Jason Crawford on The Techno-Humanist Manifesto

Samuel Arbesman:

Jason, great to be chatting with you and welcome to the Orthogonal Bet. You've been writing at Roots of Progress for years now, and it's gone from small blog to an entire organization at this point. I think maybe the best place to start then would be actually discuss your path of how you started thinking about progress, how you ended up writing the blog, and how it kind of led you to what you're doing and building now.

Jason Crawford:

Yeah, sure. So first, thanks for having me. Great to be talking to you again, Sam. I have been writing The Roots of Progress as a blog for eight years now. I began in early 2017. Over time, it went from an intellectual hobby of mine, a side project part-time to my full-time focus, and then to a full-fledged cultural institute building a culture of progress for the 21st century and beyond. So it was a long organic journey. Everything sort of evolved very naturally. I got interested in progress in late 2016, early 2017. From a basic perspective, just thinking about what I knew of history and how much progress had happened in just the last few hundred years, how much living standards had improved, how much better life had gotten in so many ways, and just thinking, "Wow, this is about the best thing that ever happened to humanity."

And so if you care about humanity, you ought to care about one, how did that happen? Two, why did it take so long to get started in world historical terms that hockey stick of economic growth, and three, how can we keep it going into the future? Is this a trend that can be sustained? And ultimately, I wanted get to what are the underlying causes, what are the root causes? And that's why I called my blog when I started at The Roots of Progress. So for a few years I was just writing about this and had a very small audience for the first couple of years, and then it was mid 2019 that one, my audience started to grow through some viral hits that I had and getting a bigger audience for the blog. But then also soon after that, the progress movement kind of was kicked off by this article in The Atlantic that coined the term progress studies by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen.

And that piece kind of galvanized this movement. All of a sudden there were dozens of authors, journalists, academics, bloggers, and folks who were kind of looking around at each other and saying, "Yeah, actually progress is underrated. There's a progress movement. Count me in." And so when you have dozens of people saying, "If there's a movement, count me in." Well, that's the beginnings of a movement. So things got started from there, and then soon after that I decided to quit the tech industry where I had worked for almost 20 years. My background's in software engineering. I used to be a tech startup co-founder, but I left all that to go follow what I was absolutely obsessed with at the time and remain obsessed with, which was this understanding of progress. And so I went full-time on at first just continuing to write the blog, but then a couple years in, it was clear there really needed to be some movement building here.

There needed to be events, gatherings. There needed to be much more... There was a ton of writing that needed to be done much more than one person could ever do. And so somebody needed to support that happening. And ultimately there was a full cultural mindset shift that had to happen. Just looking back on the 20th century and early 21st, I think the last 50 years or so plus have been a period with a lot of fear, skepticism around the very concept of progress and whether that's a thing. We used to believe in progress in an important sense in 20th century, in the late 19th century and the early to, at least to the mid 20th century, as late as the 1960s, we were dreaming of flying cars and moon bases and making the desert bloom through nuclear power. And ever since the 1970s or so, there's been again, a lot more sort of fear and skepticism around the very concept of making life better through science and technology.

And so I think that has really played itself out. We've seen what creating a vetocracy has done to our economy and to our world. I think it is time for a change. I think the world is ripe for a reset. We need not to go back to some of the views of the past, which were definitely naive in some crucial ways, but to go forward with a new synthesis, to kind of revive a belief in the basic possibility of progress, hopefully learn the lessons of the 20th century about what went wrong and how to move forward rather than stagnating.

And so that's what we're doing. In the last couple of years, Roots of Progress has grown into a full-fledged cultural institute. In fact, last year we rebranded as The Roots of Progress Institute with a new logo and a website. We now run a fellowship program that supports progress writers. We host a big annual progress conference, the first one of which was last October in Berkeley, and I'm now working on a book, The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, laying out my philosophy of progress, kind of underlying or animating set of ideas behind all of this. So that's where things stand as of early 2025.

Samuel Arbesman:

Just out of curiosity, I find the term cultural institute very evocative. How would you define what that means exactly?

Jason Crawford:

I mean, it's a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing about a mindset shift, establishing a new philosophy of progress in terms of our basic attitudes towards progress and its role in the world, and whether it's a good thing that we want, whether it's something we believe can continue into the future and ultimately what society should do about it.

Samuel Arbesman:

Related to that, you mentioned, and there's this fellowship to promote and support people who are writing about progress, and you said one of the early goals of kind of going full-time with your blog was to do more writing around this kind of thing and you're writing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. A lot of this is around writing. I'd love to hear your philosophy on how writing changes the ideas around progress, I mean because I agree that I think it can, but there's also, to a certain degree, I could see some people arguing there could be a trade-off between doers and thinkers and writers. How do you think about the role of writing and the fellowship, your own writing, all these different kinds of things within the progress movement?

Jason Crawford:

Yeah, there's totally a trade-off and there's a division of labor. We couldn't have all thinkers or all writers or else nothing else would ever get done. But when all you have is all doers, then there is a crucial sort of set of questions which is left unanswered, which is why are we doing this and what justifies it and what are we going after and what is the goal? And what about all these objections that people are raising? And so doers, they need a creed, they need some set of answers to those questions. They need some basic philosophic ideas about what is our goal? Why are we doing this? What justifies it? And so that's why someone needs to say something about progress and why we need to write about it. Not to mention we need to continually inspire new generations of doers to come along and do the right things, and we need to point people's talent and ambition and energy towards the most worthy goals.

And so writing and speaking can serve all of those. So maybe I can sort of explain a little bit like my theory of change, my model of how this works and how ideas affect the world and affect progress in particular, I think of ideas as affecting change both sort of top down and bottom up. So top down from by directly influencing leaders of various kinds and then bottom up by influencing public opinion or the zeitgeist. So the top down, when I think of the leaders, well, who are the individuals who actually lead change that's relevant to progress? Well, they're scientists who launch new research programs, inventors, and engineers who create and develop new technologies, founders who create new ventures, investors who decide where to put the money, and policy leaders who sort of make the law and regulation that governs all of this stuff.

Those folks tend to be relatively intellectual as a bunch. And they read books. They listen to long-form podcasts, they read long technical, wonky Substacks. They directly sort of ingest ideas from intellectual thinkers. And so by writing and speaking, you can influence them directly. And I mean, that can be all sorts of things. That can be a philosophy, like what I'm writing about with The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. It can be specific policy proposals for how things should be regulated. It can be a technological vision like Eric Drexler's early books on nanotech. It can be all sorts of things. Then the bottom-up component is that anything a leader wants to do, any program is going to be affected by either headwinds or tailwinds from public opinion, if any. Public opinion is not determinative of what happens, leaders can often make things happen against public opinion, or sometimes even things that are popular don't happen because they didn't have the right leadership.

But I do believe that when public opinion is for something, strongly for something, it makes it more likely. And if it's against something, makes it less likely. And maybe in the extremes, public opinion can make things either impossible or inevitable. Then you have to ask yourself, well, where does public opinion come from? And the public, it turns out largely doesn't read books, and they don't listen to the three-hour podcasts or read the long Substacks and so forth. So where are they getting their ideas from? And it turns out the answer is indirectly. So they get their ideas, I think ultimately from these sources, from books and so forth, but via media, education, entertainment, social media, even journalism, film and television, these sort of cultural channels for ideas.

But then if you back up and say, "Well, who creates those things?" Well, ultimately, the filmmakers and the screenwriters, the journalists, the educators, the textbook writers, and curriculum developers, they are all in that intellectual class who also reads the books and listens to the podcast and so forth. So ideas can sort of directly influence the people who are creating all these cultural products that then go out in sort of a second tier of communication out to the broader world. So that's my model of change and how ideas can originate in relatively intellectual sources, sometimes academia, sometimes outside of academia, but in long form intellectual writing and then ultimately change the world.

Samuel Arbesman:

Okay. No, I love that. Well, I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that books should have an impact.

Jason Crawford:

And empirically they do. And if you say like, where did the environmentalist movement come from? Which largely set our current mindset of the relationship of technology to human life and how we're going to-

Samuel Arbesman:

It was like Silent Spring, I guess?

Jason Crawford:

Yeah, Silent Spring is one key text, but it wasn't even the first. There were William Vogt was writing Road to Survival and other texts in the '40s. There was Leopold, there were a bunch of folks, the Ehrlich's, obviously all the people were writing about overpopulation. But yeah, it was books. And then the books get turned into, Paul Ehrlich went on Johnny Carson's show to talk about The Population Bomb, right? Carson's Silent Spring got turned into a miniseries, I think through CBS. So sometimes the books get digested into more popular forms, but the books are absolutely where it originates.

Samuel Arbesman:

I guess that leads us to the book you're writing, you're writing it in public, which is a really interesting thing, and I'd like to actually hear a little bit more about that decision. But I'd love to hear about your goal with The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, where it is right now, what you're planning on doing with it as it continues to be published.

Jason Crawford:

My goal with The Techno-Humanist Manifesto is to lay out in one readable, relatively concise volume, my philosophy of progress, my answers to the questions, what is progress? Is progress good? Can progress continue? And what should society do about it? What should our culture of progress be?

Samuel Arbesman:

And just to be clear, the answers to those questions, that's what you mean by a philosophy of progress.

Jason Crawford:

I think those are the core questions that make up what I'm calling philosophy of progress. I mean, I want to put this out there as a cornerstone of the progress movement. I want to plant a flag in a certain sense and just say, okay, look, here's a set of ideas that people can point to that they can discuss. If you like these ideas, you can rally around them. If you don't like them, you can aim your cannons at them and argue against me. That's fine. Let's have a healthy debate about it. But I want that sort of a relatively coherent set of ideas around these questions to be out there. And I don't think there's anything out there that's comparable right now. And in fact, I think the debate about progress has really heated up a lot in the last couple of years. And I see people looking for a new philosophy of progress groping about finding whatever they can find, and I think there needs to be more and better ideas out there.

Samuel Arbesman:

And so far, has it inspired folks in the progress movement? Has it created a lot of debate? Have a lot of people attacked you so far, I mean which I guess could be actually a good thing because it means you're actually sparking discussion. What has been the reception so far?

Jason Crawford:

It's early. So I've only put out the first four chapters of the book so far out of I think a planned 11. So I'm about a third of the way through it. Yeah, it's been good. I mean, I've gotten more views on this than anything else that I've put out. I think it's still early. And I think the bigger impacts will come when this gets published as a book and there's a launch in campaign around it.

Samuel Arbesman:

I guess also related to the philosophy of progress, you were mentioning how early on Roots of Progress you had been writing just about various features of progress and how we got to where we are. And I remember one of your, I think, early viral hits was about the invention of the bicycle. I think that might've actually been my first exposure to your writing, and it was great, but it was also very, I guess granular in terms of it was kind focusing on a detail in the world of progress and kind of history of technology. And The Techno-Humanist Manifesto is much more, I mean, it has a lot of details, but it's also a lot more big picture. How do you think about the balance there in terms of your writing as well as what is needed to articulate an argument in favor of progress?

Jason Crawford:

So I was always interested in the big picture, which is why I called the blog The Roots of Progress and said from the beginning, "This is my goal." But also, I knew from the beginning that I knew very little about the topic, and I thought the place to start was with case studies, concrete details. I mean, if you want to explain where progress comes from, I think the first thing you have to understand and sort of say is what is progress? And literally what did it consist of? So I knew when I began the project at a high level, some things like, well, GDP has gone up. What does that really mean? Life expectancy has gone up. We produce more food now. Okay, what were we doing "wrong", quote unquote, in the past that we didn't produce as much food? Like, what "mistakes" were we making? Again, quote unquote. I mean, or putting it positively, what did we learn?

What were the actual improvements, step-by-step? I had a vague idea that the Industrial Revolution had something to do with steam engines and coal and steel and trains and railroads. But what was it really? And I was extremely ignorant when I began on this project. I mean, I actually thought that steel was basically invented in the Industrial Revolution. I quickly found out that was false. I had no idea what smelting was. So I knew I had to start by just educating myself on the very object-level, concrete details of literally what happened, what is there to be explained.

And so the first number of years of this project were just me reading up on a lot of the basic background stuff. And so that's why a lot of the early essays were just literally things like, what is charcoal and where does steel come from? That bicycle essay that you mentioned, that came out of just a question that I forget how it popped into my head, but I asked it on the social network, formerly known as Twitter. I said, why did we wait so long for the bicycle? Why weren't bicycles invented until the late 1800s or something, even when... It didn't obviously depend on some scientific breakthrough, right? It's not like electricity where the light bulb maybe we needed.

Samuel Arbesman:

And we had wheels and gears and things like that. Yeah, far earlier.

Jason Crawford:

Physics, yeah, there were wheels, there were gears, there was metal, there was all kinds of stuff. Mechanical machines had been around for a long time. So why did we take so long to get the bicycle? And a bunch of people replied and pointed me to things, and I did some more research, and I just wasn't satisfied with any of the answers. And so then I wrote up my take on it. So over time, as I've learned more of the details and as I've gotten more of an overview, I mean now I can paint for you the entire outline of the history of technological development for humanity. And I feel reasonably confident that I'm not missing any huge pieces. I've read enough now. So as that has happened, I have shifted over time to more abstract things. I've started to try to pick lessons and abstractions and principles and philosophy out of what I've read.

Samuel Arbesman:

When you think about the progress movement as a whole, obviously it's a little fuzzy at its boundaries. How do you think about it? Because there's, I think, people who would identify themselves as part of the progress movement, and they're writers. And then you also have fellow travelers who also are big name writers who might necessarily be part of the movement, like Steven Pinker or Steven Johnson or Charles Mann. Then you also have EAC or the Effective Altruism Communities, which sometimes are kind of connected with it, but kind of seem distinct. How do you think about this fuzzy thing that is the progress movement?

Jason Crawford:

First, I think there's a couple of core ideas that I see as pretty common and maybe the core things we agree on. There's a lot we disagree on, especially in politics. One of them is just some basic notion that progress is real. Something about the last couple hundred years went very right, and we might just debate exactly how right it went and how much cost and risk was generated along with it, what the trade-offs were, but we should look back to that to sort of learn the lessons of it. I think another thing we have in common is, we're all, at some level, humanists, that is we look at human well-being, human life and flourishing as at least a north star, a major component of what are we after? What do we think is good? How do we justify all this progress and say that it really is progress?

And then I think the other thing is some sense at some level of human agency that the way the future goes is actually in some degree up to us that it matters and that things could go better or worse. That when problems arise, we have an ability to solve them. And whether we solve problems, whether we take advantage of opportunities, ultimately depends on how we sort of guide and manage ourselves. And so the reality of progress, the sort of base of humanism and then this belief in agency are these kind of core ideas.

Samuel Arbesman:

Are there groups that you feel are outsiders might consider part of the progress movement that you would say, "No, no, no. This is outside of our community"? Or is it really, it is a very fuzzy kind of thing?

Jason Crawford:

You mentioned a couple, so maybe I can just speak to them, right?

Samuel Arbesman:

Sure.

Jason Crawford:

So one is effective altruism. I think there's certainly a lot of adjacency and maybe some overlap between EA and the progress movement. I'm pretty sure I know people who sort of consider themselves in that overlap, in that intersection. I did a whole dialogue in Asterisk Magazine about the differences between the communities and the similarities. There is something of a difference in temperament. The EA movement is a little more technocratic. The progress movement's a little more Hayekian and kind of bottom up. The EA movement's a little more rationalistic and the progress is a little more empirical. And EA is constantly thinking about what might go wrong. They have a big focus on human extinction, especially within the long-termist movement.

Samuel Arbesman:

I say there's a little more of a precautionary focus, sometimes a little bit more or risk than necessarily the progress. That being said, obviously risks or something that needs to be thought about in terms of progress, it's maybe the level of focus, perhaps.

Jason Crawford:

There's just a temperament or kind of mindset that's very difficult to get under. And with rational argument, it comes down to just a certain kind of philosophy and expectations about the world. That said, I mean, all of this is really kind of narcissism of small differences when you compare these people to mainstream world or culture, I think we're actually pretty close. And then you mentioned EAC sort of effective accelerationism, which is this kind of, I don't even know whether to call it a movement. It's at least a meme.

Samuel Arbesman:

Yeah, I was going to say it feels closer to a meme than a movement, yeah.

Jason Crawford:

It's an idea. It's a label that some people have adopted for themselves. I don't know if it's a real movement, but it is something that as far as I can tell, kind of arose in reaction against EA and particularly the sort of long-termist existential risk wing of EA that some people perceive as just doomers. And there's some people who kind of had an anti-doomer reaction and some of that turned into this EAC. I have a hard time totally understanding what EAC is. I've read the manifestos, and for some people, again, it seems to be just a meme and a way of cheerleading for technology and being excited and positive and kind of happy and optimistic about it, in which case I sympathize with that.

There's a vibe there that I like. But when you get down into the philosophy of it, if you actually sort of take it philosophically seriously, and it's not just a meme, it's not just cheerleading. It seems to be reifying progress into almost an independent force in the universe and upholding that force or that process as a kind of end in itself. And to my mind, that is very against the core ideas of the progress movement, which are humanism and agency.

Samuel Arbesman:

Yeah, I was going to say the agency part, it sounds like this is just something that's washing over humanity, and we have to let it continue doing that.

Jason Crawford:

Yeah, I mean, literally some of the founding kind of manifestos of this EAC say, you cannot stop the acceleration. You might as well join it. Right? Something like that. And then it seems very anti-human to me too, because it's putting, again, sort of progress first as an end in itself, rather than progress in the service of humanity and human flourishing.

Samuel Arbesman:

Thus far, do you have a sense of how these ideas have begun to, I guess, percolate into the larger culture as well as which larger parts of society more or less amenable or more willing to engage with the ideas of progress? I mean, I imagine many people outside of these worlds when they think back to, I don't know, the space race and certain things, these ideas around progress in mid-1950s and talking about the atomic age or whatever, they understand that there was this sense of, okay, things were getting better. And technology can do all these amazing things, but they're not necessarily engaging with progress. And certainly the progress movement. How have you seen it kind of spread into the larger culture so far? And are maybe people on political left are less amenable to it or versus political right? And I'm not even sure politically it makes sense, but which communities have you seen more or less interested in these kinds of ideas?

Jason Crawford:

I mean, I don't know if it really has spilled out into the mainstream so much so far. I think it's early for that. We're only a few years in. These movements often take a decade to even hit the mainstream, and they typically take something like two or three decades to actually go into policy or be making big dents. So I think you have to think on a generational timescale with these types of things. We have, I think, captured some of the attention of major journalists with large followings, folks like Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, Derek's at The Atlantic, Ezra's at New York Times, formerly a Vox.

They are coming out with a book soon on abundance. And I mean, I think they are in part intellectual leaders in this movement, but they are also, I think, influenced by some of the others in this movement. And so I think some of this kind of abundance thinking has been influenced by some of the things that other folks have been saying about progress. Again, that article coining the term progress studies by Cowen and Collison was originally published in The Atlantic as well. I think it has started to get out there in some ways. We'll see what the coming years hold and the coming administration for that matter.

Samuel Arbesman:

I like this very long-term, almost as you mentioned, generational perspective. When you take that longer term perspective and kind of recognize, okay, you're not going to make necessarily a huge impact immediately, nor should you expect to, but this is because it is this very long, slow, and steady approach. What do you see as the steps that should be taken over the next 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years? I mean, we discussed a lot around writing and articulating this philosophy, but I imagine as some of that intellectual work is done, then there's other things that need to be done. Perhaps it's just keep on advocating for these ideas, but it could be other things. How do you think about this multi-generational task?

Jason Crawford:

Well, we need to keep writing. There's dozens and hundreds, and I don't know how many books need to be written about progress studies, but if you walk into any bookstore, library, how many books will you find on environmental studies, religious studies, gender studies, any kind of right. These things have whole shelves and whole bookcases full of books, any source, and there should be just as many books on progress studies. So there's a whole lot more to be done there. We need to keep building community. And our conference last fall was a huge success, and we're going to make it an annual thing and it'll be even bigger and better next year. But then the really big thing that needs to happen is if we go back to my theory of change, my model of how the ideas get out to the world, we need to do this outreach to the broader world.

So progress needs to be taught in schools, it needs to be on display in popular culture, in film and television. Then we also, of course, need policy efforts, which are, I mean those types of things are already underway. We've got a couple of policy organizations focused on progress now. I mean, let me just elaborate on some of those. So education, I mean, I think progress should be part of the curriculum. I think it's a missing part of the curriculum, kind of falls between the cracks of history and science classes.

Samuel Arbesman:

Yeah, I was going to say, how would you distinguish it from history of technology or philosophy of technology of, I guess, in science, which you can learn, I guess you can learn history of science and technology maybe at an undergraduate or graduate level, but less so in the high school or below.

Jason Crawford:

You can if you seek it out, right?

Samuel Arbesman:

Certainly.

Jason Crawford:

Right. But look, every student should graduate with, and they should graduate high school, let alone university, with a basic understanding of an appreciation for industrial civilization, the system that generates and maintains our standard of living. They should have some idea of where did that system come from? What came before it? What was life like before we had it? What problems did it solve? How hard was it to solve them? Who did it and how? What benefit do we enjoy as a result? And what does it take to maintain that system and keep it going every single day? I call this industrial literacy, and I think it's as important as financial literacy, computer literacy, any other type of basic set of knowledge that you can name. And so I think everybody should graduate even from high school with some level of this and maybe should be reinforced in undergrad.

It shouldn't be a thing that just a very small percentage of university students seek out. So that's one goal. And we are currently researching an education initiative too early to say anything about it now. And then another thing I'll just elaborate on a bit is, I mean, I mentioned this seems to be in popular culture. So one thing I think we need is we need more biopics of great scientists, inventors, and founders. And there's too few of these, and they should really focus on the process of discovery and invention. And they usually don't. I think screenwriters generally don't understand that process. They don't know how to dramatize it or make it interesting, but it can absolutely be fascinating. And so I think there's a lot more we could use there. I think we should also have more sci-fi that depicts a future that we actually want to live in and are inspired to build. A sci-fi future that we can get excited about rather than one that we hope to prevent.

Samuel Arbesman:

Right. Yeah. It's certainly very easy to have lots of dystopias and dystopias sell well, but you're right, we should have visions to aim for. Are there examples of biopics or kind science fiction depictions in pop culture that are ready, I think are good examples of the kinds of things you think we should be making more of as a culture?

Jason Crawford:

Ooh, that's a great question.

Samuel Arbesman:

Basically, I'm wondering, is there a pop culture canon for progress?

Jason Crawford:

Yeah, that's a great question. Nothing's immediately coming to mind, except I will point you to my friend Anton Howes has an essay about this on his blog called something like Innovation on the Silver Screen or something like that, where he talks about the need for more movies like this, and he kind of goes over a list of them and the one that he actually thought was one of the best ones that he had seen, and I saw it and actually agree, it's pretty good. You would absolutely never guess what this is about or where it comes from. It's called Padman, and it is about a guy in India who developed a menstrual pad that could be manufactured cheaply enough to be sold to in India. And it really shows his kind of struggles, the inventive process that he went through. So I'm a parent. I have a young child.

I have a three-year-old, which means I'm much less familiar with movies these days, and I am much more familiar with children's books. So actually children's books I think are another area where there's just a real lack of, there should be many, many more children's books just talking about what were some of the key inventions that made the modern world, and where did they come from and who made them? A couple that I've enjoyed with my daughter, one is called John Deere, That's Who! It's about John Deere and his invention of the plow. There was another one, and I'm blanking on the title of it exactly right now, but it's about the invention of instant ramen.

Samuel Arbesman:

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Jason Crawford:

Yeah, and it totally goes through. I mean, it shows what were the problems that he faced inventing instant ramen, what were the different things that he tried? It takes you through the rollercoaster of ups and downs, and he solved this problem, but then there was this problem left, and so I've enjoyed that one. Magic Ramen is the title of the book.

Samuel Arbesman:

Magic Ramen. Okay. That's fun. Yeah. And are there any sci-fi TV shows or anything like that that you think are kind of the more optimum, I'm picturing like The Expanse, or maybe For All Mankind, which is kind of more near term. Are any things like that that you think fit in with that progress vision?

Jason Crawford:

Some of Hannu Rajaniemi's books I've enjoyed, he was actually a speaker at our progress conference. He's just came out with a book Darkome that has a really cool piece of technology that it envisions, which is basically something you can wear on your arm, strapped to your arm that has needles that go on your skin, and it's on wifi and it does mRNA synthesis. So basically, anytime a new pathogen is discovered anywhere in the world, everybody wearing one of these bands can more or less instantly get a vaccine for it. So it's this technology that could just dramatically accelerate our human civilizational immune response to new diseases. His book also, The Quantum Thief, had a bunch of cool new ideas. The worlds that these depict, they're not necessarily bright, happy worlds where everything's going pretty well. There's some dark aspects.

Samuel Arbesman:

They don't need to be utopian. They can just be-

Jason Crawford:

They don't need to be utopian.

Samuel Arbesman:

... better.

Jason Crawford:

But envisioning fascinating technology that maybe we could build and maybe we would want to build. And even maybe envisioning what are some of the problems about it. So in Darkome, there's a community of people who don't like the idea that one big central biotech company gets all your data and controls what molecules go into your body and so forth. And so they do the biohacker thing where they're off the central network and off the bio grid, basically. And I thought he explored that really well in the book, being fairly even-handed. The corporation wasn't just a big, bad evil corporation, but...

I like Neal Stephenson, I like Andy Weir. I mean, I think these are popular sci-fi authors at least who write about sci-fi or the potential future in a non-doomeristic kind of way. The Martian has been cited or upheld as like, "Hey, this is something that makes you actually excited about technology." It wasn't a, here's where the technology goes horribly wrong and blows up and kills everybody. It was like a man versus nature story. What if you get into a really, really bad situation and you have to science your way out of it?

Samuel Arbesman:

Right. But it's also, it's not just man versus nature. It's like man, plus the entire infrastructure of civilization of science and technology versus nature, which means we have a much better shot than just kind of you in the wilderness.

Jason Crawford:

Yeah. It's not a Jack London story of a guy in the wilderness and the Arctic with his sled dogs, right?

Samuel Arbesman:

Related to that, you've also written a little bit about optimism and the way in which we are hopeful about the future, but there's also, you kind of have a taxonomy of different ways in which people think about optimism, some perhaps with more agency or less agency. I would love for you to explain a little bit more how you think about the nature of optimism.

Jason Crawford:

The idea of optimism never sat totally easy with me or comfortably, and I finally realized it's because there are at least two kinds of optimism, and it's crucial to distinguish between them. One is a optimism that I've called descriptive optimism, which is saying that things are on the right track. Things will go well. The picture is bright. It's saying maybe that we won't encounter any major problems in the future, or that if we encounter problems, they'll be easy to solve. Paul Romer has called this, I think, a complacent optimism. There's been a bunch of people who have identified this kind of distinction, use different terms for it. The other kind of optimism is what I call prescriptive optimism. It's an optimism more of the will. If we encounter problems, maybe we will encounter problems. Maybe the future is not bright. Maybe there are huge challenges ahead, but we can and will step up to them.

It's a sort of energy and ambition to step up and solve the problems that are in front of us, and a belief that with sufficient effort, we probably can, but it's not a belief that such things will be easy or that we're on the right track. So I think this question of are we on the right track? Is the future bright? That's kind of a contingent on facts. It's descriptive, which means it may or may always be the case. Sometimes there are huge problems ahead. Sometimes the future is not bright, and we have to be realistic about that. But optimism of the will is a choice. It's an attitude. It is a philosophy. It's how we approach the world and any challenges that we come into.

And so instead of optimism, just because it has this ambiguity and can mean different things, I have chosen to focus on agency instead, the concept of agency. Again, the notion that we have a choice and we can step up. Let's be absolutely realistic and totally frank about the problems that we're facing. But then let's also have the energy and the ambition to step up and hope that we can find some solutions and try to find them.

Samuel Arbesman:

Maybe a place to end would be a question I have related to, I guess the most recent chapter you wrote for The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, where you kind of talk about how progress is not in technological progress or economic progress. These things, they're in service of helping promote meaning and purpose and fulfillment within humanity. It's not just economic progress is not an end to itself. Maybe you can just talk a little bit about how you think about progress being intertwined with allowing for human possibilities and agency and increased sources of meaning.

Jason Crawford:

Ultimately, progress increases our agency. In fact, in some sense, I think increasing human agency could just be a north star for progress, the key thing that we're trying to enable. I think we have vastly improved control over our lives and choice in our lives. We have vastly increased choice in what to do with our lives, in where to live, in when to marry, whom to marry, whether to marry at all, whether to have children, and how many to have, and how we raise them, in how we express ourselves in style and fashion, in the knowledge that we can learn, the ways we can build ourselves and grow in our ability to travel and see the world, so on and so forth.

I mean, all of these things were extremely, extremely limited to the average person, and in some cases, to all people, just a few hundred, let alone a few thousand or tens of thousands of years ago. And I think that gives us greatly improved ability to find meaning in life, more meaning in work, more meaning in love, more meaning in parenting in children, more meaning in having an intellectual life, an emotional life, an aesthetic life. All of these things, the opportunities today are greater than ever before.

Samuel Arbesman:

I love that. That's probably a perfect place to end. So Jason, thank you so much. This has been fantastic.

Jason Crawford:

Thanks for having me. Great conversation.

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