Faster, Please! — The Podcast

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:Anxiety is running rampant about the future of artificial intelligence and its place in society. When technology CEOs warn of an impending white-collar jobpocalypse (or jobageddon, if you prefer), it’s no wonder public pessimism is so widespread. Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, I chat with tech policy analyst Dean Ball to help us sift through some of the uncertainty.We talk about recursive self-improvement, the role of AI in everything from medicine to defense, and what to think about the possible growing risk of AI company nationalization.(FYI: Our chat occurred just before the White House released new guidelines for AI federal legislation, about which Ball opined on X/Twitter: “The White House’s proposal for a nationwide AI law is a thoughtful document that will serve as an excellent foundation for the legislative work ahead. I would be happy to see these principles, if translated well into statute, become law.”) Ball is a senior fellow at FAI, the Foundation for American Innovation. He recently served as senior policy advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as strategic advisor for AI at the National Science Foundation. He was previously a research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a policy fellow at Fathom. He’s also the author of the excellent Hyperdimensional Substack newsletter.In This Episode* Public pessimism (1:37)* Differing narratives (4:21)* The nationalization risk (16:15)* Accountability via audit (25:55)* Productivity projection (34:18)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:Headlines portend rising seas, raging storms, and a planet in crisis. It’s easy to feel like the future is something to fear; however, the key to cooling things down isn’t scaling civilization back. If the world wants to cut back on carbon emissions without sacrificing growth, the answer lies in bold innovation. A sustainable tomorrow requires smart energy investment and long-term thinking today.On this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Roger Pielke Jr. about the ever-evolving discussion around climate change. We talk about the benefits of embracing new energy technology and identifying some easy wins.Pielke is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where his research focuses on science and technology policy. He is also a professor emeritus at University of Colorado Boulder, a distinguished fellow at Japan’s Institute of Energy Economics, a research associate with Risk Frontiers in Australia, and an honorary professor at University College London. Pielke has authored and edited several books, including The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming. He also writes The Honest Broker Substack.In This Episode* The Shale Story (1:42)* Unknown Unknowns (7:42)* The Weather Forecast (14:19)* Alternate History (25:23)* The Path Forward (28:25)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:Since humanity’s beginning, we’ve been pondering about our end. From war, to disease, to divine reckoning, the means of our destruction seem endless. The advent of the atomic bomb, concerns around climate change, and now AI have prompted many to wonder whether our demise will be random, or if it will come as the result of our own actions.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Dorian Lynskey about the way we talk about the end times. We discuss whether catastrophizing leads to action or paralysis and the role of hope in our narratives.Lynskey is a prolific journalist and the author of three books. His most recent: Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, which was released last month in the US. He also co-hosts two podcasts, Origin Story and Oh God, What Now?.In This Episode* Scare Tactics (1:32)* Effects of Hopefulness (10:25)* AI Doomsayers (17:01)* Countdown to Catastrophe (21:15)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:The human pursuit of progress stems from our desire for security and a higher quality of life. Yet, even as today’s advanced economies are the richest and most comfortable they’ve ever been, something is amiss. What explains the decline in R&D growth, mental health, and birth rates, just to name a few challenges?In his new book, The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing, author Brink Lindsey identifies the critical gap between material abundance and abundant human flourishing.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Brink and I chat about what constitutes a truly healthy society, beyond surface-level affluence. We identify the conditions for continual progress after our basic needs have been met and far exceeded.Linsey is a senior vice president at the Niskanen Center. He previously served as vice president for research at the Cato Institute and as a senior scholar at the Kauffman Foundation. He has authored and co-authored six books on economics and culture, and is the author of his own Substack, also titled The Permanent Problem.In This Episode* More of everything . . . !? (1:54)* Falling fertility (7:31)* What we’ve lost (10:20)* Evaluating flourishing (13:13)* A culture of growth (20:24)* Future-world problems (28:04)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:Headlines abound with news of the coming nuclear renaissance — a long-awaited era of clean, abundant energy to power our future. But this is hardly the first time the media has heralded the dawn of the atomic age. Still, this round of nuclear optimism is seeing unprecedented corporate investment, more cost-effective modular reactors, and a greater sense of political consensus.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Jessica Lovering about past obstacles to growth, and what we might expect from the US going forward.Lovering is an advocate for nuclear power currently based in Sweden. She is the co-founder and former executive director of the Good Energy Collective, as well as a senior fellow with the Nuclear Innovation Alliance and the Energy for Growth Hub. She also authors her own Substack, Nuclear Power to the People.In This Episode* The lost Atomic Age (1:30)* To regulate or not to regulate (8:26)* Reactor capacity past and future (10:44)* The economics of nuclear (14:51)* Power projection (18:32)* The new nuclear status quo (24:04)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:NASA is attempting the difficult task of juggling highly ambitious goals, but also possibly intense budget cuts. Despite personnel losses and unclear leadership, the administration is racing to put humans on the Moon — ideally ahead of China — and then Mars.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I’m chatting with Casey Dreier about this complicated new era in NASA’s history. We’ll discuss whether or not we’re really in a space race, what to make of the differing visions of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and the rise of planetary defense.Dreier is chief of space policy at The Planetary Society where he advocates for planetary exploration, defense, and the search for extraterrestrial life. He has been featured in major publications from The New York Times to the Washington Post, and hosts his own podcast, Planetary Radio: Space Policy Edition.In This Episode* The return of Isaacman (1:32)* Ditch the Space Race (7:42)* Visions of space (14:48)* Planetary defense (21:23)* Proceed with optimism (24:51)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:What really gets AI optimists excited isn’t the prospect of automating customer service departments or human resources. Imagine, rather, what might happen to the pace of scientific progress if AI becomes a super research assistant. Tom Davidson’s new paper, How Quick and Big Would a Software Intelligence Explosion Be?, explores that very scenario.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Davidson about what it would mean for automated AI researchers to rapidly improve their own algorithms, thus creating a self-reinforcing loop of innovation. We talk about the economic effects of self-improving AI research and how close we are to that reality.Davidson is a senior research fellow at Forethought, where he explores AI and explosive growth. He was previously a senior research fellow at Open Philanthropy and a research scientist at the UK government’s AI Security Institute.In This Episode* Making human minds (1:43)* Theory to reality (6:45)* The world with automated research (10:59)* Considering constraints (16:30)* Worries and what-ifs (19:07)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Making human minds (1:43). . . you don’t have to build any more computer chips, you don’t have to build any more fabs . . . In fact, you don’t have to do anything at all in the physical world.Pethokoukis: A few years ago, you wrote a paper called “Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth?,” which argued that growth could accelerate dramatically if AI would start generating ideas the way human researchers once did. In your view, population growth historically powered kind of an ideas feedback loop. More people meant more researchers meant more ideas, rising incomes, but that loop broke after the demographic transition in the late-19th century but you suggest that AI could restart it: more ideas, more output, more AI, more ideas. Does this new paper in a way build upon that paper? “How quick and big would a software intelligence explosion be?”The first paper you referred to is about the biggest-picture dynamic of economic growth. As you said, throughout the long run history, when we produced more food, the population increased. That additional output transferred itself into more people, more workers. These days that doesn’t happen. When GDP goes up, that doesn’t mean people have more kids. In fact, the demographic transition, the richer people get, the fewer kids they have. So now we’ve got more output, we’re getting even fewer people as a result, so that’s been blocked.This first paper is basically saying, look, if we can manufacture human minds or human-equivalent minds in any way, be it by building more computer chips, or making better computer chips, or any way at all, then that feedback loop gets going again. Because if we can manufacture more human minds, then we can spend output again to create more workers. That’s the first paper.The second paper double clicks on one specific way that we can use output to create more human minds. It’s actually, in a way, the scariest way because it’s the way of creating human minds which can happen the quickest. So this is the way where you don’t have to build any more computer chips, you don’t have to build any more fabs, as they’re called, these big factories that make computer chips. In fact, you don’t have to do anything at all in the physical world.It seems like most of the conversation has been about how much investment is going to go into building how many new data centers, and that seems like that is almost the entire conversation, in a way, at the moment. But you’re not looking at compute, you’re looking at software.Exactly, software. So the idea is you don’t have to build anything. You’ve already got loads of computer chips and you just make the algorithms that run the AIs on those computer chips more efficient. This is already happening, but it isn’t yet a big deal because AI isn’t that capable. But already, one year out, Epoch, this AI forecasting organization, estimates that just in one year, it becomes 10 times to 1000 times cheaper to run the same AI system. Just wait 12 months, and suddenly, for the same budget, you are able to run 10 times as many AI systems, or maybe even 1000 times as many for their most aggressive estimate. As I said, not a big deal today, but if we then develop an AI system which is better than any human at doing research, then now, in 10 months, you haven’t built anything, but you’ve got 10 times as many researchers that you can set to work or even more than that. So then we get this feedback loop where you make some research progress, you improve your algorithms, now you’ve got loads more researchers, you set them all to work again, finding even more algorithmic improvements. So today we’ve got maybe a few hundred people that are advancing state-of-the-art AI algorithms.I think they’re all getting paid a billion dollars a person, too.Exac

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,China’s spacefaring ambitions pose tough competition for America. With a focused, centralized program, Beijing seems likely to land taikonauts on the moon before another American flag is planted. Meanwhile, NASA faces budget cuts, leadership gaps, and technical setbacks. In his new book, journalist Christian Davenport chronicles the fierce rivalry between American firms, mainly SpaceX and Blue Origin. It’s a contest that, despite the challenges, promises to propel humanity to the moon, Mars, and maybe beyond.Davenport is an author and a reporter for the Washington Post, where he covers NASA and the space industry. His new book, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race, is out now.In This Episode* Check-in on NASA (1:28)* Losing the Space Race (5:49)* A fatal flaw (9:31)* State of play (13:33)* The long-term vision (18:37)* The pace of progress (22:50)* Friendly competition (24:53)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Check-in on NASA (1:28)The Chinese tend to do what they say they’re going to do on the timeline that they say they’re going to do it. That said, they haven’t gone to the moon . . . It’s really hard.Pethokoukis: As someone — and I’m speaking about myself — who wants to get America back to the moon as soon as possible, get cooking on getting humans to Mars for the first time, what should I make of what’s happening at NASA right now?They don’t have a lander. I’m not sure the rocket itself is ready to go all the way, we’ll find out some more fairly soon with Artemis II. We have flux with leadership, maybe it’s going to not be an independent-like agency anymore, it’s going to join the Department of Transportation.It all seems a little chaotic. I’m a little worried. Should I be?Davenport: Yes, I think you should be. And I think a lot of the American public isn’t paying attention and they’re going to see the Artemis II mission, which you mentioned, and that’s that mission to send a crew of astronauts around the moon. It won’t land on the moon, but it’ll go around, and I think if that goes well, NASA’s going to take a victory leap. But as you correctly point out, that is a far cry from getting astronauts back on the lunar surface.The lander isn’t ready. SpaceX, as acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy just said, is far behind, reversing himself from like a month earlier when he said no, they appear to be on track, but everybody knew that they were well behind because they’ve had 11 test flights, and they still haven’t made it to orbit with their Starship rocket.The rocket itself that’s going to launch them into the vicinity of the moon, the SLS, launches about once every two years. It’s incredibly expensive, it’s not reusable, and there are problems within the agency itself. There are deep cuts to it. A lot of expertise is taking early retirements. It doesn’t have a full-time leader. It hasn’t had a full-time leader since Trump won the election. At the same time, they’re sort of beating the drum saying we’re going to beat the Chinese back to the lunar surface, but I think a lot of people are increasingly looking at that with some serious concern and doubt.For what it’s worth, when I looked at the betting markets, it gave the Chinese a two-to-one edge. It said that it was about a 65 percent chance they were going to get there first. Does that sound about right to you?I’m not much of a betting man, but I do think there’s a very good chance. The Chinese tend to do what they say they’re going to do on the timeline that they say they’re going to do it. That said, they haven’t gone to the moon, they haven’t done this. It’s really hard. They’re much more secretive, if they have setbacks and delays, we don’t necessarily know about them. But they’ve shown over the last 10, 20 years how capable they are. They have a space station in low earth orbit. They’ve operated a rover on Mars. They’ve gone to the far side of the moon twice, which nobody has done, and brought back a sample return. They’ve shown the ability to keep people alive in space for extended periods of times on the space station.The moon seems within their capabilities and they’re saying they’re going to do it by 2030, and they don’t have the nettlesome problem of democracy where you’ve got one party come in and changing the budget, changing the direction for NASA, changing leadership. They’ve just set the moon — and, by the way, the south pole of the moon, which is where we want to go as well — as the destination and have been beating a path toward that for several years now.Is there anyone for merging NASA into the Department of Transportation? Is there a hidden reservoir? Is that an idea people have been talking about now that’s suddenly emerged to the surface?It’s not something that I particularly heard. The FAA is going to regulate the launches, and they coordinate with the airspace and make sure that the air traffic goes around i

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,Some Faster, Please! readers have told me I spend too little time on the downsides of AI. If you’re one of those folks, today is your day. On this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with self-described “free-market AI doomer” James Miller. Miller and I talk about the risks inherent with super-smart AI, some possible outcomes of a world of artificial general intelligence, and why government seems uninterested in the existential risk conversation.Miller is a professor at Smith College where he teaches law and economics, game theory, and the economics of future technology. He has his own podcast, Future Strategist, and a great YouTube series on game theory and intro to microeconomics. On X (Twitter), you can find him at @JimDMiller.In This Episode* Questioning the free market (1:33)* Reading the markets (7:24)* Death (or worse) by AI (10:25)* Friend and foe (13:05)* Pumping the breaks (20:36)* The only policy issue (24:32)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Questioning the free market (1:33)Most technologies have gone fairly well and we adapt . . . I’m of the belief that this is different.Pethokoukis: What does it mean to be a free-market AI doomer and why do you think it’s important to put in the “free-market” descriptor?Miller: It really means to be very confused. I’m 58, and I was basically one of the socialists when I was young, studied markets, became a committed free-market person, think they’re great for economic growth, great for making everyone better off — and then I became an AI doomer, like wait, markets are pushing us towards more and more technology, but I happen to think that AI is eventually going to lead to destruction of humanity. So it means to kind of reverse everything — I guess it’s the equivalent of losing faith in your religion.Is this a post-ChatGPT, November 2022 phenomenon?Well, I’ve lost hope since then. The analogy is we’re on a plane, we don’t know how to land, but hopefully we’ll be able to fly for quite a bit longer before we have to. Now I think we’ve got to land soon and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way of doing it. So yeah, the faster AI has gone — and certainly ChatGPT has been an amazing advance — the less time I think we have and the less time I think we can get it right. What really scared me, though, was the Chinese LLMs. I think you really need coordination among all the players and it’s going to be so much harder to coordinate now that we absolutely need China to be involved, in my opinion, to have any hope of surviving for the next decade.When I speak to people from Silicon Valley, there may be some difference about timelines, but there seems to be little doubt that — whether it’s the end of the 2020s or the end of the 2030s — there will be a technology worthy of being called artificial general intelligence or superintelligence.Certainly, I feel like when I talk to economists, whether it’s on Wall Street or in Washington, think tanks, they tend to speak about AI as a general purpose technology like the computer, the internet, electricity, in short, something we’ve seen before and there’s, and as far as something beyond that, certainly the skepticism is far higher. What are your fellow economists who aren’t in California missing?I think you’re properly characterizing it, I’m definitely an outlier. Most technologies have gone fairly well and we adapt, and economists believe in the difference between the seen and the unseen. It’s really easy to see how technologies, for example, can destroy jobs — harder to see new jobs that get created, but new jobs keep getting created. I’m of the belief that this is different. The best way to predict the future is to go by trends, and I fully admit, if you go by trends, you shouldn’t be an AI doomer — but not all trends apply.I think that’s why economists were much better at modeling the past and modeling old technologies. They’re naturally thinking this is going to be similar, but I don’t think that it is, and I think the key difference is that we’re not going to be in control. We’re creating something smarter than us. So it’s not like having a better rifle and saying it’ll be like old rifles — it’s like, “Hey, let’s have mercenaries run our entire army.” That creates a whole new set of risks that having better rifles does not.I’m certainly not a computer scientist, I would never call myself a technologist, so I’m very cautious about making any kind of predictions about what this technology can be, where it can go. Why do you seem fairly certain that we’re going to get at a point where we will have a technology beyond our control? Set aside whether it will mean a bad thing happens, why are you confident that the technology itself will be worthy of being called general intelligence or superintelligence?Looking at the trends, Scott Aronson, who is one of the top computer scientists in the world just on Twitter a few days ago, was mentioning how G

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,For most of history, stagnation — not growth — was the rule. To explain why prosperity so often stalls, economist Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping tour through a millennium of innovation and upheaval, showing how societies either harness — or are undone by — waves of technological change. His message is sobering: an AI revolution is no guarantee of a new age of progress.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Frey about why societies midjudge their trajectory and what it takes to reignite lasting growth.Frey is a professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and a fellow of Mansfield College, University of Oxford. He is the director of the Future of Work Programme and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School.He is the author of several books, including the brand new one, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations.In This Episode* The end of progress? (1:28)* A history of Chinese innovation (8:26)* Global competitive intensity (11:41)* Competitive problems in the US (15:50)* Lagging European progress (22:19)* AI & labor (25:46)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. The end of progress? (1:28). . . once you exploit a technology, the processes that aid that run into diminishing returns, you have a lot of incumbents, you have some vested interests around established technologies, and you need something new to revive growth.Pethokoukis: Since 2020, we’ve seen the emergence of generative AI, mRNA vaccines, reusable rockets that have returned America to space, we’re seeing this ongoing nuclear renaissance including advanced technologies, maybe even fusion, geothermal, the expansion of solar — there seems to be a lot cooking. Is worrying about the end of progress a bit too preemptive?Frey: Well in a way, it’s always a bit too preemptive to worry about the future: You don’t know what’s going to come. But let me put it this way: If you had told me back in 1995 — and if I was a little bit older then — that computers and the internet would lead to a decade streak of productivity growth and then peter out, I would probably have thought you nuts because it’s hard to think about anything that is more consequential. Computers have essentially given people the world’s store of knowledge basically in their pockets. The internet has enabled us to connect inventors and scientists around the world. There are few tools that aided the research process more. There should hardly be any technology that has done more to boost scientific discovery, and yet we don’t see it.We don’t see it in the aggregate productivity statistics, so that petered out after a decade. Research productivity is in decline. Measures of breakthrough innovation is in decline. So it’s always good to be optimistic, I guess, and I agree with you that, when you say AI and when you read about many of the things that are happening now, it’s very, very exciting, but I remain somewhat skeptical that we are actually going to see that leading to a huge revival of economic growth.I would just be surprised if we don’t see any upsurge at all, to be clear, but we do have global productivity stagnation right now. It’s not just Europe, it’s not just Britain. The US is not doing too well either over the past two decades or so. China’s productivity is probably in the negative territory or stagnant, by more optimistic measures, and so we’re having a growth problem.If tech progress were inevitable, why have predictions from the ’90s, and certainly earlier decades like the ’50s and ’60s, about transformative breakthroughs and really fast economic growth by now, consistently failed to materialize? How does your thesis account for why those visions of rapid growth and progress have fallen short?I’m not sure if my thesis explains why those expectations didn’t materialize, but I’m hopeful that I do provide some framework for thinking about why we’ve often seen historically rapid growth spurts followed by stagnation and even decline. The story I’m telling is not rocket science, exactly. It’s basically built on the simple intuitions that once you exploit a technology, the processes that aid that run into diminishing returns, you have a lot of incumbents, you have some vested interests around established technologies, and you need something new to revive growth.So for example, the Soviet Union actually did reasonably well in terms of economic growth. A lot of it, or most of it, was centered on heavy industry, I should say. So people didn’t necessarily see the benefits in their pockets, but the economy grew rapidly for about four decades or so, then growth petered out, and eventually it collapsed. So for exploiting mass-production technologies, the Soviet system worked reasonably well. Soviet bureaucrats could hold factory managers accountable by benchmarking performance across factories.But that became much harder when something new was needed because whe