I was invited to speak at the Festival of Progressive Abundance, a conference to rally around “abundance” as a new direction for the political left. This is a writeup of what I said: my message to the left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry for the late cross-post. Once again it’s been too long and this digest is too big. Feel free to skim and skip around, guilt-free, I give you permission. I try to put the more important and timely stuff at the top.

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, or Farcaster.

Contents

• Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers
• From Progress Conference 2025
• My writing
• Jobs
• Fellowships & workshops
• Fundraising
• New publications and issues
• Queries
• Announcements

For paid subscribers:

• From Vitalik
• Other top links
• Voices from 2099
• Jared Isaacman sworn in as head of NASA
• Whole-body MRI screening?
• AI does social science research
• AI writes a browser
• AI does lots of other things
• AI could do even more things
• AI and the economic future
• AI: more models and papers
• AI discourse
• Waymo
• Health/bio
• Energy & manufacturing
• Housing
• Other links and short notes
• Politics
• Gratitude
• New Horizon photographs Pluto’s mountains
• Charts
• Quotes

Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers

Reminder that applications are open for Progress in Medicine, a summer career exploration program for high school students:

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?

Discover careers in medicine, biology, and related fields while developing practical tools and strategies for building a meaningful life and career— learning how to find mentors, identify your values, and build a career you love that drives the world forward.

Join a webinar to learn more on February 3. Or simply apply today! Many talented, ambitious teens have applied, and we’re already starting interviews. Priority deadline: February 8th.

From Progress Conference 2025

A few more batches of video:

• American Dynamism: Progress begins at home. New industrial paradigms, anti-fragile and future-proof regulation, the case for hardtech, the grid as the bottleneck, and a call for US innovation in shipbuilding: the American Dynamism talks, and some of the writing published afterwards
• Culture: Inspiring progress in stories and institutions. How do you create a culture of progress? What is it—and why does it matter? Jerusalem Demsas, Virginia Postrel, Charles C. Mann, Alexander Berger, Dan Wang in discussion with Kmele Foster, and I shared our thoughts

My writing

• My essay series The Techno-Humanist Manifesto has concluded, and you can read the whole thing online. I’m pleased to announce that the series will be revised for publication as a book from MIT Press (expected early 2027)!
• 2025 in review. My annual update, including my reading highlights
• How to tame a complex system. Nature is a complex system, I am told, and therefore unpredictable, uncontrollable, unruly. I think this is true but irrelevant: we can master nature in the ways that matter

Jobs

• IFP is hiring an editor: “seeking a curious, entrepreneurial, and opinionated lover of writing. … You’ll partner with our policy experts to turn their drafts into pieces that change minds across DC. You’ll coach both new and experienced writers to become better communicators. You’ll also innovate on our systems to help the team consistently ship great products.” (via @rSanti97)
• OpenAI is hiring a Head of Preparedness: “If you want to help the world figure out how to enable cybersecurity defenders with cutting edge capabilities while ensuring attackers can’t use them for harm, ideally by making all systems more secure, and similarly for how we release biological capabilities and even gain confidence in the safety of running systems that can self-improve, please consider applying. This will be a stressful job and you’ll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately” (@sama)
• Anthropic is hiring someone to work with Holden Karnofsky on his projects, “in particular re Anthropic’s ‘Responsible Scaling Policy’. Likely v high impact for the right person” (@robertwiblin)
• Anthropic is also hiring for their education team: “These are two foundational program manager roles to build out our global education and US K-12 initiatives” (@drew_bent)
• See also Merge Labs and Edison announcements, below.

Fellowships & workshops

• MATS 10.0 (Machine Learning Alignment & Theory Scholars): “Come work with Seth Donoughe and me this summer on AI-biosecurity! We will be mentoring projects on threat models, frontier evaluations, and technical safeguards.” (@lucafrighetti)
• Beyond the Ivory Tower, via Joseph Fridman: “an intensive two-day writing workshop for academics, taught by James Ryerson, a longtime editor at the New York Times. … Our alumni have published hundreds of pieces in outlets from the Atlantic to Aeon to the Wall Street Journal. … I think historians and economists of technology and innovation would be a great fit.” Apply by March 1

Fundraising

Nonprofits that would make good use of your money:

• Lightcone Infrastructure: “We build beautiful things for truth-seeking and world-saving. We run LessWrong, Lighthaven, Inkhaven, designed AI-2027, and so many more things. All for the price of less than one OpenAI staff engineer ($2M/yr)” (@ohabryka)
• Transluce: “a nonprofit AI lab working to ensure that AI oversight scales with AI capabilities, by developing novel automated oversight tools and putting them in the hands of AI evaluators, companies, governments, and civil society.” OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba calls them “one of the strongest external AI safety orgs—on par with METR and Apollo.” (@woj_zaremba)
• And of course, us

New publications and issues

• Works in Progress, Issue 21. The triumph of logical English; a measure of monopoly that actually works; getting artificial gravity in space with current tech; why the developing world needs more roads; and more. (via @s8mb)
• Abundance and Growth Blog, from Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy). Writers include Matt Clancy, Saloni Dattani, and Dylan Matthews (via @mattsclancy)
• Stefan Schubert launches The Update, “a newsletter in the spirit of my tweets.” (@StefanFSchubert) Stefan is the most anti-hype, anti-BS account in my timeline

Queries

• “Who is best to read / follow for advice on using AI e.g. Claude Code? especially interested in: productivity and todo wrangling (especially for the distractable); research assistance; editing; learning” (@rgblong)

Announcements

• Merge Labs launches, “a research lab with the long-term mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence … by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone” (via @SumnerLN). SamA is listed as a co-founder. Merge grew out of the Forest Labs FRO; Convergent Research notes that the tech is ultrasound-based and that they’ve raised over $250M. (!) And of course, they’re hiring
• Edison, the for-profit spinout of Future House, has raised $70M: “we are integrating AI Scientists into the full stack of research, from basic discovery to clinical trials. We want cures for all diseases by mid-century.” They are hiring software engineers, AI researchers, scientists, and business operators. ”Our goal is to accelerate science writ large.” (@SGRodriques)
• Science Corp. announces Vessel (WIRED). Vessel is “a project focused on rethinking perfusion from the ground up, extending how long life can be sustained, and expanding what’s possible in transplantation and critical care. Life-support technologies like ECMO can keep patients alive when the heart or lungs fail, but they aren’t designed for long-term use. Vessel exists to close the gap between what perfusion technology is fundamentally capable of and how it is deployed in daily practice.” (@ScienceCorp_)
• Fuse Energy raises a $70M Series B. Honestly hard to figure out exactly what they do, but it seems to involve deploying solar and batteries, and maybe later doing fuel synthesis and fusion? Anyway I liked this from (presumably) one of the founders: “Energy is the fundamental source for human progress. But for the last 30 years, we’ve been told that the future requires sacrifice ‘use less, be less, restrict yourself’. No one should have to trade a good life today for the chance of a better tomorrow.” (@alanchanguk)
• Confer is a new LLM app from Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike, where your conversations are end-to-end encrypted. Confer goes to impressive lengths to ensure that the LLM server doesn’t, e.g., exfiltrate your data somewhere. The entire server image is signed and is auditable on a public ledger. The client verifies the signature before chatting. The server also runs in a VM that is isolated from its host at the hardware level.
• Gordian Bio announces “a research collaboration with Pfizer to apply Gordian’s in vivo mosaic screening platform to obesity target discovery.” (@GordianBio) Story in Business Wire

To read the rest of this digest, subscribe on Substack.

Reality is a dangerous place. From the dawn of humanity we have faced the hazards of nature: fire, flood, disease, famine. Better technology and infrastructure have made us safer from many of these risks—but have also created new risks, from boiler explosions to carcinogens to ozone depletion, and exacerbated old ones.

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

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

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

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

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

How was this achieved?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So fire safety was achieved through the combination of:

• General-purpose technologies: engines, electronic communications, electric light and heat
• Specific inventions: fire pumps, fire hose, fire alarms
• Infrastructure: municipal water supply, telephone lines
• Standards, testing and certification: of electrical products, fire preventing and fire-fighting equipment, building materials, etc.
• Law: building codes and other fire safety codes
• Education and training: in fire departments, among the public

This is a general pattern. Safety requires:

• both prevention and “cure”
• both technical and social solutions
• among technical solutions, both products and systems
• among social solutions, both education and law

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

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

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

Selected sources and further reading:

• Bruce Hensler, Crucible of Fire (2011)
• Harry Chase Brearley, The History of the National Board of Fire Underwriters (1916) and Symbol of Safety (a history of Underwriters Labs, 1923)
• Dennis Nolan, Fire Fighting Pumping Systems at Industrial Facilities (2011)
• W. Fred Conway, Those Magnificent Old Steam Engines (1996)
• Ramon Klitzke, “Roman Building Ordinances Relating to Fire Protection” (1959)
• Lionel Frost and Eric Jones, “The fire gap and the greater durability of nineteenth century cities” (2007)
• John Rainbird, “The Vigiles of Rome”
• Alex Tabarrok, Firefighters Don’t Fight Fires

Historical and primary sources:

• Charles Frederick T. Young, Fires, Fire Engines, and Fire Brigades (1866)
• James Bugbee, “Fires and Fire Departments” (1873)
• James Braidwood, “On the Means of rendering large supplies of Water available in cases of Fire; and on the application of manual power to the working of fire engines” (1844)
• Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Investigate the Cause and Management of the Great Fire in Boston (1873)
• Clarence Goldsmith, “The Use of Pumpers at Fires” (1930) and “Efficient Utilization of Water for Fire Fighting” (1939)
• Journal of the New England Water Works Association, Vol 7 Issue 1
• National Board of Fire Underwriters, Model Building Code (1905)
• Maurice Webster, “What is ‘Fireproof?’” (The Atlantic, 1946)
• FEMA, “America Burning” (report)
• Charles II, An Act for rebuilding the City of London (1666)

I get a lot of pushback to the idea that humanity can “master” nature. Nature is a complex system, I am told, and therefore unpredictable, uncontrollable, unruly.

I think this is true but irrelevant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. ^{^}

   Eric Drexler makes this point at length in Radical Abundance.

Everyone loves writing annual letters these days. It’s the thing. (I blame Dan Wang.)

So here’s mine. At least I can say I’ve been doing it for as long as Dan: nine years running (proof: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024). As usual, this is more of a personal essay/reflection, and not so much of an organizational annual report, although I will start with some comments on…

RPI

Over the last three years, the Roots of Progress Institute has gone from “a guy and his blog” to a full-fledged cultural institute. This year we:

• Held our second annual Progress Conference, featuring speakers including Sam Altman, Blake Scholl, Tyler Cowen, and Michael Kratsios (Director, OSTP). The conference has become the central, must-attend event for the progress community: it is sold out each year, with hundreds on the waitlist, and some attendees report it is literally the best conference they have ever attended.
• Inducted the third cohort of our progress writers fellowship, bringing the total to 74 fellows. Our fellows are having impact: Dean Ball helped draft the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, Madeline Hart has co-authored a book with the CTO of Palantir on revitalizing the American defense industry, Ryan Puzycki helped legalize single-stair buildings in Austin (a key YIMBY reform), and three other fellows have recently had opinion pieces in the NYT or WSJ.
• Announced our first education initiative: Progress in Medicine, a high school summer career exploration program. I’ve previewed the content for this course and I’m jealous of these kids—I wish I had had something like this when I was a teenager!

And the best part about all of these programs is that I don’t have to run any of them! I have a fantastic staff at RPI who deserves credit for all of these, from design to execution: Emma McAleavy, Ben Thomas, Yel Alonzo, and especially Heike Larson—thanks to them for making our programs a success every year.

We’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, supported mostly by donations. There’s still time to get in a last-minute end-of-year contribution. Huge thanks to all those who have already given this year!

My writing

Most of my writing effort this year was devoted to finishing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, an essay-series-cum-book laying out my philosophy of progress. In 2025 I published the last 14 (out of 21) essays in the series, you can read them all here. Also, as just announced, I’ve signed with MIT Press to publish a revised version of the series in book form. The manuscript is out for comment now, and (given typical publishing schedules) I expect the book to launch in early 2027.

I also wrote eight other essays, and ten links digests. I put the links digest on hold after May in order to focus on finishing the book, but I’m working on bringing it back. All subscribers get the announcements and opportunities at the top, but the rest of the digest is paywalled, so subscribe now to get the full version.

The most-liked posts here on Substack were:

• The future of humanity is in management
• How sci-fi can have drama without dystopia or doomerism
• The Unlimited Horizon, part 2
• The Spirit We Lost, part 1
• In defense of slop

The most-commented posts were:

• How much does it cost to back up solar with batteries?
• We should install a thermostat on the Earth
• Where is the YIMBY movement for healthcare?

My longest post, at over 8,400 words, was:

• The Progress Agenda

I now have well over 55,000 subscribers on Substack, up over 68% YOY.

Social media

Here are some of my most-liked posts and threads of the year:

• One model for Elon is that he is perpetually operating in wartime mode: Move as fast as possible, bring overwhelming force, extract superhuman effort, accept collateral damage. A thread. For some reason many people seemed to think I was praising or defending this: I wasn’t, just observing.
• Grocery stores have price transparency and open competition, which health services don’t (replying to a wrong-headed comment by Rep. Jake Auchincloss)
• Everything has to be invented—even buttons
• The moment the Boom XB-1 test plane went supersonic
• “Daddy, why is a hundred a big number?”, and other difficult questions from my 3yo
• “On paper, titanium should be the world’s #1 structural metal”
• When Tyler Cowen just flat-out says that tariffs are bad, you know they are very straightforwardly bad
• A great moment from a legendary interview with Morris Chang of TSMC, on the Acquired podcast
• Waymo achieves 80–90% reduction across all crash/injury metrics. If there were some intervention that achieved this, safety advocates would be demanding its wholesale adoption immediately, even if it were costly or inconvenient

You can join well over 40,000 people who follow me on Twitter, or find me on your favorite social network; I’m on pretty much all of them.

Speaking and events

Like last year, I tried to mostly say no to events and speaking gigs this year, but there were a few I couldn’t refuse. Some highlights of the year:

• I spoke at “d/acc Day” alongside Vitalik Buterin, Juan Benet, Mary Lou Jepsen, Allison Duettmann, and others. My talk was “d/acc: The first 150 years”: a whirlwind tour of how society has thought about progress, decentralization and defense over the last century and a half
• I gave a short talk at Social Science Foo Camp titled “The Fourth Age of Humanity?”, based on ideas that I later wrote up in The Flywheel
• I did a fun Interintellect salon with Virginia Postrel based on her essay “The World of Tomorrow”
• I hosted a discussion series at Edge Esmeralda with the aim of envisioning the future. Each day there was a ~90-minutes session with a theme like AI, health & bio, or energy
• I went to Mojave to watch the first supersonic flight of the Boom XB-1 test plane. Here’s some video I took of the plane taxiing down the runway, and then the pilot getting out after landing and shaking hands with Boom founder Blake Scholl

In 2026 I hope to do more travel, events and speaking. But maybe I’ll just hole up and write some more.

Reading

I put my monthly “what I’ve been reading” updates on hold at the end of 2023 (!) in order to focus on the book. I’d like to bring these back, too. For now, here are some the highlights from my reading this year (that is, things I thought were interesting and valuable to read, not necessarily things I “liked” or agreed with).

Books and other book-length things I read

Or read at least most of:

Max Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence. A history of the evolution of the brain, from the first animals through humans. It is organized into five major evolutionary steps—to oversimplify: the worm brain, the fish brain, the mouse brain, the monkey brain, and the human brain. This answered some key questions I had on the topic, very well-written, probably my favorite of the year. Hat-tip to @eshear.

Charles Mann, How the System Works, an essay series in The New Atlantis. It covers four of the major systems that form the foundation of industrial civilization and help deliver our modern standard of living: agriculture, water sanitation, electricity, and public health. Mann thinks of these pieces as the start of a curriculum that should be taught in schools—inspired by a group of “smart, well-educated twenty-somethings” who “wanted the hungry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well,” but “knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public-health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.” Enjoyed this, recommended.

Brian Potter, The Origins of Efficiency, from Stripe Press, a history of manufacturing efficiency. Light bulbs used to cost ~$50 (adjusted for inflation), now they cost 50 cents; how did that happen? This is a comprehensive and very readable overview of the answer to that question and others like it.

For the (much longer) full reading update, and some thoughts on what’s next for my writing, subscribe on Substack.

My essay series The Techno-Humanist Manifesto concluded in October. You can read the whole thing here.

“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!

The links digest is back, baby!

I got so busy writing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto this year that after May I stopped doing the links digest and my monthly reading updates. I’m bringing them back now (although we’ll see what frequency I can keep up). This one covers the last two or three weeks. But first…

A year-end call to support our work

I write this newsletter as part of my job running the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI). RPI is a nonprofit, supported by your subscriptions and donations. If you enjoy my writing, or appreciate programs like our conference, writer’s fellowship, and high school program, consider making a donation:

• If you can give $100, subscribe to our paid Substack
• If you can give $500, make it a founder subscription
• If you can give $1000 or more, support us on Patreon, or see here for PayPal and other methods, including DAF and crypto

To those who already donate, thank you for making this possible! We now return you to your regularly scheduled links digest…

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, or Farcaster.

Contents

• Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers
• Progress Conference 2025
• My writing
• From RPI fellows
• Jobs
• Grants & fellowships
• Events
• Miscellaneous opportunities
• Queries
• Announcements

For paid subscribers:

• What is worthy and valuable?
• Claude’s soul
• Self-driving cars are a public health imperative
• Slop from the 1700s
• The genius of Jeff Dean
• Everything has to be invented
• AI
• Manufacturing
• Science
• Health
• Politics
• Other links and short notes

Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers

We recently announced a new summer program for high school students: “Discover careers in medicine, biology, and related fields while developing practical tools and strategies for building a meaningful life and career—learning how to find mentors, identify your values, and build a career you love that drives the world forward.”

I’ve previewed the content for this course and I’m jealous of these kids—I wish I had had something like this. We’re going to undo the doomerism that teens pick up in school and inspire them with an ambitious vision of the future.

Applications open now. Please share with any high schoolers or parents.

Progress Conference 2025

• Our writeup: Reflections on Progress Conference 2025
• Big Think released a special issue after the conference, “The Engine of Progress,” featuring articles from Boom CEO Blake Scholl, futurist Peter Leyden, and six RPI fellows
• We’ve also started to release video of the talks, including:
  • Tyler Cowen interviewing Sam Altman and Blake Scholl
  • AI Protopia: Ideas for how AI can improve the world (track)
  • New cities, housing policy, and lessons from the YIMBY movement (track)

More to come!

My writing

• “Progress” and “abundance”: “Abundance” tends to be more wonkish, oriented towards DC and policy. “Progress” is interested in regulatory reform and efficiency, but also in ambitious future technologies, and it’s more focused on ideas and culture. But the movements overlap 80–90%
• In defense of slop: When the cost of creation falls, the volume of production greatly expands, but the average quality necessarily falls. This overall process, however, will usher in a golden age of creativity and experimentation

From RPI fellows

• Ruxandra Teslo (RPI fellow 2024) and Jack Scannell have written “a manifesto on reviving pharma productivity … Public debates focus on improving science or loosening approval. We argue there’s real leverage in optimizing the middle part of the drug discovery funnel: Clinical Trials.” (@RuxandraTeslo) Article: To Get More Effective Drugs, We Need More Human Trials. Elsewhere, Ruxandra comments on the need for health policy to focus more on the supply side, saying: “The reason why I felt empowered to propose things related to supply-side is because of the ideological influence of the Progress Studies movement (Roots of Progress, Jason Crawford)” (@RuxandraTeslo)
• Dean Ball (RPI fellow 2024) interviewed by Rob Wiblin on the 80,000 Hours Podcast. Rob says of Dean that “unlike many new AI commentators he’s a true intellectual and a blogger at heart — not a shallow ideologue or corporate mouthpiece. So he doesn’t wave away concerns and predict a smooth simple ride.” (@robertwiblin) Podcast on Apple, YouTube, Spotify
• Andrew Miller writes for the WSJ about the inevitable growing pains of adopting self-driving cars: Remember When the Information Superhighway Was a Metaphor? (via @AndrewMillerYYZ)

Jobs

• Astera Neuro (just announced, see below!) is looking for a COO: “This is an all-hands-on-deck effort as we build a new paradigm for systems neuroscience” (@doristsao)
• Astera Institute is also hiring an Open Science Data Steward “to help our researchers manage, share, and facilitate new solutions for their open data” (@PracheeAC)
• Monumental Labs is hiring two Business Development VPs: “One will focus on large-scale building projects and city developments. Another will focus on developing new markets for stone sculpture, including public sculpture, landscape etc.” (@mspringut)
• Jason Kelly at Ginkgo Bioworks is “personally hiring for scientists that are automation freaks. Not that you run a high throughput screening platform but rather that you believe we should automate all lab work” (@jrkelly)
• Lulu Cheng Meservey is hiring a “puckish troublemaker” for special projects. “This is a real job with excellent pay, benefits, and budget. Your responsibilities will be to conceive of interesting ideas and make them happen in the real world, often sub rosa” (@lulumeservey)

Grants & fellowships

• Edison Grants from Future House to run their AI-for-science tools: “Today, we’re launching our first round of Edison Grants. These fast grants will provide 20,000 credits (100 Kosmos runs) and significant engineering support to researchers looking to use Kosmos and our other agents in their research.” (@SGBodriques)
• Foresight Institute’s AI Nodes for Science & Safety: “If you’re working on AI for science or safety, apply for funding, office space in Berlin & Bay Area, or compute by Dec 31!” (@allisondman via @foresightinst)

Events

• I’ll be speaking at The Festival of Progressive Abundance, LA, Jan 30–Feb 1 (@YIMBYDems)
• The Economics of Ideas, Science, and Innovation Online short course for PhD students, hosted by IFP, is back for the third time (@mattsclancy). Online, Feb 3–April 30

Miscellaneous opportunities

• a16z Build: “A dinner series and community for founders, technologists, and operators figuring out what they want to build next — and who they want to build it with. … It’s not an accelerator, or even a structured program. … Instead, we focus on one thing: creating small, repeatable environments where people with ambition, ability, and similar timing spend enough time together that trust compounds, decisions get easier.” (@david__booth)
• Vast’s Call for Research Proposals: “Vast is opening access to microgravity research aboard Haven-1 Lab, the world’s first crewed commercial space-based research and manufacturing facility” (@vast, h/t @juanbenet)
• A long-running project with HBO to make a series about the early days of Elon Musk and SpaceX has died. The series was based on Ashlee Vance’s biography, and he’s still interested in doing something with this: “If there are serious offers out there to make something amazing, my mind and inbox are open” (@ashleevance)
• Manjari Narayan (@NeuroStats) is looking for a co author to collaborate on one or more explainers about surrogate endpoints and other proxies in health and bio—including why we waste time and money on those that don’t work and how we can do better. She is the domain expert, all you have to bring is the ability to make technical topics readable and accessible to a non-specialist audience. Reply or DM me and I’ll connect you

Queries

• “It’s ‘well-known’ that science is upstream of abundance… I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to find strong general discussion of this link between science and our ability to act. … The best discussions I know are probably Solow-Romer from the economics literature, and Deutsch (grounded in physics, but broader). What else is worth reading?” (@michael_nielsen)

Announcements

• NSF launches a Tech Labs Initiative “to launch and scale a new generation of transformative independent research organizations to advance breakthrough science.” Caleb Watney, writing in the WSJ, calls it “one of the most ambitious experiments in federal science funding in 75 years. … the goal is to invest ~$1 billion to seed new institutions of science and technology for the 21st century.” (@calebwatney) Seems like big news!
• Astera Neuro launches, a neuroscience research program led by Doris Tsao. “We’re seeking to understand how the brain constructs conscious experience and what those principles could teach us about building intelligence. Jed McCaleb and I are all-in on this effort.” (@seemaychou)
• Ricursive Intelligence launches, “a frontier AI lab creating a recursive self-improving loop between AI and the hardware that fuels it. Today, chip design takes 2-3 years and requires thousands of human experts. We will reduce that to weeks.” (@annadgoldie) Coverage in the WSJ: This AI Startup Wants to Remake the $800 Billion Chip Industry
• Boom Supersonic launches Superpower: “a 42MW natural gas turbine optimized for AI datacenters, built on our supersonic technology. Superpower launches with a 1.21GW order from Crusoe.” (@bscholl) Aeroderivative generator turbines are not new, but Boom’s has much better performance on hot days
• Cuby launches “a factory-in-a-box” for home construction: “a mobile, rapidly deployable manufacturing platform that can land almost anywhere and start producing home components locally. … Components are manufactured just-in-time, packaged, palletized, and sent last-mile for staged assembly. … Full vertical integration from digital design → factory → site.” (@AGampel1) I’m still unclear whether this is going to be the thing that finally works in this space, but Brian Potter is a fan, which is a strong signal!
• OpenAI announces FrontierScience, a new eval that “measures PhD-level scientific reasoning across physics, chemistry, and biology” (@OpenAI)
• Antares raises a $96M Series B “to build and deploy our microreactors … paving the way for our first reactor demonstration in 2026. Two years in: 60 people, three states, a 145,000-sq-ft facility, and contracts across DoW, NASA, and others” (@AntaresNuclear)
• GPT-5.2 Pro (X-High) scores 90.5% on the ARC-AGI-1 eval, at $11.64/task. “A year ago, we verified a preview of an unreleased version of OpenAI o3 (High) that scored 88% on ARC-AGI-1 at est. $4.5k/task … This represents a ~390X efficiency improvement in one year” (@arcprize)

To read the rest of this digest, subscribe on Substack.

“Slop” is Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• More experimentation. It can be hard to predict how good or great a piece of writing, art, music or video is going to be. Major Hollywood pictures can be disliked by audiences, critics, or both; books often fail to make money or even pay out their advances. Conversely, sometimes an unknown creator comes out with a work that is initially ignored but goes on to fame and/or fortune. Lowering the bar for creation allows for more experiments, more chances to create something high-quality.
• Removal of the gatekeepers. If it’s hard to predict or evaluate what is good, who decides? Editors, producers, etc., who act as gatekeepers to the means of production and distribution. But gatekeepers are imperfect predictors, and they have blind spots. Harry Potter was rejected by twelve publishers before finding one that would take it: how many potentially great books never found that one editor to champion them, and never saw the light of day? Today there are far fewer gatekeepers for writing or podcasting, but they still exist in music and movies; AI will gradually remove these.
• More chance for people to make a start. E.g., there are many good bloggers who never would have gotten started if they had to first find a job as a journalist.
• More runway for works to find their audience. My writing had about 50 subscribers for the first two and a half years (now well over 50,000). Dwarkesh Patel was “was 2 months away from quitting the podcast for 2 years” before becoming a rocket-ship success. Lowering the cost of production allows these experiments to be incubated for years, kept alive by love and sweat, until they evolve into a more valuable form or catch their break.
• More content for niche audiences. When content is expensive, it has to serve a large audience, and everything converges on bland mainstream taste. When the only significant cost is one creator’s time, it only has to find 1,000 True Fans, and there is much more room for a broad and varied menu to serve many different palates.
• More diversity of content and format. When content is expensive, and gate-kept, it becomes the work of Trained Professionals, who are Serious People, and it should follow Formal Conventions. No serious magazine editor would approve a column that ranges widely across psychiatry, philosophy, politics, science, and epistemology, covering everything from book reviews to academic papers to online controversies. But that’s Scott Alexander, and he’s one of the best and most successful writers of our generation.
• Freedom from the tyranny of finance. When content is expensive, it becomes the domain of large corporations, who have a duty to their shareholders and who frequently succumb to the ruthless logic of financial returns. Hollywood today has found the safest returns in sequels, remakes, and the endless continuation of franchises such as Star Wars or the MCU. Low costs give you more ability to work for the love of the craft and for the sake of the art.

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

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

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

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

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

What the Progress in Medicine program offers

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 Progress in Medicine takes place

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 this program is for

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.

Program advisors and and near-peer 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 the Roots of Progress Institute is creating this program

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 it 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, 2026.

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

Ben Norman, Max Maton, Jian Xin Lim and I are working on a Progress Studies Society in London for students/professionals. Our initial experiment is an 8-week in-person project-based fellowship, aimed at helping talented individuals start working on concrete problems relevant to progress studies.

We're looking for lists of relevant project ideas -- similar to what people have done in AI safety (e.g. here and here). The people working on these would be lower context, but dedicated/smart. We would be very grateful if anyone has suggestions :)