Government. How does the law enable progress, or hamper it? Progress depends on good legal institutions; equally, it can be stifled by bad ones.
Culture. What is the basic philosophical attitude of society towards progress, and the people who pursue it? Is progress seen as possible and desirable?
Correspondingly, my top three hypotheses for technological stagnation are:
The centralization of research funding into a small number of inherently conservative agencies
The growing burden of regulation and bureaucracy
A culture that is increasingly skeptical of or actively hostile to progress
(These are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Incidentally, this is pretty much the same set of factors identified by J. Storrs Hall in Where Is My Flying Car?, which is part of why the book resonated with me so much.)
Inverting these (and changing the order), here are three broad approaches to accelerate progress:
Inspire people to pursue progress
In particular, create a culture that recognizes progress and appreciates it. Some ways to do this:
Report on progress fairly and honestly, without muckraking. The Atlantic and WIRED are a few publications that generally do this well; see in particular the work of Derek Thompson.
Write science fiction that envisions amazing inventions and the world they would create. For instance, many inventors and entrepreneurs have been inspired by the “primer” from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age (a sort of educational e-book or tablet based on advanced AI). And countless scientists and engineers have been inspired by the world of Star Trek, with its communicators, replicators, and teleporters.
Produce movies that tell stories of progress. Anton Howes has begun collecting a list of these; I think much more could be done. For instance, I’d love to see modern, popular biopics of Norman Borlaug, Louis Pasteur, or the Wright Brothers.
Bring back the World’s Fair. Anton also wrote about this recently, envisioning something that is like “all of today’s specific industry fairs, combined”: drone deliveries, driverless cars, VR/AR, 3D printed organ tissue and metals, food stalls with lab-grown meat, cloned animals brought back from extinction, exoskeletons and jetpacks to play with. Put forth a positive vision of the future we could create.
In particular, provide more decentralized, distributed, heterogenous sources for research funding. Some interesting proposals and experiments along these lines:
Adam Marblestone and Samuel Rodrigues have proposed an idea called “Focused Research Organizations” (FROs), under the auspices of the Day One Project. FROs combine some of the aspects of DARPA, startups, and national labs, while aiming to fill a gap that isn’t well-addressed by any of these.
Donald Braben wrote a book, Scientific Freedom, about what went wrong with science funding, and his experiences with a different model. For over a decade, Braben ran a program called Venture Research at British Petroleum that gave grants for scientists to pursue ambitious, transformative research agendas, and gave them complete freedom to direct their work according to their own judgment. There was no committee-based peer review: grants were made on the potential of the idea and the persuasiveness of the researcher, without requiring proof up front that an idea would succeed, and without being biased in favor of older or more established researchers. Venture Research was relatively cheap to fund, with an annual budget of only a few million dollars a year, yet Braben lists a number of successes in disparate areas, from the study of macroscopic quantum objects to the foundations of “green chemistry”.
A Vox article argues that an unstable and unpredictable regulatory environment is party responsible for needlessly high costs of nuclear power in the US (especially stark when contrasted with more efficient construction in France and South Korea).
I don’t know how to drive solutions to these problems, but folks at places like the Mercatus Center and the Center for Growth and Opportunity are working on it. (And maybe part of the solution is to create “special economic zones” as charter cities.)
To condense these ideas even further into a pithy formulation, you could call them the three F’s: Progress needs founders, funders, and freedom. By “founders”, I include entrepreneurs who found startups or nonprofits, scientists who found new fields or subfields, and inventors who found new technologies.
These are ways to address stagnation and accelerate progress at a broad level, society-wide. But let me close with a note to anyone in science, engineering or business who has a vision for a specific way to make progress in a particular domain—whether anti-aging, space, energy, or anything else. My message is: Just go for it. Don’t let the funding environment, the regulatory environment, or the culture stop you. Work around barriers or break through them, whatever it takes. The future is counting on you.
Not necessarily. Globalization has had many negative second-order effects. For example: As much as air connectivity has helped us travel across the world, it has also increased the risk of infections travelling longer distances quicker than if we had a localism-based model. If we are epistemically humble enough, it is not difficult to see how many COVID-like events might have happened in the past in various isolated parts of the world, that we do not know of, but never ravaged the entire world.
Globalization has benefits, not saying that it is not useful, but describing progress as a function of globalization is what I take issue with. Progress is a multiscale phenomenon. You need a strong localism-based core for innovation and you also need decentralization to accentuate the process, and then you can use globalization to scale. And then there is also the part where you need a lot of wisdom to know what should be scaled and what shouldn't be.
When I wrote my post on technological stagnation, the top question I got asked was: So, how do we fix it?
I don’t have the definitive answer, but here’s a starting point. I generally think about the causes of progress on three levels:
Correspondingly, my top three hypotheses for technological stagnation are:
(These are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Incidentally, this is pretty much the same set of factors identified by J. Storrs Hall in Where Is My Flying Car?, which is part of why the book resonated with me so much.)
Inverting these (and changing the order), here are three broad approaches to accelerate progress:
Inspire people to pursue progress
In particular, create a culture that recognizes progress and appreciates it. Some ways to do this:
Enable them with funding
In particular, provide more decentralized, distributed, heterogenous sources for research funding. Some interesting proposals and experiments along these lines:
Unblock them through regulatory reform
Some examples of the problem:
I don’t know how to drive solutions to these problems, but folks at places like the Mercatus Center and the Center for Growth and Opportunity are working on it. (And maybe part of the solution is to create “special economic zones” as charter cities.)
To condense these ideas even further into a pithy formulation, you could call them the three F’s: Progress needs founders, funders, and freedom. By “founders”, I include entrepreneurs who found startups or nonprofits, scientists who found new fields or subfields, and inventors who found new technologies.
These are ways to address stagnation and accelerate progress at a broad level, society-wide. But let me close with a note to anyone in science, engineering or business who has a vision for a specific way to make progress in a particular domain—whether anti-aging, space, energy, or anything else. My message is: Just go for it. Don’t let the funding environment, the regulatory environment, or the culture stop you. Work around barriers or break through them, whatever it takes. The future is counting on you.