Being A Pessimist Will Make You Look Smart But Youll Probably Be Wrong

TITLE: Being a pessimist will make you look smart, but you’ll probably be wrong CHANNEL: Existential Hope DATE: 2026-06-02 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Pessimism has this way of sounding kind of smart and wise and sober and rational, but it’s actually just wrong. If you want to make a smart, sober, wise, rational analysis or prediction, you don’t assume any breakthroughs. You don’t assume any wild new things coming out left field. There was a scientist who started to see that we were running out of fertilizer. And he predicted that if nothing changed, you know, population was going to overtake food production capacity and we’re going to have famine. He was, you know, called a bit of an alarmist for this, but his response to this was not, “Oh, we need to like limit population.” What he did was he called on the chemists of the world to invent synthetic fertilizer. He wanted a way forward where we could, you know, continue uh growth. And it turned out, by the way, that he was exactly right and synthetic fertilizer was exactly the way forward. You know, you’re looking at me and you’re like, “Well, was he an optimist or a pessimist?” He was very he was sort of pessimistic about the problem looming, um but he was optimistic about a solution. And he was also correct about that. I’m really excited today that we have uh Jason Crawford here on the podcast. Um Jason has actually been on the podcast before, but I wanted to have you back on to speak uh specifically about this one that you’ve written, um techno-humanism. It’s the techno-humanist manifesto. Uh this is not the full book. I know that there’s um there’s this is just the first chapter, um but you can find the whole uh thread on Substack, um and it’s also going to be a physical book from MIT Press, I believe. That’s right. So, the techno-humanist manifesto is a essay series. Uh it’s on the Roots of Progress Substack right now. Um currently being revised into a book for publication and uh yeah, what you’re holding there is a little teaser that’s got the uh the intro and the first chapter. It’s very, very nice. We got this at the progress conference that you guys hosted. Um Yes, very limited edition run handed out at the progress conference and uh uh published by Big Think magazine. So nice with all the the pictures and everything. I love a book with pictures, I would say. Um yeah, and yeah, I basically wanted you back on to talk about this because I thought that, you know, there’s there’s often this clinch between people who really believe in technology and people that um are perhaps have have a bit of a harder time adopting it. And I think that this just really holds that balance and the challenges of it. And so that’s why I I want to dive into this basically. Um so let’s let’s just start. What what made you feel the need to write a manifesto? Yeah. Um the manifesto is my philosophy of progress um laid out and stated, you know, so simply. Uh and the core idea is pretty simple. Um science, technology, and industry are good. They’re forces for good and but the the reason they’re good, the justification for why they’re good is human life and well-being. So it’s a combination of holding up, um you know, humanism, holding up human uh life and health and well-being as uh our North Star, um but then seeing technology and industry as a means to that. Yeah. And I think that um I mean you you’re obviously, I would say, one of the the founders of the the progress movement. Um and I think that um one of the the things that I wasn’t expecting to to feel like there was that much new stuff because I’ve been following what you’ve been doing for a while, but there were things that I felt were um new to me or just like very crisp uh summaries of, you know, the the ideas, I think. Uh and I think the first thing that I would like to to dive into is this um idea where you you speak of progress as um expansion of human agency. Could you just talk about what you mean by that? Yeah. I mean so when I say human agency, I mean our ability to uh control our lives and our world and our ability to make choices and to choose what happens to us, what happens to the world, uh uh, to control our fate or our destiny. And, uh, one of my core contentions is that, um, I think, uh, human agency may be, you know, is is also in some sense a a north star for, um, for what does progress mean? Um, and and what does progress do for us? And I think that human agency in in in almost all dimensions has been, uh, greatly increasing over time. And, uh, I don’t think this I think this is a little, um, non-consensus. I think this is something that some people might be surprised by or push back on. Um, some people feel like the more the world moves faster and is more and more fast-paced, oh, maybe we’re losing control. Number of authors in over the decades have expressed this idea that, oh, no, the more things the speed up, the more they’re going to, you know, we’re going to they’re going to fly out of our hands. We’re going to lose control. And when I look back over, uh, the the millennia and and tens of millennia of human history, um, what I see is that actually we are more in control of our lives and our world than any of our ancestors at any time. Even though our world moves faster, uh, we have, you know, even better ability to control it. So, we, uh, you know, we are more in control of our fast-paced world today than Bronze Age kings were in control of their relatively slow-paced world. And even they were more in control than, you know, tribal hunter-gatherers were in their extremely slow-paced world in the Stone Age. And the reason is that just as technology and industry, um, speeds things up and accelerates the pace of change, it also gives us more and more tools to deal with change, to know what’s going on in the world, to understand the implications, um, to communicate about it, to coordinate on a response, and then to do something about it. Um, so, I actually expect that the faster pace to the world gets, um, the more we are going to be able to control and to steer it. And, yeah, what do you think we should do with that agency? Like, what what is the ultimate goal that we should pursue? I mean, in some sense, anything we want. It is up to us and it’s up to each individual and us as society to decide where we want to go, to chart our course and steer our direction. Um I uh but I think we need to make those choices consciously. And I hope that we will use the newfound agency to live healthier and happier and more meaningful lives. Um I think that as uh as technology and industry have progressed, as we’ve gotten wealthier and more and more choices have been opened up to us, I think we’re in an area age where uh there is you know, you and everyone everyone alive today has more ability than ever before to choose uh rich and fulfilled and meaningful life. Um we can choose what work we want to do that fits our personal inclinations and talents. Um we can uh we can uh choose what we want to do in terms of what we can you know, who we want to marry, uh how many children we want to have, where we want to live, what kind of lifestyle we want to lead. We can surround ourselves with um art and music and aesthetics to express our own personal taste and and and lifestyle. Um we can enrich ourselves. We have access to all pretty much all of the world’s knowledge, art, philosophy, music, uh entertainment. Uh so we can we can fill our lives with with beauty and with joy. Um and so I think all of these things are out there. Now, I think there are some signs that um maybe people are taking even less advantage of this now than in the past, right? So maybe people aren’t uh filling their lives with love and family and children. Maybe they aren’t reading as much as they used to, right? In some ways our world is uh aesthetics have gotten worse, right? Our world is not as beautiful as it used to be. Um you know, people talk about this a lot in architecture, but it’s also I think true in maybe fashion, in automobiles, in you could argue in um in visual arts and music. So um you know, I think but I think this is a this is a product of our choices, right? And this is a product of what are we doing with the with the great choice now open to us. And so, I think what’s happened is technology and industry have opened up all of these choices. Now, we need to find a better place and a better equilibrium to be within that. Yeah, we need to find our footing or like our priorities, basically. Yeah. Um what do what do you think like um what should we be doing now in terms of concrete next [clears throat] steps? Like what would you like to see in trying to figure this out, basically? Yeah, I mean, um you know, there’s a lot to do. Um and I mean, personally, I feel like I’ve been able to achieve a lot of, you know, meaning and enjoy my life. Um and so, I’ve been thinking about, you know, whether that’s something that I can help other people figure out how to do. I don’t know if I’m the best person to figure that out. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that also there’s a whole lot more progress to be made. And so, a whole, you know, the book is kind of split and the essay series split into three parts. The first part is basically the value of progress. Uh the second part is the future of progress, like can progress continue? And then the third part is the culture of progress. And so, I think a lot about, um about those those last two things. So, one is what is the future of progress? There’s so much more progress to be made. We I mean, I look forward to a future in which we cure aging and death, in which we can zip around the world in supersonic planes, and maybe blast off other, you know, moons and planets. Uh in which we have, you know, nanotech manufacturing and genetic engineering. Um Uh so, uh and you know, all of it powered by, you know, maybe solar and nuclear energy and and geothermal and other forms. Um so, uh there’s a there’s a lot of that and and part of what I want to do is as get people excited about that future and inspire people to go work on it. I think um yeah, so if we deal with the the first part, um on um the the criticism that I think most people might have when you when you talk about like it’s the we should expand agency is maybe climate as a counter example of like, “Oh, we think that this is uh an example where humanity has damaged the planet more than helped it.” Um and I think that you actually you make a bit of a case there that we it’s it’s not about like stopping climate change. Uh it’s about sort of uh giving um uh something building like a thermostat for Earth or something like that. Do you want to expand a bit on that or like yeah, dive into it? Yeah, that’s right. So, uh so I have a chapter in the book uh and there’s there’s an essay on the on the side titled uh you know, we should install a thermostat for the Earth. And uh what I do in there is I I reframe the goal from stop climate change, which is a framing based on sort of human non-intervention in the environment. Um so I mean let me back up a little bit. So, there’s an a little earlier in the in the book, uh there is an essay where I talk about our relationship to the environment. And one of my um maybe more radical stances is that I am an unabashed anthropocentrist. Um I believe that the value of nature uh entirely derives from its value to humanity. Um that’s you know, partly it’s utilitarian value, partly aesthetic value, psychological value, so we can have an expansive concept of what is the value of nature to humanity. But I don’t believe in the intrinsic value of nature. I don’t even really think that’s a coherent concept. So, when it comes to um so so I’m very much against the non-intervention framework that says we have to limit our impact on the environment. Um I think we need to have thoughtful impacts on the environment that are good for uh humanity um systemically and long term. Um but ultimately that you know, impact on the environment per se is not necessarily a bad thing. So, when it comes to uh climate change, what my framing is that um rather than take a non-impact framework and just say, “Well, we should not change the climate.” I think what we should do is we should look at this and we should say, “Oh, we’re having an inadvertent impact on the climate, right? Something we didn’t plan or choose, uh something that sort of came about as a side effect.” And uh increased human agency means uh being aware of those side effects and controlling them, right? Not having inadvertent effects that you didn’t uh want and that maybe you wouldn’t wouldn’t have chosen or bad trade-offs, but being able to even control the side effects uh right of industrial civilization. And so, um I talk about it as a control problem. I say, “What we need to do is uh let’s reframe this positively and in terms of human agency. We need to achieve climate control.” Right? We need to be in control of the climate, not just letting it happen to us uh inadvertently. So, um in the in that essay I dive into some of the, you know, technical possibilities and I sketch out not only where could we get uh abundant, reliable, cheap, clean energy from, uh which is obviously one key part of the equation, um but also uh technologies for carbon removal. I ended up uh after looking over a bunch of things being most uh bullish on um enhanced rock weathering. And then um I also look at the technologies for albedo control. Um so, that is sometimes called uh geoengineering or, you know, solar radiation management. And I think that uh what we need is a combination of all three of those things and the solution sort of up and down that stack um to achieve climate control. And um one one of the things that I thought So, you you claim you’re an anthropo- anthropo-

For a percentrist, yes. Putting humans at the center, right? Exactly, yeah. Um I do remember thinking about and the there was a bit of a note also that uh even even though uh you’re an anthropocentrist, um you think that that could also be good for nature and for animals and things like that. Do you want to also expand a bit on that? Yeah, again, what does it mean to be good for nature? Nature is not one thing. Um it doesn’t have one uh set of goals or one ideal state. Uh there are different animals and different species and plants and right there’s all sorts of organisms. Um and you might be able to have some notion of an overall, you know, uh more vibrant or less vibrant ecosystem, but I just I don’t I don’t really think there’s a coherent uh thing in there. Um and certainly, I mean the point that I make in the essay is um if you look at what in practice are people’s positions on different issues, and you try to ask and you then you ask yourself um what is the simplest model that explains all of their positions, right? So I So I talk about different things that that that it might mean. Um people talk about the value of biodiversity, right? If biodiversity is a value, does that mean we should genetically engineer new species to have more diversity? If you say that to someone who says that they care about biodiversity, they will generally reel against, you know, they’ll they’ll have the most the worst reaction. No, huh, not like that. That’s not what I meant, right? Okay, if climate change, you know, is bad, then why shouldn’t we do solar radiation management uh to control albedo and and control climate change? They’re very much against that. It’s extremely controversial. Um uh that’s that’s not what they want, either. Um you know, if uh if a vibrant ecosystem is uh a a great thing, should we terraform Mars to have a vibrant ecosystem, right? Cuz right now it’s mostly a bunch of rocks. No, that would also be uh you know, a bad thing, right? So you get all of this pushback. The only consistent position uh that explains all of these uh you know, positions on all these issues is essentially um anything humans do to intervene is bad. And anything that already exists, anything that’s non-human, anything that that existed before us or anything that animals do without us or etc. uh is fine and is okay and is good. But anything that humans do is bad. That is not a positive value. That’s just an anti-human stance. And so, I think that is deeply I mean it’s nihilistic, right? Um so, uh you know, when we think about the value of nature, we should think about things like um again, obviously, nature has utilitarian value. It’s like it’s infrastructure for us. It provides services to us. Um and so, we should think about maintaining, but also maybe enhancing or upgrading that infrastructure. Um nature has uh aesthetic value. Obviously, it’s lovely to be out in a on a clear sunny day, fresh water, white clouds, trees, sunshine, uh big open spaces, mountains, oceans. All of these things are, you know, just give us there’s a there’s a fresh aesthetic sense. Um and so, we should we should always have those places for the for the sake of human enjoyment. Um I mean, even there, uh enjoying nature is is a uh is an artificial human construct. I mean, um national parks, for instance, are you have to find the best spot for a park. You have to uh you know, cordon it off. You have to find trails through it, groom the trails, build stair stairways and railings, fence off dangerous areas, control wild animals. It’s a it’s a you know, it feels like being out in nature, but it’s a highly artificial experience to make it safe and pleasurable and enjoyable. Um and then finally, I do think there’s uh room for a uh sort of psychological moral sense of caring about animal welfare. Um and so, uh I I I I don’t have a very firm strong position on how much we should care and how much it’s optional, right? Is it a personal value or is it a is it a universal value? Are we obligated to care? I don’t really know. Um but I do think there is some way in which it makes sense to care about animals just uh because we sort of psychologically resonate with them. I think it’s a little bit of a luxury. Um uh it is a luxury of our current status of um of technology and wealth and infrastructure that we can devote resources to caring about animals. Um certainly um you know, tribal hunter-gatherers didn’t really care and they would gladly use animals. I mean, some some tribes would you know, run an entire herd of buffalo off of a cliff just so they they would all you know, literally pile up corpses at the bottom just cuz that was a convenient way to essentially hunt them. Um I don’t Yeah, I I I think caring about animals is something that we now have the luxury of doing. We can pay extra for you know, cage-free eggs or free-range chickens or whatever um or other you know, technologies like InovoSexing. Um and that’s great. And we can do that if we want to. But again, at the end of the day, it’s a human value. A human psychological value. Yeah, I think for me I mean, it’s obviously a luxury and you also see that like if you visit a poorer country, there’s not so much room. You need to make sure you survive yourself. Um to me I think I like it as as a form of humanism more like that that should be the goal that we’re striving for like uh that that should be the goal that we’re in general trying to care for all conscious conscious beings and yeah. Um Except the mosquitoes. That is true. Oh, sorry. [clears throat] Yeah, you always have to I I support I support eradicating uh mosquitoes at least the species that uh spread disease. Yeah, but is there has anyone done interesting research on like what happens like how does that affect ecosystem and can we then be safe I haven’t dug into this, but what I’ve heard is that it probably wouldn’t be an issue. Okay. We can just get rid of them. Okay. Good. Then we get rid of malaria uh while we’re at it. It’s perfect. Um yeah, you do have this whole chapter basically called uh Ode to Man. Yes. Um So, it’s it’s basically like trying to uplift humans cuz there is this like kind of anti-human stance. Yeah, that one is a a bit of a more brief and poetic chapter um a more, you know, appealing to something than making an argument there, but yeah, it’s just just trying to remind people that like humans are actually pretty great and it’s okay to be human. We should be proud of of being human, what we can do, and what our accomplishments are and have been. We should believe humanity to be worthy of being at the center of our own moral code. And we should have reverence for human achievements, including the achievements of industrialization. And do you think um when you’ve talked about this, what is the are there any particular arguments that actually convince people like make them agree with you on this? Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t I’ve I I don’t know if I’ve ever changed someone’s mind on whether humans are good. That feels like a pretty deep conviction, you know, but for people who are open to, you know, for if the argument resonates with them, I wanted to just put it out there and kind of stake it out. You know, part of what you do in a manifesto, you can’t really argue against every possible objection. So, part of what you do in a manifesto is you just put an idea out there and you give it a clear statement. And that’s a lot of what I was trying to do. Yeah, I mean it must be a very good practice like actually where do I stand? What do I think about all these things? Yeah. So, another really important thing that I think goes hand in hand a bit with with this discussion of like are humans bad or good and is technology bad or good is this point of like risk risks that come with technologies and things. I do really I did really appreciate that in the manifesto as well that you you talk about being too dismissive of risk is not a good idea basically when you develop these new technologies and things like that. Yeah, what what did you think there? Yeah. Um I mean, new technology very often almost always creates risks and problems, right? There there are there are costs and risks to technological progress. And progress when you when we look back on it historically and philosophically, progress making progress doesn’t consist of ignoring the problems or the risks or dismissing them or downplaying them or just sort of blithely, you know, plowing through and hoping that it’ll be all right or trusting that it’ll be all right. Progress actually comes about in significant part from acknowledging and embracing the risk and the problems and then using our best efforts to solve them in turn. So I have a chapter in the book I call solutionism because I want to get away from what can often be an unhelpful dichotomy of optimism versus pessimism, right? Optimism can become complacency where we’re so optimistic that we um you know, we don’t even see the problems, right? Or or admit the existence of the problems. On the other hand, pessimism isn’t good either because pessimism can be so defeatist fatalistic that it doesn’t see the opportunity for solutions. So we should be realistic about acknowledging the problems but then also ambitious and agentic in seeking solutions. So I advocate a not necessarily a descriptive optimism but a prescriptive optimism. A descriptive optimism says the future is bright. The path will be easy. It’s going to be smooth sailing. No major problems ahead. It’s kind of a rosy view and it’s just not always correct. Sometimes the reality is much darker picture, right? But prescriptive optimism says look, no matter what is lies ahead, we are going to bring our best efforts. We believe we can solve it. We’re going to step up to the challenge. We’re not going to give up in a sort of fatalistic or defeatist way. So that’s the kind of optimism that I advocate and so I tend to speak more a about optimism and more about agency and ambition. Uh and so I call it I call it solutionism. In the book, I give a few different examples of um uh times when uh even technologists um embraced risk and problem and stepped up to solve it. Um I talk about uh I’m remembering a few of the examples I gave. Uh so one was um risk uh from uh electrical products in the early days of the uh electronics industry, electrical industry, uh especially for fire. Um uh and the uh testing and standards and certification that were uh developed in order to deal with that. Um I talk about the uh smog that was created by automobiles and how we invented the catalytic converter in order to uh get rid of the pollution in our atmosphere. Um Uh I talk about a really interesting case of a um uh an agricultural crisis, a looming agricultural crisis that um uh some scientists started to see in the late 1800s, like the end of the 1800s. Uh there was a scientist who started to see that we were running out of fertilizer. And he predicted that if nothing changed, you know, population was going to overtake food production capacity. Um we’re going to have famine. And um he was, you know, called a bit of an alarmist for this. But, you know, his his his uh response to this or his his what he what he got out of this was not um oh, we need to like limit population or we need to all become poorer or learn how to deal with less. What he did was he called on the chemists of the world to invent synthetic fertilizer. Um he wanted a way forward where we could, you know, continue uh growth, uh population growth and economic growth. Um and it turned out, by the way, that he was exactly right and synthetic fertilizer was exactly the way forward. Um so, you know, you’re looking at me, you’re like, “Well, was he an optimist or a pessimist?” He was very he was sort of pessimistic about the problem looming, right? And a lot of people at the time wanted to just say, “Ah, you’re worrying too much.” You know, and he wasn’t, he was correct. Um but he was optimistic about a solution and he was also correct about that. Um, so that’s the solutionist mindset that I advocate. Yeah, I think that the the point that I really appreciated that I think is greatly under appreciated in general is that safety is not like a natural feature. And so I think that really ties together the point of like actually people are are good and like that humanism is good because we can invent safety. That’s like that’s something that we can do. Safety is an achievement, right? Life is inherently risky um, both because nature is inherently risky uh, and for millennia we faced risk from fire, flood, famine, disease, uh, you name it. Um, technology is also inherently risky. Um, and again every technology brings new problems and so we need to achieve safety and security and resilience against uh, both the hazards of nature and the hazards of technology. Mhm. Um, when so the it’s very easy to fall into if we go back to this sort of pessimism optimism thing. Pessimism often sounds like you’re smarter or like at least that’s how people perceive it for some reason. Um, yeah, what what I wrote an I wrote an essay a long time ago called why pessimism sounds smart. Yeah. And the thing that I realized was um, a lot of times you want to figure out what’s going to happen in the future and you try to project. Well, what do you project? You project current trends. And uh, if you want to make a smart, sober, wise, rational analysis or prediction, you don’t assume any breakthroughs. You don’t assume any wild new things coming out of field, right? You just say, well, what would happen on current trends? And current trends always look bad in the long term because uh, current um, I mean if you’re if you understand especially the S curve of technologies, right? So all technologies kind of plateau at some point and they stop giving us more gains. You know, whereas maybe population and demand and everything just you know keep growing. Um, but you cannot forecast infinite progress if you just extrapolate current technologies. So, you always run into something where you say, well, this is only going to last so far. Here here’s problem X, Y, and Z that we don’t have any solutions to. So, once we hit those, you know, absent some total random thing coming out of left field that I’m not going to include in my analysis, we’re not going to solve these problems, right? The thing is if you look at the course of history and how things have actually run, uh, what happens is we do solve those problems. We do create new breakthroughs. There are always things that couldn’t have been accounted for in the forecasts. So, in some sense to be an optimist, you have to believe that some solution is going to come along that you can’t name and you don’t know what it is or where it’s going to come from, but somehow we’re going to solve this problem. And that just sounds kind of, you know, almost irresponsible, right? It’s uh, and and so so pessimism has this way of sounding kind of smart and wise and sober and rational. Um, but it’s actually just wrong. Like on a deeper level or at a at at some sort of meta, you know, rational level, um, optimism actually is the is is what is warranted from the the history of humanity. Yeah, I mean the pessimist can use like current data, whereas optimist is you do have to like yeah, trust human ingenuity. We have to extrapolate some really long-term thing. Like look at this world GDP curve, you know, Yeah, exactly. That or you have to like, oh, maybe this and maybe this and maybe that. And so, yeah, it’s like not not as clear, obviously. That’s why I mean the the fundamental thing you have to see is you have to see humanity as a problem-solving animal. So, I have a chapter in the book titled The Problem-Solving Animal where I try to go into why is it um, I should first show that that I, you know, history shows that we can overcome problems. Even ones that seem totally uh insoluble or intractable until we finally find the solution. Um, and I tried to get into some kind Is there some kind of deeper reason? Like, why is it? And so, I came up with with kind of a two-part answer to this. The first part is that uh the solution space within reality or the possibility space within reality is combinatorially vast, right? So, the number of small molecules that are possible just from recombining atoms in in, you know, some non- polymer, right? Small numbers. It has been estimated at something like 10 to the 60th. It’s an astronomical number. Um, the number of proteins that are possible or just like sequences of amino acids, right? Or genes is is even vaster. I mean, it’s to call that an astronomical number is like not even fair, right? It’s way bigger than anything astronomical. Um, the number of whole genomes, right? And therefore, of organisms that are possible is just like, you know, you’re looking at like a six-digit exponent, right? 10 to a six-digit number. Um, the number of uh computer programs that are under uh you know, some reasonable limit of of code, uh the number of um uh codes of law or morality or that we could have, the number of philosophies that we could have. I mean, it’s all just vastly um uh you know, you can’t even fathom the the combinatorial space that’s out there. And so, that means there’s so many things that we haven’t tried yet. Um, and uh that means there’s just there’s got to be much better things out there than where we are now. And there’s got to be solutions to problems that come up. I mean, there there isn’t a a law of physics that says that the solutions absolutely must exist, but when there’s so many things to try, right? I think that’s part of where the solutions come from. And then, the the second part of the answer is I mean, the problem with a vast solution, you know, combinatorially vast solution space, of course, is it takes that much time to search it if you just are doing brute-force search. So, the second part of the answer is um it turns out the solution space has structure, and that structure can be exploited for efficient search. And it turns out that intelligence is a tool or a faculty that allows us to efficiently search through the structure of uncontrollably vast spaces. And so that is how, you know, we have been able to find these solutions. Yeah. And that I mean, we’re going to get into that a little bit more later also because you are arguing that we’re approaching this intelligence age. So, yeah, let’s let’s talk about that. But just on the the combinatorial spaces or these things. You you do also talk about like that um And cuz I think another thing that people might think when you say this is that there’s progress is is limited by natural resources. And I think you actually argue that that’s not necessarily the case. Do you want to expand? Yeah, I mean, look, this is a this is an old debate and one that I think was, you know, settled long long before I came around. But I do try to summarize the case. Yeah, if you look at the history of natural resources, there’s basically no natural resource that we have ever run out of in any kind of a catastrophic way. Um generally, one of two things happens. One is that we just keep finding more and more. This is what happened to oil, right? Some people thought oil was going to run out. US is now, you know, I mean, oil production is at an all-time high. US is now a net oil exporter, right? I mean, there’s just People were talking about it running out in the 1800s. Um and you know, here we are 150 years later. Um Uh and then the other thing that can happen is sometimes a natural resource really does run out because there actually just isn’t much of it. But what happens is we tend to anticipate this. We see it coming, and we switch to something else. Um you know, so we switched away from whale oil to kerosene, right? In general, in the 1900s sorry, in the in the 19th century, in the 1800s, we switched off of a lot of biological, you know, sources of material, which were not scaling with the economy and with the population, and we switched on to much more abundant mineral sources. Um, and you know, someday in the future when those mineral sources run out, we are going to be able to anticipate it far in advance and switch to something else. So, we tend to make a smooth and all of, uh, you know, capitalism and all of the market economy, uh, gives incentives to make these predictions and to, uh, to come up with the new technologies in advance. So, um, uh, the the the sort of deeper, more philosophical point is that in a in a deep and important sense, there are no natural resources. There’s no such thing as a as a totally natural resource because, again, in important sense, all resources are artificial. All resources, David Deutsch says, are the product of knowledge. Um, they are the product of the, right, sand, right, that we make our chips out of, right? Um, that was not useful until we had the technology to to make the chips. Uh, Deutsch points out that, you know, some at some point in the past, some ancient or, you know, prehistoric person must have died in the woods of exposure, literally lying on top of the fuel that could have saved their life if they’d known how to make a fire with it. So, uh, uh, knowledge is what turns all of these things into resources. Yeah, which brings me to another interesting sort of counterpoint, which is, uh, also or the argument made that like, well, good ideas are are getting harder to find. Um, yeah, what do you have as a counter argument to that, maybe? Yeah. Well, in a sense, it’s true that good ideas, uh, get harder to find over time because we as we pick off low-hanging fruit, um, the the problems that remain are more difficult. Uh, also, the the more we expand the frontier of knowledge, the more detailed and specialized our knowledge gets, the longer it take the more individuals have to specialize in, um, you know, in their in their field, the longer it takes to get to the frontier, the more years of explore of of education that you need, um the harder it is, you know, the to cross-collaborate across different disciplines. So, all of these things um make it harder and harder to make progress over time. But, there is a counterforce. As ideas get harder to find, we get better at finding them. Um we have a larger uh population and a larger base of wealth and technology and infrastructure to put into R&D and to use to find new ideas. Um we have better scientific instruments, we have better scientific methods and statistical methods. We have uh better tools, we have better um uh computational resources to gather and crunch the data. Um we have better ways of sharing ideas and recombining them over the internet. Um and uh ultimately uh this factor of uh of ideas getting of of us getting better at finding ideas has um has overcome and overwhelmed the factor of ideas getting harder to find. If that were not the case, then the pattern of history would have been one of deceleration. And the actual pattern of of economic history is one of acceleration, right? Uh you know, if if if ideas getting harder to find were the only thing that mattered for progress, then we would have seen the fastest ever progress in the Stone Age. Because ideas were extremely easy to find in the Stone Age. They were they were everywhere. There’s so much low-hanging fruit. It’s practically uh sitting on the ground, right? All you had to do is pick it up. But, we didn’t have the people and the infrastructure to do so, right? Um so, that pattern of acceleration over history means that um we’ve been able to get finder better at finding ideas faster than they’ve been getting harder to find. And I think we can continue to do that. This is the the flywheel um metaphor that you use, basically. Yeah, I talk about the So, so when trying to explain this basic pattern of acceleration, and let me just define it a little more clearly, what we look at when we uh what we see when we look at the pattern of economic history is super exponential growth, by which I mean growth greater than any exponential. So, you know, if you um if you plot a curve uh if you plot an exponential curve on a logarithmic Y axis, it turns into a straight line, right? Straight lines on Y on log axis mean exponential growth. If you plot world GDP on a logarithmic Y axis, it still bends upwards. It still kind of looks like an exponential curve sort of. Um that is super exponential growth, where it’s not like oh yes, we’ve just been growing at 2% per year uh for every year of human history. It’s more like no, in the Stone Age, maybe we grew at two basis points, like 0.02% per year. And maybe in the agricultural age, we grew at closer to 0.2%, and now in the industrial age, we’re growing at something like 2%, right? Um so that’s that acceleration um and if you ask where does that come from, well, uh my short answer is it comes from feedback loops. Um progress begets progress. The more progress we make in science uh and technology and wealth and infrastructure, the more we have better tools to make progress with. And that is at all levels from obviously, you know, more uh technology helps us do more science, science helps us create better technology, um more a greater population and more wealth lets us plow more of that back into R&D, which then grows the economy even bigger. Um as we notice that progress is happening and decide we want to make more of it, we create institutions of progress. We created the research university in the 19th century. We created the limited liability corporation. Uh we created uh venture capital, right? And so, you know, all of these mechanisms um are are things that we create. Uh and so at every level um uh oh, market size is another big one, right? So, uh communication and transportation technology creates larger markets, and larger markets uh justify greater investment because now you have a bigger, you know, market to address uh with whatever you come up with. So, all of these factors compound and they actually increase the rate of growth over time. That’s where we see this accelerating pattern come from. And so, I mean, maybe now is a good time to dive into this like intelligence age point because it looks like currently where we are, we might really increase that part of the sort of flywheel, like our our access to intelligence. What do you think that’s going to mean for humanity? Yeah. Um I mean, it could mean Let me back up. Uh AI is clearly a big thing and I think the question for the last few years has been sort of like, well, how big of a thing is it? Within the tech industry, it’s clearly sort of the next big thing in computer and information technology, right? We had the PC, we had the internet, we had you know, mobile, we had social web, sorry, not in that order. And you know, AI is like the next big thing within computing. Um but then there’s a question of maybe it’s bigger than that. Maybe it’s the next big thing within the economy, like the next general purpose technology, like you know, the steam engine or electricity or synthetic chemistry or something. Um there’s another question like, okay, maybe it’s even bigger than that. Maybe it is as big as the industrial revolution itself or the invention of agriculture. So, if you look back at human history, there’ve been basically three, roughly speaking, modes of production and social organization. Right? For tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, we had a sort of tribal hunter-gatherer era or at the Stone Age. Um for about 10 or 12,000 years, we had an agricultural era based on agriculture and state you know, large settled societies. Um and then for last, you know, 300 years-ish, we’ve had an industrial era, right? Based on energy and mechanization and nation states. And so, it is possible that AI is a big enough change that it will be as big of a transformation, it will actually lead to a fourth age of humanity. Right, it’s been called the intelligence age and where it fundamentally changes the mode of production. Where in the agricultural age, it was mostly you know, it was agriculture and it was human labor doing crafts and and manufacturers. In the industrial age, it was machines and energy and in the intelligence age, it might be a fundamentally new mode of production based around intelligence and as a as a as a utility, right? Um And I mean we we talked about the agency human agency as a as a really big part of this vision. How do you see that interact with the intelligence age? Like how can we preserve meaningful human agency in the intelligence age? What do you think is like the best case scenario? Yeah, I mean I think we need to make sure that AI amplifies human agency and not seed our agency to the machines. Um and you know, that begins with just making being aware of the difference and making the choice to do so, right? But it it has to do with how each individual chooses to use these tools. It has to do with how the makers of these tools design them. It has to do with how our social institutions evolve and I think this is I mean it’s a huge open area um of research and thought and a lot of people are are thinking about it. The Cosmos Institute for example thinking about these things and I know the the frontier AI labs are are thinking about these questions. I’ve been thinking about it too. I don’t think we have a total road map right now, but I think one of the most important things for humanity is to figure it out. Um but yeah, but I mean I would like to see a future where what AI does for us is allows us to learn any topic we want, achieve any goal that we have in mind, realize any creative vision that comes to us and generally just you know live better and and and healthier lives where we’re actually yeah achieving all of our visions and goals and dreams. Yeah. Yeah, is there anything else you think that as we maybe enter this age now anything else you think we should keep in mind or that would be important for humanity to sort of get right as we enter it? Yeah, and I think we do have to think about our relationship with AI. We have to think about our relationship with all technology. Whenever a new technology comes along it changes the landscape of what’s possible and how we live our lives and we are going to change and our lives are going to change in response to it. We don’t really have a choice about that but we do have a choice about how our lives change. And you know when the internet comes along into your life you have a choice of what to do with it, right? And you can have a choice of you know using it for self-enrichment and deliver better life and you know to for education and um engaging with things that you will actually feel good about or you can sort of slip into a kind of mindless consumption just you know let the algorithm dictate where your attention goes and then at the end of the day feel like really unfulfilled and be like I didn’t mean to doom scroll all day, right? Um and you know those temptations can be very powerful but like you do actually have a choice at the end of the day and you can you can choose how to to to live your life and how to direct your attention. And so I think there’s a similar thing with AI, right? We can we can decide okay if I want to know the answer to something am I just going to ask the AI and trust whatever it tells me? When am I going to trust it? When am I going to dig in? When am I going to ask it to cite sources? When am I going to go check the sources, right? And so I mean I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I as I interact with AI more and more to answer my questions but some of the best interactions I’ve had have been when I am using AI as a guide to you know material that’s out there, right? So, maybe I’m interested in a book um that I haven’t read, but I know something about. I might start off by asking AI uh to tell me, okay, tell me a little bit about this book. Tell me about the context. Give me an overview. What are interesting parts I might want to read. Maybe I’ll decide I don’t actually want to read the whole book, but I’ll read certain chapters. Um and then I might come back and ask uh the you know, ChatGPT hey, uh I have some follow-up questions now that I’ve read the book or parts of the book. And uh I also I’m curious about what happened after this book was published. Maybe it was published 50 years ago or 150 years ago. And like what’s happened since then? How did its predictions play out? And so that kind of thing has been um or I found that really enriching, right? And so that’s an example I think of uh you know, using AI to just save you time and direct you to resources where you can actually go and and learn. But again, not just um completely trusting it uh and not just relying on it or starting to uh become dependent on it, letting your own, you know, epistemic facilities atrophy. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a bit like um food or something. You you don’t just eat all the candy. Yeah, exactly, right? We need to develop a healthy relationship with food as well. Um and that’s also you know, a personal choice. It’s also something that technology maybe can help with, right? We have drugs now that seem to be helping people with this. Yeah. Um Yeah, I think that’s such a funny one. It’s like the it no one I mean, it used to be that horse poop was the problem on the streets. You know, that that was dirt. And then we got cars. And now I think or something picking drugs like that. It’s just so interesting like we we with the obesity and like how we’re able to just like yeah, prob- the problem solved with animal I guess is the the point that you’re making. These unexpected solutions, I would say. Yeah. Um but if we if we sort of back it up because I I take it that the reason you wrote this manifesto is because you think we need more of a culture of progress um and that that’s that’s not what we’re seeing in the in the sort of mainstream culture right now. Um why do you think that is? Yeah, so this is so part three of the book is the culture of progress and I talk about how um you know, there was there was a time when we uh had a big ambitious vision for the future. Um certainly in the sort of pre-World War I era, people were very optimistic about technology and science and progress in the future, maybe even naively optimistic. Um I would say even up through the 1960s at least, we were dreaming of things like moon bases and flying cars. And ever since then, the last 50 years or so or even a little longer, um we’ve really soured on progress at least in Western culture. Yeah. Uh we are much more fearful, skeptical uh than in the past. Um people are skeptical even of the very concept of progress and some people will never use it without putting it in scare quotes. Mhm. Um and so I think we need to we need to restore a belief in progress, not a naively optimistic belief, right? We need to learn the lessons of the 20th century. Um technology and industry and science brought a lot of brought about a lot of horrible things in the 20th century. They brought about more destructive war, um pollution, hazards from radiation and uh and and chemicals and and drugs that weren’t adequately tested and uh automobile accidents and plane accidents and um you know, there were lots of problems we had to solve. Um but we actually have solved a lot of those. We’re on the way to solving many more. And um I think, you know, in a sense we kind of intellectually or philosophically threw the baby out with the bathwater in rejecting the very concept of progress itself uh just because there were, you know, certain problems that we hadn’t solved yet. And so I think we need to kind of move forward with a not go back to the naive optimism of the Victorian era, but move forward with the kind of 21st synthesis where we acknowledge the problems, but we feel that we have agency and ambition to solve them, and we have some vision of a of a world that is uh you know, that is better than today, right? A vision of an optimistic vision of the future that’s not just avoid disaster. Not just stop climate change and prevent pandemics, but it’s actually let’s build um you know, let’s build something new and better better than we’ve ever had. Certainly, you know, better than the world today. Yeah. Are you seeing any um any traction for it? Are you seeing any signs that um we’re able to to rebuild this belief a bit more? You know, I mean, it’s very early for the progress movement, but it’s got a lot of momentum. It’s growing. Um you know, the movement’s really only about I would say 6 years old or something. Uh the term progress studies was coined in 2019. And um you know, we held our first progress conference just uh last year in 2024. Um uh so, yeah, I think we’re really seeing momentum build. Um there was just this uh book out uh earlier this year about abundance by uh Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, which popularized that idea. That’s now caught hold in DC at least among you know, sort of the Democrats and and and on the left. Um I think the right has their own view of uh of progress and American dynamism and um reindustrializing. And so, there’s um politically suddenly um ideas of progress and abundance are kind of winning ideas on both sides of the aisle, which is encouraging. Yeah. Um and more broadly, I think we’re seeing the idea spread within the scientific community, the um the engineering community, within Silicon Valley. Um so, yeah, I’m I’m optimistic about the growth of this movement. And um if you Yeah, if you think forward, what what do you want to do? What do you think we should be doing to to grow this movement? Um yeah, sure. Well, uh we need more and more writers uh who are laying the electoral foundation for this movement. Uh, we need more people writing blogs and writing books. Uh, that’s why my organization, the Roots of Progress Institute, has a fellowship program to support progress writers. Uh, we need to continue building community at events like Progress Conference and Vision Weekend and um, we need to uh, eventually get these ideas out into the broader culture through channels like education, media, entertainment. Um, we are uh, getting ready soon to uh, announce a student outreach program. I won’t spoil or spoil that thunder or steal that by um, by talking about it now, but um, pay attention or maybe by the time this podcast is out we’ll have announced it already. Follow Roots of Progress, I guess. Um, I think, you know, we need more Hollywood biopics of scientists and inventors that actually dramatize the creative process and the process of discovery. I think we need more out of out of science fiction. We need more visions of a future that we actually want to build and are inspired inspired to build because we actually want to live in that future. Um, I think uh, we need more uh, journalists and commentators like Derek Thompson or Noah Smith, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Jerusalem Demsas, who actually are sort of aware of these issues. John Burn-Murdoch at Financial Times, writers sort of covering what’s going on and writing editorials from a progress lens. I think we need more um, technology uh, media like uh, you know, Ashley Vance’s Core Memory or Arena magazine or um, Works in Progress magazine or uh, Asimov Press that are sort of um, you know, covering covering technology without hating technology. I mean, you don’t have to be a cheerleader or an uncritical booster, right? Let’s just start from the premise that like we’re tech media that’s not anti-tech. Yeah. Um, that’s a growing field right now and I think it’s a market opportunity, so I’m I’m encouraged to see that. Um, so all of these things are how we will build a culture of progress. Yeah, I’m I’m actually a bit curious to dive into the the stories point that you mentioned a bit um and thank you for writing you wrote this post that I think I’ve shared a a bunch on like was it um seven ways sci-fi Yeah, something like I yeah, how how sci-fi can have conflict and intrigue Exactly. and interesting stories without having to be a dystopia, right? So, when I tell people, “Oh, you know, we need more sci-fi that uh shows a world we want to live in.” I get this uh reaction a lot of time, which is like, “Oh, but you can’t do that because sci-fi has to have conflict.” Right? And there’s no reason that conflict has to mean doomerism or dystopia. So, I outlined a bunch of different ways that uh sci-fi can be interesting uh without without having those things. Um you know, and it’s things like you can tell a man versus nature story, like The Martian, right? Mhm. Um you can have a story where the heroes are the builders and the villains are the people who want to stop them or you know, tear them down. Uh you can have a story where the heroes want to use the technology for good and the villains want to steal it and use it uh for evil, right? Um there are There’s There’s lots of different ways um to do it. And yeah, I I think I had seven or eight different ideas in there. Yeah, yeah, I I I thought it was great, actually. Yeah, I always my my pet peeve is I think also just a good love story. Sure. Yeah, so another thing you can do is you can tell an old story uh and just set it in a futuristic context, right? So, a love story is a great example. Um you know, uh Quantum Thief is basically just like a detective story, but told on Mars with nanotech, Yeah. right? Um uh you know, there’s different variations of this. Yeah, yeah. I think yeah, I think like those classic stories just with like an other backdrop cuz now often times it’s like a very dystopian backdrop if it’s if it’s at all a futuristic movie or anything. Um so, if we revisit this conversation 20 years from now, what what do you hope um will have happened? Well, I hope that in 20 years the idea of progress will have gone mainstream. Um, that’s 10 or 20 years is about how long it takes for an intellectual movement to go from the first few weirdos writing blogs and books to it kind of breaks out into the mainstream media and um, mainstream education. Um, one thing I didn’t mention earlier that I would love to see is more progress as a subject in the curriculums of our schools. I think, uh, you know, in high school and university students should be learning about the the history of progress and the idea of progress and debating the philosophy of it. Um, I think students graduate today without really having any understanding of or appreciation for industrial civilization, right? For the system that created and maintains our standard of living, right? Where did it come from? Why did we put it in place? What problems did it solve? What was life like before? What does it take to What did it take to create it and what does it take to keep it going? Um, Charles Mann, uh, author who wrote 1491 and The Wizard and the Prophet, uh, has a series out in the New Atlantis called How the System Works, where he’s just kind of going over the key things that everybody ought to know. So, I’d love to see that series turned into like a a course at high school or college level. Yeah. Um, so, you know, that’s one example and then I would like to see, you know, all those, um, all those there’s other cultural things that we just talked about. I would like to see, um, you know, regulatory reform to try to, uh, roll back the vetocracy and some of the the overburden of the regulatory state that’s really slowing down, uh, us, you know, being able to getting in the way of our ability to build pretty much anything. Um, right now, uh, I would like to see more experimentation and reform in the institutions of science and research. Um, I think we have a bit of a monoculture in science funding right now, uh, where, you know, the vast majority of sort of funding dollars are funneled through a small number of large sort of centralized bureaucratic federal agencies. Um, they tend to give these small project-based grants to university-based principal investigators with small labs to do this sort of incremental project work. Um and then you have to write it all up in journals in a in a certain format to like get credit and build your H-index and so forth, right? It’s like all of those things have a good rationale and maybe even a place. Uh but we’ve become too focused and centralized on that one narrow model of how to do, organize, and fund science. Um and a lot we just need um more diversification, more experimentation with different kinds of models, uh more experimentation with focused research organizations, FROs, experimentation with ARPA-style models, uh like uh Speculative Technologies is working on. Um more of experimentation with different ways of publishing. Not everything should be a journal paper, especially I mean, you know, a journal paper, you know, is an artifact of uh I mean, how how how long have journal papers been around, right? What uh I mean, they were invented in the pre-electronic communications era, right? In some sense, they came out of Republic of Letters and the Royal Society in the 1600s, right? And they’ve evolved somewhat since then, but they haven’t evolved as much as they ought to in the age of uh you know, the internet and Jupiter notebooks and right? I mean, uh so there’s there’s there much better ways that we should be publishing and I think we should be experimenting with this more. Uh the way first is that like Arcadia Science and Aster Institute are doing. Yeah. Do you have any like if there was one uh deregulation or if you want to do like a new regulation, um that would be the most leverage. Um do you have any any special ones? Uh it’d be hard to pick just one. I mean, um you know, NEPA reform, like permitting reform is a big one um that people talk about. Uh rolling back the burden of environmental impact statements. Um I would say uh certainly in the US and UK, um you know, nuclear reform. There was just a a big list of uh recommendations published for Britain’s uh nuclear regulation program uh that would streamline those things and allow them to build again and um you know, you could you could come up with a similar list for the US. Um we very recently uh there was an executive order to repeal the ban on supersonic flight. I think that was great and so that needs to be implemented. Um we need to change it from a speed limit to a noise limit. Um so that we can actually fly supersonic again over land as long as we’re not bothering people with the sonic boom uh which is which is totally technologically possible. Um uh those are a few off the top of my head. I do have an essay in the in the series called the progress agenda where I lay out all of these things. So you can go there for more. Perfect. Um is there anything before I’m uh I’m going to ask you one last question on your existential hope vision? Uh is there anything you think we haven’t covered that you want to say about the manifesto? No, this is pretty wide-ranging. Yeah. Yeah, I think we covered a lot of it, but I still recommend people also read it. It was uh a great read and you’ll get a lot more of the detail. Um but yeah, then let’s let’s end on on the note of what’s your existential hope vision for the future? Yeah. Um it’s the expansion of human agency. Yeah. It is uh it’s curing aging and disease so that we have uh more agency and control over our own lives and deaths. Uh it is uh uh expanding artificial intelligence and giving everybody the you know, a an infinitely wise and patient uh tutor and coach and uh an assistant. Um allowing people to start entire new businesses with virtual teams. Uh realize any creative vision that they have. If they’ve got a great idea for a song or a movie or anything that they want that they can just make it without a whole team and a budget. Um it is uh yeah, increasing the speed of transportation again. I want I I want to zip around the world in those supersonic planes. Um uh I would love to see us develop a real space economy that has an actual like economic engine behind it, right? Where we’re creating economic value and people are willing to pay for for for rockets and space travel and it’s not just a it’s not just a pure sort of scientific research program and it’s not just a it’s certainly not a you know national glory program the way it kind of was in the 1960s but that we actually develop the economic engine of space. Um you know, those are just a few parts of it but it’s it’s really it’s everything that foresight is envisioning and working on. We are covering a lot of it yeah actually. Well, thank you so much Jason. Really appreciate this conversation. We’re going to we’re at Vision Weekend right now for us at the Institute’s Vision Weekend so I think we’re going to go out and try to listen to some of those talks about also just a bit of what we were talking about. But yeah, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Great conversation.