The Roots of Progress

Starting June 15th, the Roots of Progress team brought together 30 teenagers to learn about Progress in Medicine. These talented, ambitious high schoolers are choosing to spend six weeks of their summer exploring careers in medicine, biotech, and health as part of the inaugural cohort of the Roots of Progress summer career exploration program.

I don’t use AI to draft my writing. These are fine handcrafted artisanal essays, every word placed individually with loving care. I use AI a lot for researching, occasionally for brainstorming, and increasingly for fact-checking. But not for outlining, drafting, or directly editing. This isn’t some principled objection to AI use, or a revulsion at the idea of letting technology intrude on my craft. It has simply never occurred to me to do it. Why? I just don’t think AI writing is good enough today.

You have 3 more days to submit your application to the Blog-Building Intensive program, a writing intensive for aspiring progress writers. You can read more about this year’s program or apply here. The application deadline is this Monday, June 1. Our fellows have sung the program’s praises, and you can hear directly from them about how it changed their lives in the video below. You can also watch the recording of yesterday's Substack Live session.

We’ll be hosting a Substack Live event at 2 pm PT / 5 pm ET this afternoon. Come learn more about the nuts and bolts of the Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship. You have 5 more days to submit your application to the fourth cohort of our Blog-Building Intensive program, a 10-week program for aspiring progress writers. You can read more about this year’s program or apply here. You may have seen alumni singing the program’s praises on Substack over the last few weeks.

At a Roots of Progress annual team meeting, I gave a short presentation on the state of the world. It was informal, opinionated, mostly off-the-cuff, and not fact-checked. Here’s what I said. (Apologies to James Burnham.) What’s going on in the world, and what matters right now? I’ll cover this in two parts: science/tech, and politics.

Announcing the third annual Progress Conference! The pace of technological change feels faster this year, and the progress movement is growing too. Gathering people together helps build community and establish a movement’s identity. We want this annual event to continue to connect and inspire people, catalyze new projects, and share ideas.

“Intelligence Age” is a series from the Roots of Progress Institute featuring reported essays that extrapolate the capabilities of AI systems along current trend lines. In our second feature, Stanford University political economist Andy Hall explains how AI has already changed the way he and his team conduct social science research and how academics might increase knowledge generation 100-fold in the near future. “Intelligence Age” is made possible by a grant from OpenAI.

Progress studies has emerged as a vibrant intellectual movement over the past few years. But despite Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen’s original call that ”We Need a New Science of Progress”, progress studies has remained largely outside the university classroom. Most students today graduate without a basic understanding of industrial civilization, how it works, and why we need it. Call this a lack of “industrial literacy”. We want to change that.

This year’s speakers: Virginia Postrel, Tyler Cowen, Greg Lukianoff, Alice Evans, Kevin Esvelt (top row); Alex Kustov, Brandan McCord, Eli Dourado, Brian Potter, Elle Griffin (bottom row). Applications are now open for the 2026 cohort of The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive, a 10-week program for aspiring progress writers.

Sorry I [haven’t replied to your email / couldn’t make your event / have been ignoring your texts]. I’ve been vibecoding. Like everyone else, I’ve gotten addicted to Claude Code. (It happens to be the tool I picked up first, but I’ve heard that OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Replit, etc.