• Event Manager

• Education Program Operations Manager

Both roles are full-time, fully remote, and based in the United States.

We also have three other roles still open:

• Development Manager

• Head of Content

• Program Manager, Fellowships

Please apply if interested, or share these opportunities with great candidates! The links above are shareable. The full text of the new Event Manager and Education Program Operations Manager roles are also shared below.

Event Manager

The role

The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) is seeking an Event Manager, to bring together people and foster community in and around the growing progress movement.

RPI is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. We are part of the broader progress movement that was kicked off in The Atlantic and has been profiled by BBC and Vox. Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, is quoted as a spokesman for progress in those stories, and we are known as a central organization in that movement.

Our annual Progress Conference is the main event for the community, with headliners including founders of billion-dollar companies (Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Dimitri Dolgov), Nobel laureates in physics and economics (John Martinis, Michael Kremer), and heads of government agencies like DARPA (Steven Winchell) and OSTP (Michael Kratsios). The conference is sold out every year with hundreds on the waitlist, and participants rave about it each year: “like reading Leonardo DaVinci’s notebooks”, “the best event I’ve ever attended”, “will be paying dividends for many years”, “the quality of people and conversations was pure gold”.

With this strong track record, we want to do even more events and community building. The biggest next step is Progress Conference Europe, planned for Amsterdam in late spring 2027. This is our first event outside the US, and the flagship project for this role. Alongside it, we are planning more specialized events, such as workshops with professors, journalists, or storytellers. We’re also eager to pilot one-day regional events in the US and to expand our online community efforts.

As the Event Manager, you will of course be in charge of all the operational details of the events you run. But what sets this opportunity apart for the right candidate is your ability to fully own both strategy and execution. We operate like a startup, with high autonomy. The right candidate will be able to shape the programming of our events—from choosing topics for conference track talks, to designing working sessions, to communicating with speakers and partners in the service of events. And the bar is high: If successful, these events are where new ideas and projects get incubated and where long-term relationships form between people who might just change the world.

What you will own and do

You will be responsible for:

• Progress Conference Europe, planned for Amsterdam in late spring/early summer 2027

• Additional events TBD—such as another regional conference, or more focused workshops for university professors or other participants

• Supporting events in service of other programs, such as the Progress in Medicine summer career exploration program for high school students, or the book launch for Jason’s forthcoming book with MIT Press, The Progress Manifesto

How we’ll measure success:

• Reach: Attendance across the events you run

• Financial sustainability. Our events are expected to be largely self-funding. You’ll own the budget for your events, and work with our Development Manager (once hired) on sponsorship and with the team on ticket revenue, so that the events program sustains itself over time rather than drawing on funding meant for other work.

• Quality: We’re proud of our attendee satisfaction, with NPS typically 70+, and you’ll own that for your events.

We also track outcomes particular to each event—new courses launched after a workshop for university professors, for instance. Getting better at measuring what events actually produce (projects started, collaborations formed, careers changed) is something we want to improve on, and we’d want your thinking on it.

You will own the events you’re responsible for from start to finish, working with RPI’s leadership on programming decisions—speaker selection, track design, and the shape of the experience.

Day-to-day tasks might include:

• Venue & vendor management—assessing locations and production partners, negotiating contracts, managing venue execution

• Collaboration with the Development Manager to raise sponsorship funding & communicate event results to sponsors

• Collaboration with event partners and co-hosts

• Speaker management—securing speakers, coordinating their talks and logistics

• Program design and execution—event flow, non-speaker programming (e.g., book signing, evening entertainment, VIP reception, factory or lab tours)

• Guest management—invite list management, ticket sales, application review for open applications, attendee communications

• Event marketing and communications—website, outreach posts, post-event video production—in coordination with the Head of Content (once hired)

• Event operations—scheduling, badges, swag, catering, AV, check-in management and all the many details that make an event great

• Manage the event budget and ensure financial goals are met

• And much more that you will figure out!

You will report to Heike Larson, our Vice President of Programs. You’ll work closely with Ben Thomas, our first event manager, who will bring you up to speed; you’ll support each other during high workload phases around each event.

About you

Among other qualifications, you should:

• Be excited by the ideas of the progress movement—whether you’ve been part of this community for years or are discovering it through this post

• Be excellent at operations, including project management, and proactive at using tech (software, and AI tools) to drive operational effectiveness and efficiency

• Be crisp and articulate in communications. You must be able to communicate with partners, sponsors, and event participants in an effective, no-nonsense way.

• Be a people person who enjoys connecting and bringing people together around shared interests and purpose

• Have experience with events—any kind of in-person gathering where great experiences matter and many details need to line up perfectly

Beyond that, we’re open to a range of experience:

A more senior candidate will have led large, complex events end to end, and will be deeply familiar with the progress movement—its ideas, its themes, and the people driving it. If this is you, then you’d take on programming decisions, speaker slates, and sponsor relationships early.

A more junior candidate might be earlier in your career but strong on the fundamentals above. In this case, we’d support you more heavily on programming and speaker selection while you build that judgment, and we’d want to see the trajectory that gets you there within a couple of years.

Formal event-management experience isn’t required for this path. You might come from a people team at a startup where you ran off-sites, a chief-of-staff or operations role at a consulting firm or VC fund, or a nonprofit that runs workshops.

Location and travel

We’re a distributed team, and you can work from anywhere in the contiguous United States. You must be authorized to work in the US; we aren’t able to sponsor visas or employ outside the country.

This role travels: roughly 25+ days a year across 8-10 trips. Most are short (2–3 days) for site visits, planning, RPI team meetings, and smaller events; three or four are longer (5–7 days) to run or support major events.

You’ll need a valid passport: Progress Conference Europe will be organized from the US, with several planning trips to the Netherlands and a longer stay for the event itself. Travel will be heavier in your first year, as it will be the first time we host Progress Conference Europe.

Living reasonably close to a major hub airport makes this role considerably easier, though it isn’t a requirement.

Apply for the Event Manager position

Education Program Operations Manager

The role

The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) is seeking someone who loves working with teenagers to run our high school summer program Progress in Medicine. Over the next couple of years, you’ll grow this program to hundreds of students, and lay the foundation for scaling our education outreach to thousands of students.

RPI is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. We are part of the broader progress movement that was kicked off in The Atlantic and has since been profiled by BBC and Vox, with our founder Jason Crawford as a key voice. Speakers at our annual Progress Conference include founders of billion-dollar companies, Nobel laureates in physics and economics, and heads of agencies like DARPA and OSTP; our writers fellowship includes influential voices on topics from AI policy to YIMBY reform to longevity technology. We also run a fellowship for progress writers, now in its fourth year. We have been doing all of this with a full-time team of five, which tells you something about how we operate—and we’re hiring to do even more.

In summer 2026, we launched a new summer career exploration program for teenagers, Progress in Medicine, which features several weeks of virtual instruction capped by a five-day in-residency program at Stanford University. It is the pilot program for a systematic educational campaign that aims to reorient teenagers from doom and anxiety toward agency and inspiration to help build a better tomorrow. We believe that ideas shape the future, often by changing how young people see the world and what purpose they pursue with their lives.

The pilot was a great success. We enrolled 30 ambitious, talented teens, showed them how people like them tackled medical problems in the past and built the modern world. We exposed them to ambitious builders in medicine, bio, longevity, and policy. By the end of the programs, this initial group of teens reported being more optimistic about the future, and being inspired to pursue different, more ambitious career paths in medicine.

As Education Program Operations Manager, you’ll own operations for Progress in Medicine in 2027 and scale it from there: more cohorts, more topics, more universities, run well enough that parents trust us with their kids and students leave changed. You’ll work closely with our curriculum leaders to choose advisors, near-peer mentors, company tour locations, and other partners. You’ll work with Stanford, our current summer camp host, and help us build similar relationships with other top universities. That alone is a major, multi-year initiative.

Beyond that, we expect to create programs that will scale beyond the high-touch in-person experiences we lead, which can reach at most a few hundred students each year. This will be some combination of online programs, high school curricula, and career resources; our leadership team will research and decide the strategy in the coming year. If you join now, you’ll build the operational foundation and the reputation that will enable future growth. Depending on what you bring to the table, there’s a path here that grows into running a team and contributing to the future expansion.

This role reports to Heike Larson, our VP of Programs, and will work closely with the curriculum leader for the summer programs—Laura Mazer for Progress in Medicine.

What you will own and do

You will be responsible for all operations for our high school educational programming:

• Marketing, recruiting, enrollment, ongoing communications

• Virtual program operations

• In-person on-campus programs

You’re the person who makes sure the program runs flawlessly and safely for our students, and that parents have confidence in entrusting their teenagers to us.

How we’ll measure success

• Reach. How many teens go through our programs, and how much of the program they complete. Growing this—more students, additional cohorts, eventually new topic areas beyond medicine—is the point of the role.

• Financial sustainability. Over time, we want our summer programs to pay for themselves: tuition plus sponsorships covering program costs, including staff time and teaching (but not necessarily new program development). You’ll manage the program budget and work with the team on enrollment and sponsor support so the program sustains itself operationally as we scale.

• Quality. We’re proud of our participant satisfaction, with NPS typically 70+ across RPI programs, and you’ll own that for your programs.

We also care about what the program does for students themselves: we survey them before and after on what they learned and whether their view of the future shifted in a more solutionist direction. Measuring that well is hard, and getting better at it is something we want your help with.

Day-to-day activities

• Plan and set up key program elements, from advisors and mentors, to university relations and lab/company tours

• Plan and execute program marketing, from website to socials and paid placement, to video production

• Organize and run the application and enrollment process, including student interviews and parent and student enrollment forms

• Run the virtual program, from setting up the program platform to handling the production of program binders

• Plan and execute the in-person residency—everything from managing dorm room assignments to transportation between locations to organizing the final celebratory event

• Own program communications—with students, parents, and partners (university, advisors, near-peer mentors, company partners)

• Own the program budget and drive continuous improvement, including automating operations so the program can scale

About you

You should:

• Be excited to work with young people (high school through early college). You enjoy this age group and relate well to them. Ideally, you have some experience as a tutor, coach, camp counselor, or other role where you have supervised and supported young people.

• Believe that education shapes what a young person does with their life, and, deep down, that empowering young people to choose purposeful careers as builders is important.

• Be excellent at operations, including project management, and a power user of software and AI tools—someone who reaches for them to make operations faster and better.

• Be crisp and articulate in communications. You’ll be communicating with students, parents, advisors, and university partners, and you need to be clear and no-nonsense with all of them.

• Be excited by the ideas of the progress movement—whether you’ve been part of this community for years or are discovering it through this job post.

Beyond that, we’re open to a range of experience:

A more senior candidate will bring both deep experience working with high-school-aged students and a demonstrated ability to manage and scale operations in a physical, in-person setting (private schools, hospitality, summer camps or similar). If this is you, you will be able to fully own scaling Progress in Medicine from one cohort to two (or more), as well as designing the non-curricular elements of another Progress in ____ program (engineering, or economics/entrepreneurship, for example), including finding advisors, near-peer mentors, and tour partners. You’ll also take on university relationships from the start, first with our current partner, Stanford University, and down the road with other universities.

A more junior candidate might be earlier in your career but strong on the fundamentals above. In this case, you’d own the 2027 program end to end—marketing, applications, enrollment, and the in-person residency itself—while we handle advisor, mentor, and university partner relationships until you’ve built that judgment. We’d want to see the trajectory that helps you grow into the full role within a couple of years.

Great candidates can come from a variety of backgrounds. You might have worked with young people during college summer jobs, or as a tutor, sports coach, or teacher. Separately, you might have owned operational responsibility at a small business, start-up, retail store, or hotel, or you might have been run operations at a school or summer camp.

What we’re hiring for is the operations job: our curriculum leads own what gets taught, and you own everything that makes it happen.

Location and travel

We’re a distributed team, and you can work from anywhere in the contiguous United States. You must be authorized to work in the US; we aren’t able to sponsor visas or employ outside the country.

This role requires significant travel during the summer. The in-residency portion of our programs runs on campus (at Stanford in 2027, and likely at additional universities as we grow), and you’ll be on site for the duration. The 2027 residency is roughly a week; as we add cohorts, expect this to grow toward a month of continuous on-site work each summer. During residency, days are long and include evenings and weekends: you’re the person making sure the program runs well and our students are safe and cared for.

The rest of the year is lighter — roughly 10–15 days across a handful of short (2–3 day) trips for campus and partner site visits, RPI team meetings, and program-related events. You’ll also be able to attend our annual Progress Conference in the fall, where a handful of our summer students join us as guests.

Living near the campuses where we run programs makes the summer stretch easier—you can sleep in your own bed some nights—but it isn’t a requirement, and the locations will change as we expand. Being close to a major hub airport also helps.

One thing we want to be upfront about: over time, a month away from home in the summer is a real ask. It’s demanding, and people come back from it tired. That’s why we expect you to take extended paid time off after the residency to recharge—not just a week, but a meaningful vacation plus time off at home.

Apply for the Education Program Operations Manager position

Compensation and benefits for all roles

Mission-driven work shouldn’t mean sacrificing your livelihood. We benchmark pay against comparable roles at both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and set salaries using a structured leveling rubric rather than by negotiation. We won’t match Silicon Valley salaries, and we don’t have equity, but we don’t expect anyone to take a hardship discount for caring about the mission.

• Health insurance. A monthly allowance through Thatch, a new type of health insurance broker under ICHRA, that you use to buy your own plan. RPI currently covers roughly the cost of a typical silver-level plan, 100% for you and 75% for dependents. Because you choose from many plans available in your state from multiple insurance carriers, rather than the one or two a small employer could negotiate, most people land on better coverage, a better price, or both.

• Retirement. A 401(k) plan; RPI doesn’t currently match contributions.

• Time off. We work to outcomes, not hours. Rather than counting days, we expect people to take roughly 20–25 days off a year, plus holidays, and we’re largely closed between Christmas and New Year’s. After an intense stretch, when taking time off often isn’t possible—like running a conference or closing out a program—extra recovery time afterward is normal and encouraged. Sick leave is separate.

• Parental leave. After a year of employment: eight weeks at full salary for any new parent, by birth, adoption, or surrogacy, plus four additional weeks for birth mothers. Your role is held for you, and you can come back at half time for the first two weeks at full pay.

About the Roots of Progress Institute

The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. Our programs this year include:

• Progress Conference, the main annual gathering for the progress community

• The Blog-Building Intensive, a fellowship program for progress writers

• Progress in Medicine, a summer program for high school students

• Teaching Progress, a workshop for university professors who want to teach ideas of progress

Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, writes and speaks about the history and philosophy of progress, including in his forthcoming book The Progress Manifesto.

Why care about progress? The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.

In order to make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust. We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and beyond.

Read more about our mission and the bios of our team.

Application Process and Timeline

We believe a good application process allows us to get to know you, and you to get a feel for what it’s like working with us. We move quickly, and expect roughly these steps:

• Written application. Give us some basic info about you and your current situation, and answer a handful of questions on why you’re excited about this role and qualified to do it well. You’ll also need to link to your resume and your relevant socials.

• A 30–45-minute Zoom screen with hiring manager Heike Larson

• An application task. You show you can do some of the work, and get a feel for the job. This will take several hours, depending on your background and speed.

• Round 2 interviews. You’ll meet with two additional RPI staff members relevant to your role. They’ll review your task with you and go deeper on your experience.

• Final conversations with Jason Crawford, our founder and president, and a follow-up with Heike to address any open questions on either side.

We’ll ask finalists for two references we can call before making an offer.

Both roles are near-term hires. Apply as soon as you can. We’d like to invite finalist candidates to join us for Progress Conference 2026 in Berkeley, CA on October 8-11. Start dates for both roles are asap; we’d like to have them on the team by December or January.

Apply for the Event Manager position

Apply for the Education Program Operations Manager position

Last week we kicked off our fourth Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship with a cohort of 41 outstanding fellows.

This year’s fellows were selected from a pool of nearly 400 impressive applicants. They include scientists, chip builders, former diplomats, philanthropists, economists, veterans, teachers, policymakers, and two former child actors! They’ll be writing from Europe, China, Kenya, India, and the United States about aging, immigration, manufacturing, housing, Georgism, global development, AI, ecomodernism, public health, educating the next generation of builders, and so much more.

Here are the 2026 Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive Fellows:

Aaron Fried was the Senior Director of Growth at the Ayn Rand Institute. He is building an AI tool for writers and writing about how AI can enhance creative expression.

Abi Olvera is the founder of DC Abundance and an AI researcher. She has a master’s degree in international relations from Yale and spent 10 years as a foreign service officer with the U.S. State Department. She writes about the politics of abundance..

Adam Rochussen is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he studies T cells, circadian rhythms, and cancer immunotherapy. He writes about science and culture.

Ajwal Dsouza studies plant production in controlled environments. He was a finalist on the Canadian Space Agency’s Deep Space Food Challenge. He writes about the intersection of plant science, technology, and business.

Alex Araki supports research into chronic pain classification and is a former drug hunter at Gordian Biotechnology. He writes about philanthropy and fundraising.

Alex Plesa researches aging at Harvard’s Wyss Institute. He also completed his PhD at Harvard, where he discovered new ways to reverse the age of cells and extend lifespan in mice. He writes about aging research.

Alex Wakeman is an emerging technology research officer for the U.K. Government Office for Science. He completed his PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of Leeds and has written for Asimov Press and Works In Progress.

Alexander Thompson is a tutor of law and philosophy in the United Kingdom. He has a PhD in the history of law from Cambridge University, with a focus on the Industrial Revolution.

Ben Hyman is Operating Partner at the Africa Jobs Fund, a philanthropic investor/venture-builder focused on creating higher-productivity jobs for low-income workers in Africa. He received his BA from the University of Oxford.

Cooper Kramer is an equipment engineer at Tokyo Electron, where he works on semiconductor manufacturing equipment at the Albany (New York) NanoTech Complex. He writes about the business and geopolitics of chips.

Daniel Golliher is the founder of Maximum New York, a school that teaches students inside and outside of New York City how the government works. He writes about governance and civics.

Deena Mousa leads Coefficient Giving‘s grantmaking at the intersection of AI, global health, and economic growth. She has written about these topics for The Economist, Scientific American, and National Geographic, as well as on her Substack.

Farrell Gregory is a non-resident research fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation in Washington, D.C., where he focuses on how America and China build technological power.

Gil Guerra is a senior policy analyst at Hudson Institute, where he researches immigration and foreign policy, migration-related security issues, and immigrant assimilation in the United States.

Inferential Gap is an anonymous Substack author who aims to narrow the inferential gap between the Chinese and Western AI ecosystems.

Jack Despain Zhou is a cultural commentator, law school graduate, and education policy advocate and cofounder of the Center for Educational Progress. He writes about institutional design and educational progress.

Jacob Bruggeman is an incoming assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University, where his research examines the entangled histories of technology, politics, and American institutions. He writes about politics and policy.

Lars Doucet is president of data and research at the Center for Land Economics. Previously, he was a video game designer. He writes about Georgism.

Latham Turner is a homeschooling dad working to create an education that allows his kids to advance the frontier of their potential. He writes about education as a human potential problem.

Lauren Teixeira is an analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, an energy-focused think tank. She is interested in compelling stories about why the world is the way it is, and has developed an “obsessive commitment” to hosting parties!

Luke Eure is head of sales at Lighthouse, which helps frontier talent navigate the U.S. immigration system. He holds a BA in physics from MIT and writes about talent-maxxing through immigration.

Marius Drozdzewski is the founder and editor of ævum, a German-language magazine about political ideas, and works at Prometheus, a Berlin-based think tank.

Matthew Gammans is an assistant professor of agricultural policy at North Dakota State University, where he researches how markets, policy, and climate shape the future of agricultural production and the environment. He writes about agriculture economics.

Michael Wiebe is an economist focused on housing. His an independent research and is currently conducting a living literature review for Coefficient Giving. He received his PhD from the University of British Columbia and writes about housing policy.

Morgan Livingston has worked on AI and science policy in the Senate, the White House, and federal agencies, with a focus on how America can both advance and govern risky technologies.

Nick Frassinelli is an electrical engineer, a power systems graduate student at Clemson University, and an all-around energy nerd. He writes about the technical, political, and economic constraints that shape the energy landscape.

Nikhil Davar helps run the recruiting arm of The Diff. He writes about how can we use machine intelligence to better select for, develop and reach the human intelligence

Olya Irzak is the founder and CEO of Frost Methane Labs and a co-founder of Diamond List, which publishes an annual list of climate startups that have been nominated by qualified climate investors.

Oren Hadar is an urbanist based in Los Angeles. He writes about making Southern California more affordable.

Pamela Hobart is the gifted education advocate in residence at GT School. Previously, she studied the philosophy of education and education policy at Teachers College, Columbia University. She writes about academic acceleration..

Patrick Mineault funds frontier neuroscience and AI research at the Amaranth Foundation. Previously, he worked on the Brain-Computer Interface team at Facebook. He writes about AI and neuroscience.

Peggy Yin is a PhD student at Stanford, director of the Cognitive Security Task Force, and a board member at LearnerStudio. She designs and studies transformative experiences, particularly in education and workforce development.

Rohit Shinde is a senior software engineer at The Trade Desk. He received his master’s in computer science from Rutgers University and writes about development in India.

Ryan Alimento is a clean energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute. He received his bachelor’s in chemical engineering and master’s in green technology from the University of Southern California.

Ryder Kimball is a climate tech writer at Lowercarbon Capital and a landscape photographer. He previously worked on the comms team for Planet, a satellite data provider, and Pacific Fusion, a nuclear fusion startup.

Salma Abdalla is a professor of population health research at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her medical degree from the University of Khartoum and completed a PhD in public health at Boston University. She writes about public health and progress.

Sam Roland is a nonresident fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and a law student at George Mason University Antonin Scalia School of Law, where he is also founder and president of the Scalia AI Law Society. He writes about regulation and progress.

Samuel Scheuer is a graduate analyst at Aurora Energy Research. He received his master’s in environmental change and management at Oxford University, and writes about energy policy.

Sophie Gilbert is a senior researcher at the Property and Environment Research Center. She completed her PhD in wildlife biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and blogs about conservation and abundance.

Thomas Briggs is director of operations at the Center for Educational Progress. He received his JD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Trey Gordner is a policy researcher and data scientist at the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization, where he works on housing affordability. He writes about municipal charter reform.

• Development Manager

We also have two roles recently announced that are still open:

• Head of Content

• Program Manager, Fellowships

Please apply if interested, or share these opportunities with great candidates! The links above are shareable. The full text of the new Development Manager role is also included below.

All roles are full-time and fully remote (North America–based).

Development Manager

The role

The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) is seeking a Development Manager, to own our fundraising process and all philanthropic donations.

RPI is a startup nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. We are part of the broader progress movement that was kicked off in The Atlantic and has been profiled by BBC and Vox. Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, is quoted as a spokesman for progress in those stories, and we are known as a central organization in that movement.

You will work closely with Jason. He will be the public face of the organization and the primary donor contact. You will own the pipeline, process, and followup; and you’ll be in the loop on all meetings and emails.

The people you will meet in this role are some of the smartest, most accomplished, and best-informed people in the world (and we say that not just because some of them might be reading this!) Some are highly successful individuals in Silicon Valley, New York finance, and other communities; others run funds of $100M or more at some of the most forward-thinking foundations on the planet.

They are also one of the most demanding audiences you will meet. They are busy and require conciseness; they want to see credible plans and tangible results; they are allergic to hype and fluff; they cannot be snowed. In short, they will keep you on your toes.

You will join at a pivotal time, and start from a solid foundation: We already have a good network of donors and good relationships with them. We have more leads than we have been able to follow up on. We also have a very good brand. Our annual Progress Conference is the main event for our community. Our writer’s fellowship, university workshops, and high school summer program are already having an impact, and provide plenty of material for donor pitches and updates. And next year, we’ll be launching Jason’s book, The Progress Manifesto, which will greatly expand our mindshare and create evidence of momentum and attention.

You’ll report directly to Jason, and will work closely with him and with the program leads. We’re a small team with Silicon Valley DNA; we operate with high autonomy and minimal process. You will fuel the work of this fantastic team. This is a role that will stretch and grow you: the rigor of your thinking, the clarity of your communication, your ability to execute with minimal oversight.

Apply now

What you will own and do

You will be responsible for:

• All philanthropic donations and grants, from individuals and foundations, at all levels

• All donor relations and communications

• Sponsorships for our conference and other programs (but not direct program revenue, such as ticket sales)

Your key metric will be the revenue brought in through these channels.

You will have broad latitude to devise fundraising strategies and tactics. At the same time, you must own execution: you will be the only person dedicated full-time to fundraising.

Examples of day-to-day tasks you might perform include:

• Prospecting for foundations, grants, and donors; and for events where we can build these relationships

• Researching donor prospects

• Writing grant proposals

• Getting sponsorships for Progress Conference and other programs

• Developing/improving our donation pipeline tracking system

• Creating our annual fundraising letter / pitch deck

• Writing donor communications such as a monthly update and annual report

• Sending thank-you cards and gifts; planning and creating donor swag

• Planning and attending fundraising events

• Setting up donor meetings; joining on those discussions whenever possible, and debriefing with Jason afterward

• And probably other things that you will figure out!

Apply now

About you

You should:

• Be familiar with the progress community and its ideas.

• Be crisp and articulate in communications. You must be fluent in the efficient, non-nonsense communications style of Silicon Valley.

• Thrive on closing deals; but be able to face rejection without taking it personally.

No prior experience in fundraising roles is strictly required, although experience in relevant roles is valued! The right candidate in this role might come from a sales or operations background.

Location and travel

We’re a distributed team, and you can work from anywhere that has reasonable overlap with US timezones. You’ll be expected to travel multiple times a year for donor events, our annual conference, and our annual team meeting.

About the Roots of Progress Institute

The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. Our programs this year include:

• Progress Conference, the main annual gathering for the progress community

• The Blog-Building Intensive, a fellowship program for progress writers

• Progress in Medicine, a summer program for high school students

• Teaching Progress, a workshop for university professors who want to teach ideas of progress

Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, writes and speaks about the history and philosophy of progress, including in his forthcoming book The Progress Manifesto.

Why care about progress? The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.

In order to make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust. We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and beyond.

Read more about our mission and the bios of our team.

Application process

We’ll review applications on a rolling basis. Promising applications will get an intro call from Jason. To get an offer, expect that you will interview with a few members of the team, and do a written assignment that we’ll discuss with you.

This role can start immediately. We aim to fill it by October.

Apply now

• Head of Content

• Program Manager, Fellowships

Both are full-time, fully remote (North America–based).

Head of Content

The role

The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) is seeking a Head of Content to manage our content operations, to grow our online audience, and to tell that audience about everything we’re saying and doing.

RPI is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. We are part of the broader progress movement that was kicked off in The Atlantic and has been profiled by BBC and Vox. Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, is quoted as a spokesman for progress in those stories, and we are known as a central organization in that movement. Our annual Progress Conference is the main event for the community, with headliners including founders of billion-dollar companies, Nobel laureates in physics and economics, and heads of government agencies like DARPA and OSTP; the conference is sold out every year with hundreds on the waitlist. Our Substack has 60,000 subscribers, and Jason has over 43,000 Twitter followers.

You will also have a lot of great material to work with: regular essays and threads from Jason and our fellows; dozens of hours of recorded talks coming out of every conference; and announcements from our fellowship, conference, and university and high school programs. Biggest of all, next year, we’ll be launching Jason’s book, The Progress Manifesto.

You’ll report directly to Jason, and will work closely with him and with the program leads. We’re a small team with Silicon Valley DNA; we operate with high autonomy and minimal process. You will amplify the work of this fantastic team.

You will uphold the highest standards for taste and quality. No slop, no clickbait, no feeding the outrage machine. We write the kind of posts we want to read. We don’t pollute the epistemic commons—we clean it up.

What you will own and do

You will own:

• all our online audiences across Substack and other social media

• all communications about our programs

• the launch of The Progress Manifesto, forthcoming from MIT Press in Spring 2027

Your key metrics will be audience growth, engagement, and book sales.

You will have broad latitude to devise comms strategies and tactics. At the same time, you must own execution: you will have a budget for contractors like video production, but otherwise you will be a one-person comms team.

This is not a PR role: it’s about managing our own audience, not about getting external media mentions or interviews. However, when we have a major media campaign, like the book launch, you will work with an external PR firm who does those things.

Examples of day-to-day tasks you might perform include:

• Creating a launch plan for The Progress Manifesto, each year’s Progress Conference, each cohort of the Blog-Building Intensive, etc.

• Drafting announcements, updates, and retrospectives for all our programs (or editing drafts written by the program leads) and publishing them

• Drafting and publishing the links digest (which we would like to put out more regularly!)

• Publishing essays and turning them into social posts and threads

• Managing production for promotional videos, like this one for our fellowship

• Publishing the talks from the Progress Conference, including creating short clips for social media

• And much more that you will figure out!

Apply Now

About you

You should:

• Be very online: you don’t have to post a lot or have a large audience yourself, but you should read a lot of social media and blogs/newsletters

• Be familiar with the progress community and its writers

• Have good taste in essays and talks

• Be a good copy-writer (but not necessarily an essayist)

• Have backbone: we touch on controversial topics

No prior experience in communications roles is strictly required, although experience in relevant roles is valued!

Location and travel

We’re a distributed team, and you can work from anywhere that has reasonable overlap with US timezones. You’ll be expected to travel at least a few times a year for our annual conference and possibly other events, and for our annual team meeting.

Application process

We’ll review applications on a rolling basis. Promising applications will get an intro call from Jason. To get an offer, expect that you will interview with several members of the team, and possibly do a small amount of prep or writing offline.

This role can start immediately. We aim to fill it by mid-October at the latest.

Apply Now

Program Manager, Fellowships

The role

We’re looking for a program manager to cultivate a community of progress writers.

The Roots of Progress is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. As program manager, you will support and empower the intellectuals who generating the ideas that form the foundation of the progress studies movement.

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.

As program manager you will be responsible for the operations of our flagship fellowship program, the Blog-Building Intensive, along with a new program, the Audience-Building Intensive. You also provide 1:1 support to our fellows to help accelerate their careers as public intellectuals.

• Our Blog-Building Intensive Program is a 10-week-long online program designed to accelerate the careers of progress intellectuals. We admit 25-35 fellows each year through a competitive application process. During the program, we host daily sessions with our fellows that include writing lessons, guest speakers, and feedback sessions. We also provide editorial support to help our fellows write and publish >4 essays during the program. Successful fellows establish a regular writing cadence, become skilled at communicating complex ideas to a general intellectual audience, and are embedded in the broader progress community.

• Our Audience-Building Intensive Program is a 5-month-long program designed to meet the needs of intellectuals with an established writing practice. The program includes modules on Op-Ed writing, public speaking, developing a paid publication, and optimizing published writing for engagement and growth. As with the Blog-Building Intensive Program, our developmental editor provides ongoing editorial support to our fellows. The ABI builds on BBI to increase the impact our writers have: larger, better-matched audiences, more viral and higher-impact publications, and skills at monetizing writing or leveraging expertise into other ways to make writing a (larger) part of their careers.

This role reports to Emma McAleavy, who leads our fellowship programs. It is a full-time, fully remote position, with a couple of multi-day trips required every quarter.

Apply Now

About You

You love managing programs that bring people together, enabling them to learn and form communities. You’re excited about working in a small team. You are thrilled when your work enables others to succeed. And: you’d be delighted to apply these skills toward enabling human progress to continue and even accelerate.

• Do you enjoy organizing and project management? You have substantial experience managing a project or program. You’re energized by figuring out what it takes to deliver a delightful experience for a program or an event. Perhaps you have led online cohort-based programs before. Or an in-person program like a retreat, a camp, or an educational program. Or maybe you’ve organized a larger-scale, more complex event that took months of prep and planning. Whatever your specific background, you are comfortable using wide variety of tools and tactics to ensure an exceptional participant experience.

• Are you an indefatigable champion for other people? Can you listen deeply to someone and help them identify goals and blockers? Are you obsessed with helping other people achieve their potential? Are you excited to roll up your sleeves and offer practical support: a letter of recommendation, a nomination to an exciting opportunity, edits on a fellowship application? Do you like to help people develop a concrete strategy for accomplishing their goals, and then help them execute on this strategy?

• Do you have an ownership mentality? You thrive in a work environment with clear objectives and regular kind-and-candid, growth-oriented feedback. You take full ownership of your area, planning your own work and communicating proactively with your teammates. You love finding efficient ways to do things and dislike bureaucracy.

• Are you passionate about ideas in general and human progress in particular? You believe, like us, that ideas shape history and that writers, researchers, storytellers, and educators need a team behind them so they can do their best work and have the most impact. You’re fascinated by the amazing progress we’ve made in the last 200 years, lifting most of humanity out of poverty, and you are eager to support the intellectual entrepreneurs who explain this progress and advocate for policies and programs that will keep it going. You don’t aspire to be an intellectual yourself, yet you admire their work and want to amplify their impact.

Day-to-Day

As the Program Manager for the blog-building fellowship, your main focus will be:

• Running the annual 10-week Blog-Building Intensive. You’ll own the entire program, including managing partners (e.g., our editors and advisors), running marketing and program outreach, managing the application and selection process for the 25-35 fellows, executing the 10-week online program, and planning and running the three-day in-person retreat. You may also teach or co-teach the writing curriculum that we’ve developed. We’ve run this program three times, and have perfected many aspects of it. But, as program manager, your job will be to continuously solicit and incorporate feedback to continue improving the program. This program typically runs sometime between July-October, with applications open May-June.

• Running the 5-month Audience-Building Intensive program. As with the Blog-Building Intensive program, you will own the entire program. You will manage the advisors we contract with to teach various modules, and you will teach or co-teach some of the modules yourself. You will manage the application and selection process, and suggest improvements to the program based on fellow feedback and outcomes. We have run this program once with alumni of the Blog-Building Intensive program. We may open this program up to the general public in its second year. This program has run only once, January–June; future scheduling TBD.

• Individual alumni fellow and alumni support. One of the most delightful parts of the role is meeting and engaging with our Roots of Progress fellows, who are an amazing group of ambitious intellectuals—the type of students every teacher dreams of! You will provide individual and customized support to the fellows. Is a fellow writing a book? You could find yourself helping them refine a query letter. Are they looking for job? You might be called upon to write letters of introduction and help them connect with the right people. Does a fellow want to publish an op-ed? You might identify editors and help them prepare their pitch. Whatever the fellows want to do, as part of their work as public intellectuals, your job is to help them do it.

• Running additional programs. The Blog-Building Intensive Program, the Audience-Building Intensive program and ad-hoc fellow support will require ~70% of your time. The other 30% will be dedicated to other programs. This could including helping to run our Progress in Medicine program for High School students, or adding a second Blog-Building Intensive cohort during the year, or supporting specific events like the Progress Conference during critical times.

In this role, you’ll work closely with Emma McAleavy, your manager, Mike Riggs, our developmental editor, as well as our partners (e.g., instructors we bring on for the program, and other progress organizations who support our fellows in a variety of ways).

Apply Now

Application process

We’ll review applications on a rolling basis beginning August 1st. We’ll conduct first round interviews in August and September. Finalists will be asked to complete a take-home assignment and participate in two final round interviews.

Apply Now

About the Roots of Progress Institute

The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. Our programs this year include:

• Progress Conference, the main annual gathering for the progress community

• The Blog-Building Intensive, a fellowship program for progress writers

• Progress in Medicine, a summer program for high school students

• Teaching Progress, a workshop for university professors who want to teach ideas of progress

Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, writes and speaks about the history and philosophy of progress, including in his forthcoming book The Progress Manifesto.

Why care about progress? The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.

In order to make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust. We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and beyond.

Read more about our mission and the bios of our team.

We launched Progress in Medicine (PiM) in December as a test, a pilot program aimed at answering the question: How can we inspire young people to choose builder careers that advance human progress?

Our hypothesis when we designed PiM was this: Schools generally are ill-equipped to help teens figure out their life purpose—and teens and parents feel this problem urgently enough that they are willing to invest time and money. While many other great summer programs exist, none offered what we would have wanted for our own teens: a hybrid model that enabled teens to go deep on content and community building, without requiring them to commit their entire summer to one camp. Plus, few selective programs go broad: many competitive, ambitious programs zero in on one specialty, rather than helping teens explore a wide range of careers to see where they might fit. We thought teens needed to learn not just the what of a specific discipline, but get the framework of the why and how. That means learning the story of historical progress in medicine and bio, including the people who made it happen. It also means meeting the people on the current frontiers, and learning where they as young people can build a career that matters.

This is what Progress in Medicine set out to do, and now that the program has started, we’re even more excited about its potential to solve a real parent-student problem and have meaningful impact on the broader world.

Without much marketing (one ad in an online summer camp listing space, plus a couple of emails to organizations like HOSA, a health care network for young people, plus our own network), we received well over 100 applications. The 30 students, ages 14–18, who we admitted in this inaugural class come from all over the US, Canada, and four international countries. Some are interested in becoming neurosurgeons, pediatricians, cancer researchers, and biomedical engineers; others are just curious about medicine and eager to figure out where they might fit. Some are already medical builders, launching an app with 10,000 users or putting together business plans for moonshot ideas; others have built in other areas (AI tools, computers, robots); and others have volunteered or had challenging summer jobs.

This week showed us that we selected well. We had great (on-time, camera-on!) attendance in our four two-hour long Zoom sessions. Teens maxed out their break-out room chats, completed their online assignments, and flooded our Zoom chat with their answers. For our first advisor session on sanitation, 22 of our students asked a wide range of questions of Dr. Jake Swett, Executive Director and founder of Blueprint Biosecurity—and their questions showed how deeply many had researched Dr. Swett and his company.

The Progress in Medicine program is led by Laura Mazer, a Stanford-trained surgeon turned educator, who writes about the history of Medicine on Substack. PiM has three parts:

• Four online weeks, two hours per day. Teens learn about the history of medicine and bio via case studies (sanitation, infectious diseases, cancer, research ethics, obesity, longevity). They meet with expert advisors and ask them questions. They learn life skills—such as how to be a good mentee and get the most out of mentors. They then apply those skills, for example, by meeting in small groups with young professionals who have agreed to be near-peer mentors.

• A four-day in-person residency at Stanford. Teens will tour university facilities and labs, as well as Bay-Area biotech companies. They’ll gather for a celebratory reception at The Institute at Salesforce Tower, where they’ll meet with inspiring adults involved in medicine and biotech, and the broader Bay Area progress movement. They’ll get to experience dorm life and meet Stanford students, and spend time with each other to deepen their relationships.

• A reflection and writing week. Back home and online, teens will write up what they learned. With guidance by our on-staff editor, Mike Riggs, they’ll synthesize their insights about the world of medicine, biotech, and health, and their growing awareness of their own interests into a personal narrative which can form the basis for a college application essay.

When we launched this program we had two big questions:

• Are teens and parents eager to explore careers through a wider, progress-oriented lens?

• Can we help raise ambitions and broaden perspectives of talented teens in a way that empowers them to choose great-fit careers that tackle some of humanity’s biggest challenges?

We won’t have the full answers for a few more weeks, as PiM runs through late July. But we do know this: 30 teens and their parents are in the program. Two-thirds of the families have paid $2,000 to participate, and one-third of the students attend on scholarships. We’re grateful to our donors who funded the scholarships (without asking for name recognition): your generous donations enabled us to make admissions decisions need-blind, and give these teens a unique summer opportunity.

This summer, we will learn a lot. If Progress in Medicine ends up being the success we now think it can be, it’s a first step in a larger program to help orient teens toward a solutionist mindset and toward builder careers that fill their lives with meaning and contribute toward a better future for all of us. Stay tuned: we’ll have lots of plans to build on this first pilot program!

For now, join us in congratulating these teens on a great first week. We’re excited for the next five weeks we get to spend with them, and can’t wait to meet them in person during the Stanford in-residency in mid-July!

Questions the students asked of Dr. Swett. They were more insightful and better researched than the questions we’ve heard at many adult conferences!

You can read more about this year’s program or apply here. The application deadline is this Monday, June 1.

Our fellows have sung the program’s praises, and you can hear directly from them about how it changed their lives in the video below.

You can also watch the recording of yesterday's Substack Live session. We talked about the origin of the Blog-Building Intensive and how it emerged out of Jason’s own blog. We talked about how we designed it, and how it has evolved over the last three years. And we talked about what it’s like to participate in the program.

For this year’s Blog-Building Intensive Program, we have two tracks: Human Talent & Potential and Security & Resilience. We welcome fellows writing on any progress-related topic, but for 10-15 spots, we will give preference to applicants focusing on these themes.

Over the course of 10 weeks, fellows will participate in our bespoke writing curriculum, work 1:1 with our developmental editor Mike Riggs, workshop their writing with their peers, and hear from some of the leading lights of the progress studies movement, Virginia Postrel, Tyler Cowen, Eli Dourado, Brian Potter, Brendan McCord, Alexander Kustov, Elle Griffin, Alice Evans, Greg Lukianoff, and Kevin Esvelt.

• 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: 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 27–October 2. Our in-person weekend takes place August 20–23. Optional and strongly encouraged: attend Progress Conference in Berkeley October 8–11; 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.

You can read more about this year’s program or apply here. The application deadline is this Monday, June 1.

Join us on Substack Live

You have 5 more days to submit your application to the fourth cohort of our Blog-Building Intensive program, a 10-week program for aspiring progress writers.

You can read more about this year’s program or apply here.

You may have seen alumni singing the program’s praises on Substack over the last few weeks. Among the many complementary things they’ve said about the program:

• “The Roots of Progress fellowship changed my life.”— Grant Mulligan

• “I will push you out of your comfort zone in the best ways.”— Colleen Smith

• “The Roots of Progress fellowship was, and continues to be, one of the most important and impactful things I’ve ever done as a writer.” — Elle Griffin

• “I feel I can improve my craft by being part of this community and, most importantly, has increased my already high optimism about humanity!” — Rhishi Pethe

Our alumni have published over 1,500 essays on their own blogs and Substack publications. And their work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal, where they’ve written on topics such as fertility policy, AI safety, and the challenges that accompany self-driving car adoption. They have also written for magazines like WIRED, Foreign Affairs, American Affairs, Works in Progress, Asimov Press, Asterisk, and Arena.

Join us on Substack Live at 2 pm PT / 5 pm ET. We’ll be answering questions about the Blog-Building Intensive program: how it works, who it’s for, and what you’ll get out of participating.

Join us on Substack Live

This year, we have two tracks: Human Talent & Potential and Security & Resilience. We welcome fellows writing on any progress-related topic, but for 10-15 spots, we will give preference to applicants focusing on these themes.

Over the course of 10 weeks, fellows will participate in our bespoke writing curriculum, work 1:1 with our developmental editor Mike Riggs, workshop their writing with their peers, and hear from some of the leading lights of the progress studies movement, including , , , , , , , , , and .

• 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.

You can read more about this year’s program or apply here.

Join us on Substack Live at 2 pm PT / 5 pm ET. We’ll be answering questions about the Blog-Building Intensive program: how it works, who it’s for, and what you’ll get out of participating.

Join us on Substack Live

Announcing the third annual Progress Conference! The pace of technological change feels faster this year, and the progress movement is growing too. Gathering people together helps build community and establish a movement’s identity. We want this annual event to continue to connect and inspire people, catalyze new projects, and share ideas.

Thanks to everyone who made Progress Conference 2025 great: over 350 people attended, the event sold out in June, and there were hundreds of interested people on the waitlist. Several attendees again said it was the best conference they had ever attended. We shared our reflections here, including a list of write-ups from writers like , , , and more.

We are excited to build on that momentum for 2026:

Hosted by: the Roots of Progress Institute, together with , , Foundation for American Innovation, , the Institute for Humane Studies, , and .

When: October 8–11, 2026.

Where: Berkeley, CA, again at the Lighthaven campus that got great reviews the last two years.

Speakers: Keynote speakers include Dmitri Dolgov (Co-CEO, Waymo), Tyler Cowen (Mercatus Center), Stephen Winchell (Director, DARPA), John Martinis (Qolab; Nobel Laureate in Physics), and Michael Kremer (University of Chicago; Nobel Laureate in Economics). 20+ additional speakers will share ideas across three tracks: Human Talent & Potential, AI & Robotics, and Security & Resilience. Full speaker list so far here.

Attendees: We expect ~400 leaders across tech, policy, and culture; builders, founders, policymakers, storytellers, writers, and students. This is an invitation-only event, but anyone can apply for an invitation. Complete the open application by May 31st.

Program: Similar to 2025, the main two-day conference will happen all day on Friday and Saturday. Participants will attend talks on topics ranging from AI and robotics to housing construction to psychology and philosophy of builders, organize and run unconference sessions, mingle in the garden, and more. Thursday and Sunday are add-on days, with optional gatherings for interest groups and other activities like factory tours to Bay Area startups.

Children under 12 years old are welcome—must be accompanied by a parent at all times (except during childcare). We also plan to have on-site childcare available on Friday and Saturday with progress-themed programming.

Sponsors: Special thanks to our early sponsors Coefficient Giving, , Ken Broad, , Halcyon Futures, , LENS, , , , the Institute for Humane Studies, Circulate Planning & Policy, and the Foundation for Economic Education. Sponsorships make events like this one possible. 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. Now is a critical time for our culture: Technological change is happening. We can try to fight it, we can let it happen, or we can channel the path of technology consciously and deliberately towards human flourishing. It is ours to choose, as individuals and organizations.

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.