Links and short notes, 2025-03-03

Progress studies in university and high school, a positive supply shock for truth, the hinge of history, Dean Ball on AI liability, Kevin Kelly on the handoff to bots, and more

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Contents

• Progress Conference 2025

• Are you teaching progress at university?

• A progress talk for high schoolers

• Job opportunities

• Fellowship opportunities

• Project opportunities

• Events

• Writing announcements

• Fund announcements

• AI news

• Energy news

• Bio news

• Queries

For paid subscribers:

• A positive supply shock for truth

• Elon is perpetually in wartime mode

• The hinge of history

• More quotes

• AI doing things

• RPI fellows doing things

• Things you might want to read

• Aerospace

• Comments I liked

• Politics

• Fun

Progress Conference 2025

Save the date: Progress Conference 2025 will be October 16–19 in Berkeley, CA. Hosted by us, the Roots of Progress Institute, together with the Abundance Institute, the Foresight Institute, the Foundation for American Innovation, HumanProgress.org, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Works in Progress magazine. Speakers and more details to be announced this spring.

Progress Conference 2024 was a blast: Fantastic people, enchanting venue, great energy. Several people called it the best conference they had ever attended, full stop. (!) 2025 is going to be bigger and better!

Are you teaching progress at university?

Professors: are you teaching a “progress studies” course now/soon, or considering it?

I've heard from a few folks recently who are doing this. It might be useful to share syllabi and generally help each other out. We can serve as a hub for this! Reply and let me know.

A progress talk for high schoolers

I gave a talk to high schoolers:

The Future of Humanity—And How You Can Help

We hear a lot about disaster scenarios, from pandemic diseases to catastrophic climate change. Is humanity doomed? Or can we solve these challenges, and even create a future that is better than the world has ever seen? I make the case for problem-solving, based on both history and theory, and conclude by pointing towards some of the most important problems and opportunities to work on, to create the best possible future for humanity.

Job opportunities

• Arc Institute is hiring a Chief Scientific Officer “to help lead our flagship institute initiatives on Alzheimer's disease and simulating biology with virtual cell foundation models” (@pdhsu)

• Neuralink is hiring a BCI field engineer: “You’d literally be working on giving those who have lost mobility the powers of telepathy and telekineses to regain lost parts of their lives + making the Neuralink device even better in the future!

  Anyone who wants a job that fills their heart with meaning should consider this!” (@shivon)

• UK AI Security Institute: “I’m leading a new team at AISI focused on control empirics. We’re hiring research engineers and research scientists, and you should join us!” (@j_asminewang)

• Tim Urban (Wait But Why) says: “I've spent much of the past year visiting cutting-edge companies and interviewing their scientists and CEOs. Some of the places that have left me most exhilarated below. If you're looking to dedicate yourself to something incredibly exciting that's changing the world, consider applying to work at one of these companies.” See the list here

• Works in Progress magazine is hiring “an artist / designer with an interest in illustration, ornamentation and typography to help Works in Progress develop an aesthetic that is close to these images (updated where necessary to the needs of a modern magazine). We are inspired by illuminated manuscripts, the Arts & Crafts movement, traditional Islamic & East Asian styles, art nouveau, and other aesthetics that celebrate beauty and ornament, rather than minimalism and ‘challenging’ the viewer” (@s8mb). Send portfolio to wip-design@stripe.com

Fellowship opportunities

• Future Impact Group fellowship: “If you (a) have excellent writing skills, policy acumen, technical literacy, analytical skills; (b) are a Good human; and (c) want to write high quality, detailed memos for DeepMind's policy team – then you should apply to the FIG fellowship by 7 March” (@sebkrier)

Project opportunities

• “Who would like to build a teeny Solar Data Center at Edge Esmeralda in June? Completely off-grid w/ solar, batteries, cooling, Starlink all integrated. Will put together a squad if there’s interest” (@climate_ben)

Events

• Science of Science/Metascience hackathon, UC Berkeley, Mar 8–9: “bridge academia & industry, and build innovative tools that supercharge reproducibility and impact” (@abhishekn). $2,750 in prizes

• New Cities Summit, Nairobi, June 12–13, from the Charter Cities Institute (@CCIdotCity)

• AI discussions, Capitol Hill, ongoing, hosted by the Mercatus Center. Hill staffers: “If you want to attend the next briefings—possibly with special guests—get in touch!” (@deanwball)

Writing announcements

• The Technological Republic, by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his deputy Nick Zamiska. “The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation” (@PalantirTech). Don't know what % I will agree with this, but it's bound to be interesting

• Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, by Marc Dunkelman (@MarcDunkelman). Excerpt: How Progressives Broke the Government

• Edge City Roadmap: “A vision for how we go from popup villages to a thriving Network City. At the core is a simple idea: it’s time for more experiments in how we live, connect, and build global communities” (@JoinEdgeCity)

• The Rebuild, a new Substack from Tahra Jirari and Gary Winslett, on “how Democrats can break through bureaucracy, build more, cut costs, and actually deliver results that win back voters' trust” (@tahrajirari)

Fund announcements

• Public Benefit Innovation Fund, associated with Renaissance Philanthropy, launches with $20M for AI: “a philanthropic venture fund and R&D lab dedicated to accelerating technology innovations for a more abundant economic future” (@pbifund)

AI news

• Mira launches Thinking Machines: “We're building three things: Helping people adapt AI systems to work for their specific needs; Developing strong foundations to build more capable AI systems; Fostering a culture of open science that helps the whole field understand and improve these systems. Our goal is simple, advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications.” (@miramurati, see also @thinkymachines)

• Elicit Raises $22M, and launches Elicit Reports, “a better version of Deep Research for actual researchers” (@elicitorg). “With AI we can bring the rigor of a systematic review to a user who could never afford to spend months going through hundreds or thousands of papers” (@jungofthewon)

• Google launches “an AI co-scientist system, designed to go beyond deep research tools to aid scientists in generating novel hypotheses & research strategies” (@GoogleAI). Announcement: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist. “You will soon be able to create digital organizations—digital societies, even—tailored for precisely your question, for a price that will decrease rapidly” (@deanwball)

  

• Mercury, the first commercial-scale diffusion large language model (from @InceptionAILabs). LLMs so far have generated text linearly, in sequence, starting from an initial prompt. AI image generation, however, uses “diffusion,” which creates the whole image all at once. This is a diffusion-based text generator. See more detailed explanation and comments from @karpathy

Energy news

• Valar Atomics announces $19M in funding and a pilot site. “Nuclear energy today is bespoke and artisanal—every site is different. To make nuclear reactors at planetary scale, we need bigger sites. In fact, we need Valar Atomics Gigasites” (@isaiah_p_taylor)

• BP pivots back to oil and gas after ‘misplaced’ faith in green energy (FT): “Our optimism for a fast transition was misplaced and we went too far too fast. Oil and gas will be needed for decades to come,” says the CEO of BP. But BP will still produce less oil and gas in 2030 than it did in 2019, and has “not abandoned its plans to be a diversified energy company”

Bio news

• “Loyal’s drug for senior dog lifespan extension drug LOY-002 has completed its FDA efficacy package (RXE). We are on track to hopefully bring the first longevity drug to market this year” (@celinehalioua). WaPo: Antiaging pill for dogs clears key FDA hurdle

• Arc Institute together with NVIDIA released Evo 2, “a fully open source biological foundation model trained on genomes spanning the entire tree of life” (@pdhsu). Here’s the announcement from Arc. “Evo 2 can predict which mutations in a gene are likely to be pathogenic, or even design entire eukaryotic genomes” (@NikoMcCarty). Asimov Press coverage: Evo 2 Can Design Entire Genomes

• Arc also launched its Virtual Cell Atlas, “a growing resource for computation-ready single-cell measurements. As the initial contributions, Vevo Theraputics has open sourced Tahoe-100M, the world's largest single-cell dataset, mapping 60,000 drug-cell interactions, and we’re announcing scBaseCamp, the first RNA sequencing data repository curated using AI agents” (@arcinstitute). Press release here.

• Very early results with new therapies based on genetic technology: One gene therapy aims to cure blindness and another to restore hearing (h/t @kenbwork, @ElliotHershberg). And here’s an mRNA-based treatment for pancreatic cancer (h/t @DKThomp). I stress that these are early because often such treatments don’t pan out, and at best they take years to be available to patients. For instance, here are some reasons to moderate enthusiasm about the cancer treatment

Queries

As always, I put these out there in case anyone can help:

• Is there any podcast app that can also pull in YouTube or other videos? Sometimes there is an interview I want to add to my podcast queue, except it only exists on YouTube. (I use and enjoy Overcast but can't find this feature)

• “I'll be interviewing Ilan Gur for Asimov Press next month. What should I ask him? Ilan is the CEO of the UK's ARIA. ARIA might be the closest government entity in the world to ARPA in its early years” (@eric_is_weird)

• “Did anybody ever do a post-mortem on the super-fast I-95 repair after the bridge collapse in 2023? Why can't that become the standard? Was it obscenely more expensive than slower construction? Is it less safe than normal?” (@Ben_Reinhardt)

• “During WW2, MIT received a jolt: an injection of funds worth ~$2 billion today—contracts for R&D, training, shipbuilding, etc. MIT, not a gov favorite before, earned preeminence through this work. What org is well-situated to prove itself under similar circumstances today?” (@eric_is_weird)

• “What other words are in the word cloud for ‘agentic’? Bonus points for words that are not just near-synonyms but convey related concepts, like ‘live player’ or ‘protagonist energy’” (@catehall)

• “What ChatGPT model do you use, for what purpose? I've got no idea what the menu means any more” (@michael_nielsen). I’m interested too!