Ordinary Progress Is Extraordinary
Reflections from the 2025 Progress Conference, and a rebranding.
My Substack has rebranded! We are now The Psychology of Progress: Nature, Nurture, & Human Flourishing. This will make sense in the context of this post, and especially the next one. Stay tuned.
Roots of Progress is a relatively new and inspiring initiative centered around progress studies, a new interdisciplinary field that aims to measure and improve human progress. Early pioneers in the field include Marian Tupy, founder of HumanProgress.org (where I now work as a research fellow), and Steven Pinker, my PhD advisor. Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Tupy’s Superabundance are foundational texts in the field, documenting dramatic improvements in food availability, technological progress, and human freedom, combined with reductions in mortality rates, violence, and poverty over the past two centuries. Last week, I had the honor of attending the second annual Progress Conference in Berkeley, California, cohosted by Roots of Progress and HumanProgress.org, among other sponsors.
The Progress movement aims not only to combat cynicism by spreading awareness of these almost miraculous trends, but also to research ways to accelerate progress and achieve human flourishing. As a result, the Progress Conference was unlike any other I’ve attended. Academic conferences tend to be cautious, formal, and hyperspecialized. PhD researchers are trained not to make any overly ambitious claims that might go beyond the data, and interdisciplinary work is often disincentivized given the opportunity cost of mastering and advancing one specific niche. By contrast, the Progress Conference embraced San Francisco Bay–area start-up culture. It was an interdisciplinary gathering of researchers, policy experts, and entrepreneurs, ambitious yet casual. People spoke about progress over beanbag chairs and bonfires, not podiums and lecture halls.
There were, of course, techno-optimists who might raise a skeptic’s eyebrows. Ambitious visions for how artificial superintelligence will solve all the world’s problems (especially apt for Sam Altman, keynote speaker and CEO of OpenAI), and start-ups hoping to terraform Earth and combat climate change by injecting coolant chemicals into the stratosphere to counter the effects of carbon dioxide. To these most ambitious claims I was one such skeptic. Surprisingly, I found myself most inspired by three seemingly mundane proposals for innovation.
Automating Bureaucratic Drab
The first was the most pragmatic form of AI hype I’d ever encountered. It began with a statistic: Americans spend 10 billion hours annually on regulatory paperwork. This includes filing taxes, DMV forms, legislative review, all sorts of compliance codes for businesses, and many other tedious aspects of bureaucracy. Most of this could be automated. If there’s one thing modern large language models (LLMs) are good at, it’s analyzing text and filling out structured forms. What I love about this insight is that it doesn’t require any speculative advances beyond current AI capabilities, nor does it require the type of creative and critical thinking—like writing research papers—that state-of-the-art LLMs still struggle with. It is exactly the type of repetitive brute-force labor that computers excel at. A big concern with digitizing paperwork is privacy, or that some government forms are too important to be entrusted to automation. I am far from an expert in this, but I imagine that most of this paperwork is less sensitive than tax forms, which we have successfully digitized despite the cybersecurity risks. We do not have to digitize everything to reap the benefits of picking off billions of hours of low-hanging fruit. Likewise, even important forms that would require human review may still save billions of hours by automating a first draft, followed by human review, rather than having a human manually type in everything. If we conservatively estimate the value of people’s time at just $10 per hour—below minimum wage in most states—this could free up tens of billions of dollars’ worth of labor annually. In practice, many of these bureaucratic hours are burdened by law firms that charge hundreds of dollars hourly, bringing the potential savings into the hundreds of billions.
Same Grid, More Electricity
Another proposed innovation was a pragmatic approach to renovating the electric grid. Energy consumption is higher than ever and only going up, largely due to increased demand from AI data centers. Many innovators at Roots of Progress and elsewhere have pushed for increased investment in clean nuclear energy, and small modular reactors appear to be particularly promising. But again, I found myself more inspired by a seemingly more basic innovation. The key insight here is that the grid has to be structured around not just average or total energy demand, but peak demand. In practice, this means that our whole electric grid is optimized to handle the demand during the worst moments of summer, when everyone is blasting air-conditioning, when all the AI companies are training their biggest and most intensive models, when a meme goes viral and breaks the internet with a single hotbed of search traffic, and when energy output is lower than average due to some temporary malfunctions. Engineers have to build in contingencies for all of this so that temporary surges or decreases in energy production don’t lead to a total blackout. That means for the vast majority of the hours of each day and days of each year, we are using considerably less energy than our grid can handle. Our grid can already handle most of the new data-center demands most of the time; the reason the whole grid has to be expanded is that the upper limits of energy consumption we must constantly be prepared for also rise with increased average demand. The proposal was simple: If most homes (or businesses or factories) were equipped with large batteries, they could automatically switch to battery usage during peak times. The batteries could then be recharged throughout the day during lower demand hours. From the consumer’s perspective, so long as they get the necessary amount of energy, the source of the energy does not matter. This is different from backup generators: Peak demand is defined on a second-to-second basis. It’s not that a home would be cut off from the grid for hours and forced to rely on its battery. It’s that if it could automatically switch into battery mode, even for just a few seconds, during peak demand, the total average energy usage could dramatically rise without overloading the maximum capacity our grid already has.
More Efficient Air Travel
The last set of proposed innovations was, for me, the optimal balance between futuristic techno-optimism and pragmatic incremental progress. This came from Boom CEO Blake Scholl, whose company I had not heard of before. Boom is bringing back supersonic flight and hopes to succeed where the Concorde failed. If they succeed, the benefits are obvious: billions of hours saved annually on long flights completed in a fraction of the time. Putting the same paperwork math into place, this could have tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of annual economic value, especially considering that the people most likely to make use of supersonic flight are high earners. I would say that I’m cautiously optimistic, but skeptical, about this. What I found most inspiring about Scholl’s talk was his rants about how so much of modern aviation could be improved by mundane changes to airport security. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is not only hugely costly and inefficient, but also ineffective at its stated goal of detecting threats. Scholl believes privatizing airports is the obvious solution, citing massive improvements in the cost and efficiency of space travel in the private sector thanks to SpaceX. Tongue in cheek, Scholl says that even the greatest pessimist in 1969 would not have believed that in the 21st century we would have lost the ability to travel to the moon or fly supersonic. But that is what government-operated aerospace has given us.
There may be large flaws in each of these ideas, and I don’t have the technical ability to evaluate them. What I can confidently say as a psychologist, however, is that the Progress Conference was filled with an atmosphere of optimism and ingenuity that is sorely lacking in most places. Human flourishing is ultimately measured not just by material comfort or technological advancement but by psychological well-being and a sense of purpose. It is inspiring to be surrounded by people who believe in progress and want to do their part in contributing to the betterment of our society and our species. How much better would life be if we all did that?