I was invited to speak at the Festival of Progressive Abundance, a conference to rally around “abundance” as a new direction for the political left. This is a writeup of what I said: my message to the left.

Thank you for having me—it’s great to be here. I’m the founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute, and we’re dedicated to building the progress movement.

There’s a lot of overlap between the progress movement and the abundance movement—a lot of shared vision and goals, and a lot of the same people are involved. So I was invited here to talk about progress and how it’s relevant to abundance.

I agreed to come, because I love abundance. I love it as a vision and a goal. And I love it...

Sorry for the late cross-post. Once again it’s been too long and this digest is too big. Feel free to skim and skip around, guilt-free, I give you permission. I try to put the more important and timely stuff at the top.

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, or Farcaster.

Contents

• Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers
• From Progress Conference 2025
• My writing
• Jobs
• Fellowships & workshops
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• New publications and issues
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For paid subscribers:

• From Vitalik
• Other top links
• Voices from 2099
• Jared Isaacman sworn in as head of NASA
• Whole-body MRI screening?
• AI does social science research
• AI writes a browser
• AI does lots of other things
• AI could do even more things
• AI and the economic future
• AI: more models and papers
• AI discourse
• Waymo
• Health/bio
• Energy

Reality is a dangerous place. From the dawn of humanity we have faced the hazards of nature: fire, flood, disease, famine. Better technology and infrastructure have made us safer from many of these risks—but have also created new risks, from boiler explosions to carcinogens to ozone depletion, and exacerbated old ones.

Safety, security, and resilience against these hazards is not the default state of humanity. It is an achievement, and in each case it came about deliberately.

A striking theme from the history of such achievements is that there is rarely if ever a silver bullet for risk. Safety is achieved through defense in depth, and through the orchestration of a wide variety of solutions, all working in concert.

Recently, in a private talk, I gave a historical example: the...

Everyone loves writing annual letters these days. It’s the thing. (I blame Dan Wang.)

So here’s mine. At least I can say I’ve been doing it for as long as Dan: nine years running (proof: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024). As usual, this is more of a personal essay/reflection, and not so much of an organizational annual report, although I will start with some comments on…

RPI

Over the last three years, the Roots of Progress Institute has gone from “a guy and his blog” to a full-fledged cultural institute. This year we:

• Held our second annual Progress Conference, featuring speakers including Sam Altman, Blake Scholl, Tyler Cowen, and Michael Kratsios (Director, OSTP). The conference has become the central, must-attend event for the progress community: it is sold

My essay series The Techno-Humanist Manifesto concluded in October. You can read the whole thing here.

“Techno-humanism” is my philosophy of progress, and THM is my statement of it. It consolidates and restates material I’ve used in previous essays and talks, in a more unified and coherent form. Still, even for my biggest fans, almost every chapter should have something new, including:

• The culture of progress we once had (pre-WW1), and the decline of the idea of progress in the 20th century
• The story of progress as a story of the expansion of human agency (despite seeming counterexamples like the poor nutrition of early agriculturalists or the inadvertent creation of new health and environmental hazards)
• The nature of human well-being, including my response to the paradox of stagnant happiness metrics
• My argument

The links digest is back, baby!

I got so busy writing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto this year that after May I stopped doing the links digest and my monthly reading updates. I’m bringing them back now (although we’ll see what frequency I can keep up). This one covers the last two or three weeks. But first…

A year-end call to support our work

I write this newsletter as part of my job running the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI). RPI is a nonprofit, supported by your subscriptions and donations. If you enjoy my writing, or appreciate programs like our conference, writer’s fellowship, and high school program, consider making a donation:

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