their own sake. … And we have turned over to this system the control and direction of everything—the natural environment, our minds, our lives.”60

In identifying its antagonist, the counterculture did not distinguish between science, technology, industry, corporations, government, media, and universities—those institutions were all complicit together. Lewis Mumford called it “the megamachine,” saying that “to become the lords and possessors of nature was the ambition that secretly united the conquistador, the merchant adventurer and banker, the industrialist, and the scientist, radically different though their vocations and their purposes might seem.” (And in a perfect expression of fatalism and defeatism, Mumford described society using “the metaphor of an automobile, filled with passengers and without a steering wheel, rushing downhill toward an abyss.”)61

Technocracy had bundled progress and authoritarian control, and the counterculture opposed both, as a package. If the technocracy claimed that its authority was necessary to make progress, the counterculture rebelled against authority, and rebelled equally against progress. Ellul lamented the kinds of celebrations of progress common in the 19th century, writing that Sputniks “scarcely merit enthusiastic delirium,” and that “it is a matter of no real importance whether man succeeds in reaching the moon, or curing disease with antibiotics, or upping steel production. The search for truth and freedom are the higher goals….” He did not mean political freedom, but freedom from the forces of technology.62

Not all writers of the era rejected technology as such. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog envisioned self-sustaining communities using small-scale “appropriate technology,” minimizing their dependence on large-scale infrastructure and systems. Energy policy writer Amory Lovins advocated turning away from the “hard path” of large, centralized power plants using fossil fuels and nuclear to serve a wide-area grid, and towards a “soft path” of small, decentralized generation from “sustainable” sources like wind and solar.63 But others embraced a more romantic view of nature and a more biocentric ethics. The “deep ecology” movement “freely criticizes so-called advanced technology and concepts of ‘progress,’” wrote philosopher Arne Naess. “The destruction now going on will not be cured by a technological fix.”64

Seeds of this thinking appear as early as the 1930s and ‘40s, in authors such as William Vogt and Lewis Mumford. By the 1960s, the counterculture was a major social force—but the US was still led by technocrats. But by the early 1970s, the credibility of technocracy had suffered an accumulation of blows, including the Watergate scandal, the oil crisis, and the growing opposition to the Vietnam War. By the mid-1970s, many people had decided that our leaders were unfit to govern, both practically and morally: they could not handle affairs either at home or abroad, and they were plagued by scandal. Trust in government, which polled at 77% in 1964, had fallen to 36% a decade later.65 Belief in progress, too, began to plummet: the same textual analysis showing the rise in themes of progress and the future before the mid-20th century shows a 25% drop in those words in recent decades, while at the same time themes of caution, worry and risk have doubled:66

Skepticism of technocracy and of progress was soon embodied in regulation and activism. The technocracy had created federal agencies in the name of health and safety; the growing anti-establishment sentiment saw them as ineffective or corrupt, believing, in the words of one historian, that “those agencies were no longer representing the public interest and that citizen groups needed to force the government agencies to do the right thing.”67 Ralph Nader pioneered a strategy of “public interest law,” and he and his allies helped to create a “vetocracy” that empowered activists to slow, obstruct, and kill projects they saw as harmful.68 The motivation was explicit: a 1971 court ruling, enforcing the new National Environmental Policy Act against a proposed nuclear plant, stated that the recently enacted laws “attest to the commitment of the Government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material ‘progress.’”69

And so we end up at today, and the situation I described in the introduction: where The Atlantic asks whether progress is good for humanity, and serious historians call agriculture a “mistake” or say that the idea of progress has been “refuted”; where the public believes that energy usage is “shameful,” and young people believe that “humanity is doomed”; where TFP growth has fallen by almost a factor of four, and our most prosperous states struggle to build even popular projects such as solar power or mass transit; where our planes fly slower and our rockets soar lower than they did over 50 years ago.

The 19th-century philosophy of progress was naive, perhaps hopelessly so. But the 20th century left us with something worse: fatalism, defeatism, and a hollowed-out vision of the future.

We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. One that corrects the errors of the 20th: the naive optimism of the pre-war era, the attempt to achieve security through authoritarian control, the wholesale rejection of progress by the counterculture.

Techno-humanism is that philosophy. It reaffirms that progress is real, important, and good; that we have agency to solve problems and to shape our destiny. It paints an inspiring vision of the future: one where we cure disease and aging, expand our knowledge and abilities using AI, harness massive amounts of energy, and expand to the stars.

At the same time, it acknowledges that progress comes with costs and risks—pollution, health hazards, economic upheaval—and that moral progress does not automatically come with technology, which can be used to enable empire, wars of conquest, and totalitarian oppression. We must be solutionists, rather than complacent optimists or defeatist pessimists, about these problems.

In short, techno-humanism combines a deep belief in the power of science, technology, and industry together with a commitment to use those for the advancement of human well-being.

Progress is not automatic or inevitable. It does not unfold according to a divine plan or cosmic will. It requires choice and effort. Above all, progress requires that we believe in it. Techno-humanism is the foundation for restoring that belief.

Next: Chapter 10, The Grand Project

Parts of this essay were adapted from “We Need a New Philosophy of Progress,” “The Lure of Technocracy,” and “From Technocracy to the Counterculture.”

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

On a fine day late in May, 1883, hundreds of thousands of people gathered along the East River in New York City for a grand celebration.1 Perhaps a hundred thousand came from outside the city: by train, by boat, by wagon from the country. “The streets leading to the river were packed solid with people. … Every available rooftop and window was filled and along the river front there was scarcely a place left to stand.” Ships and boats gathered in the river in “a great, elongated flotilla”; the North Atlantic Squadron of five warships had been called in for the occasion. All the major hotels sold out by midday. President Chester A. Arthur was in attendance, along with then-governor Grover Cleveland, the mayor, and other officials. Many schools let out, federal courts were closed, most businesses were empty, and the floors of several exchanges were closed at noon.

They were not celebrating a war hero, a centennial, or a political inauguration. They were celebrating the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Vendors were hawking bridge buttons, commemorative medals, sheet music about the bridge, and facsimiles in metal, wax, or confection. Decorations were everywhere. “Virtually every single house and building downtown had a flag flying from its rooftop or hung from a window.” Buildings were covered in streamers and bunting; the dome of the courthouse was “gorgeous in its dress of flying colors.” The house of Washington Roebling, the Chief Engineer, “was covered with flags, shields, flowers, and the coat of arms of New York and Brooklyn”; the President would soon be received there. Framed portraits of Roebling hung in store windows. Some of the decorations were elaborate and creative: “A jeweler had made a miniature bridge with gold chain for the cables. A florist had made a bridge eight feet long, complete with bridge trains and boats passing below, all of flowers.” One decoration in City Hall Square depicted the growth of Brooklyn from a small village up to the completion of the bridge, and envisioned that a century in the future (that is, 1983) there would be a hundred bridges spanning the East River.

The ceremony began with a procession from Brooklyn: “The Twenty-third Regiment band in bright-red coats, followed by the Twenty-third Regiment in white helmets and blue coats, followed by a detachment of Fifth Artillery from Fort Hamilton and Marines from the Navy Yard, who in turn were followed by two hundred and some city officials, bridge trustees, and special guests, all in a body, led by the young mayor in a tall silk hat and followed by Mrs. Washington Roebling and her party in carriages.” The entire parade route was lined with crowds and people watching from rooftops. A brass band played and guns boomed from the Navy Yard as the President himself walked onto the bridge from the New York side. Then:

[Brooklyn Mayor] Seth Low made the official greeting for the City of Brooklyn, the Marines presented arms, a signal flag was dropped nearby and instantly there was a crash of a gun from the [warship] Tennessee. Then the whole fleet commenced firing. Steam whistles on every tug, steamboat, ferry, every factory along the river, began to scream. More cannon boomed. Bells rang, people were cheering wildly on every side. The band played “Hail to the Chief” maybe six or seven more times, and as the New York Sun reported, “the climax of fourteen years’ suspense seemed to have been reached, since the President of the United States of America had walked dry shod to Brooklyn from New York.”

Afterwards, more than a thousand guests visited Roebling’s house, including the President, the governor, and the mayors of New York and Brooklyn. Elsewhere, people partied all evening: “Every street on the Heights looked like a carnival. … No traffic was moving anywhere near the river. Uptown New York and the inland sections of Brooklyn were all but deserted. … The Times estimated there were 150,000 people just in the neighborhood of City Hall.” Around 8 p.m., “fourteen tons of fireworks—more than ten thousand pieces—were set off from the bridge”:

It lasted a solid hour. There was not a moment’s letup. One meteoric burst followed another. Rockets went off hundreds at a time and were seen from as far away as Montclair, New Jersey. … Meantime, innumerable gas balloons were being sent aloft. They were fifty feet in circumference and loaded with fireworks and as they swung into the sky, one by one, they scattered balls of colored fire over the river. …

From the middle of the bridge now came great thunderclap reports as zinc balls, fired from mortars, burst five hundred feet up, fairly illuminating the two cities, like sustained lightning.

And finally, at nine, as the display on the bridge ended with one incredible barrage—five hundred rockets fired all at once—every whistle and horn on the river joined in. The rockets “broke into millions of stars and a shower of golden rain which descended upon the bridge and the river.” Bells were rung, gongs were beaten, men and women yelled themselves hoarse, musicians blew themselves red in the face.

Hundreds of thousands of people were watching, and “nobody, in all his days, had ever seen anything like this.” At midnight, the bridge was opened to pedestrians, and thousands of people walked across it. “People poured across the bridge through the entire night and were still coming with the first light in the sky.”

Everyone, we might suppose, loves a party and a spectacle. But this was something more. The bridge had great spiritual and moral meaning. According to the speakers that day:

The bridge was a “wonder of Science,” an “astounding exhibition of the power of man to change the face of nature.” It was a monument to “enterprise, skill, faith, endurance.” It was also a monument to “public spirit,” “the moral qualities of the human soul,” and a great, everlasting symbol of “Peace.” The words used most often were “Science,” “Commerce,” and “Courage,” and some of the ideas expressed had the familiar ring of a Fourth of July oration. …

[E]very speaker that afternoon seemed to be saying that the opening of the bridge was a national event, that it was a triumph of human effort, and that it somehow marked a turning point. It was the beginning of something new, and although none of them appeared very sure what was going to be, they were confident it would be an improvement over the past and present. …

The bridge was a vindication, a heroic and monumental end result of modern industrialism, of labor and capital, of democracy, of new “methods, tools and laws of force”—of the nineteenth century.

The Bridge was called the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” It was likened to the pyramids, the Acropolis, and the hanging gardens of Babylon; Roebling was compared to da Vinci. Mayor Low said: “Not one shall see it and not feel prouder to be a man.”

The parade, the fireworks and the speeches were exemplary of the spirit of progress that imbued that era. The mainstream view was that progress was real, important, and good: that science, technology and industry had improved human life and society, and would continue to do so. This belief was strongest before World War 1, but lasted in some form through the 1960s.

This spirit enthusiastically celebrated inventive and industrial achievements. The Erie Canal was completed in 1825, connecting the Great Lakes with the Atlantic. The event, which came to be known as the Wedding of the Waters, was greeted with an “avalanche of lavish entertainments and ceremonies that consumed New York State as it greeted a dream coming true.”2 Celebrations began on October 26 and continued for well over a week as the governor and lieutenant governor rode a boat from Buffalo to New York City, stopping at more than twenty towns for ceremonies featuring guns, lights, parades, and fireworks. An allegorical painting was made showing Hercules resting from his labors in building the canal and Neptune, the god of the sea, astonished to see its locks opening before him. Artillery was lined up all along the route, each gun within hearing distance of the next, sending a signal down the line from Buffalo to Sandy Hook, NJ and back, a round trip which took more than two hours.

The welcoming committee in Albany included the Secretary of State and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The festivities that evening included “an elaborate theater performance of odes, a full drama, and a canal scene with locks, including horses and boats actually passing across the stage.” As they approached Manhattan, they were met by a brand new steamboat “covered with the most elaborate kinds of decorations, flaming torches, and sculptured figures celebrating George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, agriculture, commerce, and even the whole globe of the earth.” (Lafayette himself had visited the canal four months earlier on a tour of the US.) In New York, the governor ceremonially poured a keg of water from Lake Erie into the Atlantic. The parade that followed stretched more than a mile and a half, the largest in America up to that time. Some in attendance had been at an 1815 celebration of the defeat of Napoleon, but this spectacle “so far transcended” that one “as scarcely to admit of a comparison.”

When the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858, the celebrations “bordered on hysteria”:

There were hundred-gun salutes in Boston and New York; flags flew from public buildings; church bells rang. There were fireworks, parades, and special church services. Torch-bearing revelers in New York got so carried away that City Hall was accidentally set on fire and narrowly escaped destruction. …

Tiffany’s, the New York jewelers, bought the remainder of the cable, cut it into four-inch pieces, and sold them as souvenirs. Pieces of spare cable were also made into commemorative umbrella handles, canes, and watch fobs.3

The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, creating the first high-speed transportation link between the East and West coasts, and turning a hazardous six-month journey by ship or wagon into a comfortable seven-day ride by rail. It, too, was called the “Eight Wonder of the World” (evidently there was no official List of Wonders to keep the numbering straight). “The building of the road was compared to the voyage of Columbus or the landing of the Pilgrims. It was said that the road was ‘annihilating distance and almost outrunning time.’ The preacher at the Golden Spike ceremony, Dr. John Todd, called it ‘the greatest work ever attempted.’”4

The western cities, now connected to the great hubs of commerce and culture in the east, were especially jubilant:

At 5 A.M. on Saturday, a Central Pacific train pulled into Sacramento carrying celebrants from Nevada, including firemen and a brass band. … The parade was mammoth. At its height, about 11 A.M. in Sacramento, the time the organizers had been told the joining of the rails would take place, twenty-three of the CP’s locomotives, led by its first, the Governor Stanford, let loose a shriek of whistles that lasted for fifteen minutes.

In San Francisco, the parade was the biggest held to date. At 11 A.M., a fifteen-inch Parrott rifled cannon at Fort Point, guarding the south shore of the Golden Gate, fired a salute. One hundred guns followed. Then fire bells, church bells, clock towers, machine shops, streamers, foundries, the U.S. Mint let go at full blast. The din lasted for an hour.

In both cities, the celebration went on through Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.5

The rest of the country, too, was celebrating the achievement:

Across the nation, bells pealed. Even the venerable Liberty Bell in Philadelphia was rung. Then came the boom of cannons, 220 of them in San Francisco at Fort Point, a hundred in Washington D.C., countless fired off elsewhere. It was said that more cannons were fired in celebration than ever took part in the Battle of Gettysburg. Everywhere there was the shriek of fire whistles, firecrackers and fireworks, singing and prayers in churches. The Tabernacle in Salt Lake City was packed to capacity, with an astonishing seven thousand people. In New Orleans, Richmond, Atlanta, and throughout the old Confederacy, there were celebrations. Chicago had a parade that was its biggest of the century—seven miles long, with tens of thousands of people participating, cheering, watching.6

In 1909, the Wright brothers returned from a tour of Europe, where they had been demonstrating their airplane.7 They were greeted as heroes. Harbor whistles blared and reporters and photographers mobbed them when they arrived in New York; back home in Dayton, Ohio, they were greeted by cannons, factory whistles, cheering crowds, and children waving flags. President Taft invited them to the White House and presented them with gold medals for their “great step in human discovery.”

A “gigantic” two-day celebration was planned in Dayton. A massive parade portrayed the history of the region from the earliest times, culminating in a float titled “All the World Paying Homage to the United States, the Wright Brothers, and the Aeroplane”; the procession stretched two miles.

On Main Street a “Court of Honor” was being created reaching from Third Street to the river, white columns lining both sides of the street and strung with colored lights. … Soldiers, sailors, and the Fire Department would march, bands play. Some 2,500 schoolchildren dressed in red, white, and blue would be arranged as a “living-flag” on the Fair Grounds grandstand and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The Wrights were presented with the keys to the city, given “laudatory speeches in abundance,” and were said to have shaken hands with more than five thousand people, until only “the instinct of self preservation compelled them to cease.”

The Dayton Daily News ran an editorial at the time of the event, stating:

It is a wonderful lesson—this celebration. It comes at an auspicious time. The old world was getting tired, it seemed, and needed help to whip it into action. There was beginning a great deal of talk about man’s no longer having the opportunities he once had of achieving greatness. Too many people were beginning to believe that all of the world’s problems had been solved. … Money was beginning to tell in the affairs of men, and some were wondering whether a poor boy might work for himself a place in commerce or industry or science.

This celebration throws all such idle talk to the winds. It crowns anew the efforts of mankind. It crushes for another hundred years the suspicion that all of the secrets of nature have been solved or that the avenues of hope have been closed to those who would win new worlds.

It was an era in which such optimism was expressed unabashedly and unironically. Years earlier, on January 1, 1901, the New York World ran an editorial stating that they were “optimistic enough to believe that the twentieth century … will meet and overcome all perils and prove to be the best this steadily improving planet has ever seen.”8

It was an era in which inventors such as the Wrights were lionized with medals, parades, statues. Samuel Morse, known as “father of the telegraph,” had “honors heaped upon him by the nations of Europe”:9

He was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by Napoleon III; he was awarded gold medals for scientific merit by Prussia and Austria; he had further medals bestowed upon him by Queen Isabella of Spain, the king of Portugal, the king of Denmark, the king of Italy; and the sultan of Turkey presented him with a diamond-encrusted Order of Glory, the ‘‘Nishan Iftichar.’’ He was also made an honorary member of numerous scientific, artistic, and academic institutions, including the Academy of Industry in Paris, the Historical Institute of France, and, strangely, the Archaeological Society of Belgium.

In 1871, a bronze statue was made of Morse and “unveiled in Central Park amid cheering crowds, speeches, and the strains of a specially composed ‘Morse Telegraph March.’” It had been funded not by one wealthy backer but by donations sent in from telegraph operators all over the country. A “huge banquet was held… followed by numerous adulatory speeches”:

The telegraph and its inventor were praised for uniting the peoples of the world, promoting world peace, and revolutionizing commerce. The telegraph was said to have ‘‘widened the range of human thought’’; it was credited with improving the standard of journalism and literature; it was described as ‘‘the greatest instrument of power over earth which the ages of human history have revealed.’’

Morse was called a ‘‘true genius’’ and ‘‘America’s greatest inventor,’’ and “congratulatory messages flooded in over the telegraph network from all corners of the United States and the rest of the world: from Havana, from Hong Kong, from India, from Singapore, and from Europe.”

Another inventor who was memorialized with a statue was James Watt, famous improver of the steam engine. The meeting in 1824 to start a fund for this monument, according to a contemporary report in The Chemist, was “called by some of the first men of the land”; attendees included the First Lord of the Treasury, the Secretary of State, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, two earls, several MPs, Humphrey Davy, Charles Babbage, and Josiah Wedgwood II.10 The report said the monument would be “a memorial of his stupendous genius, and of our gratitude to that Power which made him the instrument of bestowing almost immeasurable benefits on the whole human race.” The statue was placed in Westminster Abbey with an epitaph that praised Watt for having “enlarged the resources of his Country, increased the power of Man, and rose to an eminent place among the most illustrious followers of science and the real benefactors of the World.” It said that the monument had been raised to show “that mankind have learned to know those who best deserve their gratitude.”11

Who, exactly, best deserved mankind’s gratitude? The Chemist stressed that it was not that common subject of monuments, the warrior, whose victories are destructive ones; rather it was men like Watt:

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. … Henceforth men will perceive the folly of encouraging the shedding of human blood; will recognise the wisdom of uniting glory with usefulness; and will only erect monuments to those in whose labours there is no alloy of misery and mischief.

A similar contrast was made around this time by Samuel Smiles, the author who in this era invented a new genre: industrial biography. In the introduction to one of his books, he quoted a “distinguished living mechanic”—that is, an engineer—as having said to him:

Kings, warriors, and statesmen have heretofore monopolized not only the pages of history, but almost those of biography. Surely some niche ought to be found for the Mechanic, without whose skill and labour society, as it is, could not exist. I do not begrudge destructive heroes their fame, but the constructive ones ought not to be forgotten; and there IS a heroism of skill and toil belonging to the latter class, worthy of as grateful record,—less perilous and romantic, it may be, than that of the other, but not less full of the results of human energy, bravery, and character.12

The pinnacle of the inventor as popular hero was Thomas Edison, “the Wizard of Menlo Park.” In 1879, when he unveiled his electric light, the New York Herald ran “a full-page story headlined EDISON’S LIGHT—THE GREAT INVENTOR’S TRIUMPH IN ELECTRIC ILLUMINATION—A SCRAP OF PAPER—IT MAKES A LIGHT, WITHOUT GAS OR FLAME, CHEAPER THAN OIL—SUCCESS IN A COTTON THREAD.”13

Each subsequent afternoon and evening, flocks of electricity sightseers crowded off specially scheduled Pennsylvania Railroad trains or pulled up in the crudest of farm wagons and the most luxurious of broughams, carriages equipped with coachmen and gleaming pairs. There, as the freezing December evening enveloped the snow-clad Jersey countryside, and clouds scudded across the black night sky, the visitors would head through the dark toward the bright laboratory, there to push through and gaze in awe at the magical display. The official public unveiling was December 31, 1879, New Year’s Eve. And that evening, as the 1870s became the 1880s, three thousand people poured in to Menlo Park, ignoring the stormy weather, to see the miracle of incandescence.

Edison had continual visitors, including at one point the famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who “jumped all over the machinery” and “wanted to know everything” about what she saw in the lab. “When the great inventor flashed the hundreds of outdoor lights on and off in the pitch dark of the early morning, on and off, on and off, she clapped with pure Gallic delight. … ‘C’est grand, c’est magnifique!’ she exclaimed in that world-famous voice.”

The march of progress not only amazed the public, it inspired artists. As one historian put it, in the late 1700s at least,

industry was still romantic and factories still regarded as the harbingers of a better future—artists painted them, scientists eulogized them, poets were inspired by them. … Paul Sandby saw nothing incongruous in painting a coalmine; Wright of Derby thought Arkwright's mill by moonlight a subject well worthy of his brush; and Erasmus Darwin trumpeted his approval of Etruria in many a ponderous couplet.14

Imagine an artist painting an iron forge, or worse a lead mine. What do you envision? Something dark, foreboding, malevolent? Sandby depicted them as gentle structures that integrate harmoniously with their natural surroundings and co-exist peacefully with people and animals:

Joseph Wright took the same approach to painting cotton mills—contra Blake, dark and Satanic they are not:

Positive depictions of the industrial continued through the 19th century. Here’s an 1885 painting of an iron foundry, by a Danish artist. The molten metal lights up the scene but does not scorch the men; the foundry and the workers are not dirty; the men are calm and in control:15

Or take this depiction of a workshop, by a French painter, 1888. The room is clean and well-lit, the machines are human-scale. The master and the apprentice are intent on their work; one can imagine a paternal affection between them:

Poets, too, were inspired by progress and optimistic for the future. Walt Whitman, perceiving that the world was being connected by railroads, canals, and telegraph cables, again likened these achievements to the wonders of the world:

Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong light works of engineers,
Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)
In the Old World the east the Suez canal,
The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,
The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires…

Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.

A worship new I sing,
You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,
You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours…16

Whitman describes the Suez canal with its “procession of steamships,” “the workmen gather’d” and the “gigantic dredging machines”; and “the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier,” with “the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle” whose “echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world” (again we see industrial infrastructure portrayed as existing in harmony with the natural environment). He puts the accomplishment in grand historical context, as the culmination of a dream held by sailors and explorers for centuries, and extols it as “the marriage of continents, climates and oceans!” Whitman’s ultimate focus is spiritual: the highest purpose he sees for these technological accomplishments is not “trade or transportation only,” but to connect us to the past, to tradition, to ancient wisdom, and to God; much of the poem is devoted to the religious journey he anticipates for the soul. But it is significant that he sees science and technology supporting rather than degrading the soul, and the scientists, “noble inventors,” and “great captains and engineers” all preparing the way for the poet.

In 1871, Whitman was also commissioned to write a poem for an industrial exposition.17 The resulting “Song of the Exposition” extols “​​the spirit of invention everywhere,” likens the “joyous clank” of blacksmiths’ sledges to a “tumult of laughter,” and praises “[s]team-power, the great express lines, gas, petroleum” as “triumphs of our time,” again elevated over the ancient wonders.18

Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” is written in the voice of a scorned lover who, at one point, wishes he could escape his sorrow by contemplating the wondrous age he lives in and the exciting prospects for the future, which in his youth made him feel “wild pulsation.” He seems, in 1835, to be prophesying air travel and airborne trade:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales…19

(Famously, he also foresees the horrors of airborne warfare, but hopes that eventually there will be world union and peace between nations.)

Byron, in Don Juan, praises Newton for his discoveries and his method, which he calls:

A thing to counterbalance human woes:
For ever since immortal man hath glow'd
With all kinds of mechanics, and full soon
Steam-engines will conduct him to the moon.20

An acquaintance of Byron’s wrote that in 1822, after receiving reports of experiments with air travel by balloon, he asked “Who would not wish to have been born two or three centuries later? … Where shall we set bounds to the power of steam? … We are at present in the infancy of science.” Byron even imagined that in the far future, if a comet threatened the Earth, we might use mechanical power to “tear rocks from their foundations … and hurl mountains, as the giants are said to have done, against the flaming mass.”21

Rudyard Kipling wrote a long ballad, “McAndrew’s Hymn,” in the voice of a Scottish engineer on a passenger steamship. When a snooty first-class passenger complains to the engineer that steam power spoils the romance of sailing, McAndrew laments that poets have spent so many words on love and have ignored the engine, praying “Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o’ Steam!” He calls the engine an “orchestra sublime,” and lovingly describes the harmony of the crank-throws, feed-pump, and link-head, with every part “singin’ like the Mornin’ Stars for joy that they are made.” To him, the engine represents a moral lesson: “Law, Order, Duty an’ Restraint, Obedience, Discipline!”—and he wonders whether perhaps, when the machine was forged, it was given a soul.22

In the pre-WW1 era, contrary to the fears that would arise decades later, there was outright pride in the growth of the population. In 1890, the US completed a census, and the nation eagerly awaited the result. However, the census director’s announcement “that the population of this great republic was only 62,622,250 sent into spasms of indignation a great many people who had made up their minds that the dignity of the republic could only be supported on a total of 75,000,000.” The news sent up a “howl” of “frantic disappointment.”23 The “indignation” was such that many people blamed the automatic tabulating machines, in use for the first time, for “slip shod work” that had “spoiled the census.”24 Americans were proud of being the fastest-growing country: a large and growing nation was a healthy nation, prosperous and secure.

As there was pride in growth, there was also pride in rebuilding after disaster. In 1871, when a historic fire devastated Chicago, no sooner had the blaze gotten under control than the Tribune ran an editorial headlined, “CHEER UP,” which asserted that “the people of this once beautiful city have resolved that CHICAGO SHALL RISE AGAIN. … As there has never been such a calamity, so has there never been such cheerful fortitude in the face of desolation and ruin.”25 Already, it boasted, some rebuilding contracts had been made, and the debris was to be cleared away as soon as the charred material was no longer too hot to touch. San Francisco showed the same spirit in response to the 1906 earthquake and fires; the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exposition was in part a chance to show off how quickly and how far the city had bounced back.26

In this era, human works were not only seen to blend harmoniously with nature—they were seen as an improvement on nature. One of the orators at the Brooklyn Bridge opening spoke of the astounding transformation that had taken place in New York since its “primeval” state two hundred years prior, when it was undeveloped:

In the place of stillness and solitude, the footsteps of these millions of human beings; instead of the smooth waters “unvexed by any keel,” highways of commerce ablaze with the flags of all the nations; and where once was the green monotony of forested hills, the piled and towering splendors of a vast metropolis, the countless homes of industry, the echoing marts of trade, the gorgeous palaces of luxury, the silent and steadfast spires of worship!27

To this view, untouched nature is a “green monotony”; a built-up city is a “towering splendor.”

In the 1920s, a German engineer, Franz Westermann, made a pilgrimage to the US to see the American manufacturing system, which was then the envy of the world. The highlight of his trip was the Ford factory complex at Highland Park in Detroit. After seeing it:

Westermann wrote that he had always been moved, like so many of his countrymen, by the beauties and romance of nature. He had seen the shimmering surface of woodland lakes on nights of the full moon; he had felt the power of the endless ocean while standing on the tossing deck of a steamer in a storm; and he had been deeply moved by the sight of snow-covered Alpine peaks and dark mysterious valleys. Yet “the most powerful and memorable experience of my life came from the visit to the Ford plants, where the hand of man had created in a short time a gigantic production complex, which not only through its size and technical characteristics made a staggering impression, but also filled the viewer with the powerful organizing spirit of its creators.” At every turn a new machinescape, “a Bacchanal of work,” stimulated the engineer.28

“Natural” was not automatically good, and “artificial” or “synthetic” actually had positive connotations. Virginia Postrel reports that an 1897 newspaper article anticipating the coming of artificial ice looked forward to the day when “nature will be driven from the commercial ice business, and the inventive genius of man will have scored another improvement over his clumsy and antiquated ancestor.” Despite a backlash from incumbents, who tried to claim that natural ice was superior, artificial ice was generally seen as cleaner and healthier; another newspaper reported that “a dutiful mother will have nothing but pure ice for her children.”29 When DuPont held a “Wonder World of Chemistry” exhibit at the Texas Centennial in 1936, one woman gushed: “Now everything is synthetic,” and found it “wonderful how du Pont is improving on nature.”30 (Other visitors were skeptical, but mostly “the elderly or less sophisticated.”)

Marketers of the day found the public receptive to this message. “Wonder World of Chemistry” was also the title of a DuPont promotional film, which opened with a title card stating: “The story of progress is the story of the search for ‘Better Things for Better Living—Through Chemistry.’”31 The film unabashedly showed off insecticides, gunpowder, and dynamite—including several explosions for the purposes of mining, construction, or clearing trees away for farmland. (The only thing they didn’t want to show was munitions: DuPont was trying to escape a reputation as a “merchant of death” from WW1.) In 1942, the Bakelite Corporation made a similar film titled “The Fourth Kingdom” which proclaimed that the three natural kingdoms—animal, vegetable, and mineral—had been found “insufficient” by the modern world, which “has turned elsewhere to fulfill its needs—turned to a fourth kingdom, a kingdom of scientific research, a new domain of man’s own creation.”32 One historian describes this as marking “a victory of synthesis over extraction, of the artificial over the natural.”33

In the 1940s, Seagram’s ran a campaign for its V.O. Canadian whisky in LIFE magazine with the theme: “Men Who Plan Beyond Tomorrow.” The ads featured illustrations of then-futuristic technologies, including moving sidewalks, office computers, wireless phones, video calling, 3D movies, power plants that captured energy from lightning, “facsimile newspapers” printed from your television, grocery and meal delivery, and desert irrigation powered by nuclear energy.34 The only apparent connection to their product was that both new technologies and 6-year aged whisky require advance planning; presumably Seagram’s also simply liked the brand association with progress. In a similar spirit, a 1959 ad in the LA Times, placed by a coalition of electric companies, touted the potential for ultrasound dishwashers, automatic bed-makers, and the ability “to dial a library book, a lecture or a classroom demonstration right into your home.” The ad referred without explanation or justification to “tomorrow’s higher standard of living,” and was illustrated with a picture of a flying car.

The greatest expression of the spirit of progress was the series of grand techno-industrial exhibitions that came to be known as the World’s Fair. Each fair was an enormous event, sprawled out across hundreds of acres, with dozens or hundreds of buildings constructed to house exhibits that showed off both existing technologies and visions of the future. A World’s Fair would typically run for about six months and receive tens of millions of visitors. The tradition began in London with the Great Exhibition of 1851, which built a “crystal palace” of iron and glass to exhibit industrial technologies and products from around the world.35 The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 featured Alexander Graham Bell’s new telephone.36 The 1889 Exposition Universelle gave Paris its Eiffel Tower.37 The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago showed off electric lighting powered by alternating current.38 The 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco was a celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal, called the “Thirteenth Labor of Hercules”; it was marketed as “a complete panorama of human achievement. … Its sole aim is to show the latest development in human progress.”39 Chicago 1933 used the tagline “A Century of Progress”; New York 1939 used “The World of Tomorrow.”40 Visitors left the 1939 fair sporting buttons that proudly proclaimed: “I Have Seen the Future.”41 For the 1964 fair in Flushing Meadows, NY, Disney developed an attraction called the Carousel of Progress, for which the Sherman Brothers (songwriters of Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book) wrote a song: “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.”42

Other celebrations of progress also continued well into the 20th century. In the 1920s and ‘30s, a common spectacle in New York was the ticker tape parade celebrating a heroic aviator—not only Charles Lindbergh (1927), Amelia Earhart (1928 and 1932) and Howard Hughes (1938), but dozens of other forgotten names for achievements such as flights across the Atlantic, over the North Pole, or around the world. In the 1960s the parades were held for astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and many less well-known names.43 The Apollo 11 crew went on a world tour to receive such celebrations and honors.44

In 1955, the polio vaccine was announced. Polio had terrified the nation: it struck in major epidemic waves every summer, with young children most vulnerable; the disease killed many of them and left many more paralyzed for life. The vaccine was received as a godsend, and Jonas Salk, who led its development, was hailed as a hero and savior. According to one history:

A contagion of love swept the world. People observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes, kept their traffic lights red in brief periods of tribute, took the rest of the day off, closed their schools or convoked fervid assemblies therein, drank toasts, hugged children, attended church, smiled at strangers, forgave enemies. …

The ardent people named schools, streets, hospitals, and newborn infants after him. They sent him checks, cash, money orders, stamps, scrolls, certificates, pressed flowers, snapshots, candy, baked goods, religious medals, rabbits’ feet and other talismans, and uncounted thousands of letters and telegrams, both individual and round-robin, describing their heartfelt gratitude and admiration. They offered him free automobiles, agricultural equipment, clothing, vacations, lucrative jobs in government and industry, and several hundred opportunities to get rich quick. Their legislatures and parliaments passed resolutions, and their heads of state issued proclamations. Their universities tendered honorary degrees. …

Salk awakened that morning as a moderately prominent research professor on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He ended the day as the most beloved medical scientist on earth. Worshipful humanity had borne him far beyond mere fame and had enthroned him among the immortals.45

Another historian writes:

Gifts and honors poured in from a grateful nation. Philadelphia awarded Salk its Poor Richard Medal for distinguished service to humanity. Mutual of Omaha gave him its Criss Award, along with a $10,000 check, for his contribution to public health. The University of Pittsburgh was swamped with thank-you notes and “donations” addressed to Dr. Salk. His lab was “knee-deep in mail,” a staffer recalled. … Elementary schools sent giant posters—WE LOVE YOU DR. SALK—signed by the entire student body. Winnipeg, Canada, site of a major polio epidemic in 1953, sent a 208-foot telegram of congratulation adorned with each survivor’s name. A town in the Texas panhandle bought him two heartfelt, if comically inappropriate, gifts: a plow and a fully equipped Oldsmobile 98. (Salk gave the plow to an orphanage and had the car sold so the town could buy more polio vaccine.) A new Cadillac arrived and was donated to charity. Colleges begged him to accept their honorary degrees. Newsweek lauded “A Quiet Young Man’s Magnificent Victory,” insisting that Salk’s name was now “as secure a word in the medical dictionary as Jenner, Pasteur, Schick, and Lister.” … The stories that day spoke of mothers weeping, doctors cheering, politicians toasting God and Jonas Salk.46

Warner Brothers, Columbia, and Twentieth Century Fox fought for the rights to Salk’s life story, with rumors of Marlon Brando as the lead (Salk turned them all down). He was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, only the second medical researcher to ever receive one. He was nominated for the Nobel prize. He was received at the White House, in a special ceremony at the Rose Garden. President Eisenhower was visibly moved, telling Salk in a trembling voice, “I have no words to thank you. I am very, very happy.”47

Salk had saved the lives of countless children, and the public made him into a hero. But there was a writer in this era who saw all such work as heroic—science, invention, even entrepreneurship. That writer was Ayn Rand, and the pantheon of heroes in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged included researchers, engineers, and executives in industries such as railroads, oil, copper, steel, and banking. They were intelligent, competent, ruthlessly logical, and above all, they could get things done. The plot is driven in part by their inventions: a new metallic alloy, a method of extracting oil from shale (presaging fracking), a new form of energy production from “static electricity from the atmosphere.” Scenes of industrial achievement are described with romance and glamour: metallurgical research, the first run of a train on a new railroad line, a break-out at a steel furnace that forces workers to close the hole by throwing chunks of fire clay into it by hand. Corporate logos are likened to the coats of arms of noble houses; a motor is described as “a moral code cast in steel.”48 (Rand, like Kipling, saw both poetry and moral meaning in the engine.)

The inventors and industrialists of Atlas Shrugged keep the world running and carry the rest of humanity on their shoulders; their work is portrayed as a grand quest to use reason in the service of human life. Indeed, a core tenet of Rand’s philosophy was that “productive achievement” is mankind’s “noblest activity.”49 (She did not, however, give scientists or CEOs unconditional adoration: her worst villains in the novel include crony businessmen who profit from protectionism, and a physicist whose gravest sin is to blindly serve the state, which uses his discoveries to build a terrible weapon.)

Rand wrote, however, at a time when ideas like these were already out of favor—in part, she was attempting to revive them, explicitly thinking of herself as a bridge from the pre-WW1 culture of confidence and optimism to her own time.50 But by the 1970s, the zeitgeist had dramatically changed: now there were fears of overpopulation, pollution, and the “limits to growth”; constant anxiety from the threat of nuclear war; and deep distrust of the institutions of science, industry, media, and government.

What had happened?

Next: Chapter 9, part 2

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

Is there really that much more progress to be made in the future? How many problems are left to solve? How much better could life really get?

After all, we are pretty comfortable today. We have electricity, clean running water, heating and air conditioning, plenty of food, comfortable clothes and beds, cars and planes to get around, entertainment on tap. What more could we ask for? Maybe life could be 10% better, but 10x? We seem to be doing just fine.

Most of the amenities we consider necessary for comfortable living, however, were invented relatively recently; the average American didn’t have this standard of living until the mid-20th century. The average person living in 1800 did not have electricity or plumbing; indeed the vast majority of people in that era lived in what we would now consider extreme poverty.1 But to them, it didn’t feel like extreme poverty: it felt normal. They had enough food in the larder, enough water in the well, and enough firewood to last the winter; they had a roof over their heads and their children were not clothed in rags. They, too, felt they were doing just fine.2

Our sense of “enough” is not absolute, but relative: relative to our expectations and to the standard of living we grew up with. And just as the person who felt they had “enough” in 1800 was extremely poor by the standards of the present, we are all poor by the standards of the future, if exponential growth continues.

Future students will recoil in horror when they realize that we died from cancer and heart disease and car crashes, that we toiled on farms and in factories, that we wasted time commuting and shopping, that most people still cleaned their own homes by hand, that we watched our thermostats carefully and ran our laundry at night to save on electricity, that a foreign vacation was a luxury we could only indulge in once a year, that we sometimes lost our homes to hurricanes and forest fires.

Putting it positively: we are fabulously rich by the standards of 1800, and so we, or our descendants, can all be fabulously rich in the future by the standards of today.

But no such vision is part of mainstream culture. The most optimistic goals you will hear from most people are things like: stop climate change, prevent pandemics, relieve poverty. These are all the negation of negatives, and modest ones at that—as if the best we can do in the future is to raise the floor and avoid disaster. There is no bold, ambitious vision of a future in which we also raise the ceiling, a future full of positive developments.

It can be hard to make such a vision compelling. Goals that are obviously wonderful, such as curing all disease, seem like science fiction impossibilities. Those that are more clearly achievable, such as supersonic flight, feel like mere conveniences. But science fiction can come true—indeed, it already has, many times over. We live in the sci-fi future imagined long ago, from the heavier-than-air flying machines of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to the hand-held communicator of Star Trek.3 Nor should we dismiss “mere” conveniences. Conveniences compound. What seem like trivial improvements add up, over time, to transformations. Refrigerators, electric stoves, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and dishwashers were conveniences, but together they transformed domestic life, and helped to transform the role of women in society.4 The incremental improvement of agriculture, over centuries, eliminated famine.

So let’s envision a bold, ambitious future—a future we want to live in, and are inspired to build. This will be speculative: not a blueprint drawn up with surveyor’s tools, but a canvas painted in broad strokes. Building on a theme from Chapter 2, our vision will be one of mastery over all aspects of nature:

Mastery over biology

In the bold, ambitious future, we might cure all disease.

We are already making progress against cancer and heart disease, by far the largest causes of death in wealthy countries.5 Future progress against cancer might come from early detection via blood or imaging, mRNA cancer “vaccines,” improved CAR-T cell therapy, or even direct editing of cancerous DNA; for heart disease, it might come from advances in surgery, new valve replacement techniques, or drugs such as PCSK9 inhibitors and GLP-1 agonists.6 Better gene editing toolkits, and delivery mechanisms to get them to the right cells, might cure genetic diseases such as muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, or Huntington’s—indeed, treatments for some of these are already approved or in development.7 Artificial kidneys grown from our own stem cells might replace diseased ones.8 We might cure, or learn how to prevent, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. We might cure metabolic diseases, and end obesity. We might finally discover the formula for optimal nutrition, creating food that is both delicious and perfectly healthy, and ending the curse of junk food.

We might end pandemics. Far-UVC light might be used to kill airborne pathogens, sanitizing our air the way that chlorine and filtration sanitized our water over a century ago.9 Monitoring of wastewater in cities and airports could give early warning of growing threats.10 CRISPR-based gene drives could eliminate the species of mosquitoes that carry human diseases.11 More ambitiously, biotech founder and sci-fi author Hannu Rajaniemi has proposed an “immune-computer interface,” a way to artificially augment our immune systems.12 In his novel Darkome, he imagines a wearable device: a miniature mRNA synthesizer with a wi-fi connection, strapped to your arm.13 In this world, any time a new pathogen is detected anywhere on the planet, everyone wearing one of these devices can get the vaccine for it before it has time to spread.

We might even cure aging. We rarely think of aging as a disease; we accept it as natural and inevitable. But there is no biological reason why we have to age—why we have to lose strength and muscle mass, suffer worse fractures from weaker bones, face increased risk of cancer and infection, lose our hearing and our eyesight and our energy and our fertility. A new drug, a genetic therapy, or the right cocktail of transcription factors14 might grant everyone as many years of healthy, vigorous life as they choose.

And to be truly ambitious, we should go beyond eliminating disease, beyond simply maintaining ourselves at a normal, baseline state of health. We might enhance ourselves to levels of functioning far above baseline. We should be able to achieve exceptional strength, endurance, flexibility, and energy. We should all be as attractive as we want to be, with the body composition, skin quality, and hair that we prefer. We should all have exceptional intelligence, creativity, memory, focus, willpower, resilience, and mood. We could all be “short sleepers,” those rare genetic individuals who thrive on four hours of sleep a night; perhaps we will even learn how to eliminate the need for sleep entirely.15 Almost none of this even requires going beyond demonstrated human limits for these qualities: if we could simply bring the average person up to 99th percentile on all of these axes at once, it would make them effectively superhuman.16

Nor need we stop at optimizing ourselves. We might optimize our crops and livestock as well: for efficiency, nutrition, taste, and hardiness; for resistance to disease and pests without the need for chemicals.17 That is, assuming we have livestock in the future—we might not, if we can invent more efficient ways to produce meat, by growing it in a lab, or if someday we can synthesize all our food directly from chemicals, without needing to rely on growing entire organisms that we only eat a part of.18 We might even invent entirely new types of foods, both meat and vegetable, with undiscovered flavors never found in nature. Nor need we stop at food: bioengineering could give us new materials with novel properties or applications, such as super-strong fibers derived from spider silk.19

Mastery over information

I’ve already described why AI has the potential to create a new economic era. Let’s consider what this might look like.

In the bold, ambitious future, AI workers may have enough different skillsets to enable entire virtual businesses. Today, if you have an idea for a software application, you might have to hire engineers to develop it, product managers to write the specifications, designers to create the interface, marketers to launch the product, and sales representatives to close deals—presuming you don’t have all of those skills yourself. To hire those people takes millions of dollars, so you have to figure out how to network your way to VCs and pitch them—presuming you aren’t independently very wealthy. This process takes years.20 In the future, you might be able to spin up virtual workers for all the above functions on demand. Instead of 2 years and $2 million to launch a simple app, it might take 2 months and $20k. This would be accessible to many more people, and for many more applications. Many custom applications might be created that don’t even rise to the level of businesses, to run every reading group, little league, and knitting club.

Professional services might be democratized. Today only the wealthy can afford the best lawyers or doctors, or an accountant to do their taxes, or a therapist to listen to their troubles. In the future, first-rate services might be available to almost everyone—just as the average person now consumes fruits, spices, or clothing that once were the prerogative of royalty.

Another luxury service the wealthy can afford is private tutoring. In the bold, ambitious future, every student might receive personalized instruction. Teaching could follow the student’s interests, on a daily basis, to optimize for motivation. When a student is struggling, the lesson could be slowed down, simplified, or repeated as necessary for mastery; when a student is excelling, the lesson could be sped up or taken to the next level. Every student might be able to achieve their maximum potential.

A very small team, or even one person working alone, might be able to create an entire feature-length film, for a fraction of a percent of the budget of today’s blockbusters. This could unleash a flood of creativity, make an end run around the traditional media gatekeepers, and liberate us from the Hollywood rut of sequels, franchises and remakes.

AI matchmakers might help us make all kinds of connections, both personal and professional—introducing us to people we’d never otherwise have met, and triaging out the introductory meetings that would just be a mutual waste of time. And at the other end of the pipeline, AI might help us close all kinds of deals—buying a car, selling a house, negotiating a job offer or a VC term sheet—saving us from processes that most of us find uncomfortable, and leveling a playing field that is currently tilted in favor of the more experienced party in each of these deals.

Language might no longer be a barrier, anywhere, for any reason. Imagine knowing every language in the world. Imagine being able to read any book, article, paper, essay, or blog post, no matter what language it was written in. Imagine being able to listen to any talk, podcast, or news report, with the “Babel fish” from the Hitchhiker’s Guide as your interpreter. Imagine this ability granted to everyone on Earth, beginning to dissolve the barriers between peoples and cultures.

Mathematics might soon be, in essence, completed: all open questions answered, from the Riemann hypothesis to the twin prime conjecture to the P vs. NP question.21 Unlike other branches of science, this would require no laboratory experiments, just a lot of computation; and the results could be verified via formal proofs—no need to trust the AI’s intuition or worry about hallucinations.

All of the above is based only on AI that runs in the cloud, or on your phone or laptop. A new generation of robotics, leveraging deep learning techniques and modern language and vision models, might dramatically expand what physical work can be automated.22 The obvious possibilities, already thoroughly envisioned by science fiction, need not be rehearsed here.

Also, all of the above is envisioning only our current screen-and-keyboard interfaces to software. Already AI is being incorporated into wearable electronics, such as voice-activated pendants or camera-enabled Ray Bans.23 An AI that hears what you hear, sees what you see, and is always available for a conversation might be able to assist you better than any butler or servant.

Or, someday, we might perfect brain-computer interfaces and connect to the machines directly. Already experimental Neuralink devices have allowed a paralyzed man to control a computer; other devices are being tested to restore sight to the blind.24 Information tools, from cuneiform to smartphones, have always acted as extensions of our minds, and the more ubiquitous and accessible they are, the more they can augment our cognitive abilities. The logical end of that progression is to merge with the machines.

Mastery over space

Starting with the first passenger railroads around 1830 through the deployment of passenger jets in the 1960s, powered vehicles have dramatically shrunk travel times, at all scales, from the neighborhood to the world. Yet we are still limited by distance. It matters enormously what city you live in, because it’s expensive and time-consuming to travel outside of it; even within a metro area, people are limited by commute.

Increases in speed and convenience don’t just save us time: they expand our world, as we begin to take trips that were inaccessible before. Across a wide variety of societies and transport systems, from rural African villages to modern US and Singapore, people spend about an hour a day on total travel.25 So when speed doubles, rather than cutting our travel time in half, it instead doubles our travel radius, opening up more of the world to us—and since area goes as the square of the distance, doubling a travel radius actually opens up four times as much of the world.26

The next great frontier in speed is supersonic passenger flight. At the speed of Mach 1.7 planned for the airliner from Boom Supersonic, you could fly from New York to London in under 4 hours, or San Francisco to Tokyo in 6 and a half.27 This possibility was proven more than 50 years ago with Concorde; it has merely been languishing for want of updated technologies and a profitable business model.

Passenger jets, however, will always have the problems of trains, buses, and other forms of mass transit: they go from station to station, not from your origin to your destination; and they come and go on their schedule, not yours. The ultimate in travel convenience is a personal vehicle: one that leaves whenever you’re ready, starts from wherever you are, takes you wherever you’re going, and lets you stash all your stuff in the trunk. In the bold, ambitious future, we might create transportation that combines the convenience of personal vehicles with the speed of air travel: the “flying car.”

Like most people, I was initially skeptical of this idea, seeing it as a fantasy of science fiction. I changed my mind after reading J. Storrs Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car? Hall recounts the history of flying car research and development, catalogs design approaches, models engineering tradeoffs and travel times, and concludes that there is no technological or economic reason why we can’t have flying cars with existing technology.28

The vehicles of the future might also be autonomous—a huge boost to convenience, cost, privacy, and safety. Already, self-driving robotaxis are doing business on the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and Phoenix.29 Early data shows that Waymos are far safer than human drivers—unsurprising to anyone who’s taken a ride in one and noticed how mild-mannered its driving style is. Flying cars might also need autonomy, for safety and to obviate turning everyone into pilots. And autonomous trucking might reduce the cost of freight by over 40%.30

But all of the above is just about getting around Earth. Sooner or later, it will be time to make a serious foray into space.

Rocketry, after peaking during the Apollo program and languishing thereafter, is finally advancing again in recent years, mostly thanks to SpaceX. After decades of launch costs hovering around $10,000/kg, Falcon 9 lowered costs to $2,600/kg and Falcon Heavy to $1,500/kg.31 This has driven more than a 20x increase in the annual number of objects launched into space. Many of them are Starlink satellites providing high-speed internet service to air passengers, rural homes, van-lifers, fishing boats, oil rigs, scientific outposts, disaster zones, and battlefields.32

For Starship, the aspirational long-term target launch cost is $10/kg, which would expand the space economy even more dramatically.33 But by that point, they might face competition from other launch providers—such Longshot Space Technology, which is making enormous cannons that use pressurized gas to shoot cargo out of the atmosphere.34

The economic case for space is sparse right now. The best reasons to go beyond Earth orbit are tourism, science, maybe asteroid defense, and some just-emerging applications of space manufacturing.35 Other applications, such as space-based solar power or mining the Moon or asteroids, don’t seem to be economically useful in the foreseeable future.36 Some factors will inevitably push us into space if growth continues—at some point we will exhaust something on Earth, whether material resources or energy or heat dissipation37 or simply room for more people—but those limits are orders of magnitude away.

Still, space calls to us. In his famous speech on the Moon mission, John F. Kennedy invoked the British mountaineer who had wanted to climb Mt. Everest “because it’s there,” saying: “space is there, and we’re going to climb it.”38 I suspect that as soon as we can afford the luxury, we will go to space because we want to, for the sake of exploration and adventure, well before we have to for reasons of economics.

Mastery over energy

The bold, ambitious future is going to require a tremendous amount of energy.

Most people have been taught to believe that energy usage is at best a necessary evil—or perhaps that it’s not even all that necessary. Journalist Cleo Abrams reports that when she first heard a compelling case for energy abundance, it “put my brain through the BLENDER,” because she had always seen energy usage as “shameful.”39 Calling attention to a technology’s energy use is a quick and easy way to criticize it, no further explanation needed: energy is bad, therefore jet travel or AI is bad. But from a techno-humanist point of view, this logic is backwards: planes, AI, and the rest of the industrial economy are good, and therefore energy, the most fundamental enabler of the economy, is tremendously good.

Energy usage per capita, however, flatlined in the US and Europe in the early 1970s.40 While we have squeezed out some efficiency gains, creating marginally more value with the same amount of energy,41 stagnation in energy is overall a sign of stagnation in economic growth. We would be better off with more energy. J. Storrs Hall argues that lack of progress in energy density explains which technologies dreamed of in the 1960s actually arrived (such as the Internet) and which didn’t (such as the space economy).42 He suggests, in short, that energy density is why we got progress in bits but not in atoms.

With sufficient energy, we could solve all of our water problems, making drought a thing of the past. Water is, after all, enormously abundant in the oceans; the problem with ocean water is that it’s salty and it’s below sea level—we want it to be fresh and elevated, so it can flow through our pipes to our faucets. Normally we rely on the natural water cycle to do this: an inefficient, unreliable use of solar energy. With enough industrial energy, we can control the process ourselves, desalinating water and pumping it to any elevation.43

With sufficient energy, we could solve almost all other material resource problems, too. The materials are out there; the challenge is always to gather them from dilute sources and to isolate and purify them—whether extracting metals from ore, bromine from salt water, or gasoline from crude oil. Seawater contains gigatons of metals such as lithium, nickel, copper, vanadium, molybdenum, and uranium.44 With sufficient energy, we could extract elements from common clays instead of high-grade ores, or even from landfill.45 There never need be a shortage of any resource.

Energy not only extracts material resources, it also shapes them. “A long-running story of our material world,” writes Ian McKay, “is the constant march to more embodied energy in everything we use”: as we advanced from wood and copper, to bronze, to cast iron, to steel, to titanium, to semiconductors, the energy used per kilogram to process our materials has increased by several orders of magnitude.46 By using more energy, we’re able to make lighter and tougher materials and to tap more abundant resources. It stands to reason that the materials of the future will continue this trend.

We need more energy for supersonic flight, which uses around 3x more fuel per passenger-mile than conventional subsonic jets.47 Cargo could also travel faster if we could afford to spend more energy on it.48

We need more energy for the rapid growth of AI. Although each query to an LLM uses only a small amount of energy (maybe a few watt-hours depending on the length), total AI energy usage is projected to consume on the order of 10% of US electricity by 2030.49 If the US were to reach the 100-to-1 ratio of AI to humans mentioned earlier, using an NVIDIA H100 chip as a stand-in for one human’s worth of compute, those chips alone would draw around 12 TW—more than half the entire world economy today.50

We need more energy for all the robots, too. By one estimate, there could be more than a billion humanoid robots in use by 2050, which would consume about 10% of current world electricity production.51

The need for more and more energy is ultimately the best reason to transition off of fossil fuels in the 21st century: there just aren’t enough of them. There are an estimated 13,600 TW-years of coal, oil and gas remaining in the ground; if we were to 10x world energy usage, that would only represent 68 years of energy.52 Only solar, nuclear, and geothermal have a hope of powering the superabundant energy future.

Mastery over matter

We have already come quite far in our mastery of materials and manufacturing. Our materials have gotten stronger: the tensile strength of stone, or of wood perpendicular to the grain, is on the order of 10 MPa (megapascals, a unit of pressure or stress); classical metals such as bronze and iron are in the low 100s; the best alloys of steel today are over 1,000 MPa.53 We have also improved precision: James Watt struggled with leakage from his steam engines until, using the best technology of his day, they could be made to tolerances of 1/10 of an inch; now you can buy ball bearings made to a tolerance of 80 nanometers, an improvement of over five orders of magnitude.54

There is an ultimate limit to precision: the atomic level. Making things by placing each atom exactly where we want it is a technological dream known as atomically precise manufacturing, or nanotechnology.

With nanotech, machine parts such as gears or bearings could be individual molecules, made from many atoms in exact configuration. A nanomachine such as a pump or engine, made from many such parts, might be the size of a large molecule such as a protein. A more complex machine, such as a robot, might be around the size of a cell.

J. Storrs Hall paints the possibilities for this technological platform in his book Nanofuture. Macroscopic objects, from clothing to buildings, might be made with nano-machines built into them, in incredible numbers. Objects might be able to shape-shift: a telescoping arm, for instance, made up of 6,000 concentric cylinders each an inch long and 5 microns thick, could extend to a length of 50 feet or retract into a 1-inch puck.55 With nano-motors integrated throughout, that arm and other parts like it might appear to move on their own, “like animals.”56 Other nano-parts might give objects unique optical properties, or integrate large amounts of data storage and computing power into everyday items such as clothing.

What this enables for end users is straight out of science fiction. Nanotech synthesizers might make items directly from raw materials. A household synthesizer, like the “matter compiler” from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, might create goods when they were needed; they might then be recycled afterwards for their atoms to be reused in a different configuration—no need for storage or cleaning.57 Food, too, might be synthesized directly, with no animals or crops raised for the purpose, and with better taste and nutrition.58 Thread might be made extremely strong, allowing clothing to be extremely light and flexible, like silk but much more so.59

The incredible speed of nanotech synthesis alone might dramatically lower the price of literally every physical product. Hall estimates that with mature nanotechnology, the entire capital stock of the US—“every single building, factory, highway, railroad, bridge, airplane, train, automobile, truck, and ship”—could be rebuilt in a week.60

The possibilities for medicine are also amazing. Surgery might no longer be invasive: a thread no wider than a hair might inject an army of nanobots into the patient’s body to reconstruct tissue, avoiding all of that messy cutting and sewing and the recovery time needed for wounds to heal: “There is no reason in principle that you couldn't have major surgery one day and play tennis, go dancing, or do a full day's work the next.” Artificial organs might replace diseased ones and even work better than the originals. Artificial red blood cells might transport oxygen more efficiently and store enough to allow you to hold your breath all day, or more practically, to survive a heart attack. Artificial immune cells might be able to fight pathogens more efficiently, giving you resistance against all infectious disease. Other nanobots might detect and destroy cancer, clean up accumulated toxins and other cellular “garbage,” and fix other kinds of damage to cells and tissues.61

At the macro scale, it turns out that the ultimate in precision manufacturing might give us the ultimate in material strength as well. One of the strongest ways to construct things from atoms is to build a lattice of carbon, which conveniently has four covalent bonds that suit it well for such structures. Graphene, a two-dimensional honeycomb of carbon, has tensile strength over 100 GPa (if free of defects), or two hundred times that of a typical steel.62

Stronger materials might enable larger structures. Hall has proposed that with nanotech materials, we might build a “space pier,” a set of towers 100 km tall with a 300 km runway atop them. Payloads going to space might take an elevator to the top, then be accelerated along the ramp by an electromagnetic motor, saving much of the fuel required to launch from the ground; launch costs might get as low as $10/kg.63

Diamond, with its extreme stiffness, might also be used to create very small, light structures. Hall has also proposed the “Weather Machine,” a fleet of quintillions of centimeter-sized balloons floating in the stratosphere. They could be made of nanometer-thick diamond, with remote-controlled mirrors that can reflect light or allow it to pass through, forming a “programmable greenhouse gas” that can regulate temperature and direct solar energy.64

If there is indeed a fifth economic era, a successor to the “intelligence age,” it might be based on nanotechnology.

Mastery over environment

As our ambitions grow, they might reach planetary scale.

We’ve already mentioned mastering the climate by creating a system of climate control (Chapter 5). Even beyond simply controlling CO2 and temperature, we might develop technologies to control the weather, optimizing it for agriculture and for human enjoyment, and eliminating hazards such as hurricanes.65

We might reshape the land and water. Even using late 19th and early 20th century technology, we built Suez and Panama, the Hoover Dam and the Zuiderzee; Boston created its Back Bay and San Francisco its Treasure Island. In the 21st century we should be able to do much more.

Mastery over environment would also mean being able to maintain it in pristine condition. In the bold, ambitious future, we might eliminate all pollutants, toxins and carcinogens from the air, water, and soil.66 We might protect the coral reefs, and even create new ones.67 We might be able to easily rescue any species from extinction, or even to “de-extinct” long-gone species, as is being attempted now with the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf.68

And there is no reason why mastery over environment should be limited to one planet. We might develop the ability to “terraform” other planets, creating entirely new ecosystems, and doing it far faster than the geological timescales that shaped Earth.69 There are literally whole new worlds to win.

Complete mastery over nature might enable trillions of humans living everywhere on Earth, across the solar system, or even throughout the galaxy. Compared to what we know today, it would be a life without pain, suffering, or death.

But it would not be a life without effort, challenge, and striving.

Many utopias throughout history—mythological, religious, philosophical, literary—have been conceived of as unchanging: the Egyptian Field of Reeds, the Greek Elysian Fields, the biblical Garden of Eden, the Buddhist nirvana, the Chinese “Peach-Blossom Spring.” This static utopia is a final state where we have solved all problems. In some of them, there is nothing for humans to do except leisure or worship.

But there is no utopia: such a final state can never be achieved, nor would we want it if it could. The longing for final states, the static ideal, is a fundamental mistake. Fear of population growth, a desire for “sustainability,” a general disapproval of moral and social evolution, a wish to stave off the creative destruction wrought by technological change—all are mistakes of holding a fixed world as an ideal.

Nothing in the universe is static. Not the stars, once the very definition of constancy. Not the rising and setting of the Sun, which will one day cease. Not the mountains, which drift on tectonic plates. Not the universe itself, which has evolved through stages over the eons, which even now is expanding and changing, which may someday end in a vast, scattered array of black holes.

Human progress is measured by the standard of human life, and life is a process of constant motion and growth. An ideal appropriate to living organisms, and especially to humans, is not a static ideal but a dynamic one. It is not a state, but a process, with health and success judged not by deviation from a fixed target, but by the rate of improvement.

Kevin Kelly calls this “protopia”:

I don’t believe in utopias. … I have not met a utopia I would even want to live in. … our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better.70

Let us then explicitly dispel the false vision of a static utopia and replace it with a dynamic protopia:

In the bold, ambitious future, people might not have to work—but they will not be sitting around idle. Such a life would be meaningless, and the greater we enhance human agency, the more we can fill our lives with meaning. Some people, a minority I expect, will still work—but only those who want to, only those for whom work is rewarding and fulfilling (and, like a successful entrepreneur on their second act, their work won’t have to actually earn an income on any timescale). Others will pursue knowledge and satisfy their curiosity; express their creative vision in art or music; travel and explore; spend time with family and loved ones; play games or sports. (There will always be a role for human players, because the purpose of games and sports is not to achieve a practical outcome but to experience and to witness human ability.)

There will still be problems to be solved and goals to be pursued—even if increasingly, these will seem from our perspective like luxuries: creating new forms of art and entertainment, exploring the galaxy and expanding ever outward as we fill up the space around us, answering every last question as we peer into every nook and cranny of the universe, optimizing our society for harmony and our minds for joy.

The bold, ambitious future will not be a world of uniformity and sameness. It will not be like the popular depiction of Heaven, full of angels with identical robes and harps where the only colors are shades of white. It will be marvelously diverse, with room for every individual preference, aesthetic and lifestyle.

The bold, ambitious future will not slow down. It will be far more fast-paced and exciting than anything humans have known. The future will look on our so-called fast-paced world as we look on the slow-moving centuries of the Middle Ages, or the repetitive millennia of hunter-gatherer times.

Of course, life might feel boring or stale after a thousand years, or a million—once a person has seen everything there is to see, learned the secrets of the universe, mastered every skill and game, heard every story and every melody, contemplated every idea. Perhaps there will be some way to reset ourselves, or parts of ourselves, so that we can relive those things as if for the first time. And if that turns out to be impossible or undesirable, perhaps people will simply choose, once they are a few eons old, to peacefully end their lives, in perfect satisfaction and contentment, and make room for a new life and mind to begin and do it all over again.

The bold, ambitious future is not a static Garden of Eden, but a dynamic wonderland, full of excitement, adventure, romance, exploration, curiosity, art, entertainment, play, and love. It is a paradise of human agency: the life we chose and the world we made.

Next: Chapter 9, The Spirit We Lost

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

The acceleration that we saw in Chapter 6 is driven by a feedback process in which growth itself improves the mechanisms of growth.

When we zoom out to look at thousands of years, this process looks smooth and continuous. But when we zoom in, it appears as discrete improvements. Some of these are small, like a new type of machine tool. Some are large, like electric power—such a fundamental enabler of other improvements that we call it a “general-purpose technology.”1 And some are so fundamental that they reorganize civilization itself.

The last category, however, is rare. There have only been three basic modes of production in human history, which define the three main eras: the stone age, the agricultural age, and the industrial age.

Is industrial production the end of economic history? Or could there be a fourth age of humanity? And what would such a future look like?

Recall that annual growth rates in world GDP were less than a hundredth of a percent in the stone age, a fraction of a percent in the agricultural age, and single-digit percentage points in the industrial age. If this pattern continues, a fourth age would eventually produce sustained double-digit growth, meaning a world economy doubling time measured in years. Such a massive shift could only come from a technology that is as fundamental to production as tools in the stone age, farming in the agricultural age, or engines in the industrial age.

In the year 2025, the best candidate for such a technology is AI.

The promise of AI is that it could be to cognitive work what power and mechanization were to physical work: a technology that automates much of it and assists with most of the rest. Someday, AI could help perfect robotics, which would let us automate most of what remains of physical labor as well.2 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that sufficiently powerful AI would be like a “country of geniuses in a data center” and could accelerate fields such as biology and medicine by 10x, helping us make a century of progress in those fields in a decade.3 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman calls the AI future the “intelligence age.”4

These are bold projections. To date, AI is far from fulfilling them—but it is improving extremely rapidly. In February 2019, GPT-2 was announced, and it was remarkable for being able to form grammatical sentences and coherent paragraphs.5 When GPT-3 came out in November 2020, you could actually have a conversation with it.6 GPT-4, released in March 2023, scored around 90th percentile on standardized tests such as the SAT and LSAT, and even passed the bar exam.7 In the Codeforces coding competition, GPT-4 was ranked well below the 10th percentile of human competitors; 4o was at the 10th percentile; o1-preview was above 50th; o1 was well over 90th, and o3 is over 99th—“grandmaster” level.8 For AI models completing technical tasks such as software engineering, a study from METR assessed the length of task that they could reliably complete, measured by how long those tasks take human professionals, and found that the task length is doubling every 7 months.9 “Even if the absolute measurements are off by a factor of 10, the trend predicts that in under a decade we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.”

I expect this progress to continue, especially given the massive investment now pouring into AI research and ventures. AI is attracting many of the most talented, driven and ambitious workers in Silicon Valley, and hundreds of billions of dollars of capital, including in massive buildouts of infrastructure such as GPUs and the energy to power them.10

It has been said that already “AI is hitting a wall,”11 but I predict that the walls will crumble before we run into them—although to anyone who has not internalized the lesson of Chapter 7, it will happen unexpectedly, and mysteriously just in time. If we run out of training text, we’ll find more; if we can’t find more, we’ll develop models that learn more efficiently from data; if we approach the limits of efficiency, we’ll focus on other modalities such as video. If we run out of energy, we’ll develop more efficient chips; if we run out of chips, we’ll develop more efficient algorithms. When intuition plateaued, we developed “reasoning” models using chain-of-thought; when that plateaus, we will give them memory, or teach them to take notes, or to use the scientific method, or some other technique. We are problem-solving animals, and with this much money and talent at work, we’ll solve any problems that arise until AI reaches its full potential.

To see that potential, we don’t have to debate what is a “general” intelligence (AGI), or whether “superintelligence” is even a coherent concept. We don’t have to assume that AI will be able to perform all human tasks—after all, industrial machines transformed the world a long time ago, and even now, hundreds of years in, they still can’t perform all the physical tasks done by humans, or even all the ones done by horses. All we have to do is observe that AI can already perform a wide variety of tasks—from writing code to drafting reports to creating images—and expect that it will continue to get better at these tasks and many others like them.

Automation will make this work dramatically cheaper and faster. Many tasks and projects that were once prohibitively expensive in time or money will become accessible: building custom software applications, summarizing feedback from large surveys, translating entire books. Services that are now a luxury for the wealthy—legal advice, specialist doctors, tax assistance, psychotherapy, business coaching, personal tutoring—will become a commodity for almost everyone.

The speed and the 24/7, always-on accessibility of AI services make possible a much faster mode of working. Iterations are measured not in business days, but in minutes. To think of a question and to get the answer before you’ve even stopped wondering about it, or to have an idea and to get a prototype of it before you’ve lost the moment of inspiration, is powerful.

AI will also be more precise, reliable, and consistent than human labor—just as machines are when performing physical tasks. This, too, will lead to a new mode of working. In human teams, much effort is spent training new employees up to baseline competency and then maintaining their performance through regular evaluations—and still, employee performance can be much more dependent on inherent talent than on training or feedback. In addition, employees are constantly turning over. All of this creates so much variance that it limits how much the training can be optimized in practice.

A team of AI workers will be different: they will all be copies of an already-trained model, which will execute that training consistently and never quit. This will let us experiment with AI workers—say, a fleet of customer service representatives, or math tutors, or medical advisors—in a way that is possible with factory machines, but impossible with human employees. We can iteratively improve the workers, testing each change against a standard benchmark, monitoring against performance metrics in the field, and keeping what works: a tunable workforce. Once a mistake is fixed in training, the workers will never make that mistake again, so quality ratchets upwards.

AI services will also be far more dynamically scalable than human ones. As long as data centers have capacity, you’ll be able to spin up as much intelligence as you need, with no concern for all the problems of recruiting talent. When you’re done, you can stop using them, and stop paying for them, with no advance notice—and then restart them whenever you want, with no penalty or retraining. This is intelligence as a utility.

Faster, cheaper cognitive labor will be a boon to the economy at large, but most importantly, it will accelerate R&D. Recall from Chapter 7 that total factor productivity (TFP) is a key driver of economic growth, and that the resources going into R&D, especially the number of researchers, are a key driver of TFP. AI might thus not only make existing industries more efficient and scalable, but help to create entirely new industries based on new technologies and new science.

This potential is most evident in biotech. As described in Chapter 7, the space of small molecules, proteins, or genomes is unfathomably large. The mechanisms and behavior of biological systems, even single cells, are so complex as to virtually defy description.12 Already, researchers at the Arc Institute are training AI models to learn the patterns of DNA and to predict the behavior of cells; longevity startup New Limit is using AI to predict the effect of combinations of transcription factors on cellular aging and to prioritize experiments; and the research institute Future House is developing a set of AI agents that can review scientific literature, propose experiments, and analyze data.13

AI researcher Jacob Steinhardt has suggested that models trained on massive scientific data sets, such as astronomical images or DNA sequences, “might understand stars and genes much better than we do,” giving them “unintuitive capabilities … such as designing novel proteins.”14 But AI can help accelerate research even if this never happens. A lot of invention comes, not from sudden flashes of insight or deduction from theory, but from tinkering with possibilities at the edges of the known: Edison’s lab testing thousands of materials for the filament of the light bulb, Selman Waksman’s process screening over ten thousand strains of microbes to find streptomycin and other antibiotics, Carl Bosch’s chemical company testing tens of thousands of materials as catalysts for the Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixation process.15 AI researchers can accelerate science and technology simply by making it fast, cheap and easy to do literature reviews, run simulations, or test algorithms at large scale, and someday (via roboticized labs) to do real-world experiments.

So if you are skeptical of “superintelligence,” think instead of cheap, abundant, reliable, scalable intelligence—a transformation analogous to what we went through with energy and physical work in the Industrial Revolution. In such a world, we’ll be able to “waste” enormous amounts of intelligence on minor tasks, just as today we “waste” enormous amounts of energy and machinery and raw materials to produce disposable containers for food or plastic trinkets for children. We'll use “overqualified” AI for mundane activities, such that average people will be able to enjoy the sort of first-class service previously available only to the very wealthy. When you want a nutritionist, interior decorator, investment advisor, or math tutor, you’ll hire the equivalent of a world-class expert, for an affordable price; when talking to sales or customer service, it will feel as if you got escalated to the CEO for special handling.

To extend the Industrial Revolution analogy: A human laborer exerts about 100 watts of muscle energy.16 US per-capita energy consumption is roughly 10 kilowatts, or about 100x a human—the energy equivalent of 100 servants performing manual labor night and day on behalf of every man, woman and child.17 To imagine the intelligence age, add to this 100 assistants performing cognitive labor for every human—managing our affairs, prototyping our ideas, prioritizing our correspondence, researching our questions. A human brain has been estimated at about a petaflop/s of computational power.18 Current installed computing power from NVIDIA chips alone has been estimated at 3.9 million petaflop/s as of Q4 2024, and doubling every ten months.19 At that rate, the US will reach the 100-to-1 ratio in roughly 2037.20

The transition, however, will be more complex than simply scaling up data centers. As Dario Amodei has suggested, AI’s ability to drive productivity will be limited by the need for data, the slowness of the physical world, the intrinsic complexity of certain problems, and social constraints. Not all tasks have the same “marginal returns to intelligence.”21

Given these limitations, how fast might the transition be? Agriculture took thousands of years to spread: it advanced at about one kilometer per year.22 Industry took centuries: the steam engine was invented in the early 1700s, but horses were still the main way to plow fields or pull carriages until the early 1900s.23 Any transition from one age to the next begins in the earlier age, using the technologies of that age, including the technologies that drive the transition. So for now, the AI transition is happening at the speed of humans: humans still must adapt AI to each new function, and must start to reimagine our processes and organizations with AI in mind. Thus to reach the point where AI has transformed most sectors of the economy will probably take decades.

A new economic mode can change the crucial factors of production. In the agricultural age, land was a limiting factor. In the industrial age, production was driven by labor and capital, and no longer limited by land. In the intelligence age, perhaps production will be driven by capital alone, no longer limited by labor. In economic models, if you remove labor from the production function, then output becomes simply “AK”, that is, TFP times capital. Such a model grows unconstrained by population or any biological limits. The pattern of acceleration then continues unless and until we hit the best technology allowed by the laws of physics, the greatest possible TFP. At that point there is no more R&D left, and acceleration (increasing growth rate) stops, but the economy still grows exponentially (at a constant growth rate) as long as it can accumulate capital. As Chad Jones puts it, “this result sounds like the plot of a science fiction novel: Machines invent all possible ideas, leading to a maximum productivity, and then they fill the universe rearranging matter and energy to exponentially expand the size of the artificial intelligence.”24

A fourth age would thus mean the continued acceleration of economic growth, quickly leading to wealth beyond our wildest dreams. But would it be a utopia—or a dystopia?

Work is not merely toil. It is a source of meaning, identity, and power. If AI does all the work, will we lose those things? Even if not, will we simply be excruciatingly bored? What will people do in the intelligence age?

One dystopian vision of the future is the world of WALL-E, where the humans are fat, lazy, stupid, and complacent, while the AI nannies them, distracts them, and hides the truth about their situation. Put another way, the grand potential of AI is that it magnifies human agency—but the risk is that we instead cede agency to AI: letting it think for us, decide for us, live for us. This risk was articulated in a paper titled “Gradual Disempowerment,” which worries that humans may become “unable to meaningfully command resources or influence outcomes” in the world, to the point where “even basic self-preservation and sustenance may become unfeasible.”25

But if we get AI right, it will instead lead to accelerating empowerment. It will enable people to learn any subject, start any business, and realize any vision, limited only by motivation and will. It will greatly leverage human creativity and judgement—by making it cheaper, faster, and more reliable to bring ideas into reality. If you think it would be amazing to see Sherlock Holmes set in medieval Japan, or Beowulf done as a Hamilton-style hip hop musical, AI will help you create it. If you think someone should really write a history of the catalytic converter in prose worthy of The New Yorker, AI will draft it. If you think there’s a market for a new social media app where all posts are in iambic pentameter, AI will design and code the beta. If you want a kitchen gadget that combines a corkscrew with a lemon zester, AI will create the CAD files, and you can send them to a lights-out factory to deliver a prototype.26

With AI to assist in every task, humans will step up a level, into management. A software engineer becomes a tech lead of a virtual team. A writer becomes an editor of a staff of virtual journalists. A researcher becomes the head of a lab of virtual scientists. Lawyers, accountants, and other professionals spend their time overseeing, directing, and correcting work rather than doing the first draft.

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

Most people today aren’t suited to being CEOs, but the job of CEO will become much more accessible, because it will require less skill. You won’t have to recruit candidates or evaluate them; you won’t have to motivate or inspire them; you won’t have to train junior employees; you’ll never catch them slacking off; you’ll never have to work around the vacations or sick days that they won’t be taking; you’ll never have to deal with low morale or someone who is sore they didn’t get a promotion; you’ll never have to mediate disputes among them or defuse office politics; you’ll never have to give them performance reviews or negotiate raises; and you’ll never have to replace them, because they’ll never quit. They’ll just work competently, diligently, and conscientiously, doing whatever you ask. They’ll be every manager’s dream employee. Running a team of virtual agents will make managing humans look like herding cats.

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

So, what will people do in the intelligence age? Anything we want.

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

But we must actually be managing or governing—not just along for the ride. We must cast ourselves in the role of decision-makers, with AIs as expert advisors, and we should take responsibility for ultimate decisions, as good managers do. We should question and push back on AIs, making them justify their advice. We should verify facts for ourselves, diving deep into details. We should constantly evaluate our AIs, and when necessary fire them and replace them with different models.

We should require periodic reports and reviews of AIs acting autonomously, and subject them to regular audits. We should empower AI agents to be whistleblowers when given a dangerous or unethical task, whether by a human or by a manager AI. And ultimately, we will rely on law enforcement to stop rogue actors—whether humans using AI, or AIs acting alone.

One concern is that it will become impossible to manage the enormous throughput of AI activity, the accelerated pace of change, and the growing complexity of the world. “Gradual Disempowerment” worries that “AI labor will likely occur on a scale that is far too fast, large and complex for humans to oversee,” that “the complexity of AI-driven economic systems might exceed human comprehension,” that “AI decision-making processes might be too complex for meaningful human review,” and that “the legal and regulatory framework might evolve to become not just complex but incomprehensible to humans.” In this, the paper echoes Alvin Toffler’s worries from 1965 that we noted in Chapter 2: “Change is avalanching down upon our heads … Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people.”27 But as I argued in that chapter, technology not only accelerates change, it also helps us deal with change. And AI is perfectly suited to helping us deal with the changes accelerated by AI.

AI can help us gather and digest information, monitor events and situations, make predictions, model threats, and run scenarios. It can help us comprehend and navigate the legal system—indeed, it will democratize this ability, since the legal system is already incomprehensible and unnavigable unless you are a trained professional or wealthy enough to hire one.

AIs can provide checks and balances on other AIs. If one AI system writes code, another can run a suite of tests. If one creates an engineering design, another can simulate it to find flaws. If one produces a report, another can check its calculations, verify that its references support its statements, compare its claims to historical data, or search for contradictory claims in the literature. Multiple AIs can be tasked with answering the same question, or one AI can propose a plan and another can critique it—and then they can all debate their answers, in front of a panel of AI judges. All of this will be quick and cheap, which means we will do much more of it, even in situations where it doesn’t seem worth it today to go to the trouble—say, automatically verifying every reference in every published paper or book.

An implication of this vision of the future is that we will need AI model diversity. The more we rely on AIs to provide checks and balances on other AIs, the more there is a risk of collusion, which would be magnified if all AIs are variations on the same model. An AI may decide not to blow the whistle on a copy of itself, or to fail a copy of itself in an audit. In such a world, a single dominant model becomes a single point of failure.

A future in which AI magnifies human agency is not automatic or inevitable. We must build for agency. In education, for instance, AI can either help or hurt learning, depending on how it is used. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick reports that when students use ChatGPT to do homework or write essays without guidance or special prompting, the AI ends up doing the work for them; as a result, they learn less and score lower on exams. But “when used with teacher guidance and good prompting based on sound pedagogical principles, AI can greatly improve learning outcomes,” as has been found in a variety of classroom studies from Harvard and Stanford to Malaysia and Nigeria. The problem is that “even honest attempts to use AI for help can backfire because the default mode of AI is to do the work for you, not with you.”28

So those who create AI systems, and who integrate them into the economy and society, must design them for humans who will be active learners, managers and governors, not passive followers or consumers. Otherwise, we may well be disempowered—gradually, or suddenly.

Stepping up to this challenge is worth it. The reward is a new golden age.

It may feel surreal to think that we will live through a transition to a new age of humanity, on the level of the first agricultural revolution, or the Industrial Revolution. What is even more surreal is to think that we may live through more than one.

The stone age lasted several tens of thousands of years (or even longer, depending on how you count).29 The agricultural age lasted about ten thousand years. The industrial age, so far, has lasted less than three hundred years. Each age runs its course faster than the last—dramatically faster.30 Will the length of the intelligence age be measured in decades? And what could possibly come after it?

In Chapter 6, we saw that the growth rate of world GDP is not constant, but increases over time. The simplest model that fits the data is that growth rate is proportional to the size of the economy itself. But where a constant growth rate would produce an exponential growth curve, a growth rate that increases with the size of the economy produces a hyperbolic growth curve—that is, a curve with an asymptote, that goes infinite in finite time.31

Infinite growth is impossible, so at some point this model has to fall apart. One of our assumptions has to break. There must be some maximum level of technology, past which growth can’t accelerate; or there are limits to capital based on the amount of matter and energy in the galaxy; or some other limit we can’t even conceive of now. But the acceleration may not stop until we hit these ultimate limits.

Next: Chapter 8, part 2.

Parts of this essay were adapted from “The future of humanity is in management.”

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

In part 1 of this chapter, we argued that physical resources are not a barrier to progress. In part 2, we argued that progress will also not be stalled by a lack of ideas, or by fishing all ideas out of the idea pond.

Through all of these purported barriers to progress—from resource depletion to using up low-hanging fruit to population decline—there runs a theme.

Every prediction of stagnation points at some problem and claims, implicitly or explicitly, that we won’t solve it. Often this rests on an argument that some trend can’t continue forever—the growth of agriculture, the extraction of fossil fuels, the progress of Moore’s Law, whatever.

This type of claim feels like an intelligent, sober, rational analysis. It is grounded in facts and data, based only on what we can observe and predict. It is the opposite of wild-eyed speculation or fantasy. And at some level these claims are true. No trend can continue forever.

Any given oil field will peak and decline. Sustained growth in oil production comes from finding new fields, and sometimes from inventing entirely new techniques, such as fracking.

Every technology follows an S-shaped curve: ramping up exponentially at first, then leveling off as it reaches its potential. Sustained progress comes from “stacking S-curves”: whenever one technology starts to plateau, we transition to a new one. Thus we advanced from the water wheel to the steam engine to the internal combustion engine to the gas turbine.

No proven resources or technologies can sustain economic growth. The status quo will plateau. To expect growth is to believe in future technologies. To expect very long-term growth is to believe in science fiction.

No known solutions can solve our hardest problems—that’s why they’re the hardest ones. And by the nature of problem-solving, we usually discover problems before we discover their solutions. So there will always be a frontier of problems we don’t yet know how to solve.

To believe we can somehow make trends continue, past the point where anyone can see exactly how this is possible, requires believing in an unknown solution—the next oil field, or the next innovation—arriving seemingly from out of nowhere, and just in the nick of time. It requires believing that at least some current wild-eyed speculation will come true.

This feels like blind optimism or even wishful thinking—naive, immature, irresponsible. And yet, over the long run of history, “blind” optimism would have been a better predictor than “sober” pessimism of what has actually happened. We did find the next oil field, the next alloy, the next type of engine, the next variety of wheat, the next antibiotic, and a thousand other solutions.

Believing in the next solution is not blind, nor is it a denial of the problems we face. It is a recognition of a much more profound and powerful truth: we are problem-solving animals. Problem-solving is fundamental to human nature.

The proof is in our track record: both the length and the breadth of our history of problem-solving. The length is what we saw in the previous chapter: a consistent pattern of accelerating growth across millions of years. But we should also appreciate the breadth of problems that we have solved. Our success is not due to one resource, such as fossil fuels, or even to one technology, such as energy. We have solved problems in materials, mechanical engineering, and precision manufacturing; the growth of crops and the production of chemicals; the organization of factories and the management of teams. We discovered how to find our way at sea and how to turn our thoughts into electricity. We discovered how to sanitize our food and water and how to supercharge our immune systems against disease. We discovered how to predict the weather and how to make our buildings withstand earthquakes.

This was not a fluke. We did not get lucky. We are problem-solving animals.

Our problem-solving ability is based on two deep and powerful facts. The first is that reality contains a vast space of possibilities in which to search for solutions. This is because the possibility space is combinatorial: new possibilities are created from the combination of simple elements. And combinations grow very quickly.

Suppose we are hunting for new drug molecules. Molecules are combinations of atoms, and there are many types of atoms, and many ways to combine them, even if we exclude large biological molecules or polymers. The number of possible small molecules has been estimated in excess of 10⁶⁰, an astronomical figure.1 For comparison, comprehensive databases of known chemicals, such as the NIH’s PubChem or the American Chemical Society’s CAS Registry, contain a mere ~10⁸ entries.2 That’s not a drop in the bucket; that’s a molecule of water in a hundred thousand oceans.3

Or suppose we are engineering proteins. The number of amino acid sequences of modest length, say 300, is about 10³⁹⁰.4 By one estimate, only perhaps 1 in 10¹¹ of these are functional proteins; that still leaves 10³⁷⁹.5 To call this “astronomical” would be an absurd understatement; it is closer to an astronomical figure raised to the fifth power. Again, for comparison, the UniProt database of known proteins contains only ~10⁸ entries.6

Or suppose we are optimizing a simple microbe—say brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The yeast genome has about 12 million base pairs. The number of DNA sequences of that length is ~10^7,224,720. But most of those aren’t even viable genomes, and most of the viable ones aren’t yeast, so let’s use a much more conservative estimate. One survey of over 3,000 yeast genomes found 1,918,693 locations where a significant fraction of genomes differed—known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs—and that any two cells differed in about 52,000 locations.7 Each of these variations is thus a viable option for a yeast cell, and they can be combined. Thus there are probably at least 2^1,918,693 = ~10^577,584 viable yeast genomes. This is a number that defies description. The human genome is 3 billion base pairs, with over 600 million known SNPs; making the corresponding numbers that much larger.8

These examples are based on atoms, but the same combinatorial explosion happens with information. Counting the valid computer programs with up to a million lines of code, or the neural networks with a trillion parameters, would produce numbers that are even more unfathomable.9 And remember that social institutions, such as a code of law or a moral philosophy, are also information—which means they too have a combinatorially large possibility space, out of which very, very little has even been conceived, and still less has been tried.

In short: We have not yet begun to explore.

Fantastic things could be lurking in unexplored possibilities. Paul Romer suggests:

[I]magine the ideal chemical refinery. It would convert an abundant, renewable resource into a product that humans value. It would be smaller than a car, mobile so that it could search out its own inputs, capable of maintaining the temperature necessary for its reactions within narrow bounds, and able to automatically heal most system failures. It would build replicas of itself for use after it wears out, and it would do all of this with little human supervision. All we would have to do is get it to stay still periodically so that we could hook up some pipes and drain off the final product.

This refinery already exists. It is the milk cow. Nature found this amazing way to arrange hydrogen, carbon, and a few other miscellaneous atoms by meandering along one particular evolutionary path of trial and error (albeit one that took hundreds of millions of years). Someone who had never heard of a cow or a bat probably would not believe that a hunk of atoms can turn grass into milk or navigate by echolocation as it flies around. Imagine all the amazing things that can be made out of atoms that simply have never been tried.10

The problem with such a vast space is that it is impossible to search via simple enumeration. Consider again the set of small molecules. Just as a thought experiment, to get a sense of scale: imagine you turn every man, woman and child on Earth into a biochemical researcher (~10¹⁰). Give an entire planet full of such researchers to every star in the galaxy (10¹¹).11 Repeat for every galaxy in the observable universe (another 10¹¹).12 That’s 10³² researchers. Give each of them equipment that can test out one small molecule per nanosecond (more than 10¹⁶ per year). Even with this fantastic scientific endowment, to cover 10⁶⁰ molecules would take over a hundred billion years—many times the age of the universe. And remember that this was by far the smallest possibility space calculated above. To cover even all proteins, let alone all genomes, etc., would be simply impossible.

The saving grace is that the possibility space is not random: it has structure, and the structure can be exploited for efficient search.

First, viable solutions are often adjacent. A molecule with one side chain added can be another interesting molecule; a protein with one amino acid changed can be another functional protein; a genome with one gene inserted can be another viable genome. This means that starting from something that works, it’s possible to explore other solutions by changing one thing at a time. This is how evolution has proceeded for billions of years.

But that evolution has now produced us, beings with a symbolic intelligence. And that brings us to the second key fact: human intelligence can understand the structure of reality, to produce a search that is much more efficient than random variation and natural selection.

Consider ML01, the first genetically engineered yeast used in the wine industry. Natural yeast produces malic acid during fermentation. To remove the sour taste of this acid, winemakers traditionally used a bacterial species, Oenococcus oeni, to turn malic acid into milder lactic acid. But using O. oeni was slow, unreliable, and created toxic byproducts. ML01 contains the malolactic enzyme from O. oeni, and a transport gene from another strain of yeast, in order to process the malic acid itself—no bacteria required.13 This is evidently one of the possible yeast genomes, and not even one of the 10^577,584 we counted above, since it requires not just varying SNPs but inserting entire genes.

This yeast would never have been created by nature, but it was discovered by human intelligence. Intelligence was needed to understand different types of acids, and enzymes that can convert between them; to identify the gene for one enzyme among over a thousand genes in one species of bacteria; to devise tools to cut and paste genes from one microbial species to another; to found research institutions where people can focus on such specialized, abstract tasks and integrate them into the world economy; to establish a patent system that enables such research to be funded; to formulate a scientific epistemology to guide those researchers in their work and a philosophy of progress to motivate and inspire them.

In sum: The combinatorial vastness of possibility space means that solutions are out there. The structure of that space, and the power of intelligence to navigate it, means that we can find them.

When you hear an argument that progress cannot or should not continue, try framing it as a claim that a certain problem can’t be solved. Thus, fears of resource depletion become a claim that we can’t find new reserves or switch to more abundant resources. Much of environmentalism becomes a claim that we can’t clean up pollution, patch the ozone hole, or stabilize the climate. Moral objections to social media are claims that we can’t solve problems of addiction and build a healthy relationship with our technology.

This framing is powerful. It helps us avoid defeatist pessimism, in which we claim that these problems are impossible to solve, and also complacent optimism, in which we ignore, downplay or deny the problems. It helps us reframe the discussion in more productive terms: about how to solve them, how much investment that will take, and which problems deserve more attention.

Framing progress as a product of human problem-solving also puts our focus on agency, rather than luck. This is crucial. If the progress of the last few centuries was a random windfall, then pessimism is logical: our luck is bound to run out. How could we get that lucky again? Growth was slow for most of human history, so if the next century is an average one, it will see little progress.

But progress was not a windfall. Resources did not find us. We found them. Ideas did not write themselves into our books. We invented them. Progress did not happen to us. We made it. And we can continue to do so.

Next: Chapter 8, The Unlimited Horizon

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

If ideas, not resources, drive economic growth, then one might well ask: will we run out of ideas?

Some think we already have. The slowdown in GDP and TFP growth since about 1970 is sometimes explained by claiming that all the major opportunities to improve living standards were completed by then, and that no comparable opportunities remain. Robert Gordon’s Rise and Fall of American Growth emphasizes that the innovations of the 1870–1970 period, such as automobiles or electricity, “could only happen once.”1

But all inventions only happen once: that’s the nature of invention, not a special feature of the period 1870–1970. And there will be things to invent as long as there are problems to be solved—as long as there are any unmet desires, any suffering or death, any frustration or inconvenience; as long as anyone feels cost-conscious about any consumption, from groceries to gasoline to vacations to air conditioning.

Less clear is whether we can keep up the pace of invention. Growth could in theory slow down not because there are no more opportunities to improve the quality of life, but because those improvements get harder to achieve.

We can shed light on this question by turning to economic theory, including quantitative models of economic growth. This will require describing a handful of technical concepts, but the reward is that the best-tested theories of growth will confirm some of the intuitions we’ve already developed, and give us new ones.

By the 20th century, the old land-and-labor model that Malthus had been working with was obsolete. Labor and capital, instead, became the key inputs to economic models. Crucially for economic growth, land is fixed, but capital can be accumulated.

Workers are more productive when given more capital. A farmer with a hoe becomes more productive with a tractor; a factory worker using a hand drill becomes more productive with a power drill. But pure capital accumulation faces diminishing returns. A worker with ten machine tools doesn’t get ten times as productive, since he can only use one at a time. At a certain point, adding more capital per worker isn’t worth the extra expense of depreciation and maintenance. An economy can grow indefinitely by adding both labor and capital, but this does not raise living standards, since what matters for living standards is output per capita.2

To increase output per capita, we need to raise labor productivity, which means we need better capital—that is, more advanced technology. The hand drill becomes a power drill, which becomes a computer-controlled milling machine. The scythe becomes a horse-drawn mechanical reaper, which becomes a gasoline-powered combine harvester.

In the equations of economists, technology is a multiplier on the productivity of labor and capital, called “total factor productivity” or TFP. We can’t measure it directly, but we can deduce its growth by looking at overall economic growth and then taking out the contribution of increased labor and capital. Any growth of output greater than the growth of those inputs is assumed to come from some combination of technology, business organization, and capital allocation.

In the 1950s, economist Robert Solow introduced this parameter and calculated TFP growth for the first time—work that would ultimately win him a Nobel prize.3 He found that from 1909–49, TFP had almost doubled: output per worker had more than doubled, while capital per worker had only increased about 30%. That technology had contributed more to growth than capital was surprising to Solow and his peers; it seemed to “take the capital out of capitalism.”4

Higher TFP has two effects. First, it multiplies each worker’s productivity. Second, it allows us to afford more capital: when machines create more output, we can afford to spend more on their maintenance and depreciation.5 As technology advances and we keep improving and increasing capital, we deploy more capital per worker, and each worker gets more productive. These broad patterns are seen in the economic data over long periods of time, and are well-known to economists as stylized facts that are central to the field.6

Holding technology constant, economic output is a linear function of the combined labor and capital inputs. If we double capital and we double labor, we can exactly double production. Two identical factories, staffed with identical workforces, produce twice as much as one factory and one workforce alone.7 But if we also double TFP, then we have two better factories equipped with better machines, and we can more than double output. In economics terms, there are “constant returns to scale” from labor and capital alone, but “increasing returns to scale” from labor, capital, and technology together. And increasing returns to scale are what we need to improve living standards.

The lesson from Solow’s economic model is that capital accumulation, alone, cannot sustain progress—but technology can.

Solow measured TFP and observed its growth, but he didn’t explain what drove that growth. Over the coming decades, economists proposed a variety of models. Some had technology provided by the government as a public good.8 Others focused on the accumulation of “human capital” (skills and education) rather than technology as such.9 Kenneth Arrow proposed a model of “learning by doing”, in which firms improve their techniques as a by-product of production (based on T. P. Wright’s 1936 observation of “experience curves” in airplane manufacturing).10

What all of these models neglected was private R&D by profit-seeking inventors and firms. But economists who tried to model private R&D faced a dilemma: is technology a public good or a private good? If it was a public good—freely available to all—then there was no incentive for private actors to produce it, and no way for them to recoup their investments in doing so. On the other hand, if it was a private good, it seemed like just another form of capital—in which case it should exhibit constant returns to scale, not increasing returns, when taken together with traditional forms of capital and with labor.11 One paper from the 1960s complained that “the distinction between private and public goods is fuzzy,” and that it depends on legal and social arrangements.12

The paradox was resolved in a Nobel-winning 1990 paper by Paul Romer.13 He did it by applying two concepts that were, at the time, known within the subfield of public finance, but not broadly applied in other fields:14 rivalry and excludability. A good is rival if one person’s consumption of it diminishes the amount available to others: normal physical goods such as a loaf of bread are like this, but broadcast radio is not. It is excludable if it is possible to prevent others from consuming it: again, normal physical goods are like this, but unfenced common areas, such as fishing waters, are not. These concepts tease apart two distinct dimensions that are entangled in the one-dimensional classification of “public” vs. “private.” “Private goods” are both rival and excludable. “Public goods” are neither (e.g., national defense). But a good can be one without the other. Romer explains: “Rivalry and its opposite nonrivalry are assertions about production possibilities. Excludability depends on a policy choice about rules.”15

In particular, ideas, by their nature, are nonrival: they can be replicated at trivial marginal cost and used by everyone simultaneously. Thomas Jefferson remarked that the “peculiar character” of ideas is “that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”16 But ideas can be made at least partially excludable via means such as patents. This allows firms to profit from R&D.

The nonrivalry of ideas, which made previous economists want to think of them as a “public good,” explains how living standards can rise, not fall, with a growing population—how they rise not in spite of but because of a growing population. Romer writes:

The simple point that goes back to Malthus is that if R is the stock of any rival resource, and N is the number of people, the per capita stock of resources, R/N, falls with N. Unless there is some offsetting effect, this means that the individual standard of living has to decrease when the number of people increases.

But:

… if A represents the stock of ideas it is also the per capita stock of ideas. Bigger N means bigger A so bigger N means more A per capita. [emphasis added]17

There, in a simple formal model, is the refutation of Malthusianism.

No matter what inputs we consider to be driving the economy—land, labor, capital, technology, institutions—scaling just the rival inputs gives us constant returns, but scaling the rival inputs together with nonrival ones gives increasing returns. And again, increasing returns are what is needed to improve living standards.

This model gives the weight of economic theory to our observations about the value of population from Chapter 3. A larger population is better for everyone, because a larger population generates more ideas, and everyone can benefit from them without diminishment. “That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe,” wrote Jefferson, “for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point.”18

So the growth of knowledge, represented by TFP, is crucial to progress. It enables higher living standards, it overcomes resource scarcity, it frees us from the Malthusian trap. The most crucial question for the future of growth, then, is: what drives TFP?

Looking back at the pattern of accelerating growth we saw in the previous chapter, Romer suggested that the growth rate was proportional to the investment in R&D.19 On the face of it, this is a reasonable hypothesis. But soon after, Chad Jones pointed out that, contrary to the very long-term pattern of increasing growth rates, growth has actually held quite steady for more than 100 years—despite massive increases in the number of researchers and total R&D investment.20 More recently, a paper by Bloom, Jones, van Reenan and Webb found that this pattern holds not only at the macro level but in various specific industries.21

Consider one of the prime examples of sustained exponential progress: Moore’s Law. What investment is required to maintain exponential growth in the number of transistors in an integrated circuit? Bloom et al define a metric of investment which is the amount spent on R&D by the semiconductor industry, deflated by the wage rate of high-skilled workers (who are the ones doing R&D). They find that in 2014, it took 18 times as much investment by this metric to drive Moore’s Law than it did in 1971.

Why? In the early days of IC manufacturing, when feature sizes were 10 microns, the challenges were things like mechanizing manual processes, or using more sophisticated optical systems to obviate the need for the lithography mask to come into physical contact with the chip.22 Now that features are measured in nanometers, lithography has to be performed with extreme ultraviolet light, feature etching is marred by the nanoscale randomness of individual atoms and photons, electrons threaten to quantum-tunnel right through our logic gates, and the chips generate so much heat you could cook dinner on them.23 The further we push technology, the harder the problems become to solve.

We see the same pattern in other areas of technology. In the 1700s, labor productivity in textile manufacturing could be improved by multiples via very simple devices such as the flying shuttle or the cotton gin. Today, the fiber-to-fabric pipeline is already so highly automated that to get a similar multiplier would be a much bigger challenge.24

We see the same pattern again in science. Galileo became a legendary scientist by rolling balls down inclined planes and observing the planets through simple, low-powered telescopes. Now, to push forward the frontiers of science, we build such massive, expensive instruments as the James Webb Space Telescope, the Large Hadron Collider, and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO)—collaborations between thousands of researchers that require hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of investment.25

We might think of ideas like apples in an orchard, which become harder to reach as we pick off the low-hanging fruit. Jones calls the effect “fishing out,” as if ideas were a finite number of fish stocked in a closed pond, such that as we empty the pond of fish, it becomes harder to catch them.26 Others have used the metaphor of mining for ideas, where any vein of ideas can run thin.27

Jones’s fishing-out effect is the flip side of Romer’s increasing returns. Both are consequences of the non-rivalry of ideas. The upside of this non-rivalry is that when an idea is created, everyone can share it. But the downside is that we can’t generate more value by generating the same idea over again year after year, nor can two people or teams generate twice the value by each generating the same idea.28

On top of this, we can add the “burden of knowledge.” The more we learn, the longer a researcher has to study in order to reach the frontier, where they can make progress; and the more they have to specialize, which makes it harder to forge connections across disparate fields.29

If we imagine the frontier of knowledge and technology as an expanding sphere, we might suppose that each researcher or lab can only push forward a constant surface area—thus as the sphere expands, we need more researchers to join the effort all the time in order to keep pushing the whole thing outwards. Altogether, as we advance the frontier, we face a greater quantity and quality of problems to be solved—more problems because of the specialization of fields, and harder problems because the low-hanging fruit gets picked.

Bloom et al provocatively titled their paper “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” And in Jones’s formal models, this is represented by TFP itself having diminishing returns on future TFP growth.30 Some have interpreted this as a prediction of stagnation in the future—decreasing growth rates and slowing progress, as ideas continue to get harder to find—or even as an explanation for the slowdown in recent decades.31

But Jones’s model does not predict stagnation. Fishing-out is only one factor affecting growth rates. Remember, ideas have been getting harder to find ever since the stone age! There was so much low-hanging fruit in the stone age. If this were the only factor, then the long-term pattern of history would be one of deceleration, not acceleration.

The other side of the equation is that as ideas get harder to find, we get better at finding them. As the quantity and quality of the problems we have to solve increases, so does the quantity and quality of the resources we bring to bear on that challenge—more and better-educated researchers, working with more and better-designed tools.

The lesson of these models is not that stagnation is inevitable. They were originally developed to explain constant growth, not slowing growth. The lesson, instead, is about the intensity of inputs required to sustain growth. A constant base of R&D can’t sustain exponential growth. Exponential growth in R&D inputs is required for exponential growth in the economy. And super-exponential growth in those inputs can generate super-exponential economic growth. This is in fact what has happened over the long run of human history—the accelerating pattern we saw in the last chapter.32

Note that all the metaphors people use for innovation—fruit-picking, fishing, mining—are analogies to physical resource extraction. The comparison is instructive, given what we have discussed above about resources. Ideas get harder to find, but resources do too, and in both cases our investment in discovery and exploitation ramps up to meet the challenge: just as we continue to extract copper from lower-grade ores, we can continue to solve more difficult problems in science and technology. A particular field of ideas can run out, like an oil field or a mine—but just as we find new deposits of minerals, we also find new fields of innovation that open up the possibility for rapid advancement, such as computing in the 20th century or mRNA technology in the 21st. So just as it’s always been a mistake to call Peak Resources, I think it’s far too early to call Peak Ideas.

If there is truly a vast unexplored space of productive ideas remaining, and all we need to find them is a sufficient number of intelligent people, then our final concern for long-term growth might be: will we run out of people?

As noted in the last chapter, accelerating growth is driven by several self-reinforcing factors, including the base of ideas in science and technology, the industrial infrastructure we have built out, the surplus wealth we have to invest in R&D, and the total population, which gives us more brains to create more ideas.

All of these factors are growing, and we can expect them to continue to grow—except people. Population growth has fallen dramatically in recent decades and shows no signs of bottoming out. We have already passed “peak child.”33 UN projections show population growth reaching zero by the end of the century, with population leveling out at maybe eleven billion.34

There is no consensus among economists about which factors are crucial and how they quantitatively interact. But in Jones’s model, labor—that is, the number of researchers—is the driving factor. Under this model, if population were to level off as per UN estimates, economic growth would asymptote to zero, as we picked off all the low-hanging fruit. The frontier would get harder and harder to push out, and with only a constant base of researchers, progress would get slower and slower. No more acceleration, not even exponential growth, just a gentle plateau.35

There are a few ways we could stave off this stagnation. For one, the number of researchers is still only a fraction of a percent of the population. More people could become researchers, especially in large countries that are rising in affluence and education, such as India and China.36 This might take us a long way, but eventually it will level out, as the research fraction of the population can never exceed 100%.

A somewhat longer-term solution would be to reverse the decline in population growth—without, of course, regressing to a world in which couples had little ability to control fertility and women had little choice about what to do with their lives anyway. It might instead reverse through a combination of cultural, political, economic, and technological factors. Policy reform could reduce the cost and burden of caring for children, by relaxing regulation on everything from car seats to daycare.37 The general increase of wealth might allow families to afford more children while still maintaining the lifestyle they desire; governments may decide to help at the margin through increased subsidies.38 Advanced biotech may make it easier to prolong fertility later into life, or to reduce the burden of childbearing.39 AI companions might keep children entertained in a form that is healthy and educational, relieving parents of the guilt of “screen time.” Social movements could help steer parents away from burdensome “helicopter parenting” and into a more relaxed, “free range” parenting style; or help to remind prospective parents of the joy of young children and the value of having grown children in one’s old age.40 A shift in the zeitgeist could raise the honor and prestige of parenting, or quell the pessimism about the future that makes some people wary of bringing children into the world (especially if those children are perceived primarily as a carbon footprint).41 Likely none of these is a silver bullet for the fertility decline—which is widespread across cultures and is notoriously difficult to affect with policy—but a combination of all of them might slowly turn the trend around. Even if successful, however, this will hit social and biological limits—enough to keep up exponential growth, but not accelerating growth.

Beyond continuously increasing the number of researchers, another possibility is continuously increasing researcher productivity, through more and better tools. Surely scientists and engineers have been able to do more as we went from making calculations with pen and paper, to using a slide rule, to a mechanical calculator, to a computer. But of course, progress in such tools has been happening for a long time, so it is already contributing to growth and acceleration, and there’s no reason to think that we can increase this factor faster to make up for any shortfall in researchers. Also, remember the challenge of diminishing returns: there is only so much capital that can profitably be deployed per worker, and this must hold in the production of ideas as much as in the production of goods.42

Unless we can automate the production of ideas completely. If, as some have predicted, AI researchers can advance science and technology on their own, then humans are no longer the bottleneck on progress.

Silicon researchers could overcome biological limitations. They could overcome the burden of knowledge: they would be instantiated with training and skills, rather than requiring a lengthy education; and they could have encyclopedic recall of the scientific literature. They could also overcome the fishing-out effect, by sheer scale: they would work faster and cheaper than human researchers, and they would be faster and cheaper to create, with no biological limitations—only sufficient capital for GPUs and the energy to run them. In short, they could be the solution to driving the next era of growth and progress.

Regardless of how this plays out, notice that in the course of this chapter we’ve gone from worries about overpopulation to worries about underpopulation. That signifies the shift from a view of humans as primarily consumers and wasters to one of them as producers and idea-generators.

Next: Chapter 7, part 3

Parts of this essay were adapted from “Ideas getting harder to find does not imply stagnation.”

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

I feel sorry for the Rev. Thomas Malthus. He was doomed to be misremembered by history.

His Essay on the Principle of Population is remembered as a prophecy of scarcity. But Malthus’s focus was how to deal with scarcity, which he took as a given. The subtitle of his book promised “remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers”—utopian thinkers whose visions of the ideal society included universal welfare.1 Malthus countered that if supply of food is limited, then giving alms to the poor will only drive up the price of food—a point of economics on which he was correct.2 The only way to deal with the inherent scarcity of food, he said, was to limit population—and if population were not limited deliberately, through delayed marriage and abstinence, then it would be limited by disaster, such as famine, plague, or war.3 With rational family planning, though, resource catastrophes were avoidable.

But what Malthus is remembered for is the starting assumption he tossed off casually in the first chapter: that while population increases exponentially, there was no conceivable way for agricultural production to increase more than linearly. He took this as obvious, not even bothering to give an argument for it beyond failure of imagination:

If I allow that by the best possible policy… the produce of this Island [Great Britain] may be doubled in the first twenty-five years, I think it will be allowing as much as any person can well demand.

In the next twenty-five years, it is impossible to suppose that the produce could be quadrupled. … The very utmost that we can conceive, is, that the increase in the second twenty-five years might equal the present produce. … The most enthusiastic speculator cannot suppose a greater increase than this.4

But Malthus had the misfortune of writing just at the moment when humanity was about to escape the condition we now give his name to—the Malthusian trap.5 And so he is remembered, not as an economist who warned against subsidizing demand in the face of limited supply (a warning that bears repeating today!), but as a prophet of stagnation.

As long as people have noticed progress, they have wondered: will we run out of natural resources? Malthus wrote at the tail end of the era when land, a relatively fixed resource, constrained economic growth. The Industrial Revolution that was just getting underway would change this equation: production would thereafter be driven by machinery and energy. But no sooner had we overcome the limited supply of land than people began to worry about the limited supply of energy.

In 1865, William Stanley Jevons wrote The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-mines. Collecting statistics on the rate of production of coal, the depth of mines, and the cost of extraction, and comparing them to the growth of population and of industry, he warned that coal would eventually run out—and with it, Britain’s dominance in the world economy. He saw no solutions: not in substitute energy sources, not in fuel imports, not in energy efficiency (which, he pointed out in a famous paradox, tends to increase total fuel usage).6 “[I]t will appear that there is no reasonable prospect of any relief” from a future coal shortage, he concluded, and thus “we cannot long continue our present rate of progress.”7 All Britons could do was pay off their debt while the wealth was still flowing, and resign themselves to inevitable decline.8

Jevons did not anticipate what happened next: oil became a still greater resource than coal.9 But even as this happened, many observers, including staunch industrialists, expected those supplies to run out quickly as well. In 1885, less than thirty years after the first oil well, the state geologist of Pennsylvania called oil “a temporary and vanishing phenomenon—one which young men will live to see come to its natural end.”10 Charles Mann recounts:

Even as oil poured out of Texas, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 invited all forty-six U.S. governors to the White House to decry the “imminent exhaustion” of fossil fuels and other natural resources—“the weightiest problem now before the nation.” Afterward Roosevelt asked the U.S. Geological Survey to assay domestic oil reserves, the first such analysis ever undertaken. Its conclusions, released in 1909, were emphatic: if the nation continued “the present rate of increase in production,” a “marked decline” would begin “within a very few years.” Output would hit zero about 1935—a prophecy the survey repeated, annual report after annual report, for almost twenty years. …

When I searched through an archive of 1920s newspapers, I turned up more than a thousand articles prophesying an inevitable “oil crisis,” “oil famine,” or “oil shortage.” Some of those articles mentioned that oil executives were baffled by the cries of doom. But the overall tone was ominous. “The United States is face to face with a near shortage in petroleum supplies so serious it threatens the very economic fabric of the nation,” cried the Los Angeles Times in 1923. A year later, the Houston Post-Dispatch forecast “oil famine within two years.” “Oil exhaustion in fifteen or twenty years,” said the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1925. A special twelve-part wire-service investigation in 1928 flatly decreed, “There is no possible excuse for assuming an adequate future supply of oil.”11

Fortunes were lost again and again betting on the end of oil. Andrew Carnegie tells of a scheme he invested in during the early days of the industry:

Mr. Coleman, ever ready at suggestion, proposed to make a lake of oil by excavating a pool sufficient to hold a hundred thousand barrels (the waste to be made good every day by running streams of oil into it), and to hold it for the not far distant day when, as we then expected, the oil supply would cease. This was promptly acted upon, but after losing many thousands of barrels waiting for the expected day (which has not yet arrived) we abandoned the reserve. Coleman predicted that when the supply stopped, oil would bring ten dollars a barrel and therefore we would have a million dollars worth in the lake. We did not think then of Nature’s storehouse below which still keeps on yielding many thousands of barrels per day without apparent exhaustion.12

Carl Bosch, the brilliant industrialist behind the Haber-Bosch process that gave synthetic fertilizer to the world, also invested enormous sums of his company’s money developing a process to synthesize gasoline from coal, an expensive way of producing fuel that only made sense in the expectation of a coming shortage.13 Bosch achieved little with this process other than helping the Nazis prolong WW2.14

Despite over a century and a half of worries, worldwide fossil fuel production has grown steadily since Jevons, with only few and minor dips, and is now at an all-time high.15 Britain’s coal reserves did not run out. Its coal production did peak and decline, but as part of a shift to oil and gas, especially after large oil deposits were discovered in the North Sea in the 1970s—Britain actually became a net energy exporter in the ‘80s and ‘90s.16 Teddy Roosevelt and the USGS made their predictions before major oil deposits were found in the 1920s and ‘30s in Oklahoma and Texas, and then even bigger deposits in the Middle East. US oil production declined for a while after the 1970s, but fracking and horizontal drilling reversed that trend, and in 2024 US oil production reached an all-time high of 4.8 billion barrels.17

Fossil fuels are not the only resource people thought would run out. Metals have been a popular concern as well. In the 1870s, geologist Eduard Suess warned that “from geologic indications we must expect in the future a scarcity of gold,” expecting that silver would fully replace it as money.18 Ed Conway recounts in Material World that when copper became crucial to the electric industry, “wise observers of the day predicted that the new technology of electricity would be toppled by its reliance on this scarce natural resource. In 1924 prominent geologist Ira Joralemon predicted that ‘the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years,’ adding: ‘Our civilization based on electrical power will dwindle and die.’”19 We did, in fact, use up the best grades of copper ore, which dropped from 12% or more of copper in the 18th century to less than 1% by the end of the 20th. It now takes 16 times as much stone to produce a unit of copper as it did in 1900. But the price of copper since then has remained mostly flat, because we’re also about 16 times more efficient at extraction.20

Steven Pinker suggests that:

When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages.

What is that flaw? First, shortages are often predicted based on proven reserves: resources that are known to exist and to be economical to extract with current technology. But proven reserves can thus expand when we discover new deposits or improve our technology, or when the price of a resource rises, making it profitable to work marginally productive reserves.

Nor is it a coincidence when this happens just in time to rescue us from a shortage: it is the shortage itself, or the prospect of one, that drives these factors. Shortages raise prices, and anticipation of future demand motivates the search for both new deposits and new technologies. As Tyler Cowen has said and I have often repeated, “Never underestimate elasticity of supply.”21

On the demand side, the same factors drive the search for efficiency and for substitutes. Thus, when specific resources do truly run out, we switch to other ways of satisfying the same need. We saw an example of this in Chapter 5, when the imminent exhaustion of natural fertilizer motivated innovation in synthetic fertilizer. This was part of a general theme of the late 19th and early 20th century: the shift from unscalable biological resources to far more abundant mineral resources. Whale oil for lighting, for instance, was replaced by kerosene.22 Similarly, using tortoise shells for combs and brushes, or elephant tusks for piano keys and billiard balls, was unsustainable; and fears of elephant extinction drove the search for substitutes that ultimately helped to create the plastic industry.23

Any resource is just a solution to a problem. It was selected because it was the most effective, abundant, or cheap. If it stops being the best way to solve the problem, we can find a different solution.

And we usually do. Rarely if ever have we suffered a catastrophic resource shortage. The most compelling examples are the ones furthest back in history—the megafauna hunted to extinction in prehistoric times; or silphium, a plant used by ancient Romans for food, perfume, and medicine, and evidently used up in the first century BC24—bolstering my contention that human agency has increased over time. When Ed Conway, author of Material World, decided to start a series of essays on “lost materials,” he canceled it after one installment:

[I]n trying to hunt around for minerals we have run out of, I came to an unexpected conclusion. So far, we haven’t really, meaningfully run out of, well, pretty much anything. … while we like to tell ourselves humankind has exhausted this or that resource, we are much better at talking about it than actually, well, exhausting said resource.25

Keep all this in mind when you hear about an imminent lithium shortage, or that “the world is running out of sand,” or that all of world semiconductor manufacturing crucially depends on a specific variety of extremely pure quartz found only in a single town in North Carolina.26

The fundamental mistake behind the predictions of resource doom is thinking of fuels or metals or plants as “natural” resources. There are no natural resources.27 All resources are artificial: the product of knowledge. Iron ore is useless without the knowledge of how to smelt it and work the result. Sand becomes far more valuable when we know how to turn it into integrated circuits. Even water needs to be purified for health, and needs extensive systems to make sure it’s available when and where we want it. Even fire, as David Deutsch eloquently explains:

Before our ancestors learned how to make fire artificially… people must have died of exposure literally on top of the means of making the fires that would have saved their lives, because they did not know how. In a parochial sense, the weather killed them; but the deeper explanation is lack of knowledge.28

By about 1970, one might have expected that the world had internalized this lesson. Since Malthus first wrote, GDP per capita had risen over 5x in the UK, over 9x in the US and Germany, and almost 11x in Japan—even as the populations of these countries had tripled, quadrupled, or in the case of the US, grown well over 30x.29

But history does not interpret itself. Instead of going away, Malthusianism returned with a vengeance.

In 1972, a group of researchers at MIT published a report on the future of industrial civilization, based on what was for the time a sophisticated computer model of the industrial economy and the global ecosystem. Their guiding philosophy and their bottom-line conclusion were contained in the title: The Limits to Growth.

They had run dozens of scenarios for the future of humanity, and the picture was bleak: “The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse” (emphasis original).30 If world population and the economy were allowed to grow exponentially, then both population and living standards would crash as we used up all the world’s resources.31 If we solved the resource problem, then the world would be poisoned by pollution.32 If we controlled pollution, then we would succumb to famine as we ran out of farmland.33 If we increased agricultural yields, one of the other problems would return.34 If we tried to solve all of this using birth control, bringing world population growth to zero, then we would still suffer from resource shortages and pollution as long as industry was allowed to grow.35 The only way to stave off catastrophe was to stop both population growth and industrial growth, and to throw all of our efforts at resource efficiency and pollution control—a world of complete stasis.36

But all the Limits authors had done was to take the old Malthusian assumption of fixed resources and formalize it in a computational model. The model was not validated against or fit to historical data. It had no term to represent the advance of technology—even though economists, who were trying to fit the data, had incorporated such a term into their models since the 1950s.37 They claimed to take technology into account, even devoting a whole chapter of the report to it, but they modeled technological effects as one-time changes to certain parameters, such as pollution intensity or agricultural yields—not as an ongoing, cumulative process of improvement. This choice was a philosophical position: they believed that “technological optimism is the most common and the most dangerous reaction to our findings from the world model. Technology can relieve the symptoms of a problem without affecting the underlying causes. Faith in technology as the ultimate solution to all problems can thus divert our attention from the most fundamental problem—the problem of growth in a finite system—and prevent us from taking effective action to solve it.”

Their modeling forecast “a desperate land shortage before the year 2000 if per capita land requirements and population growth rates remain as they are today.”38 But per capita land requirements did not remain as they were: cereal yields since 1972 have doubled, allowing us to feed a growing population with less than a 10% increase in land usage.39 “Even the ocean,” they said, “which once appeared virtually inexhaustible, is losing species after species of its commercially useful animals. Recent FAO statistics indicate that the total catch of the world's fisheries decreased in 1969 for the first time since 1950, in spite of more mechanized and intensive fishing practices.”40 But fish and seafood production continued unabated, and have tripled in volume since the book was published.41 They thought it “unlikely” that the world population would reach much above 8 billion without a rise in the death rate from factors such as pollution and famine.42 Population passed 8 billion in 2022; the death rate has continued to fall, and is now about 40% below its 1972 levels.43 The authors disclaimed that their model could not make exact predictions, only demonstrate the general dynamics of a system; and in any case, their main prediction of global collapse was only supposed to arrive sometime in the 21st century. But they felt that the conclusions were certain enough to warrant immediate action to slow growth.44

The Limits to Growth was just one of several books in that era sounding the klaxon over population growth: we’ve already mentioned some others, such as The Population Bomb and Famine 1975!. Fear of “overpopulation” is the logical conclusion of the focus on fixed, “natural” resources: if resources are fixed, then more people implies diminished resources per capita.

This logic is called “Malthusian,” but even Malthus at least allowed for some ongoing rate of technological improvement; he just thought it could never keep up with the exponential growth of population. And he at least had the excuse that this assumption was true up until his time, and the acceleration of growth before his era was too slow to be noticeable given the scant data available to him. The neo-Malthusians of recent decades give Malthus a bad name: they are more pessimistic and with less excuse.

The Limits to Growth called its static world “equilibrium,” but this concept soon became known as “sustainability.” It is the ideal of moderating our consumption and choosing technologies and resources such that the same processes and way of life can be maintained indefinitely.

“Sustainability” is a disastrous concept. It is based on false assumptions and on the wrong moral standard. It negates the basic principles of techno-humanism. This concept must be destroyed.

There is no inherent superiority to a process that can go unmodified indefinitely.45 If our standard is human well-being, then what we want to sustain is not a particular mode of production. What we want to sustain is growth and progress. “Sustainability” is actually stagnation, the opposite of progress. In the words of David Deutsch, it means “forcing the future world into our image, endlessly reproducing our lifestyle, our misconceptions and our mistakes.”46

To sustain progress means to not use any one resource or technology forever. Each particular mode of production is temporary. Often, instead of being forced onto a new technology by resource scarcity, we willingly abandon an old process simply because we invented something better. The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, nor did the iron age begin when we ran out of bronze, nor did oil rise when we ran out of coal, nor did we invent the Internet because we ran out of paper.47 What matters about a particular process is not whether it can last indefinitely, but whether it can last until it is obsoleted by an improved successor.

In this light, we should redefine what it means for a resource to be “sustainable.” In common usage, resources are considered “sustainable” if they are regenerated on short timescales, regardless of their cost or abundance. Instead, resources should be considered sustainable only so long as they can grow along with the economy. “Sustainable” biological feedstocks for commodities such as fuel or plastics, for instance, are a bizarre regress to the unsustainable pre-industrial reliance on plant and animal resources—such as guano fertilizer, whale oil, and elephant ivory—that we moved on from in the 19th century.

Discussions about “sustainability” often equivocate between moral and practical concerns. On its face, “sustainability” can be posed as a practical argument: its advocates warn against impending doom and talk about progress as an unhealthy “addiction.” But underneath is a moral argument that rests on denial of the value of progress: an exaggeration of the costs and minimization of the benefits. The “sustainability” ideal is a fantasy world in which people can be perfectly well-off, even better off, with reduced consumption and slower growth. The Limits to Growth authors claimed that “global equilibrium need not mean an end to progress or human development,” and even that innovation would be more likely in a world without growth.48 It is telling that the examples of progress they envision are all “green” technologies such as recycling, solar power, natural pest control, and contraception—all focused on reducing human impact, and very little on improving human well-being. In an afterword, the committee that commissioned the work stated that “no fundamental human value would be endangered by a leveling off of demographic growth.”49

Such statements neglect the effects discussed in Chapter 3: economies of scale, network effects, and the non-rivalry of ideas that allows everyone to benefit from anyone’s discovery or invention. They belie a deeply impoverished view of humanity’s potential: a world with less pollution and lower mortality perhaps, but with no increase in material wealth, no reduction in physical labor, no bigger homes, no faster transportation, no space exploration, no (energy-hungry) artificial intelligence. This “sustainable” future would not be a victory for humanity, but a defeat.

Deutsch captures the clash of ideas here as, at heart, two different conceptions of people:

In the pessimistic conception, they are wasters… In the optimistic conception… people are problem-solvers: creators of the unsustainable solution and hence also of the next problem. In the pessimistic conception, that distinctive ability of people is a disease for which sustainability is the cure. In the optimistic one, sustainability is the disease and people are the cure.50

“Infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet,” I hear them rebuking me right now.51 Literally, this is true—but it does not imply that stagnation is imminent. There are many orders of magnitude left to grow. From where we stand, growth is practically if not literally infinite: the true limits to growth are currently unknowable and need not affect any decisions we make today. As we saw in Chapter 5, Earth has truly massive energy resources: incoming solar alone is almost ten thousand times our current energy usage; fusion fuel resources are potentially more than a billion times annual consumption. Deposits of iron, copper, aluminum, nickel, and lithium are all estimated to be almost 100 times current annual material usage or more; phosphate and potash (used in fertilizer) over 1,000 times; salt and sulfur millions of times.52 Limestone is so abundant that the USGS doesn’t even bother to estimate reserves, simply calling them “sufficient”; and arguably the most important resource today—silicon—is effectively inexhaustible, as it makes up 27% of the Earth’s crust.53

And of course, we are not limited to Earth—by the time we come anywhere close to using up the mass and energy on our home world, we’ll be ready to make use of the solar system and someday the galaxy. Our only real limits are those imposed by physics—the speed of light, the matter and energy within our lightcone, the time remaining until the heat death of the universe. If we ever reach those, humanity will have had a pretty good run.

Next: Chapter 7, part 2

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

In part 1 of this chapter, we saw that the long-term pattern of growth is one of acceleration. But the standard disclaimer for financial investments also applies to human progress: past performance does not guarantee future results.

Indeed, some claim that growth in the West has already slowed, at least compared to its peak around the first half of the 20th century. Tyler Cowen wrote a book with this thesis, The Great Stagnation:

Today … apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953. We still drive cars, use refrigerators, and turn on the light switch, even if dimmers are more common these days. … Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down compared to what people saw two or three generations ago.1

Cowen had been influenced by conversations with Peter Thiel, who leads the VC firm Founder’s Fund.2 Around the same time, Founders Fund published a manifesto, “What Happened to the Future?”, with a subtitle that became a Silicon Valley catchphrase: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”3 A few years later, in an interview with Cowen, Thiel said:

I think we’ve had a lot of innovation in computers, information technology, Internet, mobile Internet in the world of bits. Not so much in the world of atoms, supersonic travel, space travel, new forms of energy, new forms of medicine, new medical devices, etc.4

In The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Robert Gordon surveyed American economic progress over almost 150 years, and concluded that living standards had improved faster from 1870 to 1970 than they have in the decades since:

[E]conomic growth since 1970 has been simultaneously dazzling and disappointing. … advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down after 1970, both qualitatively and quantitatively.5

Knowing how much progress has been made in recent decades, I was initially skeptical about claims of stagnation. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket and a global communications network to connect everyone on the planet to each other and to the whole of the world’s knowledge and culture”—when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.6 But I was eventually convinced by a systematic survey of the evidence. Progress has not ground to a halt, nor is it even slow compared to the pre-industrial era, but in the US at least, it has slowed relative to its peak in the late 19th to mid-20th century.

The slowdown can be seen from economic statistics. Gordon points out that growth in output per hour has fallen from an average annual rate of 2.82% in the period 1920–1970, to 1.62% in 1970–2014.7 He also analyzes TFP (total factor productivity, a residual calculated by subtracting out increases in capital and labor from GDP growth; what remains is assumed to represent productivity growth from technology). Annual TFP growth averaged 1.89% from 1920–1970, but closer to 0.5% since then, with the exception of a partially accelerated decade 1994–2004:8

Here’s another view of TFP, extended to the 2020s (note the log scale; straight lines indicate constant growth rates):9

Measuring growth is hard. GDP is not a measure of economic production, and it does not capture consumer surplus: since you don’t pay for articles on Wikipedia, searches on Google, or entertainment on YouTube, a shift to these services away from paid ones actually shrinks GDP, but it represents consumer benefit and progress. Estimates of the consumer surplus of the internet, however, “are at least an order of magnitude smaller than the trillions of dollars of measured output lost to the productivity slowdown.”10 Further, Gordon points out that GDP has never captured consumer surplus, and there has been plenty of surplus in the past, such as free radio and television broadcasting, or the value of a patient’s life versus the cost of the penicillin that saved them. Nor is it only services or information technology that can deliver large consumer surplus: the refrigerator made food safer and gave us greater variety in our diets; the automobile cleared city streets of horse manure and urine.11 Altogether, it seems unlikely that unmeasured value creation can explain the GDP growth slowdown.

Other, less ambiguous metrics have also stagnated. The most striking is US energy usage per capita, which grew steadily for well over a century before flatlining around 1970.12 Some of this is the result of increased energy efficiency, but there was also improved energy efficiency in the past, and it’s implausible that greater efficiency can fully account for the ever-widening gap between the previous growth curve and actual usage, or that flat or declining resource usage is optimal for progress.

We can also see the slowdown qualitatively. Compare the last 50 years, 1975–2025, to the equivalent period a century earlier, 1875–1925. The last half-century has seen a revolution in information technology: the PC, the Internet, the smartphone. But in the earlier period, we also had a revolution in information technology: the telephone and the radio. And on top of that, we had the entire electrical power industry, including generators, light bulbs, and motors; the internal combustion engine, and the vehicles it made possible: the automobile and the airplane; the first synthetic plastics and fertilizers; and the establishment of the germ theory and its applications to public health, including improved water sanitation and some of the first vaccines.

The last 50 years have seen no comparable advances in manufacturing, energy, or transportation. There have been no new materials to replace steel, concrete, or plastic; no new power source to replace the internal combustion engine or the electric motor; no new vehicles to replace the automobile or the airplane. Our planes actually fly a bit slower than they used to.13 We haven’t ended any major diseases, the way we eliminated smallpox, malaria, or polio. One might argue about whether computers and the Internet are more or less of a revolution than telephone and radio, but it’s hard to maintain that a revolution in one field, or even two, is greater than five revolutions stacked together.

Consider also the technologies that were expected, but never arrived or haven’t come to fruition; or those that were launched, but aborted or stunted. Nuclear power was supposed to deliver cheap, abundant, reliable, clean energy, and it was on a strong growth trajectory until the 1970s—after which it stalled and plateaued at about 20% of US electricity generation.14 The Concorde offered supersonic passenger travel, but it was never affordable to the middle class, and service was canceled in 2003.15 The Apollo program promised a new Space Age, but after planting our flag on the Moon, no human has set foot there since 1972.16 A “War on Cancer” was declared in 1971; more than 50 years later, despite significant progress in mortality rates, we are still searching for a cure.17

Is all this just a blip in the long-run trend of acceleration, one that future economic historians will barely notice on their zoomed-out charts? Or is it the beginning of a historic reversal? Tyler Cowen saw the “great stagnation” as temporary: around the time of his book, he predicted that it would end within twenty years.18 Peter Thiel tends to blame “something in the culture that’s changed that makes us less ambitious, more risk-averse, more scared to try to do things,” and in particular a culture “that dislikes science and technology in just about all its forms.”19 In this view, stagnation can be reversed, but only by our will. Robert Gordon, in contrast, calls himself “the prophet of pessimism.”20 He sees no opportunities to improve life in the future as much as it was improved before 1970, and he notes that the social trends that contributed to growth, such as increasing education rates and women entering the workforce, have reached natural limits and plateaued.21 In a 2013 TED talk, he proclaimed “The Death of Innovation, the End of Growth.”22

In any case, if progress has stalled, that makes it all the more urgent to understand what drives it, what might cause it to slow down or stop, and what if anything we can do to re-accelerate it. In the next chapter, we’ll consider some of the most common reasons for skepticism about continued growth.

Next: Chapter 7, The Problem-Solving Animal

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

The YIMBY movement is now well established and gaining momentum in the fight against the regulations and culture that hold back housing. More broadly, similar forces hold back building all kinds of things, including power lines, transit, and other infrastructure. The same spirit that animates YIMBY, and some of the same community of writers and activists, has also been pushing to reform regulation such as NEPA.

Healthcare has both types of problems. We need breakthroughs in science and technology to beat cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and aging. But also, healthcare (in the US at least) is far more expensive and less effective than it should be.

I am no expert, but I am struck that:

• The doctor-patient relationship has been disintermediated by not one but two parties: insurers and employers.

• It is not a fee-for-service relationship. The price system in medicine has been mangled beyond recognition. Patients are not told prices; doctors avoid, even disdain, any discussion of prices; and the prices make no rational sense even if and when you do discover them. This destroys all ability to make rational economic choices about healthcare.

• Patients often switch insurers, meaning that no insurer has an interest in the patient's long-term health. This is a disaster in a world where most health issues build up slowly over decades and many of them are affected by lifestyle choices.

• Insurers are highly regulated in what types of plans they can offer and in what they can and cannot cover. There's no real room for insurer creativity or consumer choice, or for either party to exercise judgment.

• A lot of money is spent at end of life, with little gained by in many cases except a few years or months (if that) of a painful, bedridden existence.

Just to name a few.

Bill Gurley wrote in 2017 that “we have the worst of both worlds … the illusion of a free market and the illusion of regulated market with the apparent benefit of neither.” John Arnold said more recently that health care is “not a fair and open market” and that it has basically every market failure. Or in Alex Tabarrok’s words, “any theory of what is wrong with American health care is true because American health care is wrong in every possible way.”

We could do much better, without any scientific or pharmaceutical breakthroughs, by reforming law and culture.

Where is the equivalent of the YIMBY movement for healthcare? Where are the people pointing out the gross violation of economic wisdom and common sense? Where are the campaigners for reform against the worst inefficiencies?

This field is wide open, and some smart writer or savvy activist should step in and fill the vacuum.

UPDATE: Niskanen has a report by Lawson Mansell: “Healthcare abundance: An agenda to strengthen healthcare supply”

UPDATE 2: The Institute for Justice is also working to repeal certificate of need laws.