“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” –Alan Kay
MEDIA
The Science of Progress with Tyler Cowen
If progress is so important, why do we know so little about it? Tyler Cowen and Yaron Brook discuss why we need a science of progress studies, and some of the most important questions that science needs to answer.
Tyler Cowen is a blogger, author, podcaster, and economist at George Mason University. His article "We Need a New Science of Progress" (co-authored with Patrick Collison) helped launch the progress studies movement.
The Opportunity of Ingenuism
On the Silicon Valley Explored podcast, Robert Hendershott and Don Watkins discuss how the Silicon Valley mindset can be exported around the globe—and the challenges that make this incredibly difficult.
INSIGHT
Our filthy rich future
By Robert Hendershott and Don Watkins
Ingenuism explains how increased connection lays the foundation for unprecedented progress in the 21st century. But that progress won’t happen automatically. We need to commit to rapid progress—and that starts with appreciating its benefits.
Progress includes more than just economic growth as measured by GDP. We can, nevertheless, learn a lot by focusing purely on GDP growth and measures like it. In their book Abundance (see Recommendations below), Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler note that human beings have trouble understanding the power of exponential growth:
In our ancestor’s . . . linear environment, change was excruciatingly slow—life from generation to the next was effectively the same—and what change did arrive always followed a linear progression. To give you a sense of the difference [between linear and exponential growth], if I take thirty linear steps (calling one step a meter) from the front door of my Santa Monica home, I end up thirty meters away. However, if I take thirty exponential steps (one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on), I end up a billion meters away, or, effectively lapping the globe twenty-six times.
Observe that the first few exponential steps weren’t that impressive. Similarly for exponential economic growth. In the short run, exponential economic growth is hard to notice.
The median family income in the U.S. is roughly $78,500/year today. What happens if we were to experience 4% real (inflation adjusted) growth? (That’s high compared to recent years, but about what we averaged during the mid-20th century.) A year of 4% growth would raise that to $81,640. Meanwhile, the poverty line in the U.S. for a family of four is roughly $26,000. Four percent growth would raise that level of income to $27,000. Both these changes are noticeable, but neither is dramatic.
But keep playing the tape forward. Four percent growth for a decade raises incomes by 48%: the median increases to $116,000/year and the people earning $26,000/year now make $38,500/year. The new median income equals what was formerly a 75th percentile income while the increased poverty level income is now at the level of a 30th percentile income. These are noticeable differences! What was poverty is now approaching middle class.
And long-term growth? It produces astonishing outcomes. Four percent growth for a century raises incomes by a factor of 50: the median income is approaching $4m/year and the poverty level income has become $1.3m/year.
This is why Ingenuism matters. Sustained progress changes the world. Compound growth creates staggering results. And, by contrast, even seemingly small reductions in growth compound to creating staggeringly depressing results: if, starting in 1870, economic growth in the U.S. had been just 1% lower each year than it was, our standard of living today would be below Mexico’s. Looking forward, at 1% growth it takes 110 years to bring the poverty level income up to today’s median income. With 4% growth it takes 28 years. Why wait?
Now, you might be thinking, “Four million dollars a year median income? Come on! That’s not realistic. Are you seriously saying that in two centuries, everyone will be making $200 million a year? Is everyone really going to have a yacht and private jet?”
No, not exactly. One of the problems with using dollars to conceptualize long-term growth is that on a scale of decades (let alone centuries) the numbers start to lose their meaning. The world a century from now will not look like our world, and so in a century the meaning of making $4m/year (or $200m/year in two centuries) will be completely different from the meaning of making $4m/year or $200m/yr today.
The easier way to see the possibilities of long-term exponential growth is to look backwards. Think of how the average person lived in 1920 or 1820 and how we live today. Had you told someone in the 1820s that Americans in the 2020s would be hundreds of times richer they would have balked and said, “So we all have fleets of clipper ships and massive herds of horses?” No. It’s way better.
But looking backward can be misleading as well. That’s because with exponential growth, progress accelerates. To put numbers to it: over 100 years of 4% growth, one-half of the absolute progress happens in the first 82 years and the other half only takes 18 years. If you want to understand the progress that is possible from 100 years of rapid growth, you must look back, not one century, but over four centuries.
The 21st century can get way better far faster than we think. The fact that we can’t imagine what the world of tomorrow will look like doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to make it real. We don’t know what it will mean for human beings to enjoy a $200m median income—but we want our great grandchildren to find out.
QUICK TAKES
The Grant Professionals Association could not be reached for comment
Innovations in funding can be just as important to progress as innovations in technology. Silicon Valley wouldn’t have had the same success without the rise of venture capital and angel investing.
One area where there hasn’t been much innovation is in the funding of scientific research. The process has been the same for decades: most funding comes from government or private institution grants issued through a laborious and bureaucratic process.
That’s a problem. As Patrick Collison, Tyler Cowen, and Patrick Hsu note:
As the first U.S. lockdowns commenced in March last year, we reached out to various top scientists, and were surprised to learn that funding for COVID-19 related science was not readily available. . . .
[W]e found that scientists—among them the world’s leading virologists and coronavirus researchers—were stuck on hold, waiting for decisions about whether they could repurpose their existing funding for this exponentially growing catastrophe. It’s worth visiting the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s application overview for this, launched in March 2020, to get a tangible sense for what those seeking emergency funding were facing.
This motivated Collison, Cowen, and Hsu to start Fast Grants:
The original vision was simple: an application form that would take scientists less than 30 minutes to complete and that would deliver funding decisions within 48 hours, with money following a few days later.
See the whole article for the results and lessons learned. As they note, the ultimate impact of Fast Grants remains to be seen. But bringing fast and flexible money to science seems like a guaranteed win long term if we want scientists to be able to explore outside-the-box ideas.
The Atlantic should totally delete this article
We’ve written about how human beings have conquered knowledge loss through knowledge diffusion—particularly with the rise of the Internet. But a recent Atlantic article argues that we should not be so sanguine. There is a problem built in to “the distributed web and internet.”
Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on. Links work seamlessly until they don’t. And as tangible counterparts to online work fade, these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge.
Whereas traditional writings may have been costlier to create, distribute, and preserve, there was an entire industry devoted to preservation. We don’t have to worry about losing Shakespeare’s works because not only are countless copies of his books available, but the originals are preserved in hard and digital form.
But the Internet? It’s subject to two major forces that create knowledge loss: content drift (the content on a cited webpage changes) and link rot (the URL no longer works at all). The author notes that “link rot and content drift are endemic to the web,” and shares this striking example:
In 2010, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion in a case before the Supreme Court, and his opinion linked to a website as part of the explanation of his reasoning. Shortly after the opinion was released, anyone following the link wouldn’t see whatever it was Alito had in mind when writing the opinion. Instead, they would find this message: “Aren’t you glad you didn’t cite to this webpage … If you had, like Justice Alito did, the original content would have long since disappeared and someone else might have come along and purchased the domain in order to make a comment about the transience of linked information in the internet age.”
There’s no question that the Internet is a massive net-positive force for knowledge preservation. And, ss the article notes, innovations like the Wayback Machine are helping to solve the problem of knowledge preservation on the Internet. But this is an area that deserves further thought. Knowledge creation is vital for progress—but so is knowledge preservation. Improvements in either benefit progress.
CRISPR arrives
CRISPR is one of those technologies that’s rightfully been celebrated for its incredible potential, and yet its real-world applications have taken a while to materialize. That’s starting to change. In fact, scientists just made an important breakthrough.
The gene editor CRISPR excels at fixing disease mutations in lab-grown cells. But using CRISPR to treat most people with genetic disorders requires clearing an enormous hurdle: getting the molecular scissors into the body and having it slice DNA in the tissues where it’s needed. Now, in a medical first, researchers have injected a CRISPR drug into the blood of people born with a disease that causes fatal nerve and heart disease and shown that in three of them it nearly shut off production of toxic protein by their livers.
That is thrilling. But the long-term prospects almost defy belief.
The study paves the way for treating other liver diseases with CRISPR, either by knocking out a gene or—more challenging—modifying it with the help of a DNA template. The latter approach could also be used to turn the liver into a factory for making an enzyme needed elsewhere in body.
Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, who shared a Nobel Prize last year for developing the gene editor CRISPR from a bacterial immune system and co-founded Intellia, sees even bigger prospects. The new work, she says, is “a critical first step in being able to inactivate, repair, or replace any gene that causes disease, anywhere in the body.”
Code me a lever big enough, and I shall move the world
Noah Smith has a fascinating interview with famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s a taste:
I am very optimistic about the future of tech, at least in the domains where software-driven innovation is allowed. . . .
[A] common criticism of software is that it’s not something that takes physical form in the real world. For example, software is not a house, or a school, or a hospital. This is of course true on the surface, but it misses a key point.
Software is a lever on the real world.
Someone writes code, and all of a sudden riders and drivers coordinate a completely new kind of real-world transportation system, and we call it Lyft. Someone writes code, and all of a sudden homeowners and guests coordinate a completely new kind of real-world real estate system, and we call it AirBNB. Someone writes code, etc., and we have cars that drive themselves, and planes that fly themselves, and wristwatches that tell us if we’re healthy or ill.
Software is our modern alchemy. Isaac Newton spent much of his life trying and failing to transmute a base element—lead—into a valuable material -- gold. Software is alchemy that turns bytes into actions by and on atoms. It’s the closest thing we have to magic.
So instead of feeling like we are failing if we’re not building in atoms, we should lean as hard into software as we possibly can. Everywhere software touches the real world, the real world gets better, and less expensive, and more efficient, and more adaptable, and better for people. And this is especially true for the real world domains that have been least touched by software until now—such as housing, education, and health care.
Like I said, read the whole thing.
Silicon Peninsula
It seems as though half the places on earth are striving to create their own Silicon Valley. But South Korea is succeeding.
South Korea is becoming a hotbed of big technology startups.
New businesses are emerging in areas such as biotechnology, ride-hailing and online payments, and South Korea now has 10 unicorns, or young private companies worth more than $1 billion, according to CB Insights. That makes it the third-largest hub for such companies in the Asia-Pacific region, after the far more populous China and India.
What explains it success?
Bankers, investors and entrepreneurs say a few characteristics have helped South Korean startups thrive. The country has an affluent, tech-savvy population that is mostly squeezed into a few big cities, where superfast mobile broadband is widespread. . . .
In addition, [Viva Republica Inc. CEO Lee Seung-gun] said, the South Korean government was supportive of startups. That backdrop contrasts with China, the U.S. and Europe, where big technology companies face intensifying regulatory scrutiny.
A highly connected populace in a free, supportive environment may not be enough to guarantee tech success. But it’s a heck of a foundation.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
There has been a small library of books published arguing that pessimism over humanity’s future is unwarranted—from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist to Johan Norberg’s Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future to Julian Simon’s classic The Ultimate Resource.
But arguably the most optimistic book written about the decades ahead is Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. The book’s uniqueness isn’t in how much better the authors’ believe our future will be, but in the specificity with which they try to pin down the forces that will make the future better than ever.
Most optimistic books focus at a high level on humanity’s ability to solve problems through thought and innovation. Diamandis and Kotler don’t dispute that picture: “the greatest tool we have for tackling our grand challenges,” they write, “is the human mind.” But they go beyond that basic insight to the specific forces that are poised to revolutionize the availability of water, food, energy, health care, and education in the 21st century.
For example, they highlight recent advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and nanomaterials. And they show how these and other advances are being buttressed by three major forces promoting progress: a “Do-It-Yourself” revolution that allows “backyard tinkerers” to make important contributions in “once-esoteric fields like genetics and robotics”; the rise of technophilanthropists “who are using their fortunes to solve global, abundance-related challenges”; and the rise of the “bottom billion” thanks to “the Internet, microfinance, and wireless communication technology,” which are “transforming the poorest of the poor into an emerging market force.”
They conclude:
[F]or the first time in history, our capabilities have begun to catch up to our ambitions. Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Within a generation, we will be able to provide goods and services, once reserved for the wealthy few, to any and all who need them. Or desire them. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp.
But abundance, they note, is not automatic. The book, therefore, is not mainly a prediction, but a call to arms. Our job is not to sit back and wait for abundance, but to create it.
Until next time,
Don Watkins
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Thank you Don and Robert for this optimistic article about the possibility of a filthy rich future. With the advances in the medical field and the conversion of multiple fields I’m hopeful that I will be able to see this progress come to fruition. Articles like these are like good art and give me fuel to continue creating and producing values or as you ended your email to create abundance. Thank you both again, Steve Henderson