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1 day ago | 
newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford
This digest is late and slightly outdated because I’ve been focusing on writing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. If I missed some of the more recent announcements, they’ll be in the next digest, which will be out approximately whenever. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.
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2 days ago | 
newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford
Previously: Solutionism, part 1, part 2 and part 3. Part of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. If the dramatic progress of the last few centuries is the great boon of history, then the great tragedy of history is in all the centuries prior, when that progress didn’t happen. For tens of thousands of years, people toiled, starved, suffered, and died until we finally achieved modern economic growth. Why? Why was progress so slow, for so long? Did it have to be?
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1 week ago | 
newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford
Previously: Solutionism, part 1 and part 2. Part of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. Progress solves problems, but creates new ones. I have claimed that the new ones are better problems to have, that they can be solved in turn by more progress, and that history shows a pattern of us doing so.
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1 month ago | 
newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford |Brian Potter |Casey Handmer
Solar has an average capacity factor in the US of about 25%. Naively, you might think that to turn this into a highly-available power source, you just need to have 4x the solar panels, plus enough batteries to store 75% of a day’s worth of power. E.g., for each continuous megawatt you want to supply, you need 4 MW of solar panels, and 18 MWh of batteries. During the day, you supply 1 MW from the panels and use the other 3 MW to charge the batteries.
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1 month ago | 
newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford
Much of this content originated on social media.To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.
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1 month ago | 
newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford
Much of this content originated on social media.To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.
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2 months ago | 
newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford |Ethan Mollick |Tomas Pueyo |Noah Smith
2024 was a big year for me, and an even bigger year for the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI). For one, we became the Roots of Progress Institute (with a nice new logo and website). Here's what the org and I were up to this year. (My annual “highlights from what I read this year” are towards the end, if you're looking for that.)Progress Conference 2024, hosted by RPI together with several great co-presenters, was the highlight of my year, and I think some other people's too.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford
Previously: The Present Crisis; Fish in Water; The Surrender of the Gods, part 1 and part 2; Ode to Man. The per-capita GDP of Canada has increased about thirty-fold over the last two centuries, from $1,441 in 1820 to $45,530 in 2022 (adjusted for inflation). This is an enormous increase. Are Canadians enormously better off? That is, we’ve been assuming so far that material benefits improve human well-being. Do they? And if not, what’s the point of material progress?
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford
Previously: The Present Crisis, Fish in Water. So far we have told the story of progress as one of humanity climbing out of poverty, isolation, disease and death into abundance, connectedness, health and safety. More fundamentally, it is a story of the expansion of human agency. Our primitive ancestors lived at the mercy of nature. They ate what food they found: what edible plants happened to be growing nearby, what game they could catch.
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Jun 9, 2023 | 
newsletter.rootsofprogress.org | Jason Crawford
In this update:A plea for solutionism on AI safetyLinks and tweetsFull text below, or click any link above to jump to an individual post on the blog. If this digest gets cut off in your email, click the headline above to read it on the web. Will AI kill us all? This question has rapidly gone mainstream.