We want to change that. This May, the Center for Economy and Society at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the Roots of Progress Institute are co-hosting a workshop in Washington, D.C., with financial support from Coefficient Giving. The goal: help university faculty design courses incorporating progress studies into their own disciplines.

The Teaching Progress workshop

The Teaching Progress workshop will bring together faculty members from engineering schools, business schools, and social science and humanities departments, along with public intellectuals from RPI and other stakeholders in progress studies.

The workshop is hosted by Steven Teles (Professor, School of Government and Policy, Johns Hopkins University), Simon Halliday (Associate Research Professor, Center for Economy and Society, Johns Hopkins University), and Jason Crawford (Founder, Roots of Progress Institute).

Participants will alternate between presentations by progress scholars and intensive working sessions developing syllabi for their own courses. The range of possibilities is wide: a political economist might design a course on state capacity and innovation policy; a business school professor might focus on organizational design for breakthrough R&D; an engineering educator might explore why construction costs have soared while computing costs have plummeted.

The workshop will include sessions from:

• Kevin Bryan (University of Toronto) will give a keynote on Progress, or How Big Things Get Done. This is a graduate seminar that integrates economic history, the history of technology, institutional economics, and philosophy to examine why extraordinary achievements occur at particular times, places, and organizations.

• Simon Halliday (Johns Hopkins University) and Matt Burgess (University of Wyoming) will respond, presenting their undergraduate courses designed for students encountering these ideas for the first time. Simon’s course includes experiential components like factory visits and industry guest speakers. Matt’s course, “American Economic Success”, integrates progress studies with foundational readings from Pinker, Henrich, Koyama & Rubin, and others.

• Ohid Yaqub (University of Sussex) will lead a discussion on industrial policy, bringing an international perspective on how governments fund and organize progress.

• John Handel (Baylor University) and Lee Vinsel (Virginia Tech) will present complementary views on “Maintaining Progress”, discussing what happens as technologies move from breakthrough to implementation at scale and the bottlenecks, second-order effects, and longer-run problems as new systems grow and decay.

• … and more.

Participants will leave with draft syllabi, curated reading lists, and pedagogical strategies ready for implementation. Our goal is that the workshop produces publicly available resources—model syllabi, case studies, and teaching guides—that other faculty can adapt.

Details

• When: May 21–24, 2026 (Memorial Day weekend)

• Where: Washington, D.C.

• How much: No cost to participants (travel stipend, hotel, and food included)

This workshop is made possible by generous support from Coefficient Giving.

Interested in participating?

We have room for a few more attendees at this invitation-only event. If you teach at the university level, can commit to teaching a course on progress in your discipline by the end of 2027, and are interested in attending, we’d like to hear from you. Please email us at teaching-progress@rootsofprogress.org with what you teach and why you’d like to be invited, no later than April 17th, 2026.

Applications are now open for the 2026 cohort of The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive, a 10-week program for aspiring progress writers.

Our 74 alumni have published over 1,500 essays reaching over 150,000 subscribers, on topics like the boring part of Bell Labs, the science policy behind Brazil’s agricultural triumph, aesthetics of progress, why housing scarcity is bad for kids, nanotechnology, the magic phrase that kills AI regulation, how to win on immigration, the everyday magic of soil, how to design AI for science, clinical trial abundance, the state of the German research ecosystem, Beijing vibe-coders, how to fix clinical trials, the history of penicillin, how China still makes $1 lighters, the history of the color blue, and so much more.

They helped write the U.S. AI policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology (Dean Ball), they are co-authoring books on re-industrializing America (Madeline Hart) and helping to steer major U.S. cities towards housing abundance (Ryan Puzycki).

They have published opinion essays in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on topics like fertility policy, AI safety and the challenges that go along with self-driving car adoption. They have written for magazines like The Atlantic, WIRED, Foreign Affairs, American Affairs, Works in Progress, Asimov Press, Asterisk, and Arena.

Past fellows have described the program as life-changing and impactful:

• “If you’re on the fence, you should absolutely do this; your writing and thinking will get so much sharper” –Steven Adler

• “The connections I have made through RPI are truly lifelong.” –Lesley Gao

• “The greatest collection of people in the world” –Ibis Slade

Now, you too, can join this optimistic intellectual community. You will launch (or re-launch) a blog/Substack, get into a regular writing habit, improve your writing, and make progress on building your audience.

As a Blog-Building Intensive Fellow you will meet and learn from progress studies leaders, authors, and industry experts. You’ll participate in a structured 10-week writing course designed to support the type of writing our fellows want to excel at: long-form, informational essays that explain and persuade, often in technical topic areas or tricky policy topics.

You will learn how to write more, create writing habits, and develop a writing system. You’ll write and publish four essays, one every other week, and you’ll receive detailed feedback from an experienced professional editor, from the Roots of Progress team, and from your peers.

New this year: An in-person retreat — We will gather for a 3-day-long in-person retreat in Pennsylvania, August 20th - 23rd. We’ll play games, engage in enlivening discussion, and get to know one another in-person over the course of the weekend. We will host one or two workshops to talk about goals and career trajectories for public intellectuals, and there may even be a special guest or two.

Learn more and apply

This Year’s Themes: Security & Resilience and Human Talent & Potential

Themes: In addition to a general focus on progress studies, this year’s fellowship features two themes: (1) security & resilience and (2) human talent & potential. We welcome fellows writing on any progress-related topic, but for 10-15 of spots, we will give preference to applicants focusing on these themes.

(1) Security & Resilience. Material progress brings extraordinary benefits, but it also introduces new risks. More powerful biotechnology means more potential for engineered pandemics. More powerful AI means more potential for misalignment, surveillance, and epistemic breakdown. Greater global interdependence means greater vulnerability to supply chain disruptions and geopolitical conflict. The question is not whether to pursue progress, but how to build the defenses and safeguards that allow progress to continue safely. We need more writers exploring what it looks like to proactively defend against the full range of threats the future might bring while simultaneously building resilience safeguards around the systems and institutions we value most.

(2) Human Talent & Potential. People are the engine of progress, but we are far from unlocking the full potential of human talent. Education systems remain stubbornly resistant to reform and aren’t optimally preparing young people for a quickly changing world. Immigration policy fails to get the right people to the right places. Falling birth rates are shrinking the pool of future talent. And the rise of AI raises questions about what humans will do when non-human intelligence is too-cheap-to-meter. These challenges are connected: they are all about how we develop, deploy, and sustain human capability in a rapidly changing world. Solving these challenges entails building a world where all people, not just exceptional outliers, can thrive and contribute.

Learn more and apply

This year’s speakers

Speakers: We have a fantastic group of speakers for you to meet and learn from, including:

• Tyler Cowen (George Mason University / Marginal Revolution)

• Greg Lukianoff (FIRE; free speech and political resilience)

• Virginia Postrel (author, The Future and Its Enemies)

• Brendan McCord (The Cosmos Institute; post-AI human flourishing).

• Eli Dourado (Abundance Institute)

• Brian Potter (Institute for Progress)

• Kevin Esvelt (MIT Media Lab; biosecurity)

• Alice Evans (Stanford; gender and demographics)

• Alex Kustov (The University of Notre Dame; immigration)

• Elle Griffin (The Elysian)

Who: This program may be for you if you’re excited about progress studies and you love to write. Maybe you’d like to explore a career in writing about progress, or maybe you’re already blogging but would like to get to the next level — find your own topic area, increase your productivity, get more plugged into the community, and grow your audience. Successful participants in previous cohorts often brought deep expertise in a specific area, and we helped them develop the writing skills and habits to make their insights accessible to the intellectual public. You need to be excited about writing and have some writing samples you can share, but you don’t need to have a large portfolio of public writing to be eligible.

If you have a background in and are passionate about security and resilience topics — biosecurity, AI safety, defense technology, geopolitical risk, or democratic resilience — or about human talent and potential — education, immigration, fertility, demographics, or the future of work — please apply to those specific tracks: it will be great to have a community of people with similar focused interests to support each other.

Commitment: 10–15 hours a week, for 10 weeks. You’ll use the time to read, to write, to participate in discussions with experts, to provide editing and feedback to your peers, and to participate in group meetings.

Cost: Free! There is no cost to you. This is a free-tuition program, and we’ll also provide travel, lodging, and food for the in-person long weekend. Plus, you get free, guaranteed tickets to the 2026 Progress Conference in October.

When: The program runs online July 27th–October 2. Our in-person weekend takes place August 20th - 23rd. Optional and strongly encouraged: attend Progress Conference in Berkeley October 8th -11th; on a free, guaranteed ticket.

Applications are now open. We will review applications on a rolling basis; the final deadline is June 1st. Applicants will receive a decision from us no later than July 7th.

Learn more and apply

Track dispatch

Rethinking how we think about progress by Jeff Fong

In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI Fellow (and National Board Chair at YIMBY Action) writes about how good policy ideas become real-world progress.

At Progress Conference 2025 […] I noticed something new in the progress community.

In the past, its discourse was solidly grounded in specific problems (e.g., outdated policies, technical challenges) and their potential solutions (e.g., policy reform, technological innovations). But I’m now noticing more conversations about the meta-problem of implementation or, as we call it in the YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) community, “theories of change.”

Talk videos

Government at the Speed of Progress

’s keynote at Progress Conference 2025 (a few days before launching the Recoding America Fund): “Technological and economic progress increasingly depends on functional government institutions. A “state capacity deficit” is constraining American competitiveness and innovation, but there’s a path forward that everyone who cares about progress can encourage.”

Creating a Marketplace for Outcomes

Tom Kalil, CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy, talks about new models for federal funding: “Currently, the federal government has made trillions of dollars of financial commitments that are contingent on failure (loan guarantees) but rarely makes financial commitments that are contingent on success, such as incentive prizes, milestone payments, and Advance Market Commitments. Kalil discusses recent successes, such as Operation Warp Speed, the NASA-SpaceX collaboration on the Falcon 9 rocket, the role of DARPA self-driving car competitions in creating Waymo, and Frontier Climate. He also makes the case for increasing the use of these approaches, and for thinking more creatively about the use of contingent commitments more broadly.”

Operationalizing Abundance

From Inclusive Abundance founder and CEO : “Abundance is a new framework for identifying and dismantling the artificial scarcity that’s holding America back. Derek discusses how a network of policy experts, business leaders, and public officials are working together to encourage scientific innovation, build more housing, invest in clean energy, and make government work better for everyone. Derek covers how policy philanthropy and strategic political giving can create the conditions for progress, and share details of Inclusive Abundance’s advocacy efforts around permitting reform and AI policy.”

How You Can Help Pass Meaningful State & Local Policy

“State and local” policy is often pushed into one word, but there are important differences in what it really takes to move the needle on policy at the state level vs the local level. Cadences, election cycles, coalitions, policymaker motivations, and incentives are different from the federal level and different across states. Learn about motivating people to contribute meaningfully to passing state and local policy. A dialogue with Misha Chellam , , and , moderated by Alec Stapp.

Other media

The DOGE days are over. Now what?

An interview with on how we can modernize federal agencies to improve people’s lives.

Procedural Rituals over Governance Results by Will Rinehart

(American Enterprise Institute) wrote about Jenifer Pahlka’s keynote talk:

At the Roots of Progress Conference this weekend, Jen Pahlka, who was formerly the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama, related a harrowing experience she had. While she was walking around her home, she was confronted with a home invader. Though he wasn’t violent, she immediately dialed the Oakland Police Department (OPD). The phone rang, and rang. After several attempts, an operator finally answered and promised that officers would come. They didn’t arrive for two days.

The Bleeding Edge of Progress by Ryan Puzycki

After speaking at the conference, Ryan reflects on the event:

I recently toured Zipline’s South San Francisco headquarters, where young engineers were testing and building the same aircraft which continue to save lives in Africa and now also perform package and food deliveries in Japan and the United States. More than a thriving startup, it was a reminder that Silicon Valley began with hardware—and that the Bay Area still sits at the bleeding edge of technological progress. […]

If Zipline represents California at its best, the rest of the state too often shows it at its worst: a tangle of local vetocracies, procedural fetishism, and civic exhaustion. That contrast—between creation and decay—was on my mind at the Progress Conference in Berkeley ten days ago.

Democrats Could Learn a Lot from the Progress Movement by Ruy Teixeira

Here are my impressions:

1. There was more political diversity than among abundance advocates who tend to lean a bit left and mostly aspire to be a faction within the Democratic Party. The progress movement/studies umbrella includes such people but also many who lean right and/or libertarian and don’t have much use for the Democrats.

2. There was an entrepreneurial, as opposed to technocratic, feel to the crowd and many of the discussions, not least because there were quite a few startup founders and VCs present. That’s not to say there weren’t quite a few policy wonks too, but the entrepreneurial vibe helped give a sense of people creating progress, rather than twisting policy dials to help it along.

3. There was a fierce and generalized techno-optimism to the crowd that far surpassed what you see in Democratic-oriented abundance circles where it tends to be focused on favored goals like clean energy. These are people who deeply believe in the potential of technological advance and the process of scientific discovery that leads to such advance—”the endless frontier” if you will.

This is the last collection of videos from Progress Conference 2025. All the videos, including prior year talks, are available on the RPI YouTube channel. Progress Conference 2026 will be October 8–11 in Berkeley, CA at Lighthaven. More info coming later this spring!

Thanks to Big Think, our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.

Track dispatch

Aging as a disease: The rise of longevity science by Laura Mazer

In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, board-certified surgeon, educator, and RPI Fellow Dr. writes about how the frontier of medicine is shifting.

Most of my writing focuses on the history of medicine and innovators who found cures and solutions to problems that we barely remember today. To sit for four days with people who are so focused on the future, so committed to the next frontier, was an exciting departure. To pursue longevity, not survival — to target aging itself, not a specific disease — is to shift the paradigm of medicine. A transition from less disease to more life. The science is still in its early days, and it’s happening largely along non-traditional paths and with non-traditional funding and support models. In that, it keeps company with many of the true medical breakthroughs in history.

Talk videos

Automating Scientific Research

Ludovico Mitchener, Member of Technical Staff at Edison Scientific (and previously at FutureHouse), talks about components of scientific research that can be automated and what it might look like to have end-to-end automation of scientific research.

A techno-humanist perspective on female fertility extension

covers fertility extension: “As global fertility declines, pro-natalism has become a politically polarized, male-dominated issue in the culture wars… I argue that a techno-humanist approach can reconcile these goals. Progress studies already champions many structural changes that would make it easier for young people to have children. An example is housing and the YIMBY movement. However, explicitly supporting fertility technology: tools that expand reproductive autonomy, improve IVF outcomes, and extend reproductive longevity can align pro-natal goals with women’s empowerment. Next, I will outline what can be done at a policy and scientific level in the short, medium, and long term to advance this vision.”

Rethinking life expectancy in the 21st century

, Data Reporter at the Financial Times, talks about trends in life expectancy you might not know about: “Throughout most of the last century, lifespans in the developed world steadily lengthened for rich and poor alike as infectious diseases were beaten back and modern medicine and healthcare made steady progress against other conditions. But that pattern has not held in recent years, with lifespans for those at the top and bottom diverging in several countries and the key mechanisms behind these shifts also evolving. How should we recalibrate our thinking about life expectancy for this new era, and what lessons can be learned for the challenges that lie ahead?”

Four numbers define progress in Longevity

, founder of Norn Group, provides “A look at longevity through the lens of Grove’s ‘breakfast factory’. Healthy years of life is what we’re serving, but how do those get made and what would help us get more of them (per time and dollar)? We’ll go from basic research through clinical trials and identify the four most important numbers to optimize for this factory of life.”

Would that all diseases had but one neck!

Francisco LePort, CEO of Gordian Biotechnology, talks about new models for drug discovery: “Today, every age-related disease requires specialized expertise, experimentation, and equipment to solve. Learning the mechanisms of even one disease can take a lifetime (or more!). Yet all life springs from the same fundamental chemical processes. The vast complexity we see, including all of these diseases we wish to cure, stem from relatively small changes in the DNA based coding system shared across all biological systems. Can we design a drug discovery system with today’s tools that takes advantage of this? Can we scale drug discovery across all age-related diseases, rather than attacking each individually? What are the building blocks of such a discovery system, and how would this impact not just the science of drug discovery, but how it is funded and implemented?”

We are publishing videos of conference talks over several weeks; this is the second to last group. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.

Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.

We didn’t originally plan to have tracks about energy or climate at this year’s Progress Conference. But once there were several excellent speakers lined up to talk about climate and energy topics, we knew it would be worth it to highlight their expertise together. Here are select talks from the conference and related writing.

Track dispatch

Powering progress: The quest for energy abundance by Grant Mulligan

In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI Fellow writes about exploring the barriers to clean, abundant power.

Progress runs on power. There is no progress without energy. Our ability to harness energy has enabled enormous strides in agriculture, industry, manufacturing, transportation, and medicine. The more energy available to a society, the wealthier it becomes.

There’s a reason that Lewis Strauss’ famous line about “energy too cheap to meter” — delivered in 1954, when he was chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission — has stuck in the public consciousness for more than 70 years.

[…]

Strauss’ vision of a future where energy is so cheap that it isn’t worth the effort to measure individual usage looks a lot like the visions of progress shared at the conference.

Talk videos

Next Nature: Engineering the Biosphere

From investor and author Ramez Naam: “Climate change is altering the conditions that wild ecosystems—forests, oceans, reefs, and more—are adapted to. Even in a best case climate scenario, conditions are changing faster than evolution can keep up. To keep a vibrant “wild” biosphere, humanity’s only choice is to intervene to accelerate the adaptation and evolution of these ecosystems. This talk will cover both the why and the how of engineering the biosphere for a new climate reality, starting with the most critically endangered ecosystem: coral reefs.”

The Hard Stuff: Navigating the Physical Realities of the Energy Transition

Mekala Krishnan (McKinsey Global Institute) covers research on the energy transition: “While the energy transition has seen meaningful momentum in the last years, it remains in its early stages. Only about 10% of the low-emissions technologies needed by 2050 to meet global commitments have been deployed. This session unpacks the 25 most critical, interlinked hurdles in the physical world that need to be overcome for the transition to succeed—from scaling variable renewables and building hydrogen networks to decarbonizing industry and deploying carbon capture. Drawing on McKinsey Global Institute research, this session will explore the hard realities of technology and infrastructure, physics and engineering, innovation and execution, that underpin the energy transition today, and how leaders can accelerate progress to turn commitments to action.”

Table Stakes

Luke Iseman, co-founder of geoengineering startup Make Sunsets, says: “There are 10 things we must do for the 22nd century to be way better than the 21st. What, why, and how.”

How Do We Get SAI Right?: Risks, Research, and the Route Forward

, CEO of Reflective, talks about another perspective on SAI: “Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) could, in theory, cool the planet within years, buying time to cut emissions and remove CO₂. The big question isn’t whether we could do it—it’s whether we should. And if so, how to do it in ways that minimize risks and protect people and ecosystems. This is why bans on research are shortsighted: it’s imperative that we understand the global impacts to make more informed decisions. We need to be clear on what we know—and what we don’t—and generate the data we need, fast, to guide the decisions we can’t avoid. That’s the responsible path: reducing risks and protecting people and ecosystems, without gambling the planet.”

Building a Rad Future

Isabelle Boemeke and Madison Hilly led a pro nuclear movement which included extending the life of California’s only nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. Isabelle’s book, RAD FUTURE, brings nuclear to the mainstream. In this talk, Isabelle and Madison discuss how to lead a successful grassroots movement, as well as issue some words of caution about the current nuclear renaissance.

Other writing

We should install a thermostat on the Earth by Jason Crawford

In Chapter 5 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, writes about applying solutionism to the climate:

Every solution creates new problems, and solving any problem of control creates a new problem of governance. If we install a thermostat on the Earth, what should we set it to—and how could we ever agree? Regional communities have dealt with such challenges before, such as the governance of water systems, but this would be the first one at planetary scale. I’m not going to solve those political problems in this essay. I’m also not going to address exactly how fast we should build a climate control system, or how much we should be willing to spend on it; Nobel-laureate economists who have been modeling this for decades do not agree. My purpose here is only to show that we can solve the problems of climate change by moving forward with technology and industry—not by rolling them back.

Sunscreen for the planet by Daniele Visioni & Dakota Gruener

In this essay for , Daniele and Dakota discuss the possibility of cooling the earth by reflecting sunlight.

The evidence that sulfur emissions cool the world is overwhelming. It is now uncontroversial that we do this unintentionally, and that, if we wished, we could do it deliberately. What we don’t yet know is exactly how much a given injection would cool the world, how uniform that cooling would be, how long the effects would last, and whether it might produce dangerous interactions with other processes we don’t yet understand.

We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.

Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.

We didn’t originally plan to have a “metascience track” at Progress Conference 2025, but when there were a half dozen excellent speakers we knew we had to put those talks next to each other to show distinct perspectives and models for scientific progress. Here are select talks from the conference and related writing.

Track dispatch

Inside the movement that’s rewriting how we do science by Smrithi Sunil

In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI fellow reports on the “metascience track” at the conference.

Ultimately, I find that what’s missing from today’s research funding ecosystem is not just more money, but incentives that encourage healthy competition between funders. Research funding in the U.S. remains remarkably one-dimensional. Most public science is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, to a lesser extent, the National Science Foundation (NSF), agencies that overwhelmingly fund small, principal investigator-led grants designed for an earlier era of individual inquiry. This structure rewards safety over exploration and leaves little room for institutional or methodological experimentation. Unlike in venture capital, where investors compete to identify and back the most promising, high-risk ideas, science funders face no comparable pressure to seek out unconventional bets or refine their own models.

The result is a stagnant funding ecosystem that selects for conformity rather than creativity. A truly dynamic research economy would mirror the process of evolution: many funding mechanisms, each taking different approaches, competing for the best ideas and talent. If we can build that kind of diversity in our funding landscape, with real competition and variation, we might restore the adaptive spirit that science depends on.

Talk videos

PDB 2.0: a metascience experiment in scientific acceleration with AI

From , scientist, CEO of Arcadia Science, and co-founder of Astera institute: “We’re moving into an age in which agents are our partners across all aspects of science. Machines will systematically process data, spot patterns, propose experiments, and even generate hypotheses across more and more of our work. A technological shift of this magnitude requires a similarly big shift in what science we pursue and how we go about it. Two major unanswered questions are 1) how we more rationally determine what data might be important to generate for AI-assisted discovery and 2) how we effectively design and scale those data systems. We recently funded and launched a new structural biology initiative called The Diffuse Project, which is aimed at enabling the next frontier models in protein biology — predicting not only how proteins are structured but how they move, which is central to their function. Diffuse gives us a golden opportunity to experiment with what science could look like in the future, empirically rethinking scientific systems and the role scientists play in them. Come learn more about the biophysical questions driving The Diffuse Project as well as the metascience levers we are testing in the process.”

Designing a new agency for progress, not process

How do you build a new national R&D agency from the ground up? In January 2023, the UK launched the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) with a $1B budget and a bold mandate: fund breakthroughs to drive the future of economic and societal progress. Watch founding CEO Ilan Gur as he pulls back the curtain on ARIA’s first three years. He will share stories behind the core, and often contrarian, DNA-level decisions that shaped the agency’s portfolio and operating model.

Learn why ARIA bets on people before projects, how ubiquitous clean energy will unlock a new materials and manufacturing paradigm, and the value of embedding a product team at the center of a government agency. This is a candid look into both scientific and institutional experimentation for anyone interested in building breakthroughs for a better future.

How to Prioritize Capabilities for the Intelligence Age

What does it mean to do high-impact science in the midst of massive transition? What capabilities are we missing now that we need to develop rapidly, and which do we need to be ready for what is coming?

Anastasia Gamick is the President and co-founder of Convergent Research, a mission control for frontier technology. Convergent has secured almost $400 million to design, launch and operate a new kind of organization for scientific and technological progress—the Focused Research Organization (FROs)—across a range of fields, including neuroscience, mathematics, astronomy, and climate.

In this talk, Anastasia will share Convergent’s outlook on the intelligence age, drawing lessons from the dozen or so FROs that Convergent has worked to launch.

Bell Labs Xs: Reimagining Corporate Research for the 21st Century

Jeffrey Tsao (formerly at Sandia National Laboratories) has decades of experience in fundamental research. In this talk, he discusses how corporate research once fused inspiration from real‑world utility with fundamental learning and discovery, driving breakthroughs from semiconductors to information theory. Today that tradition lies dormant—yet its need has never been greater. Tsao presents a vision for “Bell Labs Xs”: a new funding and organizational architecture to revive use‑inspired learning and discovery, mobilize industry for the public good, and raise America’s R&D productivity to new heights.

Don’t Put All Your Labs in One Basket

Science policy is, at its core, an investment strategy. Over time, the balance of funding across institutions (universities, companies, nonprofits, and government labs), and mechanisms (project grants, investigator awards, institutional block grants, training programs, prizes) has shifted in ways that shape what kinds of discoveries we get. In this talk, (co-founder of the Institute for Progress), looks at the past, present, and future of our scientific “portfolio” and discuss how policymakers should diversify it to maximize long-term progress.

Soon after the conference, IFP re-launched , a newsletter about metascience ‘aimed at increasing the speed and effectiveness of American science"”

We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.

Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.

Though we didn’t formalize a “culture track” at Progress Conference 2025, several excellent talks covered how to teach, tell stories, and inspire a culture of progress. And ’s remarks touched on similar themes. Here are some selected talks from the conference and related writing.

Conference dispatch

The common thread of progress by Jason Crawford

In the introduction to Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI founder discusses the unity of one goal of the progress movement: to move humanity forward.

All of us — from technologists to policy wonks to storytellers — are contributing in our own way to the grand project of human progress. There is strength in realizing that and reminding ourselves of it. By uniting in a progress movement, we can each see our work as part of a larger whole. The NEPA writer isn’t just pushing for permitting reform, and the materials researcher isn’t just trying to improve the efficiency of semiconductor manufacturing — all are working for the advancement of humanity. Each of us has our hill to take. Seeing our efforts that way can inspire and rejuvenate us, and salve the loneliness that often accompanies ambitious work.

Talk videos

Dan Wang in conversation with Kmele Foster

Jason Crawford’s Opening Remarks

The role of philanthropy in promoting progress (and safety)

In this talk, Alexander Berger, CEO of Open Philanthropy, discusses a number of examples of how philanthropic funding can help accelerate progress, especially in science and technology, ranging from the earliest days of the YIMBY movement to recent cases of boosting metascience and innovation policy. He also touches on the relationship between progress and safety and why there is a strong philanthropic case for funding both.

Worth reading along with this talk is Why We Fund Both Progress and Safety by Alexander Berger and Emily Oehlsen.

Building a culture of progress

, Editor-in-Chief of The Argument, speaks about a culture of progress. She argues that we need a new generation of cultural entrepreneurs for progress, people like Martin Luther, Charles Darwin and Adam Smith, hailed by Nobel Price winner Joel Mokyr as helping kick-off the culture of progress behind the industrial revolution. She urges progress-minded people and technologists to realize that persuasion is both necessary and possible. Tech isn’t just cool or world-changing or necessary for the US to succeed vs. China—all arguments that resonate with VCs and fellow tech people. Instead, we should emphasize in our communications that tech’s fundamental worth comes from improving human lives and flourishing—arguments that resonate with the broader population who otherwise might oppose progress and slow it down.

How the System Works

Listen to Charles C. Mann, author of the “How the System Works” series in The New Atlantis, and , celebrated author of The Future and Its Enemies and The Fabric of Civilization, discuss the overlooked burden and duty of maintaining past progress.

In the last 150 years, every developed nation has constructed vast systems that provide food, water, energy, and health-care to their citizens. They are high on the list of the great accomplishments of our civilization.

Like Europe’s great cathedrals, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-production network, and the public-health system were constructed by the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. But unlike those cathedrals, they don’t inspire caravans of gawping tourists or great works of art. No visitors clamor for tickets to visit electric reliability centers or pump-storage stations. No poets celebrate the sewage-treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery.

This ignorance is not just the province of dunderheads and yahoos. Even the educated elite—such as, just possibly, the attendees of conferences like this one—know all too little about the vital systems that undergird their daily lives. And this is a problem. All of these systems, which represent so much of the progress in our material well-being, need to be maintained and revamped to accommodate rising populations, technological advances, increasing affluence, and climate change. Schools should be, but are not, teaching students why it is imperative to join this effort. And the bitterly divided partisans of our political wars are doing anything but pay attention to the infrastructure that is the basis of our collective economic prosperity.

Closing: A Culture of Progress

Jason closes out the conference with some remarks on why culture matters for progress, especially how it guides young talent to important problems, and what the Roots of Progress Institute is doing to address that.

Other media

Why culture may be our most powerful lever for progress by Beatrice Ekers

In an op-ed, Beatrice Ekers (Foresight Institute, Existential Hope) writes about the “invisible infrastructure” of culture that shapes the future.

Progress rests on multiple layers. At the top is hard infrastructure: bridges, laboratories, power grids, and rockets. Beneath that lies soft infrastructure: laws, institutions, and systems that make the hardware useful. And beneath both rests a third layer: invisible infrastructure. Culture. The stories, narratives, and memes that determine which futures feel plausible and worth pursuing.

This layer is easy to overlook because it doesn’t leave behind blueprints or legislation. Yet history shows its importance. The Enlightenment was not an engineering project but a cultural shift. In coffee houses and pamphlets, curiosity and reason became public virtues. That shift created the conditions for modern science and the Industrial Revolution. The machines were built in workshops, but the idea that machines could transform the human condition was built in culture first.

Watch The moment every civilization fears: the growth plateau with Jason Crawford

“People got skeptical, fearful, doubtful of the very idea of progress in the 20th century and we allowed that to slow down progress itself.”

In part 3 of the Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason Crawford explores what a Culture of Progress could look like. Especially in Chapter 11, The Progress Agenda:

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.

We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.

Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.

“Techno-humanism” is my philosophy of progress, and THM is my statement of it. It consolidates and restates material I’ve used in previous essays and talks, in a more unified and coherent form. Still, even for my biggest fans, almost every chapter should have something new, including:

• The culture of progress we once had (pre-WW1), and the decline of the idea of progress in the 20th century

• The story of progress as a story of the expansion of human agency (despite seeming counterexamples like the poor nutrition of early agriculturalists or the inadvertent creation of new health and environmental hazards)

• The nature of human well-being, including my response to the paradox of stagnant happiness metrics

• My argument for radical anthropocentrism, against romantic environmentalism and in particular against the idea of any intrinsic value in nature; and my take on stopping climate change, reframing the goal as creating climate control

• The pattern of accelerating progress and what drives it; related, my take on “ideas getting harder to find”

• Some stories of unsung heroes of health and safety

• My vision for the technological future

• The progress agenda—the cause areas of the progress movement today

• How progress can be a grand project for humanity, and how it can give us a heroic ideal to emulate

I’m pleased to announce that the series will be revised for publication as a book from MIT Press. The manuscript is out for comment now, and (given typical publishing schedules) I expect the book to be available in early 2027. Stay tuned!

Founders, builders, and investors speaking at Progress Conference 2025 talked about how to close the gap in progress between software and the physical world, new regulatory paradigms, unlocking the grid from bottlenecking energy growth, and how manufacturing revolutions really work. Here are some selected talks from the conference and related writing.

Track dispatch

Physical dynamism and the immigrant’s edge by Afra Wang

In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI Fellow Afra Wang () explores how immigrant founders are driving America’s new era of “physical dynamism.”

The founders building most aggressively come from places that followed radically different development paths than America — some spectacularly successful, others failed. They watched Mumbai expand and Shenzhen materialize from fishing villages. They internalized different baselines for what’s possible, and different nightmares of what could go wrong.

That wisdom matters. Immigrants not only bring non-American-centric mindsets and building speed. They carry lived experiences of both progress and collapse, which breeds a particular kind of vigilance. They see not only what America could become, but what it risks losing. Many arrived believing in promises America made to the world, and now they’re trying to hold the country accountable to those promises, to push it to live up to the dream that brought them here.

[…]

This optimism is rare in today’s America, where apocalyptic thinking dominates both left and right, where every technological advance gets framed primarily through its dangers. This is a simple yet encouraging belief that progress is good, necessary, and achievable.

Talk videos

Blake Scholl in conversation with Tyler Cowen

I think Concorde never should have been done and Apollo never should have been done.

and talked about the future of supersonic flight, the history of “moonshots” in aerospace, how to design a better airport, and much more.

Samuel Hammond (FAI) said “This was my Progress Conference highlight by far, from an otherwise stacked line-up. Information dense, fun, thought-provoking, inspiring even.”

American Dynamism & The Case for Hardtech

Erin Price-Wright (General Partner at a16z) talks about the hardtech infrastructure that underpins the American Dynamism movement, and what is still required to bridge the gap between the rapid progress in developing software versus building in the physical world.

Anti-fragile Regulation and the Infinite Frontier

Isaiah Taylor (founder and CEO of Valar Atomics) describes progress this way: “Progress is composed of smart people taking risks together. If you want to know where the frontier will form, ask yourself two questions: where are the smart people? Where are people taking risk? Wealthy nations tend to get disrupted not by losing the smart people, but by losing their risk-taking. America’s Founding Fathers built a solution to this problem into the US Constitution: Anti-fragile regulation. It’s time to use it.”

The grid is the bottleneck to the energy revolution

In this talk, (co-founder and COO of Base Power), covers a history of the grid, how it works, and what’s needed to upgrade it for the 21st century’s power demand. He highlights how the grid is ultimately the bottleneck to realizing AI and electrification as generation rapidly catches up to load growth.

The art of industrial leapfrogging

How do manufacturing revolutions really happen? (Speculative Technologies) unpacks a new paradigm: “Throughout history, new manufacturing paradigms have rewritten the global economic map. Mechanized weaving in Britain, systematized chemistry in Germany, and interchangeable parts in America didn’t just create new industries—they shifted the center of manufacturing gravity. Today, as America seeks to rebuild its manufacturing strength, we’re ignoring this historical lesson. Instead of pioneering the next breakthrough, we’re playing catch-up with tariffs, defense tech, and bottled 1950s vibes. This talk will unpack how manufacturing revolutions really work, why new manufacturing processes matter beyond jobs and geopolitics, and sketch out the paradigm shifts could unlock manufacturing abundance on Earth and beyond.”

Here’s a written version of the talk on the Spectech newsletter.

Future-Proof: How Regulators Can (And Must) Avoid Overfitting to Today’s New Tech

(VP at Astranis) explores new regulatory approaches to encourage innovation: “Despite the strawmen set up by today’s innovators, most regulators are not captured by yesterday’s incumbents—but focusing too narrowly on present-day tech can be just as dangerous. This talk explores how regulators can design rules that are robust to an unpredictable future, and avoid overfitting too narrowly on today’s Current Things.”

Out-Innovating Through Dual Use: The New Blueprint for U.S. Shipbuilding

Sampriti Bhattacharyya (founder & CEO, Navier) talks about maritime innovation: “America once led the world in shipbuilding, but today ranks 11th, producing less than 1% of oceangoing vessels as of 2025. This is not just a matter of national security, but of immense geopolitical and economic importance. The challenge is clear - and solvable. By leveraging dual-use technology and adopting a mindset of out-innovating rather than merely out-producing, the U.S. has a real opportunity to reclaim leadership in maritime innovation.”

Other writing

Were Concorde and Apollo good for the future of aerospace? by Blake Scholl

Blake also wrote an op-ed arguing that government-led “glory projects” ultimately hurt the aerospace industry they were meant to advance and proposing a path forward.

When private founders, not committees, set the vision, constraints become creative fuel. SpaceX succeeded where NASA stagnated, not because it had more money, but because it had far less and had to make every dollar count. Iteration replaced bureaucracy. The result wasn’t just a cheaper rocket; it was the rebirth of orbital progress after 50 years of stasis.

The same dynamic is playing out in supersonic flight. Boom is doing what Concorde couldn’t precisely because we’re doing it differently. We’re building for a market, not a political mandate. The goal isn’t to prove what’s possible once, but to make it possible for everyone — affordably, sustainably, and at scale.

When innovation is reborn under entrepreneurial leadership, progress becomes self-sustaining again. Space is opening. Supersonic is returning. And for the first time in decades, the future is accelerating.

Future-friendly regulation has a blind spot: the future by Christian Keil

In this op-ed, Christian explores the main strategies officials use when regulating new technologies and how they affect progress, and argues for regulators to consider the “Next Thing” instead of just the “Current Thing.”

Imagine if the people regulating computer hardware in the 1990s had, inspired by fears of youth video game addiction, decided to create rules that halted the development of GPUs the same way NRC rules did nuclear reactors or that only allowed incumbents to develop them. This could have delayed advancements that ultimately allowed us to use GPUs for artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency mining, and so much more.

[…]

I support regulators who focus on the future and who care about growth, about business, and about startups. But I believe it would be incredibly shortsighted for them to only consider technologies of which they are personally aware when thinking about tech neutrality. I also believe that even regulators who do a great job at promoting the technologies of today run a serious risk of stymieing — even if inadvertently — the technologies of the future.

If we are truly committed to modernizing our regulatory regimes and optimizing for the future, we need to do it the right way, considering not just the Current Thing but also the Next Thing — even if there’s no way to actually know what it’ll be.

Why wait for flying cars? Flying boats are already here by Sampriti Bhattacharyya

Sampriti also wrote a piece exploring recent progress in autonomy, hydrofoiling, nad and robotics.

The most extraordinary asset for our coastal cities is the one we have spent a century ignoring: the water itself. We have long treated it as a barrier to overcome, even as our cities grew more congested and housing was pushed ever farther from opportunity. This new generation of water transit can reverse that trend, collapsing commute times, unlocking new economic corridors, and reconnecting communities without the immense cost and consequence of new land-based infrastructure.

This is not a distant vision. The convergence of electric hydrofoils, autonomy, and robotics is happening at a pace unthinkable even a decade ago. And America, as the global leader in software, autonomy, and advanced manufacturing, is uniquely positioned to spearhead this transformation. If the 20th century was defined by the highway, the 21st will be defined by the cities that reclaim their waterways. They are not relics of our past. They are the highways of our future.

We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.

Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.

Starting today, high school students can apply to Progress in Medicine, a new program by the Roots of Progress Institute.

What: In this summer program, high school students will explore careers in in medicine, biotech, health policy, and longevity. We will inspire them with stories of historical progress and future opportunities in medicine, help them think about a wider range of careers, and raise their aspirations about how they can contribute to progress in medicine. The program centers on this central question:

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

Teens will:

• Learn about and be inspired by the heroes of the past—the people who conquered infectious diseases and gave us anesthesia and all of modern medicine.

• Meet inspiring role models—like a PhD drop-out who is now a CEO of a company curing aging in dogs, and a pre-med student who shifted gears to work on an organ-freezing ambulance to the future.

• Explore hands-on skills that give them a taste of medical training and practice.

• Find community in a cohort of ambitious high school students who share their interest in medicine and related fields

• Experience life in Stanford’s dorms for four days and tour research labs and Bay Area biotech companies.

• Think differently about what happens after high school by zeroing in on a problem they are excited to help solve.

• Prepare for college, scholarship, and grant applications. They will become clearer on their goals and practice writing a personal essay in a structured, 10-hour essay process.

When & where: This is a six-week hybrid program for high school students from all over the US. It’s designed to fit around teens’ other summer plans, from family travel to part-time jobs or sports programs.

• 5 weeks live online, 2 hours a day (1-3 pm PT/4-6 pm ET), 4 days/week, Monday - Thursday. June 15-July 10 & July 20-24

• 4 days in person in-residency program at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA with small-group tours to labs and bio-tech companies in the Bay Area. July 15-19

Program cost is $2,000; scholarships are available.

Who: High school students—current freshmen, sophomores, and juniors in the 2025/26 school year. Students who are curious about careers in medicine, biotech, health policy, longevity and who have demonstrated the ability to handle a fast-paced, rigorous program. Participants will be selected via an online written application and a Zoom interview with Roots of Progress Institute staff; we expect this program to be competitive, like our RPI’s other programs.

Advisors and mentors: We have a great group of experts lined up to speak to modern problems they solve, including:

• Celine Halioua (CEO at Loyal, dog longevity drugs)

• Amesh Adalja (Senior Scholar at John Hopkins University, infectious diseases)

• Jared Seehafer (Senior Advisor, FDA Office of the Commissioner, accelerating life-saving technology)

• Jake Swett (CEO Blueprint Biosecurity, clean air for infectious disease prevention)

Teens will also meet in smaller groups with several near-peer mentors—young professionals 5-15 years older who will give them a real feel of what working in the field may look like for them. These young mentors’ work ranges widely, from being a NICU nurse, functional medicine doctor, or ER doctor—to such things as researching sleep and the body’s self-repair system, to digitizing dog’s smelling superpower, to improving clinical trials and designing hardware to cryopreserve organs for transplantation.

Why: To keep progress going—in science and technology generally, and specifically in medicine, biotech, and health—we have to believe that it is is possible and desirable.

Too many young people aren’t aware of how we built the modern world and thus see today’s problems as overwhelming and anxiety-provoking. We want to inspire talented teens to realize that the heroes who gave us modern medicine—from germ theory to vaccines and cancer medicines—are people like them who solved tough problems they faced, in their times. With this historical context and exposure to role models, teens will be inspired to solve today’s problems and become the ambitious builders of a better, techno-humanist future.

This a pilot program and our first foray into programs that reach out to the broader culture beyond the progress community. Education is one of the key cultural channels that spreads new ideas. Reaching young people has a dual benefit: it shifts the overall culture and also inspires future builders and thinkers. If this goes well, we will expand on and scale the program.

Applications are now open. The priority deadline to apply is February 8th.

Help spread the word by sharing this announcement and the program website with parents, teens, and teachers in your network: rootsofprogress.org/progress-in-medicine

While we didn’t plan a formal “housing track” for Progress Conference 2025, the concentration of experts created one organically. There were many many talks, unconference sessions, and conversation about housing, urbanism, and infrastructure. Here are some selected talks from the conference and related writing.

Track dispatch

Rethinking how we think about progress by Jeff Fong

In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI Fellow (and National Board Chair at YIMBY Action) writes about how good policy ideas become real-world progress.

Patience and perspective have to enter the picture here. To stick with YIMBYism as an example, we’ve been working on housing reform for about a decade, and people will sometimes question why we haven’t “fixed” the housing crisis yet. Often implicit in that question is an assumption that the movement has prioritized the wrong things. Obviously, I’m inclined to disagree, but the deeper lesson here is that high leverage doesn’t always mean fast.

With regard to U.S. housing policy, we live in a different universe from the one we inhabited 10 years ago, but we’re refactoring institutions that developed over the course of a century, so there’s miles left to go. The same could be said of many issue areas that concern members of the progress community.

[…]

The progress community still believes in solving specific problems; we’re just becoming more self-aware about implementation as a meta-problem. We’re moving beyond simply identifying root causes to thinking more deeply about how to intervene in systems that are sometimes inefficient and other times actively hostile. Whatever the case, there’s a growing recognition that a solution is worthless without a mechanism for putting it into the world.

Talk videos

Building the next great American city, on 100 SQM an hour north of Silicon Valley

California is worth fighting for.

Jan Sramek, founder and CEO of California Forever — which recently announced the Suisun City Expansion Plan — spoke about the inspiration for and progress towards building a new city in California, built around three pillars: Solano Foundry, the largest proposed advanced manufacturing park in America, the Solano Shipyard, the largest proposed shipbuilding complex in America, and Solano Living, a new downtown and walkable neighborhoods for 400,000 people. In this talk, Jan also made the case that this is California’s best chance at owning the Abundance Agenda, and showing it can build.

of IFP called this talk “a very compelling case that the new city they are building northeast of San Francisco has legs: both that they will be able to build it, and that it can be viable in the long term as a midsize urban agglomeration.”

Progress In Practice: YIMBY lessons in single-issue advocacy

Sonja Trauss (Executive Director at YIMBY Law) and (Executive Director at YIMBY Action) did a joint talk on lessons learned from the YIMBY movement that can be applied by other policy advocates (and followed this talk with a hands-on workshop). “Single-issue constituent advocacy is the most effective power-building strategy in modern politics. Building a visible constituency with a narrow focus avoids falling prey to the omnicause and enables you to influence policymakers. These are the lessons learned from nearly a decade of practical experience on the part of YIMBYs nationwide.”

How the Federal Government Can Help Solve the Housing Crisis

Will Poff-Webster (Institute for Progress) interviews Chris Elmendorf (UC Davis School of Law) and Alex Armlovich (formerly Niskanen Center) about their research on policy proposals for Leveraging LIHTC for Housing Abundance and other recent federal action on housing policy. “Thus far, the YIMBY movement has (appropriately) focused on advocating for policy changes at the state and local level in the US. Indeed, that’s where most of the juice is when it comes to zoning and land use issues. But that doesn’t mean there’s no role for the federal government: In fact, the Senate Banking Committee just unanimously passed a package of housing reforms that might move the needle. And there are other ambitious ideas — such as using tax credits to influence housing policy in big cities — that could do even more to help.”

Charter Cities: It’s Happening, an Update on Traction

Mark Lutter, Executive Director of the Charter Cities Institute, covers charter cities. Charter cities have long been discussed. The last few years have seen substantive traction, including serious teams, government engagement, and legislation being passed.

Other writing

YIMBYism Is Ideologically Agnostic

Laura and Sonja recommend this post as a pre-read to their join talk.

Most US cities are predominately one-party towns, and the press often flattens local candidates into a spectrum of blue, from far left to moderate. But when you zoom in, things don’t line up left to right because many local issues aren’t “naturally” moderate or “naturally” progressive. Much ink has been spilled with folks arguing that “you can’t be a real [conservative/moderate/progressive] if you’re bad on housing.” But I’m going to sidestep this by saying that YIMBYism can —and should — be left, right, or center. When you’re fighting regressive regulations, you can be anything.

[…]

YIMBYism’s ideological promiscuity is a feature, not a bug.

and this essay as prep for their action-oriented workshop:

Politicians Rarely Lie

A lot of what a politician does is try to collect as many interest groups as they can. Ideally, they want the support of the chamber of commerce AND the teachers union AND the homeowners association AND environmentalists… Candidates run around town having one-on-ones with the leaders of local organizations, collecting supporters like pokemon cards. Robert Dahl’s theory of interest-group pluralism basically summarizes this as “politicians are like several interest groups jammed together in a trench coat.”

But here’s the problem: groups have differing, and often opposed, agendas. Especially for groups fighting for the level of change YIMBYs envision, our goals are incompatible with other interest groups a politician might want in their trench coat.

As an advocacy organization fighting for major policy changes, our job is to be (1) valuable enough that we can (2) demand public specificity so a candidate is willing to (3) give up other interest groups to have us inside their trench coat coalition and (4) still win.

Reflections on the Progress Conference

After the conference , RPI Fellow and Chairman of the Board for Strong Towns, shared his reflections on the conference writ large and some specific thoughts about the housing, urbanism, and infrastructure conversations:

• At the conference I learned more about California Forever via a session with the developer. Candidly, I went in expecting to be disappointed. Instead I was delighted by the project’s dense, walkable, human-scale design, and its approach of creating a permissive platform to be built up by many hands. To get a better sense of the project, I recommend Aaron Lubeck’s description of the design, and Michael Natelli’s more general description of the approach. I don’t know about the financing or infrastructure phasing, so I can’t speak to those aspects, but after seeing the vision I’m rooting for its success.

Where is the YIMBY movement for healthcare?

Earlier this year, Jason Crawford wrote an essay about the opportunity for a YIMBY movement for healthcare.

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.

[…]

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.

We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.

Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.

Speakers at Progress Conference 2025 tackled these questions and more, and we’re glad to share the recorded talks from the AI track. Here are some of the talks from the conference, and related writing published after.

Track dispatch

The termination shock: Where AI progress meets reality by Anton Leicht

In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI Fellow reports on the AI track at the conference and, more broadly, reflects on the frictions that AI must overcome to introduce real-world change in politics, policy, and institutions.

To leave our solar system, a spacecraft must endure the termination shock, a region of space where the fiery solar winds of our Sun clash against the glacial currents of deep outer space. The termination shock can tear apart the most sophisticated and well-crafted probes and vessels, but overcoming it is the only way to explore the universe beyond our planets and Sun.

In October, I found myself at the second annual Progress Conference in Berkeley, California. Based on what I learned through its high-profile artificial intelligence (AI) track, AI progress, too, could be headed for a termination shock as it leaves the fast-paced environment of San Francisco and its tech industry and crosses the boundary into the real world of slow and thorny institution.

Getting this right will require the ability to build shortcuts at speed and the wisdom to realize when a shortcut is a mistake, which is to say it will require thoughtful appreciation of the past and an unabashed willingness to steer the future in equal measure. That balance is what distinguishes the progress movement from both accelerationism and statism: It is deeply rooted in critical consideration of what society has done right in the past. In many conversations with fellow attendees, I could sense their desire to take seriously the challenge of building the best possible future without forgetting about the merits of past accomplishments.

Talk videos

Sam Altman in conversation with Tyler Cowen

What is the best ‘this is not a bubble’ argument?

Sam and talked about when GPT-6 will be released; what might happen to margins on food, healthcare, and housing; conspiracy theories; and much more.

Solving The Complexity Crisis: Transcending Metrics And Goals

From Emmett Shear, CEO of Softmax: “Modernity and post-modernity have given us great plenty, great freedom, and great power. Yet the systems we have built are slowly strangling themselves. We are ever more polarized, ever more paralyzed, ever less trusting that we can trust our media. The root of this sickness is that our systems have become overfit. We can solve any problem in the world by building more complex systems, except the problem of our systems being too complex. For that, we must transcend our metric and goal driven systems.”

The First Amendment will determine the future of AI

, Executive Vice President at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) discusses how the First Amendment might influence the trajectory of AI development: “Will artificial intelligence develop with the freedom of the internet or the restrictions of broadcast radio and television? The answer depends on how the courts apply the First Amendment’s free speech protections to this newest communications technology. In this talk, we will explore the history of film, television, radio, and the internet to show how the First Amendment shaped these technologies, and how its application to some of the most difficult questions surrounding deepfakes, intellectual property, and discrimination will shape the future of artificial intelligence.”

AI in the Machinery of Government

(Foundation for American Innovation) moderates a discussion with Tim Fist (Institute for Progress), Samuel Hammond (Foundation for American Innovation), and Séb Krier (Google DeepMind) about AI and government. How can AI improve how governments work? How specifically might the “machinery of government” change with AGI? This discussion brought together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

AI for Science Bottlenecks

Here’s how (Freaktakes) pitched this talk: “Whether I visit the Bay or Cambridge, MA, I meet tons of researchers who want to bring the Age of AI to scientists. But they are often going about it in different ways. This panel will feature a set of individuals who span both cultures. I’d love to understand why they commit their careers to addressing the problems they do and, concretely, what work each would spend the next marginal research dollar on.” This session brought together (CEO of Rowan Scientific), Noam Brown (Research Scientist at OpenAI), and Theofanis Karaletsos (Head of AI at CZI Science) to discuss ways that AI can unlock scientific progress.

The Future of Public Epistemics: Beyond Community Notes

Jay Baxter (X), one of the engineers behind Community Notes, talked about approaches to public epistemics in the age of AI. What might the future of AI-scale public epistemic tech look like? This talk offers an optimistic vision, while sharing lessons learned from Community Notes so far, such as why finding agreement across polarized divides works so well, why democratic inputs and transparency are so important, and why “added context” can be a more helpful framing than “fact checking.”

How to Start a Frontier AI Lab

Anjney Midha (General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz) has invested in multiple startups that are now operating like frontier AI labs. At the conference, he discussed lessons learned from Anthropic, Midjourney, Mistral, Sesame, Black Forest Labs, and more with Henry Williams (Content Production Partner at Andreessen Horowitz).

Other writing

The hidden legal engine of progress — from railroads to AI

Dean Ball also wrote about how common law has long balanced innovation and accountability. Can it do the same for AI?

Take the foundational case law of the railroad. One of the earliest demonstrated harms was trains striking livestock that roamed farms and ranches alongside the tracks. Under most common law precedent, it would have been up to the railroad companies to build fences around their lines to keep livestock (and people) away. Instead, however, common law courts in Northern states concluded that, because facilitating the rapid development of the railroad was a necessity, the adjacent property owners would bear the responsibility to construct fences.

Similarly, passengers of the railroad would have to take the quirks of the new technology into account. Traditionally, railroads would have been examples of common carriers — think of courier and mail services in medieval times. Common carriers faced strict liability for property transmitted for customers, meaning they were liable for any damages, regardless of how much care they took.

Yet for the railroads, courts determined that passengers would be responsible for damage to their cargo if they failed to take care to protect it from the train’s all-too-common bumps and jolts. Understanding and mitigating these well-known downsides of rail travel was deemed to be the responsibility of the individual — not the railroad company.

Seven Thoughts on “AI Scientists”

After speaking at the conference, Corin Wagen published this essay speculating about what might happen with “AI Scientists”

At this point it’s obvious that AI will affect science in many ways. To name just a few:

• LLMs are changing the way that we write and interact with code, so any scientific field that involves software or data analysis has already been impacted a lot. (We use LLMs a ton for coding here at Rowan, as I’m sure do all other software-adjacent scientific enterprises.)

• Machine-learning models are a godsend for complex simulation problems across lots of different fields: climate modeling, fluid dynamics, systems biology, chemistry & materials science, and so forth. These models too are already seeing production use across lots of domains; to date, most of our work at Rowan has been focused in this area.

• Literature review and information retrieval is well-suited for LLMs: FutureHouse and others have done good work here, and it’s likely that we’ll see many more improvements in this domain. And there are myriad uses for computer vision and robotics in lab automation and monitoring, many of which are already being explored.

All of the above feel inevitable to me—even if all fundamental AI progress halted, it is virtually inevitable that we would see significant and impactful progress in each of these areas for years to come. Here I instead want to focus on the more speculative idea of “AI scientists,” or agentic AI systems capable of some independent and autonomous scientific exploration. After having a lot of conversations about “AI scientists” recently from people with very different backgrounds, I’ve developed some opinions on the field.

We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.

Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.

• The second annual progress conference was a great success. Progress Conference 2026 will be October 8th-11th in Berkeley. More info early next year!

• Check out videos of the conference talks, articles from well known writers, and a new Big Think special issue on progress.

This is the best conference I have ever been to. The attendees quality, the venue and the operations details are top notch. Will be a forever attendee from now on!

You will meet more excellent people and get to think about more challenging ideas in 48 hours than in any other environment/event.

If building a great culture is the really hard part, Progress Conference gives us a solid foundation to build on. The quality of ideas is extremely high and overflowing, but it’s the openness, honest discussions, and friendliness that makes it so energizing.

We’re about a month past the second annual Progress Conference. The 2025 conference was bigger than 2024: more days and more people, bringing together over 350 builders, academics, policy makers, investors, and writers who care about progress. Many attendees said it was yet again one of the best (or the best!) conference they had ever attended.

Attendees are extremely likely to recommend the conference to a friend or colleague, with an average rating of 9.3/10 and an excellent net promoter score of +83. We also received dozens of pages of feedback, even more than last year, giving us lots of ideas on how to keep improving the event.

It costs a lot of people’s time and money to get together. Why have an in-person conference in the age of video meetings, chatbots, and endless social media? In-person gatherings are necessary to build community and grow a movement. Here are the goals we had for the conference, and what people had to say about them:

Meet great people

It’s 2 days of living in the future. You meet people who are at the frontier of emerging fields and fill up on inspiration and ideas.

I really liked meeting the other attendees + spending time with them; very useful. A very orthogonal slice of people to those with whom I typically interact professionally, which makes it thought-provoking and high marginal value.

It was the best blend of academics/policy oriented folks/investors/entrepreneurs of all the conferences I’ve been to this year.

Catalyze new projects

Really really impressive work putting on such a great event. I came away with dozens of ideas, memories and contacts that I suspect will be paying dividends for many years!

Thanks for building this movement. The ideas and connections from these conferences have fueled my organization over the last year.

Be energized and inspired

THE BUZZ! Gosh I had so many wonderful conversations. It was amazing to be in a space filled with the greatest minds, working on such critical problems, without ugly ego. Still grinning from the experience.

If building a great culture is the really hard part, Progress Conference gives us a solid foundation to build on. The quality of ideas is extremely high and overflowing, but it’s the openness, honest discussions, and friendliness that makes it so energizing.

All I can say about the progress conference is that I always felt both welcome & certain I was the dumbest person in the room, which is an incredibly fortunate situation to be in. The conference sets the tone of my personal year: will I have done something meaningful enough to share next year?

Sharing ideas

Our other core goal for the event is to share ideas. You can watch videos of the talks, read articles and blog posts from the event, and browse the latest Big Think special issue on progress (just published yesterday!)

Videos of conference talks will be published over the next several weeks. We’ll post on the RPI YouTube channel (2025 specific playlist here) and on social media. Two plenary interviews are already available:

• Sam Altman in conversation with Tyler Cowen. Sam and Tyler talked about when GPT-6 will be released; what might happen to margins on food, healthcare, and housing; conspiracy theories; and much more.

• Blake Scholl in conversation with Tyler Cowen. Blake and Tyler cover the future of supersonic flight; whether the Apollo and Concord programs were good for the aerospace industry; how to design airports for the future; and more.

The buzz continued after the event, with many writers sharing ideas inspired by the conference. We’ve collected essays, blog posts, and social media commentary here. A few highlights:

• on A Culture of Progress: “Mokyr would be a great speaker for the Progress Conference. Still, the agenda that brings together frontier entrepreneurs, science and tech policy leaders, and authors is more future-oriented and action-oriented than disinterested historical analysis. In that sense, the Progress Conference is not the annual meeting of Industrial Revolution scholars, rather it is a modern form of the ‘culture of growth’ that **Mokyr studied as part of the Industrial Revolution. Lighthaven is kind of an ‘enlightenment salon’ of the singularity. Loose networks of substacks are a modern take on the ‘Republic of Letters’.”

• on Democrats Could Learn a Lot from the Progress Movement: “Here are my impressions: 1. There was more political diversity than among abundance advocates who tend to lean a bit left and mostly aspire to be a faction within the Democratic Party. The progress movement/studies umbrella includes such people but also many who lean right and/or libertarian and don’t have much use for the Democrats. 2. There was an entrepreneurial, as opposed to technocratic, feel to the crowd and many of the discussions, not least because there were quite a few startup founders and VCs present. That’s not to say there weren’t quite a few policy wonks too, but the entrepreneurial vibe helped give a sense of people creating progress, rather than twisting policy dials to help it along. 3. There was a fierce and generalized techno-optimism to the crowd that far surpassed what you see in Democratic-oriented abundance circles where it tends to be focused on favored goals like clean energy. These are people who deeply believe in the potential of technological advance and the process of scientific discovery that leads to such advance—‘the endless frontier’ if you will.”

• Zvi Mowshowitz on Dan Rothschild’s thread about our conference badges: “There’s basically no reason for everyone not to outright copy this format, forever.”

Big Think just published The Engine of Progress, exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward. This special issue features original reporting and essays from conference speakers, attendees, and RPI fellows, interviews, and much more. Here are just a few of the pieces:

• The common thread of progress by

• The grim truth about the “good old days” by

• The hidden legal engine of progress — from railroads to AI by

• Were Concorde and Apollo good for the future of aerospace? by

• Physical dynamism and the immigrant’s edge by

• A new progressive era may be emerging by

Building a culture of progress

At the Roots of Progress Institute, our programs are dedicated to building the progress community and movement.

The annual progress conference is becoming a must-attend, central event for the progress community. But there is clearly much more room to grow: the conference sold out in June, five months before the event, and there were hundreds of interested, qualified people that we wish we’d had space to include.

As we plan out more events for 2026, we are thinking about how to include many more people in our RPI events, and how to gather smaller groups at functional events aimed at solving specific questions or kickstarting projects.

A personal reflection: I joined RPI this year to organize the second annual conference (and more events to come). It’s energizing to be around so many people who believe that progress is possible and worthwhile, and that the work can be done with taste, craft, and thoughtfulness. I became a father just a few weeks before this conference, and now I feel like I have a lot more skin in the game. We can build a future that we want our grandchildren to live in!

Save the date for Progress Conference 2026: October 8th-11th at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA.

This year’s fellows are a group of 31 progress writers selected from a pool of over 400 impressive applicants. In our third year of the program, the quality of applicants has yet again gone up. Over ¼ of applicants merited a first round interview, and we had 51 finalists. Given the incredible talent of our finalists we couldn’t limit ourselves to a class of just 25 fellows, and ultimately selected 31 fellows for this year’s program.

They are scientists, urbanists, economists, lawyers, farmers, professors, policy-makers, builders, entrepreneurs and storytellers. They hail from the U.S., Canada, Ireland, the U.K., and Germany; they speak English, French, Mandarin, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, German, and Spanish. And they’ll be writing about medical history, apprenticeship programs, precision agriculture, American reindustrialization, competition with China, trains and transportation, Irish progress, aging research, biotechnology, the moral imperative of progress and so much more.

We’re thrilled to have once again assembled an outstanding group of progress writers and thinkers:

Steven Adler is a former OpenAI safety researcher. He has an M.S. in Machine Learning and Computer Science from Georgia Tech. He is writing about AI safety and the post-AGI Future. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, Making AI Go Better.

Andrew Burleson is one of the co-founders and board chair of Strong Towns. For his day job he is a head of engineering. He is writing about housing, urbanism, technology and how to bring dynamism back to our cities. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, The Post-Suburban Future.

Byron Cohen is a pandemic preparedness policy practitioner with a Ph.D. in public health from Harvard. He previously served as an advisor to the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness. He is writing about public health, pandemic preparedness and biotechnology. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, Raising Health.

Tim Durham is an agriculturalist and professor of crop science at Ferrum College. He has experience in crop biosecurity and his family operates a 30-acre farm on Long Island. He is writing about agriculture, biotechnology and pesticides. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack.

Sam Enright is the Innovation Policy Lead at Progress Ireland. He has an M.A. in Economics and Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh, and writes about metascience, Irish history and policy. He has received two Emergent Ventures grants from the Mercatus Center. You can subscribe to his work on the Substack, The Fitzwilliam.

Étienne Fortier-Dubois is a software engineer and AI evaluations specialist. His work has been published in Works in Progress and Asterisk. He is interested in the historical, cultural, and evolutionary aspects of technological progress and he is working on creating an interactive historical tech tree. You can read his work on his Substack, Hopeful Monsters.

Lesley Gao is a startup founder and operator with experience in China’s manufacturing and supply chain systems. She is writing about U.S. industrial renewal and Chinese industrial capabilities. She is fluent in Chinese. You can read her work on her Substack, Shear Force.

Michael Hill was the Asia Pacific policy advisor at the U.K. Department for Energy Security and Net Zero until recently. He will soon be starting a new policy research role at Britain Remade, a pro-progress, growth and abundance campaign organisation. He is writing about development economics for the U.K. You can read his work on his Substack, Gruntled Civil Servant.

Heidi Huang is a research scientist in Feng Zhang’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, exploring how sleep protects people from systemic stress. She is writing about health, longevity and biotech. You can read her work on her Substack.

Hiya Jain is a recent graduate from Barnard College, Columbia University with a double major in History and Neuroscience. She is also a Mercatus Center Emergent Ventures grantee. She is writing about metascience, biology and the history of science. You can read her work on her Substack, Mundane Beauty.

Adam Kroetsch spent over a decade at the FDA. He has also held roles in health policy research and at think tanks. He is writing about biomedical research, clinical trials and health policy. He is interested in clinical evidence: how we generate it, learn from it, and apply it to improve health. You can read his work on his Substack, Evolving Evidence.

Alex Kustov is a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina. He is also the author of a new book, In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular. He is writing about immigration policy, politics and (de)population. You can read his work on his Substack.

Allison Lehman was raised on a generational fruit farm that her family still operates. She has an M.S. in precision agriculture and has worked as an extension outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is writing about agriculture and intergenerational knowledge transfer. You can read her work on her Substack, Feast of Assumption.

Anton Leicht is an AI policy researcher and strategist. He has worked as a parliamentary and government advisor on tech and economic policy in Germany, and as a lobbyist and consultant in Brussels and Berlin. He is currently finishing a Ph.D. in philosophy. You can read his work on his Substack, Threading the Needle.

Laura Mazer is a board-certified surgeon who transitioned to a career as a full-time educator and curriculum developer. She is writing about history and medical science, exploring how new knowledge emerges and how old knowledge is improved. You can read her work on her Substack, The Anatomists.

Pouya Nikmand is a writer and freedom advocate who escaped Iran at eighteen, beginning an arduous seven-year journey to freedom in the Western World. Pouya is interested in the moral imperative of progress, civilization and injustice. He is writing about his personal experiences. You can read his work on his Substack, Outliving Iran.

Sean O’Neill McPartlin is the co-founder and Director of Housing Policy at Progress Ireland. He has volunteered with OneDaySooner, and published his writing in the British Medical Journal and Telegraph. He is writing about housing and infrastructure development, public policy, and the philosophy of progress. You can read his work on the Progress Ireland Substack.

Ariel Patton is a director of product at InnerPlant, a company using bioengineering to allow plants to alert farmers of stressors in their fields. She is interested in helping farmers manage their operations more profitably and sustainably. You can read her work on her Substack, Topsoil.

Rhishi Pethe has spent his career using technology to solve problems across food and agriculture systems around the world. He is writing about agriculture, food systems, and sustainability. You can read his work on his newsletter, Software is Feeding the World.

Venkatesh Ranjan is a molecular biophysicist with an interdisciplinary background in solid-state physics and microfluidics. He is interested in writing about the biographies of ideas, space exploration as a path to resource abundance, and humanity’s ongoing quest to answer science’s deepest questions. You can read his work on his Substack, Why You Should Read.

Abby ShalekBriski is a PhD candidate in agricultural economics. She grew up in rural Idaho and has worked closely with producers. She is interested in why some farmers adopt new technologies and others don’t. She is writing about food systems, rural institutions, and how to design systems of progress that account for the realities of rural life and food production.

Ibis Slade is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, studying philosophy and culture. He is interested in nineteenth-century American History. He is writing about philosophies of progress, the history of progress and cultural progress. You can read his work on his Substack, History’s Open Secrets.

Colleen Smith is an emergency medicine doctor with experience in medical simulation and education. She has been involved in administration and curriculum development for physician training programs and medical student education. She is writing about freedom in healthcare. You can read her work on her Substack.

Benedict Springbett is studying to be a lawyer in the U.K. He is interested in urbanism, state capacity, and the state as an instrument of progress and abundance. He has also written extensively about railways. You can read his work on his Substack.

Smrithi Sunil is a research scientist studying brain health using multimodal imaging. Her writing has appeared in Asimov. She is interested in understanding the structures, environments, and individuals that shape scientific discovery. You can read her work on her Substack, Engineering Discovery.

Karthik Tadepalli is completing an economics PhD at UC Berkeley. He is interested in the intersection of progress and development, and technology policy in developing countries. His writing has appeared in Asterisk. You can read his work on his Substack, Beyond Imitation.

Deric Tilson is an energy economist working on nuclear commercialization and innovation at the Breakthrough Institute. He is writing about energy, eco-modernism, nature and technological progress. You can read his work on his Substack, Returns to Scale.

Nehal Udyavar is a software engineer with a passion for biology. He runs a website for interactive STEM explainers. He is writing about cell and gene therapy, synthetic biology, and biotextiles. His work has appeared in Asimov. You can read his work on his Substack, Nehal’s Learnings.

Elizabeth Van Nostrand is a professional researcher who “wants to major in everything.” She is interested in writing about the “boring part” of Bell Labs, AI research tools, and the development of the theory of natural selection. She is especially focused on metascience and luck-based medicine. You can read her work on her blog, Aceso Under Glass.

Kelly Vedi is a senior director of policy at The College Board. She is writing about apprenticeship, with a focus on employers’ willingness to train, teenagers’ drive to jump into the real work, and the policy levers needed to unleash the growth of apprenticeship. You can read her work on her Substack, Avocational.

Afra Wang has a wealth of experience in Silicon Valley across AI, media, and crypto. She is writing about AI narratives, progress studies, and cultural stories shaping China and Silicon Valley. She is interested in examining how China serves as both a challenge and a mirror for Western technology communities. You can read her work on her Substack, Concurrent.

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

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

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

Example topics of interest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our assumptions about AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to pitch us

You can submit your pitch here!

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

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

Thank you

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

Applications are now open for the 2025 cohort of The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive, a 10-week program for aspiring progress writers.

Last year, 24 fellows, selected from well over 300 applicants, completed the program. They have sung the program’s praises:

• "It took me to another level as a writer" — Rob L'Heureux

• "I felt a sense of belonging and community I didn’t have before” — Grant Mulligan

• “It gave me the tools and confidence to actually start publishing'—Rosie Campbell

Last year’s fellows are now leading the AI policy debate, earning recognition for their writing on biotechnology, being cited in the Financial Times on China’s penetration of Western markets, and earning the top spot on the Hacker News forum. They published 81 essays in total during the program, on topics like techno urbanism, how China hacked comparative advantage, the pace of progress in medicine, the case for positive-sum environmentalism, why air conditioning is a survival technology, progress in metascience, why we should take AI welfare seriously, marine carbon dioxide removal, how EVs could change the grid, and so much more.

Now, you can join this optimistic intellectual community. You will launch (or re-launch) a blog/Substack, get into a regular writing habit, improve your writing, and make progress on building your audience.

You will also meet and learn from progress studies leaders, authors, and industry experts. You’ll participate in a structured 10-week writing course designed to specifically support the type of writing our fellows want to excel at: long-form, informational essays that explain and persuade, often in technical topic areas or tricky policy topics.

You will learn how to write more, create writing habits, and develop a writing system. You’ll write and publish four essays, one every other week, and you’ll receive detailed feedback from an experienced professional editor, from the Roots of Progress team, and from your peers. At the end of the program, you’ll meet your peers in person in San Francisco and get to attend the 2025 Progress Conference, where you’ll join 300 authors, technologists, policy experts, academics, nonprofit leaders, and storytellers.

Learn more

Themes

In addition to a general focus on progress studies, this year’s fellowship features two themes: (1) agriculture and (2) health, biotech & longevity. We welcome fellows writing on any progress-related topic, but for a handful of spots, we will give preference to applicants focusing on these themes, for which there will be dedicated programming.

Advisors

We have a fantastic group of advisors for you to meet and learn from:

• Progress thinkers, writers, and media leaders, including Tyler Cowen (Mercatus Center), Virginia Postrel (author, The Future and Its Enemies), Noah Smith (Noahpinion), Tomas Pueyo (Uncharted Territories), Saloni Dattani (Our World in Data and Works in Progress), Eli Dourado (Astera Institute) and Brian Potter (Institute for Progress).

• Industry experts, including Sam Rodriques (FutureHouse), Alison Van Eenennaam (U.C. Davis), Brad Zamft (Heritable), Meri Beckwith (Lindus Health), Robert Yaman (Innovate Animal Ag), John Wilbanks (Astera Institute), Tim Hammerich (Future of Agriculture Podcast), Niko McCarty (Asimov Press), Ruxandra Tesloianu (Wellcome Sanger Institute), and Sledge Taylor (Como Consolidated Gin Co).

Who is this for?

This program may be for you if you’re excited about progress studies and you love to write. Maybe you’d like to explore a career in writing about progress, or maybe you’re already blogging but would like to get to the next level—find your own topic area, increase your productivity, get more plugged into the community, and grow your audience.

If you have a background in and are passionate about agriculture and health, longevity and biotech, please apply to those specific tracks: it will be great to have a community of people with similar focused interests to support each other.

Commitment

10–15 hours a week, for 10 weeks. There is also a lighter week-long onboarding program that precedes the main program. You’ll use the time to read, to write, to participate in discussions with experts, to provide editing and feedback to your peers, and to participate in group meetings.

There is no cost to you.

When

The program online runs July 28th–October 10. You’ll then participate in the 2025 Progress Conference in San Francisco October 17–19; with a dedicated day of in-person fellow activities on October 16th, right before the conference.

Applications are now open, with rolling admissions; the final deadline is June 1st.

Special thanks to program sponsor, Alpha School, for helping to make this program possible!

Learn more and apply

Last fall we hosted the first annual Progress Conference. 200 people excited about human progress gathered for two days in Berkeley, California, to share ideas in deep conversation, catalyze new projects, and get energized and inspired. Several attendees even said it was the best conference they had ever attended. We shared more about our reflections here, including a list of over a dozen write-ups from writers such as Noah Smith, Packy McCormick, Scott Alexander, and many more.

Whenever a new movement is growing, an annual event like this is important to build its community and establish its identity. So, after last year’s great reception, we’re excited to announce Progress Conference 2025. It will be bigger, longer, and better, as we build on last year’s success and participant feedback.

Hosted by: the Roots of Progress Institute, together with Abundance Institute, Foresight Institute, Foundation for American Innovation, Human Progress, the Institute for Progress, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Works in Progress.

When: October 16-19, 2025

Where: Berkeley, CA, back at the Lighthaven campus that received rave reviews for the first conference.

Speakers: Keynotes include Sam Altman, Tyler Cowen, Jennifer Pahlka, and Blake Scholl. 30+ additional speakers will share ideas on four tracks: AI protopia, health/biotech/longevity, policy, and American Dynamism. Full speaker list so far.

Attendees: We expect 300+ builders, storytellers, policy makers, intellectuals, and students. This is an invitation-only event, but anyone can apply for an invitation. Complete the open application by May 15th.

Program: The main two-day conference will happen all day Friday and Saturday, similar to 2024—attend talks on topics from AI protopia to longevity to policy, sign up to run an unconference session, pitch your ideas to those who could help make your dreams a reality, and more. New for 2025, Thursday and Sunday will be add-on days, with optional gatherings for interest groups and other activities, such as SF Bay Area company tours.

Sponsorships: Special thanks to our early sponsors Open Philanthropy, Astera Institute, Freethink, the Future of Life Institute, Human Progress, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Foundation for Economic Education, Good Science Project, Kindred Subjects, and Manifold. We have more sponsorships available. View sponsorship opportunities here.

Our mission is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and to build a culture of progress. Bringing the members of the progress movement together is a core part of our strategy: the annual large conference is just a first step; we’re already planning more in-person and virtual events.

Our Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship program, which runs between July and October every year, is part of the larger mission of The Roots of Progress Institute to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. Through this program, we are developing the intellectual talent and community needed to fulfill this mission.

Our fellows, selected from several hundred applicants, are super-smart, interesting, and thoughtful people writing on fascinating topics. As the developmental editor, you’ll work directly with our fellows, helping them to grow and improve their writing skills. You’ll help bring new blogs into the world and develop the careers of great writers, while helping to advance the progress movement. You’ll have the chance to participate in the fellowship program advisor sessions with some of the most interesting thinkers and builders in the progress space. You’ll also get to attend the invitation-only Progress Conference in October.

This role reports to Emma McAleavy, our Program and Community Operations Manager. It is a full-time but limited-term role (with the potential for ongoing part-time work) that is fully remote within the contiguous US or Canada.

Learn more and apply here.

• The first progress conference was a huge success. Progress Conference 2025 will happen in October 2025, in Berkeley. More info early next year!

• We’re hiring an Event Manager to help us make this an annual event and to convene other in-person events for the progress community.

It’s been a month since the first annual Progress Conference brought together well over 200 thinkers, builders, policy makers, storytellers, and students of progress. Many attendees said it was one of the best conferences (or even the best!) they ever attended:

I had high expectations and you exceeded them. I've been to a bunch of conferences, I honestly think this was the best. The organization, the venue, the speakers, the structure, the participants, the esprit de corps, just outstanding job all around. Extremely well done!

Hats off for a truly memorable experience of this inaugural (of many needed) community building events for Progress.

Thank you for everything. This was life-giving. Genuinely.

Those quotes are from the feedback survey, which more than 100 people completed. On average, they’d be extremely likely to come back next year (average rating of 9 out of 10), or the equivalent of a 68 NPS score. We received 16,000 words of feedback, highlighting all that got people excited, and giving us many ideas on what to do even better next year.

Take-aways

The conference achieved its to priority, to connect people and build relationships:

Great people + venue that invites conversation + great weather = magic!

The people/attendees were expertly curated and very high quality. The venue made social interactions inevitable, because you would randomly bump into people. This was a highlight for me.

Meeting some of my heroes working on Progress-related topics, and having a forum to not just listen to them speak, but also to engage with them.

Conversations with the right people: a conference and venue optimized for precisely this

The curation of all the participants with each bringing something valuable to the table. They were extremely high capacity people and we all shared a generally aligned worldview. That meant almost every interaction led to some learning and something worthwhile. Rare to see that at other kinds of conferences that are open-ended and have people buy their way in.

This is THE network to connect with the founders, writers, academics, and activists working to build a better world.

The buzz continued post-conference, with over a dozen write-ups sharing impressions of the conference and writing up ideas generated by the event.

• Noah Smith: “I’m not sure if I’ve ever been to an event where the ideals and ideas of the other attendees so closely aligned with my own. Pretty much everyone there was a techno-optimist like myself”

• Packy McCormick: “It was awesome. A group of my favorite progress thinkers and doers from the internet”

• Scott Alexander: “it was great… the sort of conference you would expect in a world where the Great Stagnation was ending”

• Bryan Walsh, in Vox: “An effort to better understand how progress has happened is the first step to making it fully real once again”

• Zachary Karabell: “There is something infectious, contagious about optimism, about several hundred people jazzed at the idea of what is possible, and hard-nosed about what it takes to make it real”

• Dean Ball: “part of what made it such an exceptional event was the palpable sense of urgency in every panel, every keynote, and every impromptu debate”

• Ben Parry: “I loved this conference. It was a true celebration. I’m sure there will be much to process for many days to come”

• And more from Lynne Kiesling, Kevin Kohler, Laura Fingal-Surma, Gina Gorlin, Rob Tracinski, Jonah Messinger, Bob Ewing, and The Entrepreneurs Network.

And some love on social media (just a sample!)

• Rob L'Heureux: “the best conference I've ever been to”

• Quade MacDonald: “Reflecting on how much I learned this weekend at the Progress Conference. Talks were fantastic; but listening to and meeting heroes of mine ... really inspired me”

• Lucia Asanache: “If progress studies are a vibe … I can’t think of a better way to get a feel for it + power the engines. Hats off @rootsofprogress for the inaugural conference”

• Asimov Press: “We went to this conference and left with enough ideas to fill our entire calendar in 2025”

• Beatriz Gietner: “mind was blown and the future is bright!”

• Andrew Miller: “The sessions were excellent ... but the conversations between sessions were even better. I have never left a conference so energized and eager”

Read all the essays and blog posts here.

Videos of the talks will be available soon. We’ll post a link on the conference website, and they’ll be on our YouTube channel.

Planning the Second Annual Progress Conference

With all this great feedback, we will host the second annual progress conference in 2025. Details will be announced early next year; for now, we can share that we’re planning for early- to mid-October, in the SF Bay Area, where we are working with Lighthaven to again be our venue.

We’re hiring an Event Manager to help us make this an annual event and to run other in-person events for the progress community. Please help us find a great person for this role by sharing our jobs description—or apply if you’re interested in joining our team:

Event Manager - Roots of Progress Institute

This is a great opportunity for someone who is both great at project management and loves people and building community; it’s a full-time, remote position based in the US. Applications are now open, and our goal is to fill this position by the end of Q1, 2025.

This year’s fellows are a group of 25 progress writers selected from a pool of over 350 applicants.

They are founders, researchers, academics, policy-makers, capital allocators, and journalists from across the U.S., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, the U.K., and Hong Kong. And they will be writing about nuclear fusion, reproductive longevity, space manufacturing, housing reform, urban mobility, industrial policy, AI safety and opportunity, biotechnology, European innovation, eco-modernism and so much more.

We’re pleased to have once again assembled a thoughtful and innovative group of progress writers:

Dean Ball is a research fellow at the Mercatus Center. He is writing about AI regulation, robotics, abundance, materials science, and philosophies of progress.  You can subscribe to Dean’s work on his Substack, Hyperdimensional. 

Rosie Campbell leads the policy frontiers team at OpenAI. She’ll be writing about governance of agentic systems, the intersection of AI and epistemics, and the ethics of digital minds. You can subscribe to Rosie’s work on her Substack. 

Sarah Constantin is a science generalist and consultant with a math Ph.D. She is writing about speculative technological ambitions like longevity and human enhancement. You can subscribe to Sarah’s work on her Substack, Rough Diamonds. 

Sean Fleming is a former energy and natural resources consultant turned progress intellectual. He’ll be writing about energy, infrastructure, advanced manufacturing and building a zero-carbon energy system. You can subscribe to Sean’s work on his Substack, Clean Energy Review. 

Jeff Fong is the board chair of YIMBY Action and an early proponent of YIMBYism.  He is writing about urbanism and technology. You can subscribe to Jeff’s work on his Substack, Urban Proxima. 

Lauren Gilbert is a journalist and research fellow at Open Philanthropy.  She is writing about global development, innovation policy, and migration. You can subscribe to Lauren’s work on her Substack.

Dominik Hermle is a German medical doctor and clinical neuroscientist writing about European dynamism, European technology policy, and accelerating healthcare progress. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack. 

Mary Hui is a Hong Kong-based journalist. She is writing about the global industrial contest, innovation, and manufacturing. You can subscribe to her work on her Substack, a/symmetric. 

Ben James is a writer and builder in the grid decarbonization space. He is writing about energy and climate technologies. You can subscribe to his work on his blog. 

Kevin Kohler is a Geneva-based risk management professional. He is writing about AI analogies, policies and futures. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, Machinocene. 

Rob L'Heureux is a mechanical design engineer and technical product marketing expert. He is writing about semiconductors, manufacturing, and advancing material progress. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, Happy Future. 

Robert Long is a Research Associate at the Center for AI Safety working with the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program. He is writing about AI sentience and welfare. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, Experience Machines. 

Quade Macdonald is a “space nerd” and research fellow at the Center for Space Governance. He is writing about manufacturing in space, bottlenecks in manufacturing and industrial policy, and the economic forces of space settlement. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack. 

Niko McCarty is a former bioengineer and data journalist and the founding editor of Asimov Press. He is writing about biotechnology and metascience. You can subscribe to his—and other progress writer’s—work on his substack, Asimov Press. 

Duncan McClement is a student at the University of Cambridge, a Polaris Fellow and a research associate at the Adam Smith Institute. He is writing about housing, energy, and innovation policy. You can subscribe to his and his collaborator Jason Hausenloy’s, work on their Substack, Model Thinking. 

Jordan McGillis is the economics editor at the Manhattan Institute and an adjunct fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute. He is writing about chip manufacturing, energy, and globalization. You can follow his work on Twitter. 

Jonah Messinger is a PhD candidate in Physics at the University of Cambridge, an affiliated researcher at MIT, and an energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute. He is writing about metascience, funding innovation, nuclear fusion and the budding field of nucleonics. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, Seeking Scientific Revolutions.

Andrew Miller is a transportation consultant with a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins. He is writing about automated driving, mobility, transportation and urbanism. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, Changing Lanes. 

Grant Mulligan is a capital allocator who focuses on climate sustainability impact investments. He’ll be writing about ecomodernism and environmental technology. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, Progress Accumulation. 

Steve Newman is an 8x technical founder (including at one startup that originated what became Google Docs).  He is writing about AI policy, regulation and public discourse. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, Am I Stronger Yet? 

Jannik Reigl is the media and policy lead for a German nuclear fusion startup. He is writing about energy, metascience, and innovation policy. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, Progress: Real and Imagined. 

Julius Simonelli is an AI and machine learning engineer and technical writer for the Center for AI Safety.  He is writing about AI impacts, safety and alignment. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack, The Grey Matter.

Ruxandra Teslo is a PhD candidate in genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. She is writing about reproductive biology, accelerating progress in biology, and philosophies of progress. You can subscribe to her work on her Substack. 

Robert Tolan is an Emergent Ventures grantee and Polaris Fellow. He is writing about housing, urbanism and advancing progress in Ireland. You can subscribe to his work on his Substack. 

Dynomight is a pseudonymous blogger writing about AI, statistics and healthcare at dynomight.net.

You can follow all of our fellows on Twitter via this list.  

Finally, a special thank you to our program advisors who will be holding lectures and Q&As with our fellows over the next 8 weeks, including: Eli Dourado, Max Roser, Noah Smith, Tomas Pueyo, Tyler Cowen, Virginia Postrel, Andrej Karpathy, Blake Scholl, Bob McGrew, Brian Potter, Delian Asparouhov, Ela Madej, Holden Karnofsky, Kanjun Qiu, Timothy Lee, and Chandler Tuttle.

And thank you to our sponsors, the Cosmos Institute and Alpha School, for making this year's fellowship cohort possible!