"Be Embraced, Ye Millions"

Reflections on Progress Studies

Introduction

It’s hard for orchestras to get the rhythm of Beethoven’s music just right. One of the many reasons is a poorly timed invention. The metronome was created in something like its modern form during Beethoven’s life—after his deafness had become severe. When Beethoven encountered the metronome, he enthusiastically rewrote many of his tempi—oftentimes, comically too fast. The irony, though, is that playing Beethoven too slow is one of the great sins of some of the 20th century’s most famous conductors.

Take the Ninth Symphony. This is Beethoven’s most overtly ideological symphony, offering listeners a kind of abstract macrohistory of human civilization that culminates in a musical treatise on the Enlightenment values of human equality, unity, and rational inquiry into the nature of the world—typified by the symphony’s famous “Ode to Joy” melody.

The Ninth is, famously, quite difficult to play, owing in part to the fact that Beethoven was almost entirely deaf when he composed it, and in part to the fact that the orchestras of the time simply were not good enough to perform it. The institution of the full-time, professional symphony orchestra did not exist during Beethoven’s time—like every institution, it had to be invented.

Probably no one in Beethoven’s lifetime—including, of course, Beethoven himself—ever heard the Ninth performed properly. The scale, ambition, and complexity of his music required new institutions to do Beethoven’s work justice. I have exceptionally specific opinions about how the Ninth should be performed, but many smart people disagree with me.

Though Beethoven ultimately sets the Ode to Joy melody to the lyrics of Friedrich Schiller’s poem of the same name, the movement begins with only the orchestra playing. In the opening seconds of the final movement, the bass section plays a motif that will later be repeated by a baritone singing lyrics Beethoven inserted into Schiller’s poem: “Oh friends, not these tones!”, referring to the first three movements of the symphony—the abstract macrohistory—and to the Big Bang-like explosion of noise that begins the fourth movement.

The orchestra then quotes the themes from the previous three movements, and each time, the bass section responds unhappily, almost sounding as though it is shaking its head “no.” Each of the bass section’s rebuttals to the orchestra quote the first few notes of the famous “Ode to Joy” melody—but angry-sounding. In this sense, the idea of the Ode to Joy emerges in opposition to all that came before it. The orchestra tries to mimic those first few notes of the melody, but the bass abruptly stops it. “Let me show you how it’s done,” the bass seems to say.

And then the bass section begins to play the “Ode to Joy” melody, quietly, a little unsure of itself, like it is uttering a forbidden prayer. It is shockingly common for even the best conductors in the world to play this too quickly, giving the melody a kind of nervousness that is not quite right. But if you play it too slowly, it just sounds stilted.

Then enter the violas and the clarinets, playing the theme along with the bass section. Things should pick up in speed and energy here. The orchestra should sound a little surer of its footing, yet still play with delicacy. The music should sound hopeful, but not triumphant. It should sound like a true believer who is trying to tell you something, but who is not sure whether the listener will like what he has to say. The believer has an idea that is still young, still fragile. The believer is trying his best to do it justice.

The violins come in next, and the orchestra by now should sound much surer of itself. Yet it should still retain the same fundamental uncertainty that characterized the bass when it was playing alone. It is still asking, not proclaiming. It is proposing an idea, rather than declaring its truth.

But then come the horns, and all together now, it is clear the Ode has triumphed. It should burst off the stage. If you close your eyes, you should be able to imagine the fans of a victorious sports team drunkenly belting this theme out, arms wrapped round one another, beer sloshing around in steins. It should be played like the anthem of our species that Beethoven so clearly intended it to be. It should positively swagger.

This progression is similar in structure to the spread of many ideas, good and bad, throughout history. And that makes sense: Beethoven intended the symphony to depict a struggle in the battle of ideas, along with many other things. It is hard, both in the concert hall and in real-world battle of ideas, to get the rhythm of a sequence like this just right.

But there is a group of people whose efforts remind me just a little of this progression, and I’m proud to count myself among them. It’s called, loosely, the “progress studies movement,” and we also are sick of the old tones. We, too, seek a new melody.

What is Progress Studies?

Progress studies began in earnest with a 2019 Atlantic essay called “We Need a New Science of Progress,” written by Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison and Marginal Revolution author Tyler Cowen (n.b.: Tyler is also Chairman of the Mercatus Center, where I work). The essay argued that there needed to be a new intellectual movement that studied the causes of material and civilizational progress. By understanding progress as a phenomenon, Collison and Cowen reasoned, we might be able to improve the organizations and institutions that facilitate progress, and thereby put an end to the “Great Stagnation,” or the period of technological and economic slowdown that Cowen argues have persisted since the 1970s.

I was an immediate kindred spirit, and I have tried, in various ways, to do my part over this last half-decade. I, and many others, suspected that it would be a generational project: if we lay the intellectual groundwork for progress now, I thought, perhaps in a few decades something would come of it.

But then something happened. I don’t quite know what it is. The reality of the west’s torpor, and its rising civilizational tension with China, became too obvious to ignore. COVID laid bare both the decrepitude of some of our institutions (the public health bureaucracy, for example) and the strength of others (the hyperscalers whose vast computing infrastructure enabled society to function, or the pharmaceutical firms whose mRNA vaccines were developed with astonishing speed). The attitude and posture of the technology industry changed as a result. And then, of course, there is the unexpectedly rapid progress in AI.

All of this, and much more besides, coalesced, and today the progress studies community finds itself with a real opportunity before it. Near-term success seems as though it could be on the table—it is, as Elon Musk said of SpaceX’s effort to catch the Starship booster as it plummeted back to Earth, “one of the possible outcomes.” Cowen himself has recently argued that the Great Stagnation is now over.

But that does not mean success will be easy. In a sense, the fact that our opportunity has come sooner than many of us expected makes some things harder. We have a lot of work to compress into a short period of time, and there is quite a bit that will have to go right. Imagine, for example, that AI will soon be able to rapidly accelerate scientific research. That would be something to celebrate, but on its own, it does not mean that all the fruits of that science will be commercialized in ways that improve human material welfare. It turns out, in fact, that taking knowledge from the lab to the factory to the consumer is a staggeringly difficult problem, that many great ideas fail as a result, and that the causes of this problem are economic, social, and legal.

Many people in the progress studies world have studied this problem and have sophisticated ideas for how to solve parts of it. Some are being implemented, some exist only on paper. It is time to bring many more of our own ideas—on this specific problem and many others—out of the lab and into the harsh light of the real world. It is, as they say, show time.

The Progress Conference

None of this is news to most people who attended the Root’s of Progress Institute’s Progress Conference, which I attended this past weekend as part of my participation in the Institute’s Blog-Building Intensive (which I strongly recommend if you are a newish writer interested in progress-related issues). Indeed, part of what made it such an exceptional event was the palpable sense of urgency in every panel, every keynote, and every impromptu debate.

Also contributing a great deal was the event venue: Lighthaven in Berkeley, California. With its dozens, if not more, of tiny nooks, private rooms, and large gathering spaces, it was the perfect place to facilitate spontaneous conversations of all sizes. A one-on-one discussion I had with someone turned into a five-person conversation, and then, eventually, into a surprise debate on AI existential risk, with what felt like 40 people watching. Not a second of it was planned.  

That original article by Collison and Cowen envisioned progress studies as something more like an academic discipline, with new departments in universities. But in an interview at the Progress Conference, Collison remarked that progress studies has grown into a vibe more than it has a traditional academic field. In part, I suspect this is because the movement attracts founders, tech industry executives, and others from the private sector at a much higher rate than most academic fields. In a sense, a startup is a kind of progress studies experiment. If people like Tyler Cowen are the theoreticians of progress, startups are (some of) its practitioners.

Many of us agree about quite a bit: almost everyone likes nuclear energy, mRNA-based therapeutics, gene-edited food, space travel, and capitalism. Almost everyone thinks we should fix FDA clinical trials and reform our environmental permitting system. Enthusiastic agreement about many things abounded—a surprising fact given that progress studies is an eclectic mix of libertarians, center-left thinkers, technologists, effective altruists (gasp!), and rationalists (it is worth noting that Lighthaven is owned by the same organization that owns the rationalist community LessWrong, founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky, the grandfather of AI doomers).

The Tension Within

If you know anything about the groups I just mentioned, it will not surprise you that the most salient source of disagreement within progress studies is the question of what, exactly, we should do about AI.  

I suspect this is at least partially because many of the major figures who think about AI risks started doing so—informally, at least—a decade or so ago, before it was quite “real.” As individuals and as a broad “AI safety community,” they have built up quite a bit of theory, heuristics, lore, metaphors, and related intellectual infrastructure about the risks and the trajectory of AI. With so much prior art, it can be hard to step back and evaluate AI, as it actually exists today, on its own terms. Yet now, their ideas are making contact with reality. That means now is a good time to reflect, amend, or altogether throw out those ideas that perform poorly.

Maybe centralizing AI development through public policy was not such a great idea, after all. Maybe openness trumps secrecy at least some of the time. Maybe it was not so wise to attack open-source AI. Maybe the political economy of AI regulation is trickier than you thought, and will take much more work to get right. Maybe the empirical evidence for existential risk is not nearly as strong as the theories of a decade ago suggested. Maybe the bottlenecks to using AI to transform the world will be much more formidable than almost everyone expects, and maybe this, too, has implications for AI risks. Perhaps those bottlenecks, which are one of the major reason progress studies exists in the first place, will not magically go away just because powerful AI exists.  

Alternatively, maybe there are real risks that are not obviously solved by a pure laissez-faire approach to AI, and maybe, at the very least, it is valuable to have influential people and organizations who concentrate on evaluating and mitigating those risks. Maybe it is a bit harder than you think to adjudicate what is and is not “science fiction” in a world where a centibillionaire’s space exploration company catches skyscraper-sized rockets out of the sky as they plummet toward the Earth. The objective of techno-optimist intellectual movements—progress studies, e/acc, whatever else—is to make science fiction a reality, after all. Maybe it would be wiser to view those who consider serious AI risks as an essential part of an equilibrium we are still trying to find, even if their first and second draft policy proposals were profoundly suboptimal.

Whatever your belief on AI risks and policy has been, there is a good chance that the last year or two has given you ample new evidence on which to draw. I suspect it would be wise, at this still early stage in AI, to simply have the humility to admit where you now realize you may have been wrong.

But another reason that AI is the source of the largest disagreements within progress studies is that AI is, to put it simply, “the big one.” Many people within progress studies believe it will be an epochal technology, ushering in not just an industrial revolution but a new era in human affairs. I suspect those who do not will change their minds soon. And when you are facing a new epoch, all sorts of bad outcomes are on the table. I view “getting AI right” as a grand challenge for both our society in general and for progress studies in particular.

Conclusion

We may well fail in some important ways. We could even fail altogether. The rhythm is hard to get just right. The scale, ambition, and complexity of the technologies our species will soon create will require new institutions to do them justice. I have exceptionally specific opinions about how it should go, but many smart people disagree with me.

Much is uncertain, but this much I know: I’m sick of the old tones, and I like the melody I heard at Lighthaven very much. Our melody is still young, and it is more fragile than even we realize. But I think it will sound quite nice if we can get the whole orchestra to join us.

Thanks to Jason Crawford, Heike Larson, and Emma McAleavy for their outstanding orchestration.