All of James Rosen-Birch's Comments + Replies

AMA: Jason Crawford, The Roots of Progress

What does progress mean to you; what does your ideal progress-driven future look like? What are our daily lives like in that future?

3jasoncrawford1yNo one can predict the future, but here are a few lines I wrote in a recent article [https://bigthink.com/progress/a-new-philosophy-of-progress-jason-crawford/]: Elaborating on that a bit, and extrapolating from some of the trends of the past, here are some thing I envision in a technologically and industrially advanced future: * Much higher labor productivity, so that we all earn more rewards for a given effort. * As a consequence, much higher levels of average wealth, to the point where the average person can afford what today are considered luxuries: a large home with high-quality furnishings, a private jet (or flying car [https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car]), a butler and a nanny (robotic of course), meals without cooking (maybe through nanotech synthesizers), tailored clothing (ditto), etc. * Further, there will be benefits to the average person that are unavailable today even to the super-wealthy: the elimination of cancer and heart disease, vacations to the Moon and Mars, personalized entertainment on demand via AI, etc. * As another consequence, leisure time will increase. The work week will shorten, vacations and holidays will increase, retirement will begin earlier, more people will take a gap year between school and work, more people will take “funemployment” time off in between jobs, etc. * There will be more opportunities for people to find meaningful, engaging, fulfilling work, rather than manual or routine jobs. Or, if we don't really need to work anymore, people will find engaging and fulfilling hobby projects to occupy their time. * As population grows and people become more and more connected, there will be more opportunities for people to self-organize into niche communities. There will be more opportunities to find friends, colleagues, and romantic partners who share your values and worldview. More generally, there will be more opportunities for individuality and sel
Draft for comment: Towards a philosophy of safety

There's a reasonable argument that we all lose out by calling programmers software engineers, given they lack the training in forensic analysis, risk assessment, safety factors engineering, and identifying failure modes that other engineering disciplines (i.e. civil, mechanical, materials, electrical) have to train in. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/programmers-should-not-call-themselves-engineers/414271/

A lot of energy in the AI safety conversation goes into philosophizing and trying to reinvent from scratch systems of safety ... (read more)

Request for posts: Social change

This is an excellent subject area with a ton of material -- especially because so many 19th and 20th century social movements were so deeply tied with notions of social, economic, and technological progress, and often sought to use novel technologies to drive revolutionary change. In many cases, solidarity and freedom from hardship were seen as going hand-in-hand with modernity and industrialization.

Draft for comment: Ideas getting harder to find does not imply stagnation

The most exciting prospect here, imo, is building capacity to identify underresearched and underinvested foundational knowledge areas, filling those gaps, and then building scaffolding between them so they can cross-pollinate. And doing this recursively, so we can accelerate the pace of knowledge production and translation.

About the 'Progress' in Progress Studies

Hey there! I'm a startup founder and software engineer who is also one of the folks from the anthropology community who was initially skeptical of Progress Studies, so I can speak to their concerns -- which, to your point, largely came across as snide grumbling amongst academics. Unfortunately, as is often the case with tight-knit communities, their real concerns were understood implicitly and therefore not deemed necessary to communicate openly.

tl;dr, there's a pattern of (some) SV tech types only respecting two areas of knowledge: STEM, and economics (bu... (read more)

Draft for comment: Ideas getting harder to find does not imply stagnation

As with any metric, it comes down to what you're looking to diagnose -- and whether averages across the total system are a useful measure for determining overall health. If someone had a single atrophied leg and really buff arms, the average would tell you they have above-average muscle strength, but that's obviously not the whole story.

Same goes for innovation: if idea production is booming in a single area and dead everywhere else, it might look like the net knowledge production ecosystem is healthy when it is not. And that's the problem here, especially... (read more)

2jasoncrawford2yI agree that if you want to understand where there might be problems/opportunities, you can't just look at averages.
Draft for comment: Ideas getting harder to find does not imply stagnation

Good piece.

One of the main issues I have with economic approaches to knowledge production like Romer's is that they approach Knowledge as a singular entity that produces an aggregate economic output, as opposed to a set of n knowledges that each have their own output curves. In practice (and in the technological forecasting lit), there's a recognition of this fact in the modelling of new technologies as overlapping S-curves:

The S-curve approach recognizes that there is a point where the ROI for continued investment in a particular technology tapers off. So... (read more)

2jasoncrawford2yThanks. I generally agree with all these points, but do they change any of the conclusions? These complexities aren't represented in the models because, well, they would make the models more complex, and it's not clear we need them. But if it made a crucial difference, then I'm sure this would get worked into the models. (It's actually not uncommon to see models that break out different variables for each invention or product, it's just that those details don't end up being important for high-level summaries like this.)
2James Rosen-Birch2yAlso strongly recommend the adjacent possible work if you haven't seen it yet. https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/01/13/154580/mathematical-model-reveals-the-patterns-of-how-innovations-arise/#:~:text=The%20adjacent%20possible%20is%20all,the%20space%20of%20unexplored%20possibilities. [https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/01/13/154580/mathematical-model-reveals-the-patterns-of-how-innovations-arise/#:~:text=The%20adjacent%20possible%20is%20all,the%20space%20of%20unexplored%20possibilities.]
Intellectual Property Is Worse Than You Think

There are a few issues to parse here --

  1. Patents are a necessary part of motivation to commercialize in high-CAPEX industries
  2. Pharma companies take advantage of regulatory capture and abuse the IP system to eke out longer exclusivity periods than are typically allowed by law (e.g. making negligible changes and repatenting a drug); this has been a net drain on innovation
  3. No cap, benchmark, or standard on biotech pricing has allowed companies to slowly ramp up pricing far beyond what is considered reasonable (e.g. the gradual ramp-up to a Million Dollar Pill)

Pri... (read more)

2Maxwell Tabarrok2y1. Patents are much more useful in high-CAPEX industries, but I wouldn't call them necessary. There have been expensive capital investments without patent protection, even if they are not common. 2. Agree here. 3. 'Reasonable" does a lot of work here. Economists usually define reasonable as price = marginal cost and the whole goal here is to raise price high above that level. But the point is well taken that there is more consternation over pharma pricing than is justified. This is sort of an orthogonal point but I think the reliance of pharma on patents is an example of the "break your leg and give you a crutch" strategy that the government often takes. A huge part of the CAPEX that goes into pharma development is going through FDA approval. So if that process is not going to change, patents are essential for further pharma development. But in some lassiez-faire counterfactuals I think we could get more pharma development even without IP protection. I think that prizes could replace the incentives of patents without most of the negative second order effects that I pointed out. Theoretically you could just match the monopoly profit with a subsidy, get the efficient quantity produced, and there are some mechanisms for dispersing the cash which avoid the rent dissipation.
Intellectual Property Is Worse Than You Think

The exclusivity rights conferred by intellectual property are exceptionally important in areas where the innovator's CAPEX requirements are high, but the cost to copycats is low -- like biopharma, energy, or even mining. The creation of a temporary monopoly engineers sufficient market value to make initial investment of high-risk capital on the order of hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars worthwhile and palatable (e.g. see https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/6707/Record5.pdf; https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/vie... (read more)

3Maxwell Tabarrok2yI definitely agree that a bigger difference between original investment costs and copying costs makes patents more beneficial, but all of the criticisms I pointed out still apply. The Pharma industry spends billions on patent courts and lobbying. This has to be subtracted from the benefits that they provide, in addition to all the welfare losses from super expensive name-brand drugs. What do you think about using prizes or direct subsidies for high CAPEX projects instead of IP? In a more meta sense, I wonder if it is possible to have patents only for high CAPEX industries. It may be that the lobbying forces will inevitably push to expand the reach of patents, and one cannot separate the benefits of high CAPEX patents from the costs of low CAPEX ones.