My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

As we seemingly grow closer to achieving artificial general intelligence — machines that are smarter than humans at basically everything — we might be incurring some serious geopolitical risks.

In the paper Superintelligence Strategy, his joint project with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang, Dan Hendrycks introduces the idea of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction: a system of deterrence where any state’s attempt at total AI dominance is sabotaged by its peers. From the abstract:

Just as nations once developed nuclear strategies to secure their survival, we now need a coherent superintelligence strategy to navigate a new period of transformative change. We introduce the concept of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) where any state’s aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals. Given the relative ease of sabotaging a destabilizing AI project—through interventions ranging from covert cyberattacks to potential kinetic strikes on datacenters—MAIM already describes the strategic picture AI superpowers find themselves in. Alongside this, states can increase their competitiveness by bolstering their economies and militaries through AI, and they can engage in nonproliferation to rogue actors to keep weaponizable AI capabilities out of their hands. Taken together, the three-part framework of deterrence, nonproliferation, and competitiveness outlines a robust strategy to superintelligence in the years ahead.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Hendrycks about the potential threats posed by superintelligent AI in the hands of state and rogue adversaries, and what a strong deterrence strategy might look like.

Hendrycks is the executive director of the Center for AI Safety. He is an advisor to Elon Musk’s xAI and Scale AI, and is a prolific researcher and writer.

In This Episode

* Development of AI capabilities (1:34)

* Strategically relevant capabilities (6:00)

* Learning from the Cold War (16:12)

* Race for strategic advantage (18:56)

* Doomsday scenario (28:18)

* Maximal progress, minimal risk (33:25)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Development of AI capabilities (1:34)

. . . mostly the systems aren't that impressive currently. People use them to some extent, but I'd more emphasize the trajectory that we're on rather than the current capabilities.

Pethokoukis: How would you compare your view of AI . . . as a powerful technology with economic, national security, and broader societal implications . . . today versus November of 2022 when OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT?

Hendrycks: I think that the main difference now is that we have the reasoning paradigm. Back in 2022, GPT couldn't think for an extended period of time before answering and try out multiple different ways of dissolving a problem. The main new capability is its ability to handle more complicated reasoning and science, technology, engineering, mathematics sorts of tasks. It's a lot better at coding, it's a lot better at graduate school mathematics, and physics, and virology.

An implication of that for national security is that AIs have some virology capabilities that they didn't before, and virology is dual-use that can be used for civilian applications and weaponization applications. That's a new concerning capability that they have, but I think, overall, the AI systems are still fairly similar in their capabilities profile. They're better in lots of different ways, but not substantially.

I think the next large shift is when they can be agents, when they can operate more autonomously, when they can book you flights reliably, make PowerPoints, play through long-form games for extended periods of time, and that seems like it's potentially on the horizon this year. It didn't seem like that two years ago. That's something that a lot of people are keeping an eye on and think could be arriving fairly soon. Overall, I think the capabilities profile is mostly the same except now it has some dual-use capabilities that they didn't have earlier, in particular virology capabilities.

To what extent are your national security concerns based on the capabilities of the technology as it is today versus where you think it will be in five years? This is also a way of me asking about the extent that you view AGI as a useful framing device — so this is also a question about your timeline.

I think that mostly the systems aren't that impressive currently. People use them to some extent, but I'd more emphasize the trajectory that we're on rather than the current capabilities. They still can't do very interesting cyber offense, for instance. The virology capabilities is very recent. We just, I think maybe a week ago, put out a study with SecureBio from MIT where we had Harvard, MIT virology postdocs doing wet lab skills, trying to work on viruses. So, “Here's a picture of my petri dish, I heated it to 37 degrees, what went wrong? Help me troubleshoot, help me guide me through this step by step.” We were seeing that it was getting around 95th percentile compared to those Harvard-MIT virology postdocs in their area of expertise. This is not a capability that the models had two years ago.

That is a national security concern, but I think most of the national security concerns where it's strategically relevant, where it can be used for more targeted weapons, where it affects the basis of a nation's power, I think that's something that happens in the next, say, two to five years. I think that's what we mostly need to be thinking about. I’m not particularly trying to raise the alarm saying that the AI systems right now are extremely scary in all these different ways because they're not even agential. They can't book flights yet.

Strategically relevant capabilities (6:00)

. . . when thinking about the future of AI . . . it's useful to think in terms of specific capabilities, strategically-relevant capabilities, as opposed to when is it truly intelligent . . .

So that two-to-five-year timeline — and you can debate whether this is a good way of thinking about it — is that a trajectory or timeline to something that could be called “human-level AI” — you can define that any way you want — and what are the capabilities that make AI potentially dangerous and a strategic player when thinking about national security?

I think having a monolithic term for AGI or for advanced AI systems is a little difficult, largely because there's been a consistently-moving goalpost. So right now people say, “AIs are dumb because they can't do this and that.” They can't play video games at the level of a teenager, they can't code for a day-long project, and things like that. Neither can my grandmother. That doesn't mean that she's not human-level intelligence, it's just a lot of people don't have some of these capabilities.

I think when thinking about the future of AI, especially when thinking about national security, it's useful to think in terms of specific capabilities, strategically-relevant capabilities, as opposed to when is it truly intelligent or something like that. This is because the capabilities of AI systems are very jagged: they're good at some things and terrible at others. They can't fold clothes that reliably — most of the AI can't —and they're okay at driving in some cities but not others, but they can solve really difficult mathematics problems, they can write really long essays and provide pretty good legal analysis very rapidly, and they can also forecast geopolitical events better than most forecasters. It's a really weird capabilities profile.

When I'm thinking about national security from a malicious-use standpoint, I'm thinking about weapon capabilities, I'm thinking about cyber-offensive capabilities, which they don't yet have, but that's an important one to track, and, outside of malicious use, I'm thinking about what's their ability to do AI research and how much of that can they automate? Because if they can automate AI research, then you could just run 100,000 of these artificial AGI researchers to build the next generations of AGI, and that could get very explosive extremely quickly. You're moving from human-speed research to machine-speed research. They’re typing 100 times faster than people, they're running tons of experiments simultaneously. That could be quite explosive, and that's something that the founders of AI pointed at as a really relevant capability, like Alan Turing and others, where that’s you could have a potential loss-of-control type of event is with this sort of runaway process of AI's building future generations of AIs quite rapidly.

So that's another capability. What fraction of AI research can they automate? For weaponization, I think if it gets extremely smart, able to do research in lots of other sorts of fields, then that would raise concerns of its ability to be used to disrupt the balance of power. For instance, if it can do research well, perhaps it could come up with a breakthrough that makes oceans more transparent so we can find where nuclear submarines are or find the mobile launches extremely reliably, or a breakthrough in driving down the cost by some orders of magnitude of anti-ballistic missile systems, which would disrupt having a secure second-strike, and these would be very geopolitically salient. To do those things, though, that seems like a bundle of capabilities as opposed to a specific thing like cyber-offensive capabilities, but those are the things that I'm thinking about that can really disrupt the geopolitical landscape.

If we put them in a bucket called, to use your phrase, “strategically-relevant capabilities,” are we on a trajectory of a data- and computing-power-driven trajectory to those capabilities? Or do there need to be one or two key innovations before those relevant capabilities are possible?

It doesn't seem like it currently that we need some new big insights, in large part because the rate of improvement is pretty good. So if we look at their coding capabilities — there's a benchmark called SWE-bench verified (SWE is software engineering). Given a set of coding tasks — and this benchmark was weighed in some years ago — the models are poised to get something like 90 percent on this this summer. Right now they're in this 60 percent range. If we just extrapolate the trend line out some more months, then they'll be doing nine out of 10 of those software engineering tasks that were set some years ago. That doesn't mean that that's the entirety of software engineering. Still need coders. It's not 100 percent, obviously, but that suggests that the capability is still improving fairly rapidly in some of these domains. And likewise, with their ability to play that take games that take 20-plus hours, a few months ago they couldn't — Pokémon, for instance, is something that kids play and that takes 20 hours or so to beat. The models from a few months ago couldn't beat the game. Now, the current models can beat the game, but it takes them a few hundred hours. It would not surprise me if in a few months they'll get it down to around human-level on the order of tens of hours, and then from there they'll be able to play harder and harder sorts of games that take longer periods of time, and I think that this would be indicative of higher general capabilities.

I think that there's a lot of steam in the current way that things are being done and I think that they've been trapped at the floor in their agent capabilities for a while, but I think we're starting to see the shift. I think that most people at the major AI companies would also think that agents are on the horizon and I don't think they were thinking that, myself included, a year ago. We were not seeing the signs that we're seeing now.

So what we're talking about is AIs is having, to use your phrase, which I like, “strategically-relevant capabilities” on a timeline that is soon enough that we should be having the kinds of conversations and the kind of thinking that you put forward in Superintelligence [Strategy]. We should be thinking about that right now very seriously.

Yeah, it's very difficult to wrap one's head around because, unlike other domains, AI is much more general and broad in its impacts. So if one's thinking about nuclear strategy, you obviously need to think about bombs going off, and survivability, and second strike. The failure modes are: one state strikes the other, and then there's also, in the civilian applications, fissile material leaking or there being a nuclear power plant meltdown. That's the scenario space, there’s what states can do and then there's also some of these civilian application issues.

Meanwhile, with AI, we've got much more than power plants melting down or bombs going off. We've got to think about how it transforms the economy, how it transforms people's private life, the sort of issues with them being sentient. We've got to think about it potentially disrupting mutual assured destruction. We've got to think about the AIs themselves being threats. We've got to think about regulations for autonomous AI agents and who's accountable. We've got to think about this open-weight, closed-weight issue. We've got, I think, a larger host of issues that touch on all the important spheres society. So it's not a very delimited problem and I think it's a very large pill to swallow, this possibility that it will be not just strategically relevant but strategically decisive this decade.

Consequently, and thinking a little bit beforehand about it is, useful. Otherwise, if we just ignore it, I think we reality will slap us across the face and AI will hit us like a truck, and then we're going, “Wow, I wish we did something, had some more break-glass measures at a time right now, but the cupboard is bare in terms of strategic options because we didn't do some prudent things a while ago, or we didn't even bother thinking about what those are.”

I keep thinking of the Situation Room in two years and they get news that China's doing some new big AI project, and it's fairly secretive, and then in the Situation Room they're thinking, “Okay, what do we know?” And the answer is nothing. We don't have really anybody on this. We're not collecting any information about this. We didn't have many concerted programs in the IC really tracking this, so we’re flying blind. I really don't want to be in that situation

Learning from the Cold War (16:12)

. . . mutual assured destruction is an ugly reality that took decision-makers a long time to internalize, but that's just what the game theory showed would make the most sense.

As I'm sure you know, throughout the course of the Cold War, there was a considerable amount of time and money spent on thinking about these kinds of problems. I went to college just before the end of the Cold War and I took an undergraduate class on nuclear war theory. There was a lot of thinking. To what extent does that volume of research and analysis over the course of a half-century, to what extent is that helpful for what you're trying to accomplish here?

I think it's very fortunate that, because of the Cold War, a lot of people started getting more of a sense of game theory and when it's rational to conflict versus negotiate, and offense can provide a good defense, some of these counterintuitive things. I think mutual assured destruction is an ugly reality that took decision-makers a long time to internalize, but that's just what the game theory showed would make the most sense. Hopefully we'll do a lot better with AI because strategic thinking can be a lot more precise and some of these things that are initially counterintuitive, if you reason through them, you go, actually no, this makes a lot of sense. We're trying to shape each other's intentions in this kind of complicated way. I think that makes us much better poised to address these geopolitical issues than last time.

I think of the Soviets, for instance, when talking about anti-ballistic missile systems. At one point, I forget who said that offense is immoral, defense is moral. So pointing these nuclear weapons at each other, this is the immoral thing. We need missile-defense systems. That's the moral option. It's just like, no, this is just going to eat up all of our budget. We're going to keep building these defense systems and it's not going to make us safer, we're just going to be spending more and more.

That was not intuitive. Offense does feel viscerally more mean, hostile, but that's what you want. That's what you want, to preserve for strategic stability. I think that a lot of the thinking is helpful with that, and I think the education for appreciating the strategic dynamics is more in the water, it's more diffused across the decision-makers now, and I think that that's great.

Race for strategic advantage (18:56)

There is also a risk that China builds [AGI] first, so I think what we want to do in the US is build up the capabilities to surgically prevent them . . .

I was recently reviewing a scenario slash world-building exercise among technologists, economists, forecasting people, and they were looking at various scenarios assuming that we're able to, on a rather short timeline, develop what they termed AGI. And one of the scenarios was that the US gets there first . . . probably not by very long, but the US got there first. I don't know how far China was behind, but that gave us the capability to sort of dictate terms to China about what their foreign policy would be: You're going to leave Taiwan alone . . . So it gave us an amazing strategic advantage.

I'm sure there are a lot of American policymakers who would read that scenario and say, “That's the dream,” that we are able to accelerate progress, that we are able to get there first, we can dictate foreign policy terms to China, game over, we win. If I've read Superintelligence correctly, that scenario would play out in a far more complicated way than what I've just described.

I think so. I think any bid for being a, not just unipolar force, but having a near-strategic-monopoly on power and able to cause all other superpowers to capitulate in arbitrary ways, concerns the other superpower. There is also a risk that China builds it first, so I think what we want to do in the US is build up the capabilities to surgically prevent them, if they are near or eminently going to gain a decisive advantage that would become durable and sustained over us, we want the ability to prevent that.

There's a variety of ways one can do things. There's the classic grayer ways like arson, and cutting wires in data centers, and things like that, or for power plants . . . There's cyber offense, and there's other sorts of kinetic sabotage, but we want it nice and surgical and having a good, credible threat so that we can deter that from happening and shaping their intentions.

I think it will be difficult to limit their capabilities, their ability to build these powerful systems, but I think being able to shape their intentions is something that is more tractable. They will be building powerful AI systems, but if they are making an attempt at leapfrogging us in a way that we never catch up and lose our standing and they get AIs that could also potentially disrupt MAD, for instance, we want to be able to prevent that. That is an important strategic priority, is developing a credible deterrent and saying there are some AI scenarios that are totally unacceptable to us and we want to block them off through credible threats.

They'll do the same to us, as well, and they can do it more easily to us. They know what's going on at all of our AI companies, and this will not change because we have a double digit percentage of the employees who are Chinese nationals, easily extortable, they have family back home, and the companies do not have good information security — that will probably not change because that will slow them down if they really try and lock them up and move everybody to North Dakota or wherever to work in the middle of nowhere and have everything air-gapped. We are an open book to them and I think they can make very credible threats for sabotage and preventing that type of outcome.

If we are making a bid for dictating their foreign policy and all of this, if we're making a bid for a strategic monopoly on power, they will not sit idly by, they will not take kindly to that when they recognize the stakes. If the US were to do a $500 billion program to achieve this faster than them, that would not go unnoticed. There's not a way of hiding that.

But we are trying to achieve it faster than them.

I would distinguish between trying to develop just generally more capable AI technologies than some of these strategically relevant capabilities or some of these strategically relevant programs. Like if we get AI systems that are generally useful for healthcare and for . . . whatever your pet cause area, we can have that. That is different from applying the AI systems to rapidly build the next generation of AIs, and the next generation of that. Just imagine if you have, right now, OpenAI’s got a few hundred AI researchers, imagine if you've got ones that are at that level that are artificial, AGI-type of researchers or are artificial researchers. You run 10,000, 100,000 thousand of them, they're operating around the clock at a hundred X speed, I think expecting a decade's worth of development compressed or telescoped into a year, that seems very plausible — not certain, but certainly double-digit percent chance.

China or Russia for instance, would perceive that as, “This is really risky. They could get a huge leap from this because these rate of development will be so high that we could never catch up,” and they could use their new gains to clobber us. Or, if they don't control it, then we're also dead, or lose our power. So if the US controls it, China would reason that, “Our survival is threatened and how we do things is threatened,” and if they lose control of it, “Our survival is also threatened.” Either way, provided that this automated AI research and development loop produces some extremely powerful AI systems, China would be fearing for their survival.

It's not just China: India, the global south, all the other countries, if they're more attuned to this situation, would be very concerned. Russia as well. Russia doesn't have the hope about competing, they don't have a $100 billion data centers, they're busy with Ukraine, and when they're finished with that, they may reassess it, but they're too many years behind. I think the best they can do is actually try and shape other states' intents rather than try to make a bid for outcompeting them.

If we're thinking about deterrence and what you call Mutually Assured AI Malfunction [MAIM], there's a capability aspect that we want to make sure that we would have the capability to check that kind of dash for dominance. But there's also a communication aspect where both sides have to understand and trust what the other side is trying to do, which was a key part of classic Cold War deterrence. Is that happening?

Information problems, yeah, if there's worse information then that can lead to conflict. I think China doesn't really need to worry about their access to information of what's going on. I think the US will need to develop more of its capabilities to have more reliable signals abroad. But I think there's different ways of getting information and producing misunderstandings, like the confidence-building measures, all these sorts of things. I think that the unilateral one is just espionage, and then the multilateral one is verification mechanisms and building some of that institutional or international infrastructure.

I think the first step in all of this is the states need to at least take matters into their own hands by building up these unilateral options, the unilateral option to prevent adversaries from doing a dash for domination and also know what's going on with each other's projects. I think that's what the US should focus on right now. Later on, as the salience of AI increases, I think then just international discussions to increase more strategic stability around this would be more plausible to emerge. But if they're not trying to take basic things to defend themselves and protect their own security, then I don't think international stuff that makes that much sense. That's kind of out of order.

Doomsday scenario (28:18)

If our institutions wake up to this more and do some of the basic stuff . . . to prevent another state dominating the other, I think that will make this go quite a bit better. . .

I have in my notes here that you think there's an 80 percent chance that an AI arms race would result in a catastrophe that would kill most of humanity. Do I have that right?

I think it's not necessarily just the race. Let's think of people's probabilities for this. There's a wide spectrum of probability. Elon, who I work with at xAI, a company I advise, xAI is his company, Elon thinks it's generally on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Dario Amodei, the CEO of philanthropic, I think thinks it's around 20 percent, as well. Sam Altman around 10 percent. I think it's more likely than not that this doesn't go that well for people, but there's a lot of tractability and a lot of volatility here.

If our institutions wake up to this more and do some of the basic stuff of knowing what's going on and sharpen your ability to have credible threats, credible, targeted threats to prevent another state dominating the other, I think that will make this go quite a bit better. . . I think if we went back in time in the 1940s and were saying, “Do we think that this whole nuclear thing is going to turn out well in 50 years?” I think we actually got a little lucky. I mean the Cuban Missile Crisis itself was . . .

There were a lot of bad moments in the ’60s. There were quite a few . . .

I think it's more likely than not, but there's substantial tractability and it's important not to be fatalistic about it or just deny it’s an issue, itself. I think it's like, do we think AI will go well? I don’t know, it depends on what our policy is. Right now, we're in the very early days and I'm still not noticing many of our institutions that are rising to the occasion that I think is warranted, but this could easily change in a few months with some larger event.

Not to be science fictional or anything, but you talk about a catastrophe, are you talking about: AI creates some sort of biological weapon? Back and forth cyber attacks destroy all the electrical infrastructure for China and the United States, so all of a sudden we're back into the 1800s? Are you talking about some sort of more “Terminator”-like scenario, rogue AI? When you think about the kind of catastrophe that could be that dangerous humanity, what do you think about?

We have three risk sources: one are states, the other are rogue actors like terrorists and pariah states, and then there's the AI themselves. The AI themselves are not relevant right now, but I think could be quite capable of causing damage on their own in even a year or two. That's the space of threat actors; so yes, AI could in the future . . . I don't see anything that makes them logically not controllable. They're mostly controllable right now. Maybe it's one out of 100, one out of 1000 of the times you run these AI systems and deploy them in some sort of environments [that] they do try breaking free. That's a bit of a problem later on when they actually gain the capability to break free and when they are able to operate autonomously.

There's been lots of studies on this and you can see this in OpenAI’s reports whenever they release new models. It's like, “Oh, it's only a 0.1 percent chance of it trying to break free,” but if you run a million of these AI agents, that's a lot of them that are going to be trying to break free. They're just not very capable currently. So I think that the AIs themselves are risky, and if you're having humanity going up against AIs that aren't controlled by anybody, or AIs that broke free, that could get quite dangerous if you also have, as we're seeing now, China and others building more of these humanoid robots in the next few years. This could make them be concerning in that they could just by themselves create some sort of bioweapon. You don't need even human hands to do it, you can just instruct a robot to do it and disperse it. I think that's a pretty easy way to take out biological opposition, so to speak, in kind of an eccentric way.

That's a concern. Rogue actors themselves doing this, them reasoning that, “Oh, this bioweapon gives us a secure second strike,” things like that would be a concern from rogue actors. Then, of course, states using this to make an attempt to crush the other state or develop a technology that disables an adversary’s secure second strike. I think these are real problems.

Maximal progress, minimal risk (33:25)

I think what we want to shoot for is [a world] where people have enough resources and the ability to just live their lives in ways as they self-determine . . .

Let me finish with this: I want continuing AI progress such that we can cure all the major chronic diseases, that we can get commercial nuclear fusion, that we can get faster rockets, all the kinds of optimistic stuff, accelerate economic growth to a pace that we've never seen. I want all of that.

Can I get all of that and also avoid the kinds of scenarios you're worried about without turning the optimistic AI project into something that arrives at the end of the century, rather than arrives midcentury? I’m just worried about slowing down all that progress.

I think we can. In the Superintelligence Strategy, we have three parts to that: We have the deterrence part, which I’m speaking about here, and we have making sure that the capabilities aren't falling into the hands of rogue actors — and I think this isn't that difficult, good export controls and add some just basic safeguards of we need to know who you are if we're going to be helping you manipulate viruses, things like that. That's easy to handle.

Then on the competition aspect, there are many ways the US can make itself more competitive, like having more guaranteed supply chains for AI chips, so more manufacturing here or in allied states instead of all of it being in Taiwan. Currently, all the cutting-edge AI chips are made in Taiwan, so if there's a Taiwan invasion, the US loses in this AI race. They lose. This is double-digit probability. This is very foreseeable. So trying to robustify our manufacturing capabilities, quite essential; likewise for making robotics and drones.

I think there's still many axes to compete in. I don't think it makes sense to try and compete in building a sort of superintelligence versus one of these potentially mutual assured destruction-disrupting AIs. I don't think you want to be building those, but I think you can have your AIs for healthcare, you can have your AIs doing all the complicated math you want, and whatever, all this coding, and driving your vehicles, and folding your laundry. You can have all of that. I think it's definitely feasible.

What we did in the Cold War with the prospect of nuclear weapons, we obviously got through it, and we had deterrence through mutual assured destruction. We had non-proliferation of fissile materials to lesser states and rogue actors, and we had containment of the Soviet Union. I think the Superintelligence Strategy is somewhat similar: If you deter some of the most stabilizing AI projects, you make sure that some of these capabilities are not proliferating to random rogue actors, and you increase your competitiveness relative to China through things like incorporating AI into your military by, for instance, improving your ability to manufacture drones and improving your ability to reliably get your hands on AI chips even if there's a Taiwan conflict.

I think that's the strategy and this doesn't make us uncompetitive. We are still focusing on competitiveness, but this does put barriers around some of the threats that different states could pose to us and that rogue actors using AI could pose to us while still shoring up economic security and positioning ourselves if AI becomes really relevant.

I lied, I had one more short question: If we avoid the dire scenarios, what does the world look like in 2045?

I would guess that it would be utterly transformed. I wouldn't expect people would be working then as much, hopefully. If you've controlled it well, there could be many ways of living, as there is now, and people would have resources to do so. It’s not like there's one way of living — that seems bad because there's many different values to pursue. So letting people pursue their own values, so long as it doesn't destroy the system, and things like that, as we have today. It seems like an abstract version of the picture.

People keep thinking, “Are we in zoos? Are AIs keeping us in zoos?” or something like that. It's like, no. Or like, “Are we just all in the Zuckerberg sort of virtual reality, AI friend thing?” It's like no, you can choose to do otherwise, as well. I think we want to preserve that ability.

Good news: we won't have to fold laundry. Bad news: in zoos. There's many scenarios.

I think what we want to shoot for is one where people have enough resources and the ability to just live their lives in ways as they self-determine, subject to not harming others in severe ways. But people tend to think there's same sort of forced dichotomy of it's going to be aWALL-EWALL-E world where everybody has to live the same way, or everybody's in zoos, or everybody's just pleasured-out and drugged-up or something. It’s forced choices. Some people do that, some people choose to have drugs, and we don't hear much from them, and others choose to flourish, and pursue projects, and raise children and so on.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* Is College Still Worth It? - Liberty Street Economics

* Scalable versus Productive Technologies - Fed in Print

▶ Business

* AI’s Threat to Google Just Got Real - WSJ

* AI Has Upended the Search Game. Marketers Are Scrambling to Catch Up. - WSJ

▶ Policy/Politics

* U.S. pushes nations facing tariffs to approve Musk’s Starlink, cables show - Wapo

* US scraps Biden-era rule that aimed to limit exports of AI chips - FT

* Singapore’s Vision for AI Safety Bridges the US-China Divide - Wired

* A ‘Trump Card Visa’ Is Already Showing Up in Immigration Forms - Wired

▶ AI/Digital

* AI agents: from co-pilot to autopilot - FT

* China’s AI Strategy: Adoption Over AGI - AEI

* How to build a better AI benchmark - MIT

* Introducing OpenAI for Countries - OpenAI

* Why humans are still much better than AI at forecasting the future - Vox

* Outperformed by AI: Time to Replace Your Analyst? Find Out Which GenAI Model Does It Best - SSRN

▶ Biotech/Health

* Scientists Hail This Medical Breakthrough. A Political Storm Could Cripple It. - NYT

* DARPA-Funded Research Develops Novel Technology to Combat Treatment-Resistant PTSD - The Debrief

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? - Sustainability by Numbers

* OpenAI and the FDA Are Holding Talks About Using AI In Drug Evaluation - Wired

▶ Robotics/AVs

* Jesse Levinson of Amazon Zoox: ‘The public has less patience for robotaxi mistakes’ - FT

▶ Space/Transportation

* NASA scrambles to cut ISS activity due to budget issues - Ars

* Statistically Speaking, We Should Have Heard from Aliens by Now - Universe Today

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class - Noahpinion

* The Banality of Blind Men - Risk & Progress

* Toys, Pencils, and Poverty at the Margins - The Dispatch

* Don’t Bet the Future on Winning an AI Arms Race - AI Prospects

* Why Is the US Economy Surging Ahead of the UK? - Conversable Economist

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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

With the rise of American populist nationalism has come the rise of nativism: a belief in the concept of “heritage Americans” and a deep distrust of immigration. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Alex Nowrasteh about the ideology beneath this severe skepticism, as well as what Americans lose economically if we shut our doors to both low- and high-skilled immigrants.

Nowrasteh is the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of his own Substack with David Bier, as well as the co-author of Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions.

Read more of Nowrasteh’s work on immigration, nationalism, and other research.

In This Episode

* Illegal immigration (1:16)

* Rise of xenophobia (3:48)

* Psychology of immigration skeptics (9:20)

* The future American workforce (14:04)

* Population decline and assimilation (17:35)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Illegal immigration (1:16)

The system that I would favor is one that allows a substantially larger number of people at every skill level to come into this country legally, to work, to live, and to become Americans . . . because this country demands their labor and there's no way for them to come legally.

Pethokoukis: Will you, in a very short period of time, give me a sense of the situation at the southern border of the United States of America in terms of immigration, how that has evolved from Trump 1, to Biden, to now? Is it possible to give me a concise summary of that?

Nowrasteh: From Obama through Trump 1, the border apprehension numbers were pretty reasonable, you were talking about somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 per year. Then came Covid, crashed those numbers down to basically nothing by April of 2020.

After that, the numbers progressively rose. They were at the highest point in December of 2020 than they had been for any other December going back over 25 years. Then Biden takes office, the numbers shoot through the roof. We're talking about 170,000 to 250,000, sometimes 300,000 a month until January or so of 2024; those numbers start coming down precipitously. December of 2024, they're at 40,000 or so, 45,000. January 2025, Trump comes in, they go down again. First full month of Trump's administration in February, they're about 8,000, the lowest numbers without a pandemic in a very long time.

What's the right number?

That's a hard question to answer? In an ideal world where costs and benefits didn't matter, I think the ideal number is zero. But the question is how do you get to that ideal number, right? Is it by having an insane amount of enforcement, of existing laws where you basically end up brutalizing people to an incredible extent? Or is it practically zero because we let people come in lawfully to work in this country. The system that I would favor is one that allows a substantially larger number of people at every skill level to come into this country legally, to work, to live, and to become Americans, and that would bring that number down to about what it is now or even lower than what it is now every month, because the reason people come illegally is because this country demands their labor and there's no way for them to come legally.

Rise of xenophobia (3:48)

. . . I just don't think the economic argument is what moves people on this topic.

As I’ve understood it, and maybe understand it wrong, is this issue has developed that — at first it seemed like the concern, and it still is the concern, was with illegal undocumented immigrants. And then it seems to me the argument became, “Well, we don't want those, and then we also really don't want low-skill immigrants either.” And now it seems, and maybe you have a different perspective, that it's, “Well, we don't really want those high-skill immigrants either.”

You gave me the current state of illegal immigration at the southern border. What is the current state of the argument among people who want less, perhaps even no immigration in this country?

State of the argument is actually what you described. When I started working on this topic about 15 years ago, I never thought I would've heard people come out against the H-1B visa, or against high-skilled immigrants, or against foreign entrepreneurs. But you saw this over Christmas actually, December of 2024. You saw this basically online “H-1 B-gate” where Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk were saying H-1Bs are great. I think Musk had tweeted, “over my dead body we're going to cut the H-1B,” right? And you see this groundswell of conservatives and Republicans — not all of them, by any means — come out and say, “We don't even want these guys. We don't want these skilled immigrants,” using a whole range of arguments. None of them economic, by the way. Almost none of them economics; all culture, all voting habits, all stereotypes, a lot of them pretty nasty in my opinion.

So there is this sense where some people just don't want immigrants. The first time I think I encountered this in writing from a person who was prominent was Anne Coulter, Jeff Sessions when he was senator, and these types of people around 2015, in a big way, and it seems to have become much more prominent than I ever thought it would be.

Is it that they don't understand the economic argument or they just don't care about that argument?

They don't care about it. I have come to the realization — this makes me sad because I'm an economist by training — but I just don't think the economic argument is what moves people on this topic. I don't think it's what they care about. I don't think it animates . . . It animates me as a pro-immigration person, I think it animate you, right?

It does, yeah, it sure does.

It does not animate the people who are opposed to it. I think it is a cultural argument, it is a crime element, it is a threat element, it is a, “This makes us less American somehow” weird, fuzzy-feeling argument.

Would it matter if the immigrants were all coming from Germany, France, and Norway?

Maybe for a handful of them, but generally no, I don't think so. I think the idea that America is special, is different, is some kind of unique nation that ethnically, or in other ways cannot be pierced or contaminated by foreigners — I think it's just like an “Ew, foreigners,” type of sentiment that people have. A base xenophobia that a lot of people have combined with a very reasonable fear and dislike of chaos. When people see chaos on the border, they hate it.

I hate chaos on the border. My answer is to get rid of the chaos by letting people come in legally, because you legalize a market, you can actually regulate it. You can't regulate an illegal market. But I think other people see chaos, they have this sort of purity conception of America that's just fanciful, in my opinion, and they just don't want foreigners, and the chaos prompts them, makes it even more powerful.

To what extent is it fear that all these immigrants will eventually vote for things you don't want? Or in this case, they're all going to become Democrats, so Republicans don't want them.

That’s definitely part of it. I think that's more of an elite Republican fear, or an elite sort of nativist or conservative fear than it is amongst the people online who are yelling at me all the time or yelling at Elon Musk. I think that resonates a lot more in this city and in online conservative publications, I think that resonates much more. I don't think it's borne out by the facts, and people who say this will also loudly trumpet how Hispanics now basically split their vote in the 2024 election. David Shore, who is the progressive analyst of electoral politics, said he thinks that Trump actually won the naturalized immigrant vote, which is probably the first time a Republican has won the naturalized immigrant vote since the 19th century.

The immediate question is, does that kind of thing, will that resonate into a changing opinion among folks on the right if they feel like they feel like they can win these voters?

I don't think so because I think it's about deeper issues than that. I think it's a real feelings-, values-based issue.

Psychology of immigration skeptics (9:20)

When people feel like they don't have control of something in their country or their government doesn't have control of something, they become anti- whatever is the source of that chaos, even the legal versions of it.

Has this been there for a long time? Was it exacerbated for some reason? Was it exacerbated by the financial crisis and the slow economy afterward? The only time I remember hearing about people using the idea of “heritage Americans” were elite people whose great great grandparents came over on the Mayflower and they thought they were better than everybody else, they were elites, they were these kind of Boston Brahmans. So I was aware of the concept from that, but I've never heard people — and I hear it now — about people who were not part of the original Mayflower wave, or Pilgrims, think of themselves as “heritage Americans” because their parents came over in the 1850s or the 1880s, but now their “heritage.” That idea to me seems new.

I hadn't heard of it until just a few years ago, frankly, at all. I racked my brain about this because I used to have a lot of affinity for the Republican Party, just to be frank. And I'm from California, and I'm in my ’40s, so I remember Prop 187 in 1994 when the state had a big campaign about illegal immigrants’ enforcement and welfare, and it really changed the state's voting patterns to be much more democratic, eventually.

Then I saw the Republican Party under George W. Bush, and John McCain, and all these other guys who were pro-Republican, but always in California the Republicans were very skeptical of immigration across the board, but I didn't really see that spread. Then I saw it go to Arizona in 2010, 2009, 2008, around there. I saw it go to South Carolina, Mississippi, some of these places, and then all of a sudden with Trump, it went everywhere.

So I racked my brain thinking, did I miss something? Was there always something there and I was just too myopic to view it, or I wasn't in those circles, or I wanted to convince myself that it wasn't there? And I really think that it was always there to some small extent, but Trump is the most brilliant political entrepreneur of our lifetime and probably of our country's history, and that he took over this party from the outside and he convinced people to be nativists. Because what he was saying, the words — not that different from Scott Walker saying about immigration. It was not that different from what Mike Huckabee was saying about immigration. It wasn't that different from Santorum. But he said it or sold it in a way that just worked, I guess. That maybe absolves me of some responsibility or maybe allows me to say that I didn't miss anything, but I do think that that largely explains it.

And how does it explain that, and you may not have an answer. I can sort of understand the visceral concern about chaos at the border or people coming here illegally. But then to take it to the point that we don't even want AI engineers to come to this country from India, or, “I'm really angry that someone from a foreign country is taking my kid's spot at Harvard.” That, to me, seems almost inexplicable.

It's not the fact of the chaos, but it's the perception of the chaos, because when Trump came in in 2015, the border crossing numbers were really low. They were in the 300,000s, low 400,000s, but he talked about it like it was millions, and he created this perception of just insane, outrageous chaos.

There's a research and political psychology field about the locus of control. When people feel like they don't have control of something in their country or their government doesn't have control of something, they become anti- whatever is the source of that chaos, even the legal versions of it. In some way, it's an understandable human reaction, but in some ways it is so destructive. But, like you said, it spreads to AI engineers from China because it's like all immigration, and it's so bad, and it's so destructive, and that is the best explanation that I've seen out there about that.

The future American workforce (14:04)

What we notice in the economics of immigration, when we do these types of studies and we take a look at the wage impacts, we've got basically no wage effect on those of native-born Americans.

I write a lot about, hopefully, this technological wave that we're going to be experiencing, and then I also write a little about immigration. The question I get is, if we're going to be worried about the jobs of the future being taken over by software or by robots, if we really think that's going to happen, shouldn’t we really be thinking very hard about the kinds of people we let enter into this country, even legally, and their ability to function in that kind of economy?

I think we need to think about what is the best mechanism to select people to come here that the economy needs. What you described . . . assumes an amount of knowledge, and foresight, and, frankly, the incentive to make a wise decision in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians that they just do not have and that they will never have. and what matters most and who can pick the best in the market,

You can say STEM degrees only. I only want people who have STEM degrees from colleges that, on some global ranking, are in the top 500 universities. You could say that. That would be one way of selecting.

They could try to centrally plan it like that. . .

You're saying “centrally planned” because you know that's going to get a reaction out of me, but go ahead.

I do. The thing is, there's all different types of ways to have an immigration system and there's going to be a little bit of planning any immigration system. But I think the one that will work best is the one that allows the market to have the widest possible choice. We don't know how automation is going to turn out.

There's this thing called Moravec’s paradox in a lot of AI writing, which is the idea that you'll probably be able to automate a lot of high-skill jobs more easily than you will be able to automate, say, somebody who's a maid, or a nanny, or a nurse, or a plumber, just because the real world is harder than . . . You and I type, and talk, and do math. That's probably easier to do. So maybe the optimal thing to do would be to increase immigration for low-skilled people because all the jobs in the future are going to be low-skilled anyway, because we're going to be able to automate all the high-skilled jobs.

Though you could say then that that would take away the jobs from the natives.

You could say that, of course. What we notice in the economics of immigration, when we do these types of studies and we take a look at the wage impacts, we've got basically no wage effect on those of native-born Americans. If we were to have a situation where let's say massive amounts of jobs disappear in entire sectors of the economy, vanished, automated . . . well, that just means that we're going to have more opportunities and specialization, division of labor, where there's going to be a lot more lower-skilled and mid-skill jobs, just because there's such a much larger and more productive side of the economy.

There's going to be so much more profits in these other ones that we're going to have a bigger economy in the same way that when agriculture basically shrank as a massive section of the workforce, those people got other jobs that were more productive, and it was great. I think we could maybe see that again, and I hope we do. I don't want to have to work anymore.

Population decline and assimilation (17:35)

. . . if the whole world is going to have population decline in 20, 30, 50 years, we're going to have to deal with that at some point, but I'd rather deal with that problem with a population of 600 million Americans than a population of 350 million Americans.

The scenario — and this was highlighted to me by one of our scholars who looks a lot about demographics and population growth — his theory is that all the population-decline estimates, shrinkage, and slowing down estimates from the United Nations are way too optimistic, that population would begin to level off much faster. Whatever the UN's low or worst-case scenario is, if you want to put a qualifier on it like that, it's probably like that. And a lot of policymakers are underestimating the decline in fertility rates, and eventually everyone's going to figure that out. And there'll be a mad global scandal for population — for people.

There's going to be tons of labor shortages and you're going to want people, and there's going to be this scramble, and not every country is going to be as good at it. If people want to immigrate, they're probably more likely, everything else equal, they're going to want to go to the United States as opposed to — not to smear another country — I don't know, Argentina or something. We have this great ability to accept people to come here and for them to succeed and build companies. Maybe that company is a bodega, maybe that company is a technology company. So we're at this moment where we have this great natural advantage, but it seems like we're utterly rejecting it.

We are not just rejecting it, we are turning it from a positive into a big negative. You have these students who are being apprehended and having their visas canceled because of a fishing license violation six years ago. People who are skilled science students studying the United States who could go on to be founders of big companies or just high-skilled workers, and we're saying, “Nope, can't do it, sorry.” We're kicking people out for reasons of speech — speech that I often don't like, by the way, but it doesn't matter, because I believe it on principle. It's important.

We already see it showing up in tourism numbers plummeting to the United States, and I think we're going to see it in student visa numbers shortly. And student visas are the first step on that long chain of being able to be a high-skilled immigrant one day. So we are really doing long-term damage.

On the population stuff, I completely agree, and if the whole world is going to have population decline in 20, 30, 50 years, we're going to have to deal with that at some point, but I'd rather deal with that problem with a population of 600 million Americans than a population of 350 million Americans.

What is your general take on the notion of assimilation? Is that a problem? Should we doing more to make sure people are successful here? How do you think about that?

I do think assimilation is important. I don't think it's a problem. When I talk about assimilation, I use it in the way that Jacob Vigdor — Jake is a professor, University of Washington economist, and he says, assimilation is when an immigrant or their kids are indistinguishable from long-settled Americans on the measurements of family size, civic participation, income, education, language. Basically it takes three generations. That is, the first generation are the immigrants, second are their kids, third are their grandkids, on average.

Some, much faster. Like my Indian neighbors are more than assimilated in the first generation. They do better than native born Americans on most of those measures. Some lower-skilled Hispanic or some East African immigrants, takes three, three and a half, four sometimes, to do that well, but it's going very well.

We do not have the cultural issues that some countries in Europe have. To some extent, it's overblown in Europe, those problems, but they do exist and they exist to a greater extent than they do here. Part of that is because we have birthright citizenship. People who are born in this country are citizens, they don't feel like they're an illegal underclass because they’re not. They feel totally accepted because they are legally, and we have an ethos in this country, because we don't have an ethnic identification of being American like they do in places like Germany or in Norway. I have family members in Norway who are half Iranian and they're not really considered to be Norwegian, culturally. Here it's the opposite. If I were to go say I'm not an American, people would be offended. There, if you say, “Oh, I'm Norwegian,” they'll correct you and be like, “No, you're not Norwegian, you're something else.”

We have this great secret sauce born of our culture, born of our lack of an ethnic Americanness. It doesn't matter what ethnicity or race you are, or religion, anybody can be American. And we have done it so well and we just don't have these issues, and I don't think, as a result, we should do more because I'm worried about the government breaking it.

Based on what you just said, at a gut level, how do you feel when someone uses the phrase “heritage Americans,” and they hate the idea of America as an idea, and to be an American you need to have been here for a long time. That whole way of looking at it — do you get it, or do you at some level [think], I am not a psychologist, I do not understand it?

A way to make sense of it [is] by swapping out the word “American” in their sentence and we place it with the word “Frenchman,” or “German,” or “Russian,” or “Japanese,” or some other country that's a nation state where the identity is bound up with ethnicity. That's the way that I make sense of it, and I think this is a concept that just does not work in the United States; it cannot work. Maybe it's the most nationalistic I am, but I think that that's just a fundamentally foreign idea that could never work in the United States. It sounds more at home in Europe and other places. That's what strikes me

As I finish up, I know you have all kinds of ideas to improve the American immigration system, which we will try to link to, but instead of me asking you to give me your five-point plan for perfection, I'm going to ask you: How does this turn around? What is the scenario in which we become more accepting again of immigrants, perhaps the way we were 30 years ago?

That really is a $64,000 question. The idea that I have floated — which probably won't work, but at least gets people to pause — is the entitlement programs are going insolvent, and I have pitched to my grandmother-in-law, who is a very nice woman, who is a Republican who is skeptical of immigration, but who is worried about Social Security going bankrupt, I say, “Well, there is one way to increase the solvency of this program for 30 or 40 years.” And she said, “What's that?” and I say, “Let in 100 million immigrants between the age of the 20 and 30.” And it gives her pause. I think if that idea can give her pause, then maybe it has a shot. When this country seriously starts to grapple with the insolvency of entitlement programs, that's looming.

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In the 1960s, a deep anxiety set in as one thing became seemingly clear: We were headed toward population catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” and “The Limits to Growth,” written by the Club of Rome, were just two publications warning of impending starvation due to simply too many humans on the earth.

As the population ballooned year by year, it would simply be impossible to feed everyone. Demographers and environmentalists alike held their breath and braced for impact.

Except that we didn’t starve. On the contrary, we were better fed than ever.

In his article in The New Atlantis, Charles C. Mann explains that agricultural innovation — from improved fertilization and irrigation to genetic modification — has brought global hunger to a record low.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Mann about the agricultural history they didn’t teach you in school.

Mann is a science journalist who has worked as a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired magazines, and whose work has been featured in many other major publications. He is also the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, as well as The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World.

In This Episode

* Intro to the Agricultural Revolution (2:04)

* Water infrastructure (13:11)

* Feeding the masses (18:20)

* Indigenous America (25:20)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Intro to the Agricultural Revolution (2:04)

I don't think that people realize that the fact that most people on earth, almost the average person on earth, can feed themselves is a novel phenomenon. It's something that basically wasn't true since as far back as we know.

Pethokoukis: What got my attention was a couple of pieces that you've worked on for The New Atlantis magazine looking at the issue of how modern Americans take for granted the remarkable systems and infrastructure that provide us comfort, safety, and a sense of luxury that would've been utterly unimaginable even to the wealthiest people of a hundred years ago or 200 years ago.

Let me start off by asking you: Does it matter that we do take that for granted and that we also kind of don't understand how our world works?

Mann: I would say yes, very much. It matters because these systems undergird the prosperity that we have, the good fortune that we have to be alive now, but they're always one generation away from collapse. If they aren't maintained, upgraded and modernized, they'll fall apart. They just won't stand there. So we have to be aware of this. We have to keep our eye on the ball, otherwise we won't have these things.

The second thing is that, if we don't know how our society works, as citizens, we're simply not going to make very good choices about what to do with that society. I feel like both sides in our current political divide are kind of taking their eye off the ball. It's important to have good roads, it's important to have clean water, it's important to have a functioning public health system, it's important to have an agricultural system that works. It doesn't really matter who you are. And if we don't keep these things going, life will be unnecessarily bad for a lot of people, and that's just crazy to do.

Is this a more recent phenomenon? If I would've asked people 50 years ago, “Explain to me how our infrastructure functions, how we get water, how we get electricity,” would they have a better idea? Is it just because things are more complicated today that we have no idea how our food gets here or why when we turn the faucet, clean water comes out?

The answer is “yes” in a sort of trivial sense, in that many more people were involved in producing food, a much greater percentage of the population was involved in producing food 50 years ago. The same thing was true for the people who were building infrastructure 50 years ago.

But I also think it's generally true that people's parents saw the change and knew it. So that is very much the case and, in a sense, I think we're victims of our own success. These kinds of things have brought us so much prosperity that we can afford to do crazy things like become YouTube influencers, or podcasters, or freelance writers. You don't really have any connection with how the society goes because we're sort of surfing on this wave of luxury that our ancestors bequeathed to us.

I don't know how much time you spend on social media, Charles — I'm sure I spend too much — but I certainly sense that many people today, younger people especially, don't have a sense of how someone lived 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and there was just a lot more physical suffering. And certainly, if you go back far enough, you could not take for granted that you would have tomatoes in your supermarket year round, that you would have water in the house and that water would be clean. What I found really interesting — you did a piece on food and a piece on water — in the food piece you note that, in the 1980s, that was a real turning point that the average person on earth had enough to eat all the time, and rather than becoming an issue of food production, it became an issue of distribution, of governance. I think most people would be surprised of that statistic even though it's 40 years old.

I don't think that people realize that the fact that most people on earth, almost the average person on earth, can feed themselves is a novel phenomenon. It's something that basically wasn't true since as far back as we know. That's this enormous turning point, and there are many of these turning points. Obviously, the introduction of antibiotics for . . . public health, which is another one of these articles they're going to be working on . . .

Just about 100 years ago today, when President Coolidge was [president], his son went to play tennis at the White House tennis courts, and because he was lazy, or it was fashionable, or something, he didn't put on socks. He got a blister on his toe, the toe got infected, and he died. 100 years ago, the president of the United States, who presumably had the best healthcare available to anybody in the world, was unable to save his beloved son when the son got a trivial blister that got infected. The change from that to now is mind boggling.

You've written about the Agricultural Revolution and why the great fears 40 or 50 years ago of mass starvation didn't happen. I find that an endlessly interesting topic, both for its importance and for the fact it just seems to be so underappreciated to this day, even when it was sort of obvious to people who pay attention that something was happening, it still seemed not to penetrate the public consciousness. I wonder if you could just briefly talk to me about that revolution and how it happened.

The question is, how did it go from “The Population Bomb” written in 1968, a huge bestseller, hugely influential, predicting that there is going to be hundreds of millions of people dying of mass starvation, followed by other equally impassioned, equally important warnings. There's one called “Famine, 1975!,” written a few years before, that predicted mass famines in 1975. There's “The Limits to Growth.” I went to college in the ’70s and these were books that were on the curriculum, and they were regarded as contemporary classics, and they all proved to be wrong.

The reason is that, although they were quite correct about the fact that the human race was reproducing at that time faster than ever before, they didn't realize two things: The first is that as societies get more affluent, and particularly as societies get more affluent and give women more opportunities, birth rates decline. So that this was obviously, if you looked at history, going to be a temporary phenomenon of whatever length it was be, but it was not going to be infinite.

The second was there was this enormous effort spurred by this guy named Norman Borlaug, but with tons of other people involved, to take modern science and apply it to agriculture, and that included these sort of three waves of innovation. Now, most innovation is actually just doing older technologies better, which is a huge source of progress, and the first one was irrigation. Irrigation has been around since forever. It's almost always been done badly. It's almost always not been done systematically. People started doing it better. They still have a lot of problems with it, but it's way better, and now 40 percent, roughly, of the crops in the world that are produced are produced by irrigation.

The second is the introduction of fertilizer. There's two German scientists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who essentially developed the ways of taking fertilizer and making lots and lots of it in factories. I could go into more detail if you want, but that's the essential thing. This had never been done before, and suddenly cheap industrial fertilizer became available all over the world, and Vaclav Smil . . . he's sort of an environmental scientist of every sort, in Manitoba has calculated that roughly 40 percent of the people on earth today would not be alive if it wasn't for that.

And then the third was the development of much better, much higher-yielding seeds, and that was the part that Norman Borlaug had done. These packaged together of irrigation fertilizer and seeds yielded what's been called the Green Revolution, doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled grain yields across the world, particularly with wheat and rice. The result is the world we live in today. When I was growing up, when you were growing up, your parents may have said to you, as they did me, Oh, eat your vegetables, there are kids that are starving in Asia.” Right? That was what was told and that was the story that was told in books like “The Population Bomb,” and now Asia's our commercial rival. When you go to Bangkok, that was a place that was hungry and now it's gleaming skyscrapers and so forth. It's all based on this fact that people are able to feed themselves through the combination of these three factors,

That story, the story of mass-starvation that the Green Revolution irrigation prevented from coming true. I think a surprising number of people still think that story is relevant today, just as some people still think the population will be exploding when it seems clear it probably will not be exploding. It will rise, but then it's going to start coming down at some point this century. I think those messages just don't get through. Just like most people don't know Norm Borlaug, the Haber-Bosch process, which school kids should know. They don't know any of this. . . Borlaug won the Nobel Prize, right?

Right. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. I'll tell you a funny story —

I think he won it in the same year that “The Population Bomb” came out.

It was just a couple years off. But you're right, the central point is right, and the funny thing is . . . I wrote another book a while back that talked about this and about the way environmentalists think about the world, and it’s called the “Wizard and the Prophet” and Borlaug was the wizard of it. I thought, when I proposed it, that it would be easy. He was such an important guy, there'd be tons of biographies about him. And to this day, there isn't a real serious scholarly biography of the guy. This is a person who has done arguably more to change human life than any other person in the 20th century, certainly up in the top dozen or so. There's not a single serious biography of him.

How can that be?

It's because we're tremendously disconnected. It's a symptom of what I'm talking about. We're tremendously disconnected from these systems, and it's too bad because they're interesting! They're actually quite interesting to figure out: How do you get water to eight billion people? How do you get . . . It is a huge challenge, and some of the smartest people you’ve ever met are working on it every day, but they're working on it over here, and the public attention is over here.

Water infrastructure (13:11)

. . . the lack of decent, clean, fresh water is the world's worst immediate environmental problem.

I think people probably have some vague idea about agriculture, the Agricultural Revolution, how farming has changed, but I think, as you just referred to, the second half, water — utter mystery to people. Comes out of a pipe. The challenges of doing that in a rich country are hard. The challenges doing a country not so rich, also hard. Tell me what you find interesting about that topic.

Well, whereas the story about agriculture is basically a good story: We've gotten better at it. We have a whole bunch of technical innovations that came in the 20th century and humankind is better off than ever before. With water, too, we are better off than ever before, but the maddening thing is we could be really well off because the technology is basically extremely old.

There's a city, a very ancient city called Mohenjo-daro that I write about a bit in this article that was in essentially on the Pakistan-India border, 2600 BC. And they had a fully functioning water system that, in its basics, was no different than the water system that we have, or that London has, or that Paris has. So this is an ancient, ancient technology, yet we still have two billion people on the planet that don't have access to adequate water. In fact, even though we know how to do it, the lack of decent, clean, fresh water is the world's worst immediate environmental problem. And a small thing that makes me nuts is that climate change — which is real and important — gets a lot of attention, but there are people dying of not getting good water now.

On top of it, even in rich countries like us, our water system is antiquated. The great bulk of it was built in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, and, like any kind of physical system, it ages, and every couple years, various engineering bodies, water bodies, the EPA, and so forth puts out a report saying, “Hey, we really have to fix the US water system and the numbers keep mounting up.” And Democrats, Republicans, they all ignore this.

Who is working on the water issue in poorer countries?

There you have a very ad hoc group of people. The answer is part of it's the Food and Agricultural Organization because most water in most countries is used for irrigation to grow food. You also have the World Health Organization, these kinds of bodies. You have NGOs working on it. What you don't have in those countries like our country is the government taking responsibility for coordinating something that's obviously in the national interest.

So you have these things where, very periodically — a government like China has done this, Jordan has done this, Bolivia has done this, countries all over the world have done this — and they say, “Okay, we haven't been able to provide freshwater. Let's bring in a private company.” And the private company then invests all this money in infrastructure, which is expensive. Then, because it's a private company, it has to make that money back, and so it charges people for a lot of money for this, and the people are very unhappy because suddenly they're paying a quarter of their income for water, which is what I saw in Southwest China: water riots because people are paying so much for water.

In other words, one of the things that government can do is sort of spread these costs over everybody, but instead they concentrate it on the users, Almost universally, these privatization efforts have led to tremendous political unhappiness because the government has essentially shifted responsibility for coordinating and doing these things and imposed a cost on a narrow minority of the users.

Are we finally getting on top of the old water infrastructure in this country? It seems like during the Biden administration they had a big infrastructure bill. Do you happen to know if we are finally getting that system upgraded?

Listen, I will be the only person who probably ever interviews you who's actually had to fix a water main as a summer job. I spent [it at] my local Public Works Department where we'd have to fix water mains, and this was a number of years ago, and even a number of years ago, those pipes were really, really old. It didn’t take much for them to get a main break.

I'm one of those weird people who is bothered by this. All I can tell you is we have a lot of aging infrastructure. The last estimate that I’ve seen came before this sort of sudden jerky rise of construction costs, which, if you're at all involved in building, is basically all the people in the construction industry talk about. At that point, the estimate was that it was $1.2 trillion to fix the infrastructure that we have in the United States. I am sure it is higher now. I am delighted that the Biden people passed this infrastructure — would've been great if they passed permitting reform and a couple of other things to make it easier to spend the money, but okay. I would like to believe that the Trump people would take up the baton and go on this.

Feeding the masses (18:20)

I do worry that the kind of regulations, and rules, and ideas that we put into place to try and make agriculture more like this picture that we have in our head will end up inadvertently causing suffering for the people who are struggling.

We’re still going to have another two billion people, maybe, on this earth. Are we going to be able to feed them all?

Yeah, I think that there's no question. The question is what we're going to be able to feed them? Are we going to be able to feed them all, filet mignon and truffled . . . whatever they put truffle oil on, and all that? Not so sure about that.

All organic vegetables.

At the moment, that seems really implausible, and there's a sort of fundamental argument going on here. There's a lot of people, again, both right and left, who are sort of freaked out by the scale that modern agriculture operates on. You fly over the middle-west and you see all those circles of center-pivot irrigation, they plowed under, in the beginning of the 20th century, 100 million acres of prairie to produce all that. And it's done with enormous amounts of capital, and it was done also partly by moving people out so that you could have this enormous stuff. The result is it creates a system that . . . doesn't match many people's vision of the friendly family farmer that they grew up with. It's a giant industrial process and people are freaked out by the scale. They don't trust these entities, the Cargills and the ADMs, and all these huge companies that they see as not having their interests at heart.

It's very understandable. I live in a small town, we have a farm down there, and Jeremy runs it, and I'm very happy to see Jeremy. There's no Jeremy at Archer Daniels Midland. So the result is that there's a big revulsion against that, and people want to downsize the scale, and they point to very real environmental problems that big agriculture has, and they say that that is reason for this. The great problem is that in every single study that I am aware of, the sort of small, local farms don't produce as much food per acre or per hectare as the big, soulless industrial processes. So if you're concerned about feeding everybody, that's something you have to really weigh in your head, or heavy in your heart.

That sort of notion of what a farm should look like and what good food is, that kind of almost romantic notion really, to me, plays into the sort of anti-growth or the degrowth people who seemed to be saying that farms could only be this one thing — probably they don't even remember those farms anymore — that I saw in a storybook. It's like a family farm, everything's grown local, not a very industrial process, but you're talking about a very different world. Maybe that's a world they want, but I don’t know if that's a world you want if you're a poor person in this world.

No, and like I said, I love going to the small farm next to us and talking to Jeremy and he says, “Oh look, we've just got these tomatoes,” it's great, but I have to pay for that privilege. And it is a privilege because Jeremy is barely making it and charging twice as much as the supermarket. There's no economies of scale for him. He still has to buy all the equipment, but he's putting it over 20 acres instead of 2000 acres. In addition, it's because it's this hyper-diverse farm — which is wonderful; they get to see the strawberries, and the tomatoes, and all the different things — it means he has to hire much more labor than it would be if he was just specializing in one thing. So his costs are inevitably much, much higher, and, therefore, I have to pay a lot more to keep him going. That's fine for me; I'm a middle-class person, I like food, this can be my hobby going there.

I'd hate to have somebody tell me it's bad, but it's not a system that is geared for people who are struggling. There are just a ton of people all over the world who are struggling. They're better off than they were 100 years ago, but they're still struggling. I do worry that the kind of regulations, and rules, and ideas that we put into place to try and make agriculture more like this picture that we have in our head will end up inadvertently causing suffering for the people who are struggling.

To make sure everybody can get fed in the future, do we need a lot more innovation?

Innovation is always good. I would say that we do, and the kinds of innovation we need are not often what people imagine. For example, it's pretty clear that parts of the world are getting drier, and therefore irrigation is getting more difficult. The American Southwest is a primary candidate, and you go to the Safford Valley, which I did a few years ago — the Safford Valley is in southeast Arizona and it's hotter than hell there. I went there and it's 106 degrees and there's water from the Colorado River, 800 miles away, being channeled there, and they're growing Pima cotton. Pima cotton is this very good fine cotton that they use to make fancy clothes, and it's a great cash crop for farmers, but growing it involves channeling water from the Colorado 800 miles, and then they grow it by what's called flood irrigation, which is where you just fill the field with an inch of water. I was there actually to see an archeologist who's a water engineer, and I said to him, “Gee, it's hot! How much that water is evaporated?” And he said, “Oh, all of it.”

So we need to think about that kind of thing if the Colorado is going to run out of water, which it is now. There's ways you can do it, you can possibly genetically modify cotton to use less water. You could drip irrigation, which is a much more efficient form of irrigation, it’s readily available, but it's expensive. So you could try to help farmers do that. I think if you cut the soft costs, which is called the regulatory costs of farming, you might be able to pay for it in that way. That would be one type of innovation. Another type of thing you could do is to do a different kind of farming which is called civil pastoral systems, where you grow tree crops and then you grow cattle underneath, and that uses dramatically less water. It's being done in Sonora, just across the border and the tree crops — trees are basically wild. People don't breed them because it takes so long, but we now have the tools to breed them, and so you could make highly productive trees with cattle underneath and have a system that produces a lot of calories or a lot of good stuff. That's all the different kinds of innovation that we could do. Just some of the different kinds of innovation we could do and all would help.

Indigenous America (25:20)

Part of the reason I wrote these things is that I realized it's really interesting and I didn't learn anything about it in school.

Great articles in The New Atlantis, big fan of “Wizard and the Prophet,” but I'm going to take one minute and ask you about your great books talking about the story of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. If I just want to travel in the United States and I'm interested in finding out more about Native Americans in the United States, where would you tell me to go?

One of my favorite places just it's so amazing, is Chaco Canyon, and that's in the Four Corners area — that whole Four Corners area is quite incredible — and Chaco Canyon is a sign that native people could build amazing stuff, and native people could be crazy, in my opinion. It's in the middle of nowhere, it has no water, and for reasons that are probably spiritual and religious, they built an enormous number of essentially castles in this canyon, and they're incredible.

The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito as it's called now, it's like 800 rooms. They're just enormous. And you can go there, and you can see these places, and you can just walk around, and it is incredible. You drive up a little bit to Mesa Verde and there's hundreds of these incredible cliff dwellings. What seems to have happened — I'm going to put this really informally and kind of jokingly to you, not the way that an archeologist would talk about it or I would write about it, but what looks like it happened is that the Chaco Canyon is this big canyon, and on the good side that gets the southern exposure is all these big houses. And then the minions and the hoi polloi lived on the other side, and it looks like, around 800, 900, they just got really tired of serving the kings and they had something like a democratic revolution, and they just left, most of them, and founded the Pueblos, which is these intensely democratic self-governing bodies that are kind of like what Thomas Jefferson thought the United States should be.

Then it's like all the doctors, and the lawyers, and the MBAs, and the rich guys went up to Mesa Verde and they started off their own little kingdoms and they all fought with each other. So you have these crazy cliff dwellings where it's impossible to get in and there's hundreds of people living in these niches in these cliffs, and then that blew up too. So you could see history, democracy, and really great architecture all in one place.

If someone asked me for my advice about changing the curriculum in school, one, people would leave school knowing who the heroes of progress and heroes of the Agricultural Revolution were. And I think they'd also know a lot more about pre-Columbian history of the Americas. I think they should know about it but I also think it's just super interesting, though of course you’ve brought it to life in a beautiful way.

Thank you very much, and I couldn't agree with you more. Part of the reason I wrote these things is that I realized it's really interesting and I didn't learn anything about it in school.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

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In his famous 1962 address to Rice University, President Kennedy declared,

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard . . .

The current administration has chosen, among other things, to go to Mars. Some, Elon Musk included, are looking for a backup planet to Earth. For others, like Robert Zubrin, Mars is an opportunity for scientific discovery, pure challenge, and a revitalized human civilization.

Today on Faster, Please — The Podcast, Zubrin and I discuss how to reorient NASA, what our earliest Mars missions can and should look like, and why we should go to Mars at all.

Zubrin is the president of aerospace R&D company Pioneer Astronautics, as well as the founder and president of the Mars Society. He was also formerly a staff engineer at Lockheed Martin. He has authored over 200 published papers and is the author of seven books, including the most recent, The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.

For more, check out Zubrin’s article in The New Atlantis, “The Mars Dream is Back — Here’s How to Make It Actually Happen.”

In This Episode

* Colonization vs. exploration (1:38)

* A purpose-driven mission (5:01)

* Cultural diversity on Mars (12:07)

* An alternative to the SpaceX strategy (16:02)

* Artemis program reform (20:42)

* The myth of an independent Mars (24:17)

* Our current timeline (27:21)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Colonization vs. exploration (1:38)

I do think that it is important that the first human mission to ours be a round-trip mission. I want to have those people back, not just because it's nice to have them back, but I want to hear from them. I want to get the full report.

Pethokoukis: Just before we started chatting, I went and I checked an online prediction market — one I check for various things, the Metaculus online prediction market — and the consensus forecast from all the people in that community for when will the first humans land successfully on Mars was October 2042. Does that sound realistic, too soon, or should it be much further away?

I think it is potentially realistic, but I think we could beat it. Right now we have a chance to get a Humans to Mars program launched. This current administration has announced that they intend to do so. They're making a claim they’re going to land people on Mars in 2028. I do not think that is realistic, but I do believe that it is realistic for them to get the program well started and, if it is handled correctly — and we'll have to talk a lot more about that in this talk — that we could potentially land humans on Mars circa 2033.

When I gave you that prediction and then you mentioned the 2020s goal, those are about landing on Mars. Should we assume when people say, “We're going to land on Mars,” they also mean people returning from Mars or are they talking about one-way trips?

Musk has frequently talked about a colonization effort, and colonization is a one-way trip, but I don't think that's in the cards for 2028 or 2033. I think what is in the cards for this time period on our immediate horizon is exploration missions. I do think that we could potentially have a one-way mission with robots in 2028. That would take a lot of work and it's a bit optimistic, but I think it could be done with determination, and I think that should be done, actually.

To be clear, when people are talking about the first human mission to Mars, the assumption is it's not a one way trip for that astronaut, or those two astronauts, that we intend on bringing them back. Maybe the answer is obvious, but I'm not sure it's obvious to me.

From time to time, people have proposed scenarios where the first human mission to Mars is a one-way mission, you send maybe not two but five people. Then two years later you send five more people, and then you send 10 people, and then you send 20 people, and you build it up. In other words, it's not a one-way mission in the sense of you're going to be left there and your food will then run out and you will die. No, I don't think that is a credible or attractive mission plan, but the idea that you're going to go with a few people and then reinforce them and grow it into a base, and then a settlement. That is something that can be reasonably argued. But I still think even that is a bit premature. I do think that it is important that the first human mission to ours be a round-trip mission. I want to have those people back, not just because it's nice to have them back, but I want to hear from them. I want to get the full report.

A purpose-driven mission (5:01)

In the purpose-driven mode, the purpose comes first, you spend money to do things. In the vendor-driven mode, you do things in order to spend money. And we've seen both of these.

So should we just default to [the idea] that this mission will be done with government funding on SpaceX rockets, and this will be a SpaceX trip? That's by far the most likely scenario?

This is going to need to be a public-private partnership. SpaceX is rapidly developing the single most important element of the technology, but it's not all the technology. We need surface systems. We need the system for making rocket fuel on Mars because the SpaceX mission architecture is the one that I outlined in my book, The Case for Mars, where you make your return propellant on Mars: You take carbon dioxide and water, which are both available on Mars, and turn them into methane and oxygen, which is an excellent rocket fuel combination and which, in fact, is the rocket fuel combination that the Starship uses for that reason. So that's the plan, but you need the system that makes it

We're going to need surface power, which really should be a nuclear power source and which is difficult to develop outside of the government because we're talking about controlled material. Space nuclear reactors will need to use highly enriched uranium, so it should be a partnership between NASA and SpaceX, but we're going to have to reform NASA if this is going to work. I think, though, that this mission could be the vehicle by which we reform NASA. That is, that NASA Artemis moon program, for example, is an example of how not to do something.

That's the current government plan to get us back to the moon.

Right. But you see, NASA has two distinct modes of operation, and one I call the purpose-driven mode and the other is the vendor-driven mode. In the purpose-driven mode, the purpose comes first, you spend money to do things. In the vendor-driven mode, you do things in order to spend money. And we've seen both of these. To be fair, there's been times when NASA has operated with extreme efficiency to accomplish great things in very short amounts of time, of which, of course, the Apollo Program is the most well-known example where we got to the moon and eight years from program start. The difference between Apollo and Artemis was it wasn't human nature — and there were plenty of greedy people in the 1960s that, when the government's spending money, they want a piece of the action, they were all there.

There's no shortage of people who, when you’ve got a lot of money to spend, are willing to show up and say, “Hi, you got a great idea, but you can't do it until you fund me.” And there were plenty of them then, but they were shown the door because it was clear that if we did all these side projects that people were trying to claim were necessary (“you can't do your program until you do my program”) we would not make it to the moon by 1969. So actually, the forcing function was the schedule. That's what forced the nonsense out of the room.

Artemis, on the other hand, has been undertaken as a project whose leadership thought that they could secure a lot of support for the program if they gave a lot of people money. So Artemis has five different flight systems which are incompatible with each other. It's a ridiculous program. That's not the way to do things. We have to have a program leadership which is committed to humans-to-Mars not as a way to get pet technology programs funded, or pet constituencies funded, or pet vendors funded, or any of that stuff. It's got to be: the mission comes first. And if you have that kind of emphasis on this, this can be done and it can be the way to reform NASA.

I liken NASA today to a peacetime military, but then it gets thrown into battle, and you get rid of your McClellans and you bring in your Grants. In other words, you have a certain period of chaos and disorganization because you've got deadwood running the place, but under the stress of actually beginning a decisive mission and not being tolerant of anything less than real performance, you actually get the army you need.

So that sounds like that's a presidential decision, to give that agency a very specific goal, and perhaps a timeline, to create that kind of purpose-driven culture.

Yes. Now that's one necessity. There's another necessity as well, which is that the conceptual base of this program, the political base, if you will, which is derived from its intellectual base, has got to be expanded. This cannot be seen as a Trump-Musk boondoggle because Trump and Musk have both defined themselves in extremely partisan terms, and if this is seen as their program and not America's program, it will be gone as soon as the political fortunes of war shift, which they always do. Musk has this concept that he's been promoting, which is the reason why we have to go to Mars is so that there'll be survivors on Mars after the Earth is destroyed, and I don't think this is particularly —

You don't find that a compelling reason, given that there's not currently an obvious threat of us being destroyed, to run a program that could necessarily exist over multiple administrations and be quite expensive.

That idea is derived from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novel: The scientists go to the planet Terminus so they can reestablish civilization after the Galactic Empire collapsed. It may please science-fiction fans, but I don't think it's attractive to the general public, and also, frankly, I don't think it's practical. I don't think a Mars colony could have a million people on Mars that will survive as an autarchy. There's no nation on earth that survives as an autarchy. The ones that try are extremely poor as a result for trying.

The correct reason to go to Mars is, immediately, for the science, to find out the truth about the prevalence of diversity of life in the universe; for the challenge, to challenge our youth, learn your science and you can be an explorer and maker of new worlds; and for the future, but for the future, it's not for a few survivors to be hiding away after the earth is destroyed, it's to create a new branch, or perhaps several new branches, of human civilization which will add their creative inventiveness to human progress as a whole, as America did for Western civilization. By establishing America, you had a new branch of Western civilization which experimented in everything from democracy to light bulbs and airplanes and greatly enhanced human progress as a result.

And the Martians, you are going to have a group of technologically adept people in a frontier environment that's going to challenge them. They're going to come up with lots of inventions that they need for their own progress, but which will benefit human as a whole. And that is why you should colonize Mars.

Cultural diversity on Mars (12:07)

I believe that there will . . . be many colonies on Mars established by different people with different ideas on what the ideal civilization should be, and the ones with the best ideas will attract the most immigrants and therefore outgrow the rest.

It very much reminds me of the scenario laid out in The Expanse book and TV series where mankind has spread throughout the solar system. They're all branches of human civilization, but being out there has changed people, and Mars is different than Earth. Mars has a different society. The culture is different. I think that's a very interesting reason that I had not heard Elon Musk discuss.

I have a book called The New World on Mars, which you might want to check out because I discuss this very thing. I believe that there will, once it's possible to colonize Mars, there'll be many colonies on Mars established by different people with different ideas on what the ideal civilization should be, and the ones with the best ideas will attract the most immigrants and therefore outgrow the rest. So, for example, the one thing I disagree with about The Expanse is they have this militaristic Spartan civilization on Mars.

There's just one sort of universal culture.

Yeah, and I don't think that that civilization would attract many immigrants. The reason why the American North outgrew the South is because the North was free. That's why all the immigrants went to the North. That's why the North won the Civil War, actually. It had a larger population of more industry because all the immigrants went there and became far more creative. This is a very good thing, that the form of civilization that ultimately prevails on Mars will be one, I think, that will offer human freedom and be the most attractive in as many other respects as possible. That's why it will prevail, because it will attract immigrants.

But I want to get back to this program. If it is possible not to land humans on Mars in 2028, but to land — if you can land Starship on Mars, you can land not a robot, but a robotic expedition.

Starship, Musk claims it could land 100 tons on Mars. Let's say it could land 30. That's 30 times as much as we can currently land. The JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)-led Mars science community, they're still thinking about Mars exploration in the terms it's been done since the ’60s, which is single spacecraft on single rockets. Imagine you can now land an entire expedition. You land 30 rovers on Mars along with 30 helicopters that are well instrumented and a well instrumented science lab in it. So now you are bringing not only heavy lift, but heavy lander capability to the Mars science program, and now you have a robotic expedition on Mars. For every instrument that made it onto perseverance, there were 10 that were proposed because they could only take six, and like 100 teams wanted to get their instruments on the rover. So imagine now we can actually land 30 rovers and 30 helicopters, not little ones like Ingenuity, but ones that can carry five or six instruments each themselves.

So now you have 100 science teams, you've got life-detection experiments, you've got ground penetrating radar, you've got all sorts of things that we haven't done on Mars all being done. You're expanding Mars science by two orders of magnitude by bringing into existence the kind of transportation capability that is necessary to enable humans to Mars. So now you bring on board the science community and the science-interested public, which includes all parts of the political spectrum, but frankly it leans somewhat left, overall — university scientists, people like this.

So now this isn't just about Elon Musk, the Bond villain. This is about what we as America and we as a culture which is committed to pushing the boundaries of science. This is what we are doing. It's not what SpaceX is doing, it's not what Musk is doing, it's not what Trump is doing, it's what America is doing, and celebrating the highest values of Western civilization, which is the search for truth.

An alternative to the SpaceX strategy (16:02)

Starship plus Starboat is the flight hardware combination that can do both the moon and Mars.

That said — and we're talking about this being a public-private partnership —should we just default into thinking that the private part is SpaceX?

Well, SpaceX is one part of it. There's no question, to me anyway —

There's other companies that are building rockets, there’s other rocket companies, maybe they aren't talking about Mars, but Blue Origin’s building rockets.

I think it should be fairly competed, but SpaceX is well ahead of anyone else in terms of a booster capability. That said, I think that the mission architecture that Musk has proposed, while workable, is not optimal, that there needs to be another vehicle here. He's got the Starship, I want to have a Starboat. I've written an article about this, which was just published in The New Atlantis.

Basically, the problem with Musk’s architecture is that the direct return from Mars using a Starship, which is a 100-ton vehicle, would require manufacturing 600 tons of methane oxygen on the surface of Mars, and if that's to be done in a reasonable amount of time, requires 600 kilowatts, which is about 13 football fields of solar panels, which means we're not doing it with solar panels, which means it has to be done with a nuke, and that then adds a lot to the development.

If we had a Starboat, which is something 10 to 20 percent the size of Starship, but it would go from Mars orbit to the surface and we refuel it, and then it is what takes the crew down to the surface — although the crew could go one way to the surface in a Starship, that's okay, but whether they go down in a Starship or down in a Starboat, they come up in a Starboat, and now you're reducing the propellant requirement by an order of magnitude. It makes this whole thing work much better. And furthermore, Starship plus Starboat also enables the moon.

We've forgotten about the moon in this conversation.

Starship plus Starboat is the flight hardware combination that can do both the moon and Mars. If you take the Starship version of the Artemis thing, it takes 10 to 14 Starship launches to land a single crew on Mars refueling Starship on orbit, then refueling it in lunar orbit, and with tankers that have to be refueled in earth orbit, and doing all this, it's crazy. But if you positioned one Starship tanker in lunar orbit and then used that to refuel Starboats going up and down, you could do many missions to the lunar surface from a single Starship positioned in lunar orbit. Once again, Starship is suboptimal as an ascent vehicle to come back from the moon or Mars because it's so heavy. It's a hundred tons. The lunar excursion module we used in Apollo was two tons. So we make the Starboat — Starship plus Starboat gives you both the moon and Mars.

Here's the thing: With rockets, you measure propulsion requirements in units we call delta V, velocity changes. That's what rockets actually do, they change your velocity, they accelerate you, they decelerate you. To go down from lunar orbit to the lunar surface is two kilometers a second. Delta V to come back up is two kilometers a second. Roundtrip is four. To go down from Mars orbit to the Martian surface is practically nothing because there's an atmosphere that'll slow you down without using your rocket. To come up is four. So the round trip on Mars and the round trip from orbit to the surface on the moon are the same, and therefore the same combination of the Starship plus the Starboat as a landing craft and, in particular, ascent vehicle (because ascent is where small is beautiful), this will give us both. So we don't have to wreck the moon program in order to do Mars. On the contrary, we can rationalize it.

I mentioned one group of potential enemies this program has been the anti-Musk Democrats. The other group of enemies that this program has are the moon people who are very upset that their moon program is about to be wrecked because Musk says the moon is a diversion. Now, if it was a choice between the moon and Mars, then I would choose Mars. But we can do both. We can do both and without it being a diversion, because we can do both with the same ships.

Artemis program reform (20:42)

SLS was worth a lot in its time, but its time was the ’90s, not now.

There's been some talk about canceling — I'm not sure how serious it is — the Artemis program. If we want the next person on the moon to be an American rather than a Chinese, do we need to keep Artemis to make sure that happens?

We need to reform Artemis and this is the way to do it: Starship plus Starboat will give you the moon.

Aren’t we under a time constraint, given that if we are competing and if we think for whatever national pride reasons we want the next person on the moon to be an American, do we just kind of have to continue with the Artemis program as sort of a wasteful boondoggle as it is?

No, because there are things in the Artemis program that don't even make any sense whatsoever, like the lunar orbit gateway, which is simply not necessary. The SLS (Space Launch System) as a launch vehicle is not necessary now that we have Starship. SLS made a lot of sense when it was first proposed in the late 1980s under a different name. I happen to know that because, as a young engineer, I was on the design team that did the preliminary design for what we now call SLS at Martin Marietta in 1988. And it was really just a simplification of the Space Shuttle, and if it had been developed in flying by the mid-’90s, as was entirely reasonable, it could have had a great role in giving us massively improved space capabilities over the past quarter-century. But they let this thing go so slowly that by the time it has appeared, it's obsolescent, and it's as if someone had stalled the development of the P-51 fighter plane so it wasn't available during World War I, but it's just showing up now in a world of jet fighters — this is worthless. Well, it was worth a lot in its time. SLS was worth a lot in its time, but its time was the ’90s, not now.

Orion doesn't really make that much sense, and the National Team lander would make sense if it was modified to be Starboat. What happened was NASA gave the contract to SpaceX to use Starship as a lunar lander, and it can be, but it's suboptimal. In any case, the National Team, which was Lockheed, and Boeing, and Blue Origin, they complained, but basically their complaint was, “We want a contract too or we won't be your friends.” And so they had sufficient political heft to get themselves a contract. The least NASA could have done is insist that the lander they were getting a contract for run on methane-oxygen, the same propellant as Starship, so Starship could service it as a tanker. Instead, they let them do their own thing and they've got a hydrogen-oxygen rocket, which makes no sense! It's like someone going to the Air Force and proposing a fighter plane that runs on propane and saying, “Well, I can make a fighter run on propane, but my tankers use jet fuel.” Air Force, being sensible, insists that all their planes run on the same fuels. They don't just let someone come along and use whatever fuel they like. So the National Team contract should be changed to a Starboat contract, and the requirements should be interoperability with Starship.

The myth of an independent Mars (24:17)

We go to Mars not out of despair, we go to Mars out of hope, and by establishing new branches of human civilization, they'll be able to do all sorts of things.

As we finish up, I just want to quickly jump back to something you mentioned earlier about autarchy. Do you think it's possible to have a thriving, successful, sustainable Mars colony that's on its own?

No. I don't think it's possible to have a thriving, successful nation on earth that's on its own. This is why I think Trump's trade war is a big mistake. It will damage our economy. Now, obviously, we can survive a trade war better than a Mars —

That's what Musk is also suggesting in its whole light of consciousness that we need to be able to establish sustainable, permanent colonies elsewhere that can be just fine without a relationship with Earth.

I think that's incorrect, and as you know, since you are an expert in economics, it's nonsensical. I don't think a colony of one million people would have the division of labor to build anything like an iPhone or even an iPhone battery if you think of the complexity of what is involved.

There's this famous essay, “I, Pencil,” which I'm sure you're acquainted with. An economist went through all the different things that went into —

Yes, Milton Friedman used that example famously. I think I get your point.

iPhones are more complex than pencils. I mean, you probably could build a pencil with a million-person city, but we need to build things more complicated than that. But that's not the point here, that's not why we're going on. And I object to this. It's the Masque of the Red Death theory of how you're going to survive a plague: We'll have our castle and we can go into it and we'll be fine. No, it's extremely unattractive and it's false. The people in that castle in the Masque of the Red Death, the Edgar Allen Poe story, did not survive the plague, and it's not why we should go to Mars. We go to Mars not out of despair, we go to Mars out of hope, and by establishing new branches of human civilization, they'll be able to do all sorts of things.

America developed steamboats because we needed inland transportation because the only highways we had were rivers, and so forth, and so we've been an engine of invention. Mars is going to be an engine of invention. Mars is going to want to have not just nuclear reactors, but breeder reactors, and they're going to want to have fusion power because deuterium is five times as common on Mars as it is on earth, and they're going to be electrolyzing water all the time as part of their life-support system, which means releasing hydrogen, making deuterium separation very cheap, and one could go down this kind of thing. There's all sorts of things that a Martian civilization would develop, to say nothing of the fact that a spacefaring civilization will have the capability to divert asteroids so that they don't impact the earth. So that's why we're going to Mars. We increase the creative capacity of humanity to deal with all challenges raging from asteroid impacts to epidemics.

Our current timeline (27:21)

. . . if you have your first humans on Mars in early 2030s, I think we can have a permanent Mars base by the end of that decade . . .

So let me just finish up with this, and I think as far as a justification for going to Mars, that's about the most persuasive I know, and maybe I'm an easy audience, but I'm persuaded.

Let's set aside just putting an astronaut or a few astronauts on the moon and bringing them home, and let's set aside the permanent, sustainable, solo, doesn't-need-Earth colony. Just as far as having a sort of a permanent outpost, what do you think is the reasonable timeframe, both technologically and given the politics?

I do think, if we do what I am arguing for, which is to make it the mission of this administration to not only just land a Starship on Mars, but land a Starship on Mars bringing a massive robotic expedition to Mars, and then following that up with several more robotic landings to Mars that prepare a base, set up the power system, et cetera, then yes, I think landing the first humans on Mars in 2033 is entirely reasonable. What the Trump administration needs to do is get this program going to the point where people look at this and say, “This is working, this is going to be great, it's already great, let's follow through.”

And then, if you have your first humans on Mars in early 2030s, I think we can have a permanent Mars base by the end of that decade, by 2040, a base with 20–30 people on it. A human expedition to Mars doesn't need to grow food. You can just bring your food for a two-year expedition, and you should. You establish a base of 10 or 20 to 30, 50 people, you want to set up greenhouses, you want to be growing food. Then you start developing the technologies to make things like glass, plastic, steel, aluminum on Mars so you can build greenhouses on Mars, and you start establishing an agricultural base, and now you can support 500 people on Mars, and then now the amount of things you can do on Mars greatly expands, and as you build up your industrial and agricultural base, and of course your technologies for actually implementing things on Mars become ever more advanced, now it becomes possible to start thinking about establishing colonies.

So that's another thing. Musk's idea that we're going to colonize Mars by landing 1,000 Starships on Mars, each with a hundred people, and now you’ve got a hundred thousand people on Mars, kind of like D-Day, we landed 130,000 men on the Normandy Beach on D-Day, and then another 100,000 the next day, and so forth. You could do that because you had Liberty Ships that could cross the English Channel in six hours with 10,000 tons of cargo each. The Starship takes eight months to get to Mars, or six, and it takes a 100 tons. You can't supply Mars from Earth. You have to supply Mars from Mars, beyond very small numbers, and that means that the colonization of Mars is not going to be like the D-Day landing, it's going to be more like the colonization of America, which started with tiny colonies, which as they developed, created the crafts and the farms, and ultimately the industries that could support, ultimately, a nation of 300 million people.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* Why the Fed’s Job May Get a Lot More Difficult - NYT

* America’s Economic Exceptionalism Is on Thin Ice - Bberg Opinion

* Trump Is Undermining What Made the American Economy Great - NYT Opinion

* Don’t Look to the Fed for the Answer to Stagflation - Bberg Opinion

▶ Business

* Inside Google’s Two-Year Frenzy to Catch Up With OpenAI - Wired

* Some Nvidia Customers Are OK With Older Chips - WSJ

* SoftBank to Buy Ampere, a Silicon Valley Chip Start-Up, for $6.5 Billion - NYT

* Nvidia CEO Says He Was Surprised That Publicly Held Quantum Firms Exist - Bberg

* The promise of the fifth estate is being squeezed - FT

* Boeing Beats Lockheed for Next-Gen US Fighter Jet Contract - Bberg

▶ Policy/Politics

* Six Ways to Understand DOGE and Predict Its Future Behavior - Cato

* Government Science Data May Soon Be Hidden. They’re Racing to Copy It. - NYT

* Stopping Child Porn Online Is a Worthy Goal. But Beware the Proposed Cure - WSJ

▶ AI/Digital

* Mini-satellite paves the way for quantum messaging anywhere on Earth - Nature

* The Impact of GenAI on Content Creation – Evidence from Music Videos - SSRN

* AI weather forecast project eyes access through desktop computers - FT

▶ Biotech/Health

* Why a weight-loss drug could become a geopolitical bargaining chip - FT

* We’ve entered a forever war with bird flu - The Verge

* Doctors Told Him He Was Going to Die. Then A.I. Saved His Life. - NYT

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* Inside a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier” - MIT

* Glaciers are melting at record speed, says UN - Semafor

▶ Robotics/AVs

* Disney’s Robotic Droids Are the Toast of Silicon Valley - WSJ

* The fantasy of humanoid robots misses the point - FT

▶ Space/Transportation

* The ax has become an important part of the Space Force’s arsenal - Ars

* NASA Won't Let Starliner Die Just Yet, Even After Boeing's Space Fiasco - Gizmodo

* How Warp Drives Don't Break Relativity - Universe Today

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

* Japan Urgently Needs an AI Vibe Shift - Bberg Opinion

* What left-wing critics don’t get about abundance - Niskanen Center

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

What is Vibe Coding? - AI Supremacy

Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The American economy is growing, and, in many ways, it’s looking a lot like the 1990s. Upward trends in productivity growth and employment paired with downward trends in inflation are cause for optimism. The question is whether we will maintain this trajectory or be derailed by this emerging era of uncertainty.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Skanda Amarnath about trade policy, fiscal and monetary policy, AI advancement, demographic trends, and how all of this bodes for the US economy.

Amarnath is the Executive Director of Employ America, a macroeconomic policy research and advocacy organization. He was previously vice president at MKP Capital Management, as well as an analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In This Episode

* The boomy ’90s (1:24)

* Drivers of growth (7:24)

* The boomy ’20s? (11:38)

* Full employment and the Fed (22:03)

* Demographics in the data (25:37)

* Policies for productivity (27:55)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

The boomy ’90s (1:24)

The ’90s stand out as a high productivity growth, low inflation, high employment economy, especially if we look at the years 1996 to the year 2000.

Pethokoukis: What got me really excited about all the great work that Employ America puts out was one particular report that I think came out late last year called “The Dream of the 90’s is Alive in 2024,” and hopefully it's still alive in 2025. By ’90s of course you mean the 1990s.

Let me start off by asking you: What was so awesome about the 1990s that it is worth writing about a dream of its return?

Amarnath: The 1990s — if you're a macroeconomist, at least — had pitch-perfect conditions. Employment was reasonably high, we achieved the highest levels of prime-age employment relative to the population. We had low and declining inflation, and that variable that we use to say, this is the driver of welfare over time, productivity outcomes, the amount of output we can spin up from finite inputs, was also growing at a very strong rate, and one that we haven't really seen replicated since or really in the decades before.

The ’90s stand out as a high productivity growth, low inflation, high employment economy, especially if we look at the years 1996 to the year 2000. We'd had high productivity maybe even afterwards . . . but that was also a period where a lot of that productivity was gained from the recession. When employment falls really quickly, productivity can go up for illusory reasons, but it's really that ’90s sweet spot where everything was kind of moving in the right direction.

Obviously, over the last several years, we've seen a lot of those different challenges flare up, whether it was employment during Covid, but then also inflation over the last few years. So . . . a model to build towards, in some ways.

Some of us — not me, and I don't think you — remember the very boomy immediate post-war decades. Probably many more of us remember the go-go 1990s. One thing I always find interesting is how gloomy people were in those years right before the takeoff, which is a wonderful contrarian indicator that we had this period [when] we appeared to have won the Cold War but we had a nasty recession early in the decade, kind of a choppy recovery, and there was plenty of gloom that the days of fast growth were over. And just as we sort of reached the nadir in our attitudes, boy, things took off. So maybe that's a good omen for right now

If we're a contrarian, and if the past can be present, maybe that is a positive indicator to consider. In some ways, it's a bit surprising how much you hear the talk about growth [being] stuck in a very low-growth environment. Over the last two years, we have seen above-trend real GDP growth, above-trend productivity growth. We're going to get some productivity data revisions tomorrow. Again, this measure of productivity is output per hour, so it's basically, to a first approximation, real GDP divided by hours worked. We've seen that the labor market has, largely speaking, held itself up over the last few years, and yet, at the same time, real output has accelerated.

So that's at least something that suggests better things are possible. It's a sign that productivity can accelerate, and with the benefit of revisions tomorrow, we are likely to see at least . . . I'd say if you take a fair reading of the pre-pandemic trend on productivity growth, so five to 15 years, maybe you want to include the financial crisis and what happened before, maybe you don't, but you end up with something like 1.4 percent is what we were seeing. 1.4, maybe 1.45, that's a pretty generous view of pre-pandemic productivity growth.

I would like to do better than that going forward.

I would too. And since 2019 Q4, with the benefit of data revisions, until now, we're likely to see something like 1.9 percent — 50 basis points higher, 0.5 percent higher, we could ideally like to do even better than that. But it's 0.5 percent better over a five-year horizon in which whatever labor market weirdness spanned Covid, we've largely recovered from that. Obviously, there are a lot of different things that have changed between now and five years ago, but at least the data distortion issues should hopefully have been filtered out at this point. And yet, we probably are posting much better real output outcomes.

So through a lot of this turbulence, through a lot of the dynamism that's kind of transpired over the last few years, especially in terms of business formation activity, there was a high labor turnover environment in ’21 and ’22. That churn has come down in more recent quarters, but we have seen better productivity outcomes.

Now, can they sustain? There's a lot of things that probably go into that. There are some new potential risks and shocks on the horizon, but at least it tells you better things are possible in a way that if — I'm sure you've had these discussions throughout the previous decade, in the 2010s, when people made a lot of claims about why productivity growth was destined to be stuck, that we were either not innovating enough, or we were not able to capture that into GDP, or else there are just some secular reasons, and so I think it's an instructive moment. If people are actually looking at the data, the last two years, real output and productivity growth has been very impressive, objectively. And it's not just about, “Hey, we're reverting to the pre-pandemic trend and nothing more.” I think there are signs that this is something at least a little different from what an honest forecast pre-pandemic would've suggested.

Drivers of growth (7:24)

The three-legged stool is one where you want have a labor market that's strong, fixed investment that's growing (ideally faster than usual), and on the third leg it's the set of things that you can do to control really salient costs that everyone's paying.

Let's talk about those signs, but first let's take a quick step back. When you look at what drove growth, and productivity growth, specifically, in the ’90s, give me the factors that drove growth and then why those factors give us lessons for policymaking today.

I think there are three drivers I can point to that are a little bit independent of each other.

One is we had — I don't want to say a tight labor market, but especially a fully employed labor market is helpful in so far as, and we see this now over multiple episodes, especially when you're at high levels of prime-age employment, that's typically a point when there's a lot of human capital that's accumulated. People who have been employed for a while, they've been trained up, there's a little more returns to scale, they can scale revenue, they can scale output better. You don't need to add an additional worker to add additional unit of GDP.

In the more tangible sense, it's that people are trained up, they have more tangible experience, productive experience. You're able to see output gains without necessarily having to add hours worked. We generally saw over the late ‘90s: Hours worked slowed down, but real GDP growth held up very well.

The labor market wasn't contracting by any stretch, it was just, largely speaking, finding an equilibrium in which employment levels were high, job growth was solid if not always spectacular, but we were still seeing that real GDP growth could still be scaled up in a lot of ways. So there is a labor market dynamic to this.

There is a fixed investment dynamic. Fixed investment growth is very strong in the late ’90s. That was about information processing equipment, IT, software. We did telecommunications deregulation in 1996, which is meant to really expand and accelerate the rollout of things. That became the fiber boom. We saw a lot of construction that went into those sectors, and so we saw it really touch construction, we saw it touch equipment, and we also saw it effect intellectual property.

An investment to prevent the millennium bug?

There was probably a lot of overinvestment that also was born of some of that deregulation, but at least in terms of it adding to our welfare, making it easier for us to use the internet and the long-term benefits of that, a lot of that was built in the late ’90s. You could probably point to some stuff in policy, obviously interacting with technology that was very favorable.

The third thing I would say is also probably underrated is inflation fell over that whole period. While some of that inflation falling would've been some fortuitous dynamics, especially in the late ’90s around food and energy prices falling, the Asian financial crisis, there were also things that were very important for creating space for the consumer to spend more. Things like HMOs. Healthcare inflation really fell throughout the ’90s.

Now, HMOs became more unpopular for a lot of reasons. These health management organizations were meant to control costs and did a pretty good job of it. This is something that Janet Yellen actually wrote about a long time ago, talking about the ’90s and how the healthcare dynamic was very underrated. In the 2000s, healthcare inflation really picked up again and a lot of the cost-control measures in the private sector were less effective, but you could see evidence that that was also creating space in terms of price stability, the ability for the consumer to spend more on other types of goods and services. That also allows for both more demand to be available but also for it to be supplied.

I think with all these stories there's a demand- and a supply-side aspect to them. I think you kind of need both for it to be successful. The three-legged stool is one where you want have a labor market that's strong, fixed investment that's growing (ideally faster than usual), and on the third leg it's the set of things that you can do to control really salient costs that everyone's paying. Like healthcare, obviously there's a lot of cost bloat, and thinking about ways to really curb expenditure without curbing quality or real consumption itself, but there's obviously a lot of room for reforms in that area.

The boomy ’20s? (11:38)

Right now, you have still an increasing number of people who have had meaningful work experience over the last one, two, three, years. That human capital should accumulate and be more relevant for GDP growth going forward . . .

So you've identified what, in your view, is a very successful mix of these very critical factors. So if you want to be bullish about the rest of this decade, which of those factors — maybe all of them — are at play right now? Or maybe none of them!

Right now, the labor market is still holding up rather well. While we may not be seeing quite the level of labor market dynamism we saw earlier in this expansion, at the same time, that was also a period of great turbulence and high inflation. Right now, you have still an increasing number of people who have had meaningful work experience over the last one, two, three, years. That human capital should accumulate and be more relevant for GDP growth going forward, assuming we don't have a recession in the next year or two or whatever.

If we do, I think it obviously would mean a lot of people are probably likely to not be as employed, and if that's the case, their marketable and productive skills may atrophy and depreciate. That's the risk there, but, all things considered, right now, non-farm payroll growth has been roughly speaking 160,000 per month. Employment rates adjusted for demographics are a little higher than they were before the pandemic. It's pretty historically high. That's not a bad outcome to start with and those initial conditions should hopefully bode well for the labor market's contribution to productivity growth.

The challenge is in terms of real GDP growth. It's also a function of a lot of other factors: What are we going to see in terms of cost stability? I would generally say there's obviously a lot of turbulence right now, but what's going to happen to a lot of these key costs? On one hand, commodity prices should hopefully be stable, there's a lot of signs of, let's say, OPEC increasing production.

On the other hand, we have also things about tariffs that are pretty significant threats on the table and I think you could also be equally concerned about how much this could matter. We've already had a bigger run-through of this with a lot of this supply chain turbulence, pandemic error stimulus, and how that stuff interacted. That was quite turbulent. Even if tariffs aren't quite as turbulent as that, it could still be something that detracted from productivity growth.

We saw, actually, in the first two quarters of 2022 when inflation exploded, there were a compounding number of shocks on the supply side with the demand side that it did have a depressing effect on productivity in the short run. And so you can think if we see things on the cost side blow out, it will also restrict output. If you have to mark up the price of a lot of things to reflect different costs and risks, it's going to have some output-throttling effect, and a productivity-throttling effect. That's one side of things to be concerned about.

And then the other side of it, in terms of fixed investment, I think there's a lot of reasons for optimism on fixed investment. If we just took the start of the year, there's clearly a lot of investment tied to the artificial intelligence boom: Data centers, all of the expenditures on software that should change, expenditures on hardware that should be upgraded, and there's a whole set of industrial infrastructure that's also tied to this where you should see capital deepening really emerge. You should see that there should be more room to scale up in capital formation relative to labor. You can probably point to some pockets of it right now, but it hadn't shown up in the GDP data yet. That was the optimistic case coming into this year and I think it's still there. The challenge is there's now other headwinds.

The tariffs make me less optimistic. I really worry about the uncertainty freezing business investment and hiring, for that matter.

I share your sentiment there. I think we learned in 2018 and -19, there were tariffs being implemented but on much smaller scale and scope, and even those had a pretty meaningful or identifiable impact on the manufacturing sector, leave aside even the other sectors that use manufactured inputs from imports or otherwise. So these are going to be likely headwinds if you're any kind of company that exports at any point in time to something across borders, you have to now incorporate higher costs, more uncertainty. We don't know how long this is supposed to stick. Are you supposed to assume this is going to be a transition period, as Treasury Secretary Bessent said, or is this something that is just like a little negotiation tactic, you get a win and then we move on?

I don't think anyone's quite sure how this is supposed to play out and I worry both for the manufacturing sector itself because, contrary to the popular conception of it, we still export a lot of things. We still export, and the most competitive industries are exporting industries, and so that's a concern for whether you're a manufacturing construction machinery, you’re Caterpillar, or if you're agricultural machinery and you're John Deere, you have to start to think about this stuff more and the risk that's attached to it. The hurdle rates to investment go up, not down.

And on the other side of the ledger then we have, or at least in terms of the sectors that use manufactured inputs. Transformers are really important for building out the energy infrastructure if we're going to have load growth that's driven by AI or whatever else, we're kind of entering more uncertainty on that side as well, and not really clear what the full strategy is. It strikes me as going to be very challenging.

And then on the monetary policy [side], and this is the difference, you had in the ’90s a Federal Reserve which seems to have defeated the Great Inflation Monster of the 1970s while the Fed today is battling inflation.

What do you make of that as far as setting the stage for a productivity boom, a Fed which is quite active and still quite concerned about that inflation surge and perhaps tariffs further playing into it going forward?

I think the Fed's stuck in a hard spot here. If you think about a trade shock as likely being some mix of — well, it could be output throttling. Maybe the output throttling and the effects in the labor market are more outsized than the inflation effects? That was what we saw in 2018 and 19, but it's not a given that that's going to be the case this time. The scale of the threats are much bigger and much wider, and especially coming through a period now where there's higher inflation, maybe there's more willingness to raise prices in response to these shocks. So these things are a little different.

The Fed has basically said, “We don't know exactly how this is going to play out and we're going to need to watch the data, keep an open mind, be pretty risk-averse about how we're going to adjust interest rate policy.” We've seen evidence of inflation expectations going up. That will not give the Fed a lot of confidence about cutting interest rates in the absence of other things getting worse. What the Fed’s supposed to do in response to supply shock is almost a philosophical question because you obviously don't want to break things if there's really just a supply shock that is a one-off that you can see through, but if it starts to have longer term consequences, create bigger pain points in terms of inflation, it's just a tough spot.

When I try to square the circle here — and this will be no surprise to the listeners — I can't help but thinking, boy, it would be really fantastic if all the most techno-optimist dreams about AI came true, and this is not just an important technology, but an unbelievably important technology that diffuses through the economy in record time. That would be a wonderful factor to add into that mix.

If there are ways for that to be a bigger tailwind — and there could be, I wouldn't be too pessimistic about how that could filter through even the GDP data amidst a lot of these trade policy headwinds, we're expected to see a lot grand buildout of data centers, for example. There's an energy infrastructure layer to that.

But even beyond the investment side, actually being used, improving total factor productivity. Super hard to predict, and no one wants to do a budget forecast under the assumption we're going to be doubling a productivity growth, but it would be nice to have.

Sure would. I will say about one of the things on the inflation side, especially with the Fed, we've come through a period now where the Fed has kept restrictive interest rate policies, but only more recently have we seen a little bit more of that show up in financial markets, for example. So the stock market over the last two years has ran up quite a bit, historically, and only now we've seen some signs of maybe some pricing of risk and some of the issues around the Fed.

Inflation data itself coming into this year, relative to the Fed's target on the Fed's gauges, it was right now about 2.6, 2.7 percent. Most of that reflects a lot of lags of the past, I would say. If you look through the details, you see a lot of it in how inflation is measured for housing rent. How inflation is measured for financial services really tracks the stock market, and then there's obviously some other idiosyncratic stuff around where they're using wages as the measure of prices in PCE, which is the Fed's inflation gauge. If you take that stuff out, we still have a little bit of inflation work to do in terms of getting inflation down, but it would sound pretty manageable. If I told you, actually, if you take away those lags, you probably get some only 2.2 percent, that seems like we're almost there.

Let's take away a little more, then we get to two percent. We can just keep cutting things out

And there would probably be conditions for a lot. But if we can give the benefit of the time and do no harm, there's probably a positive story to be told. The challenge is, we may not be doing no harm here. There may be new things that rear up, to your point. If you start just deducting stuff just because you think it lags, but you don't think about forward-looking risks, which there are, then you start to get into a more challenged view of how things improve on the inflation side.

I think that's a big dilemma for the Fed, which is, they have to be forward-looking. They can't just say, well, this stuff is lagging, we can ignore it. That doesn't cash when you have forward-looking risks, but if we do see that maybe some of these trade policy risks go away, if there's a change of heart, a change of mind, I think you can possibly tell yourself a more positive story about how maybe interest rates can come down a bit more and financial conditions can be more supportive of investment over time. So I think that that is the optimistic case there.

Full employment and the Fed (22:03)

Taking people away from their job and then trying to just bring them back in several years later, don't expect the productivity dividends to be quite the same.

For someone who cares about full employment, how would you rate the Fed's performance after the global financial crisis? Too tight?

It was too tight and also it was an environment in which the Fed, at various points from 2010, maybe 2009, through to 2015, they were very eager to try and get interest rates up before the economy was giving their hard signal that it was time to raise interest rates. Inflation hadn't really reared its head, nor had we seen evidence of really strong labor markets. We were seeing a recovery that was very gentle, and slow, and maybe we were slowly getting out of it, but it was a slow grind. GDP growth was not particularly stellar over that period. That's pretty disappointing, right? We don't want do that again. Obviously, there are things like maybe fiscal policy could have been done differently, as well as monetary policy on some level, but I think the Fed was very eager to get off of zero to the point where they weren't looking at the data, just didn't like the fact they were at zero.

Coming out of it, now it's like that recovery is a lot of wasted output. We lost a lot of output out of that. We lost a lot of employment out of that. It's kind of just a big economic waste. Obviously, this past recovery has been very different and Covid was a different type of shock relative to the global financial crisis.

The thing that worries me is actually, when we start to look at the global financial crisis and we look at, say, even the recession from the dot com boom, or even the recession, to your point, in the early ’90s, prime-age employment rates took a long time to recover and it's not ideal from a productivity perspective that you want to have people out of the labor force for long periods of time, people out of employment for an extended number of years —

Also not good for social cohesion.

The social fabric, yeah. There's a lot of stuff it's not great for. We don't want hysteresis of that kind. We don't want to have people who are, “Oh, because I lost my job, I'm not going to be able to get a new job in the foreseeable future.” A lot of skills, general intangible knowledge, that's kind of part of how people become more productive and how firms become more productive. You want that stuff to keep going on some level. That's also probably why even Covid was very turbulent. It's a lot of things that we kind of have in motion, we just switched it off and then switched it back on. Even that over a short horizon can be very disruptive. There was a reason, on some level, to do it, but it is also something to learn from: Taking people away from their job and then trying to just bring them back in several years later, don't expect the productivity dividends to be quite the same.

So I look at those three recessions at least to say, if we're going to have slow recoveries out of those, it's going to cause problems. So it's a balance of Fed and fiscal policy, I'd say, because there are certain things — there was a 2001, -2, -3, there were attempts to lower taxes at the same time. That actually may have been the key catalyst, more so than the Fed cutting rates, but when you think about how the Fed is sometimes antsy to get off of low rates when the economy is depressed, that's not great. Right now the Fed has a very different set of trade-offs. Thankfully, on some level, for full employment especially, [we’re] not in that world, we're now more trying to defend full employment, protect full employment, ideally not have a recession now, would be great.

Demographics in the data (25:37)

When you see how population growth has a twofold dynamic, we typically see in periods of high population growth are the periods also where you tend to see both strong investment but also inflation risk.

I would love to avoid that. That’s the last thing we need.

I have two questions: One, how much do demographics, and there’s been a lot of talk about falling fertility rates, is that something you think about much?

I think demographics play a lot of tricks on the data itself. When you see how population growth has a twofold dynamic, we typically see in periods of high population growth are the periods also where you tend to see both strong investment but also inflation risk. Obviously, when you know that there's a bigger base of people who you can sell your goods and services to, you might be more inclined to go forward with a longer-dated investment with some confidence that there will be growth to validate it. On the other hand, it's also because there's more spending that's happening in the economy, that's higher growth, there might be more inflation risk.

I think that those background conditions then filter in various ways. You can kind of see how Japan and Europe have, generally speaking, at least maybe prior to this pandemic-era episode of inflation, are seeing lower inflation rates, lower growth rates, though, too. So lower real growth, lower inflation, real per capita outcomes are always hard to square in terms of Japan's population is declining, but also Japan's real GDP, is it declining as much more or less? These things are very hard to identify going forward.

I think it's going to just muddy a lot of different math as far as what counts as strong investment. We've gotten used to a world of non-farm payroll growth every month in the job report. If it's like 150,000 to 200,000, that's pretty solid and great. Do we need to change our expectations to it being a 100,000 is good enough because we're not actually expanding the working age population as much? Those things are going to have an effect on the macroeconomic data and how we evaluate it in real time. Even just this year, because for some people's assessments of what counts as strong payroll growth, there was a sense that payroll employment was strong in ’23 and ’24 because of immigration. I'm a little bit more skeptical than most of those claims, but if it's true, which I think it's still possibly true, that it’s then the case right now if we do see less immigration, is that the breakeven, the place where what counts as healthy employment growth might be a lot lower because of it.

Policies for productivity (27:55)

Healthcare cost growth and managing it will be important both in terms of what people see in the budgetary outcomes, but also inflation outcomes.

My last question for you, I'll give you a choice of what to answer. If you were to recommend a pro-productivity piece of public policy, either give me your favorite one or the least-obvious one that you would recommend.

Right now, I'd say the things that worry the most in productivity, and it's on the table, is the trade policy. This stuff has adverse impacts on prices and investment, and it may have impacts on employment, too, over time, if they stick. We're talking about really high, sizable numbers here, in terms of what's threatened now. Maybe it's all bark and no bite, but I would say this is what's on the table right now. I don't know what else is on the table at the very moment, but I'd say that's a place where you have to wonder what's the merits of any of this stuff, and I think I'm not seeing it.

I am more intellectually flexible than most about where sometimes some very specific, targeted, narrow trade barriers have a lot of sense in them, either because solving a particular externalities, over-capacity kind of problem that might exist. There are some intellectualized reasons you can offer if it's narrow and targeted. If you're doing stuff at a really broad-based level, the way it's currently being evaluated, then I have to ask, what are we doing here? I am not sure this is good for investment, and investment is also part of how we are able to unlock a lot of general corporate technologies, able to actually see total factor productivity growth and increase over time. So I worry about that. That's top of mind.

Things that are kind of underrated that I think is really important over time, that'll probably be also important, both for people who are thinking about efficiency, thinking about where there's room for public policy to support productivity growth, I'd say healthcare is a really prominent place right now. Healthcare cost growth and managing it will be important both in terms of what people see in the budgetary outcomes, but also inflation outcomes. There's just a lot of expenditures there where there's not a lot of incentive for rationalization that needs to be brought. And there's a way to do it equitably. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there in terms of ways we can reform the healthcare system. Site neutral payments, being one easy example to point to.

The federal government itself and private insurers, both of them, though, in terms of paying for healthcare, how they pay for healthcare and actually ensure cost control in that process, if we're able to do that well, I think the space for productivity is pretty underrated and could be quite sizable. That's also, I'd say, an underrated reason why the 2000s became far less productive. Healthcare services inflation, healthcare cost growth really exploded over that period, and we did not get a good handle on it, and we kind exited the ’90s productivity boom phase. It was more obvious towards the latter half of the 2000s as a result.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

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The space business landscape is changing. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are moving at breakneck speed toward goals Americans have dreamed of since the 1960s. At the same time, a whole host of smaller startups are arriving on the scene, ready to tackle everything from asteroid mining to next-gen satellites to improved lunar missions.

Today on Faster, Please — The Podcast, I’m talking with Matt Weinzierl about what research developments and market breakthroughs are allowing these companies to thrive.

Weinzierl is the senior associate dean and chair of the MBA program at Harvard Business School. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Weinzierl is the co-author of a new book with Brendan Rosseau, Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier.

In This Episode

* Decentralizing space (1:54)

* Blue Origin vs. SpaceX (4:50)

* Lowering launch costs (9:24)

* Expanding space entrepreneurship (14:42)

* Space sector sustainability (20:06)

* The role of Artemis (22:45)

* Challenges to success (25:28)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Decentralizing space (1:54)

. . . we had this amazing success in the ’60s with the Apollo mission . . but it was obviously a very government-led, centralized program and that got us in the mode of thinking that's how you did space.

You’re telling a story about space transitioning from government-led to market-driven, but I wonder if you could just explain that point because it's not a story about privatization, it's a story about decentralization, correct?

It really is, I think the most important thing for listeners to grab onto. In fact, I teach a course at Harvard Business School on this topic, and I've been teaching it now for a few years, and I say to my students, “What's the reason we're here? Why are we talking about space at HBS?” and it's precisely about what you just asked.

So maybe the catchiest way to phrase this for folks, there was one of the early folks at SpaceX, Jim Cantrell, he was one of the earliest employees. He has this amazing quote from the early 2000s where he says, “The Great American Space Enterprise, which defeated Communism in defense of Capitalism, was and is operating on a Soviet economic model.” And he was basically speaking to the fact that we had this amazing success in the ’60s with the Apollo mission and going to the moon and it truly was an amazing achievement, but it was obviously a very government-led, centralized program and that got us in the mode of thinking that's how you did space. And so for the next 50 years, basically we did space in that way run from the center, not really using market forces.

What changed in various ways was that in the early 2000s we decided that model had kind of run its course and the weaknesses were too big and so it was time to bring market forces in. And that doesn't mean that we were getting rid of the government role in space. Just like you said, the government will always play a vital role in space for various reasons, national security among them, but it is decentralizing it in a way to bring the power of the market to bear.

Maybe the low point — and that low point, that crisis, maybe created an opportunity — was the end of the Space Shuttle program. Was that an important inflection point?

It's definitely one that I think most people in the sector look to as being . . . there's the expression “never waste a crisis,” and I think that that's essentially what happened. The Shuttle was an amazing engineering achievement, nobody really doubts that, and what NASA was trying to do with it and with their contractors was incredibly hard. So it's easy to kind of get too negative on that era, but it is also true that the Shuttle never really performed the way people hoped, it never flew as often, it was much more costly, and then in 2003 there was the second Shuttle tragedy.

When that happened, I think everybody felt like, "This just isn't the future." So we need something else, and the Shuttle program was put on a cancellation path by the end of that decade. That really did force this reckoning with the fact that the American space sector, which had put men on the moon and brought them back safely in 1969, launching all sorts of dreams about space colonies and hotels, now, 40 years later, it was going to be unable to even put a person into orbit on its own rockets. We were going to be renting rockets from the Russians. That was really a moment of soul searching, I guess is one way you think about it in the sector.

Blue Origin vs. SpaceX (4:50)

I guess the big lesson . . . is that competition really does matter in space just like in any other business.

I think naturally we would lead into talking about SpaceX, which we certainly will do, but the main competitor, Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos company, which seems to be moving forward, but it's definitely seemed to have adopted a very different kind of strategy. It seems to me different than the SpaceX strategy, which really is kind of a “move fast, break things, build them back up and try to launch again” while Blue Origin is far more methodical. Am I right in that, is that eventually going to work?

Blue Origin is a fascinating company. In fact, we actually opened the book — the book is a series, basically, of stories that we tell about companies, and people, and government programs, sprinkled in with some economics because we can't resist. We're trying to structure it for folks, but we start with the story of Blue Origin because it really is fascinating. It illustrates some really fundamental aspects of the sector these days.

To your specific question, we can talk more about Blue in many of its aspects. The motto of Blue from its beginning has been this Latin phrase, gradatim ferociter or, “step-by-step, ferociously,” and Bezos in the earliest days, they even have a tortoise on their company shield, so to speak, to signal this tortoise and the hair metaphor or fable. From the earliest days the idea was, “Look, we're going to just methodically work our way up to these grand visions of building infrastructure for space,” eventually in the service of having, as they always said, millions of people living and working in space.

Now there's various ways to interpret the intervening 20 years that we've had, or 25 now since they were founded. One interpretation says, well, that's a nice story, but in fact they made some decisions that caused them to move more slowly than even they would've wanted to. So they didn't continue working as closely with NASA as, say, for instance SpaceX did. They relied really almost exclusively on funding from Bezos himself issuing a lot of other contracts they could have gotten, and that sort of reduced the amount of external discipline and market competition that they were facing. And then they made some other steps along the way, and so now they're trying to reignite and move faster, and they did launch New Glenn, their orbital rocket, recently. So they're back in the game and they're coming back. That's one story.

Another story is, well yes, they've made decisions that at the time didn't seem to move as fast as they wanted, but they made those decisions intentionally. This is a strategy we will see pay off pretty well in the long run. I think that the jury is very much still out, but I guess the big lesson for your listeners and for me and hopefully for others in the sector, is that competition really does matter in space just like in any other business. To the extent that Blue didn't move as fast because they didn't face as much competition, that's an interesting lesson for the private sector. And to the extent that now they're in the game nipping at the heels of SpaceX, that's good for everybody, even for SpaceX, I think, to have them in the game.

Do you think they're nipping at the heels?

Well, yeah, I was just thinking as I said that, that might have been a little optimistic. It really does depend how you look at it. SpaceX is remarkably dominant in the commercial space sector, there's no question there. They launch 100 times a year plus and they are . . . the latest statistic I have in 2023, they launched more than 80 percent of all the mass launched off the surface of Earth, so they run more than half the satellites that are operational in space. They are incredibly dominant such that concerns about monopoly are quite present in the sector these days. We can talk about that.

I think “nipping at the heels” might be a little generous, although there are areas in which SpaceX still does have real competition. The national security launch sector, ULA (United Launch Alliance) is still the majority launcher of national security missions and Blue is looking to also get into the national security launch market. With Amazon's satellite constellation, Kuiper, starting to come into the launch cadence over the next couple of years, they will have demand for lots of launch outside of SpaceX and that will start to increase the frequency with which Blue Origin and ULA also launch. So I think there is reason to believe that people in the sector will have more options, even for the heavy-lift launch vehicles.

Lowering launch costs (9:24)

[SpaceX] brought the cost of getting a kilogram of mass into orbit down by 90 percent in less than, really 10 or 15 years, which had been a stagnant number for going on four or five decades.

People in Silicon Valley like talking about disruption and disruptors. It's hard to think of a company that is more deserving, or A CEO more deserving than Elon Musk and SpaceX. Tell me how disruptive that company has been to how we think about space and the economic potential of space.

We open our chapter in the book on SpaceX by saying we believe it'll go down as one of the most important companies in the history of humanity, and I really do believe that. I don't think you have to be a space enthusiast, necessarily, to believe it. The simplest way to summarize that is that they brought the cost of getting a kilogram of mass into orbit down by 90 percent in less than, really 10 or 15 years, which had been a stagnant number for going on four or five decades. It had hovered around — depending on the data point you look at — around $30,000 a kilogram to low earth orbit, and once SpaceX got Falcon 9 flying, it was down to $3,000. That's just an amazing reduction.

What's also amazing about it is they didn't stop there. As soon as they had that, they decided that one of the ways to make the business model work was to reinvent satellite internet. So in a sector that had just over a decade ago only 1000 operational satellites up in space, now we have 10,000, 6,000 plus of which are SpaceX's Starlink, just an incredibly fast-growing transformational technology in orbit.

And then they went on to disrupt their own disruption by creating a rocket called Starship, which is just absolutely massive in a way that's hard to even imagine, and that, if it fulfills the promise that I think everyone hopes it will, will bring launch costs down, if you can believe it, by another 90 percent, so a total of 99 percent down to, say, $300 a kilogram. Now you may not have to pass those cost savings on to the customers because they don't have a lot of competition, but it's just amazing

What's possible with those launch costs in that vicinity? Sometimes, when I try to describe it, I'm like, well, imagine all your 1960s space dreams and what was the missing ingredient? The missing ingredient was the economics and those launch costs. Now plug in those launch costs and lots of crazy things that seem science-fictional may become science-factual. Maybe give me just a sense of what's possible.

Well first tell me, Jim, which of the ’60s space dreams are you most excited about?

It's hard for me, it's like which of my seven kids do I love more? I love the idea of people living in space, of there being industry in space. I like the idea of there being space-based solar power, lunar mining, asteroid mining, the whole kit and caboodle.

You've gone through the list. I think we're all excited about those things. And just in case it's not obvious to your listeners, the reason I think you asked that question is that, of course, the launch cost is the gateway to doing anything in space. That's why everyone in the industry makes such a big deal out of it. Once you have that, it seems like the possibilities for business cases really do expand.

Now, of course, we have to be careful. It's easy to get overhyped. It's still very expensive to do all the things you just mentioned in space, even if you can get there cheaply. Once you put humans in the mix, humans are very hard to keep alive in space. Space is a very dangerous place for lots of reasons. Even when there aren't humans in space, operating in space, even autonomously, is obviously quite hard, whether it's asteroid mining or other things. It's not as though, all of a sudden, all of our biggest dreams are immediately going to be realized. I do think that part of what's so exciting, part of the reason we wrote the book, is that there is a new renaissance of enthusiasm of startups building a bit on the SpaceX model of having a big dream, being really cost-conscious as you build it, moving fast and experimenting and iterating, who are going after some of these dreams you mentioned.

.So whether it's an asteroid mining company — actually, in my course later this week, we're having Matt Gialich, who's the CEO of AstroForge, and they're trying to reboot the asteroid mining industry. He's coming in to talk to our students. Or whether it's lunar mining, we have Rob Meyerson who ran Blue Origin for more than a decade, now he’s started up a company that's going to mine Helium 3 on the moon; or whether you're talking about commercial space stations, which could eventually house tourists, manufacturing, R&D, a whole new push to bring the cost savings from the launch sector into the destinations sector, which we really haven't had.

We've had the International Space Station for 20 plus years, but it wasn't really designed for commercial activity from the start and costs are pretty high. So there is this amazing flowering, and we'll see. I guess I would say that, in the short run, if you're trying to build a business in space, it's still mostly about satellites. It's still mostly about data to and from space. But as we look out further, we all hope that those bigger dreams are becoming more of a reality.

Expanding space entrepreneurship (14:42)

The laws of supply and demand do not depend on gravity.

To me, it is such an exciting story and the story of these companies, they're just great stories to me. They're still, I think, pretty unknown. SpaceX, if you read the books that have been published, very harrowing, the whole thing could have collapsed quite easily. Still today, when the media covers — I think they're finally getting better —that anytime there'd be a SpaceX rocket blow up, they're like, “Oh, that’s it! Musk doesn't know what he's doing!” But actually, that's the business, is to iterate, launch again, if it blows up, figure out what went wrong, use the data, fix it, try again. It’s taken a long time.

To the extent people or the media think about it, maybe 90 percent of the thought is about SpaceX, a little bit about Blue Origin, but, as you mentioned, there is this, no pun intended, constellation of other companies which have grown up, which have somewhat been enabled by the launch costs. Which one? Give me one of those that you think people should know about.

There's so many actually, very much to your point. We wrote the book partly to give folks inside the industry a view they might not have had, which is, I'm an economist. We thought there was room to just show people how an economist thinks through this amazing change that's happening.

Economics is not earthbound! It extends above the surface of the planet!

The laws of supply and demand do not depend on gravity. We've learned that. But we also wrote the book for a couple other groups of people. One, people who are kind of on the margins of space, so their business isn't necessarily involved in space, but once they know all the activity that's happening, including the companies you're hinting at there, they might think, “Wait a minute, maybe my business, or I personally, could actually use some of the new capabilities in space to drive my mission forward to have an impact through my organization or myself.” And then of course the broader population of people who are just excited and want to learn more about what's going on and read some great stories.

But I'll give you two companies, maybe three because I can't help myself. One is Firefly, which just landed successfully on the moon . . . 24 hours ago maybe? What a great story. It's now the second lander that's successfully landed, this one fully successfully after Intuitive Machines was a little bit tipped over, but that's a great example of how this model that includes more of a role for the commercial sector succeeds not all the time — the first lunar lander in the program that was supporting these didn't quite succeed — but try, try again. That's the beauty of markets, they find a way often and you can't exactly predict how they're going to work out. But that was a huge success story and so I’m very excited about what that means for our activity on the moon.

Another really fascinating company is called K2. A lot of your listeners who follow space will have heard of it. It's two brothers who basically realized that, with the drop in launch costs being promised by Starship, the premium on building lightweight small satellites is kind of going away. We can go back to building big satellites again and maybe we don't need to always make the sacrifices that engineers have had to make to bring the mass down. So they're building much bigger satellites and that can potentially really increase the capabilities even still at low cost. So that's really exciting.

Finally, I'll just mention Varda, which is a really fun and exciting startup that is doing manufacturing in automated capsules right now of pharmaceutical ingredients. What I love about them, very much to your point about these startups that are just flowering because of lower launch costs, they're not positioning themselves really as a space company. They're positioning themselves as a manufacturing company that happens to use microgravity to do it cheaper. So you don't have to be a space enthusiast to want your supply chain to be cheaper and they're part of that.

Do you feel like we have a better idea of why there should be commercial space stations, or again, is that still in the entrepreneurial process of figuring it out? Once they're up there, business cases will emerge?

I was just having a conversation about that this morning, actually, with some folks in the sector because there is a wide range of views about that. It is, as you were sort of implying, a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem, it's hard to know until you have a space station what you might do with it, what business cases might result. On the other hand, it's hard to invest in a space station if you don't know what the business case is for doing it. So it is a bit tricky.

I tend to actually be slightly on the optimistic end of the spectrum, perhaps just because, as an economist, I think you are trained to know that the market can't be predicted and that at some level that is the beauty of the market. If we drive down costs, there's a ton of smart entrepreneurs out there who I think will be looking very hard to find value that they can create for people, and I'm still optimistic we'll be surprised.

If I had to make the other side of the case, I would say that we've been dreaming about using microgravity for many decades, the ISS has been trying, and there hasn't been a killer app quite found yet. So it is very true that there are reasons to be skeptical despite my optimism.

Space sector sustainability (20:06)

Space does face a sort of structural problem with investing. The venture capital industry is not really built for the time horizons and the level of fundamental uncertainty that we're talking about with space.

It’s also a sector that's gone through a lot of booms and busts. That certainly has been the case with the idea of asteroid mining among other things. What do you see as the sustainability? I sort of remember Musk talking about there was this kind of “open window to space,” and I don't know what he thought opened that window, maybe it was low interest rates? What is the sustainability of the financial case for this entire sector going forward?

It is true that the low interest rate environment of the early 2020s was really supportive to space in a way that. Again, opinions vary on whether it was so hot that it ended up actually hurting the sector by creating too much hype, and then some people lost their shirts, and so there was some bad taste in the mouth there.

On the other hand, it got a lot of cash to a lot of companies that are trying to make really hard things happen. Space does face a sort of structural problem with investing. The venture capital industry is not really built for the time horizons and the level of fundamental uncertainty that we're talking about with space. We don't really know what the market is yet. We don't really know how long it's going to take to develop. So that's I think why you see some of these more exotic financing models in space, whether it's the billionaires or the so-called SPAC boom of the early 2020s, which was an alternative way for some space companies to go public and raise a big pile of cash. So I think people are trying to solve for how to get over what might be an uncomfortably long time before the kind of sustainable model that you're talking about is realized.

Now, skeptics will say, “Well, maybe that's just because there is no sustainable model. We're hoping and hoping, but it's going to take 500 years.” I'm a little more optimistic than that for reasons we've talked about, but I think one part we haven't really mentioned, or at least not gone into that yet, which is reassuring to investors that I talked to and increasingly maybe an important piece of the puzzle, is the demand from the public sector, which remains quite robust, especially from the national security side. A lot of startups these days, even when capital markets are a bit tighter, they can rely on some relatively stable financing from the national security side, and I think that will always be there in space. There will always be a demand for robust, innovative technologies and capabilities in space that will help sustain the sector even through tough times.

The role of Artemis (22:45)

Artemis is a really good example of the US space enterprise, broadly speaking, trying to find its way into this new era, given all the political and other constraints that are, of course, going to impinge on a giant government program.

I can imagine a scenario where most of this book is about NASA, and Artemis, and what comes after Artemis, and you devote one chapter to the weird kind of private-sector startups, but actually it's just the opposite. The story here is about what's going on with the private sector working with NASA and Artemis seems like this weird kind of throwback to old Apollo-style way of doing things. Is Artemis an important technology for the future of space or is it really the last gasp of an old model?

It's a very timely question because obviously with all the change going on in Washington and especially with Elon's role —

Certainly you always hear rumors that they'll cancel it. I don't know if that's going to happen, but I certainly see speculations pop-up in the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times from time to time.

Exactly, and you probably see debates in Congress where you see some Congress-people resistant to canceling some contracts and debates about the space launch system, the SLS rocket, which I think nobody denies is sort of an older model of how we're going to get to space. On the other hand, it's an incredibly powerful rocket that can actually get us to the moon right now.

There's a lot of debate going on right now. The way I think about it is that Artemis is a really good example of the US space enterprise, broadly speaking, trying to find its way into this new era, given all the political and other constraints that are, of course, going to impinge on a giant government program. It's a mix of the old and the new. It's got some pieces like SLS or Gateway, which is a sort of station orbiting the moon to provide a platform for various activities that feel very much like the model from the 1980s: Shuttle and International Space Station.

Then it's got pieces that feel very much like the more modern commercial space era with the commercial lunar payload services clips contracts that we were briefly talking about before, and with some of the other pieces that are — whether it's the lander that's also using commercial contracts, whether it's those pieces that are trying to bring in the new. How will it all shake out? My guess is that we are moving, I think inexorably, towards the model that really does tap into the best of the private sector, as well as of the public, and so I think we'll move gradually towards a more commercial approach, even to achieving the sort of public goods missions on the moon — but it'll take a little bit of time because people are naturally risk averse.

Challenges to success (25:28)

We're going to have some setbacks, some things aren't going to go well with this new model. There's going to be, I'm sure, some calls for pulling back on the commercial side of things, and I think that would be a real lost opportunity. . .

How do we not screw this up? How do we not end up undermining this momentum? If you want to tell me what we can do, that's great, but I'm also worried about us making a mistake?

There are threats to our ability to do this successfully. I'll just name two which are top of mind. One is space debris. That comes up in virtually every conversation I have. Especially with the increasing number of satellites, increasing number of actors in space, you do have to worry that we might lose control of that environment. Again, I am on the relatively more optimistic end of the spectrum for reasons we explain in the book, and I think the bottom line there is: The stakes are pretty high for everybody who's operating up there to not screw that part up, so I hope we'll get past it, but some people are quite worried.

The second, honestly, is national security. Space has always been a beacon, we hope, of transcending our geopolitical rivalries, not just extending them up there. We're in a difficult time, so I think there is some risk that space will not remain as peaceful as it has — and that could very much short-circuit the kind of growth that we're talking about. Sadly, that would be very ironic because the economic opportunities that we have up there to create benefit for everybody on Earth and are part of what hopefully would bring people together across borders up in space. It's one of those places where we can cooperate for the common good.

How could we screw this up? I think it's not always going to be smooth sailing. We're going to have some setbacks, some things aren't going to go well with this new model. There's going to be, I'm sure, some calls for pulling back on the commercial side of things, and I think that would be a real lost opportunity. I hope that we can push our way through, even though it might be a little less clearly charted.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

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▶ Policy/Politics

* Trump Set to Meet With Technology Leaders Early Next Week - Bberg

* EU Lawmakers Push Back on U.S. Criticism of Tech Antitrust Regulation - WSJ

* China aims to recruit top US scientists as Trump tries to kill the CHIPS Act - Ars

* Rebuilding the Transatlantic Tech Alliance: Why Innovation, Not Regulation, Should Guide the Way - AEI

* A New Way of Thinking About the N.I.H. - NYT Opinion

▶ AI/Digital

* You knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search results - Ars

* Are Large Language Models Ready for Business Integration? A Study on Generative AI Adoption - Arxiv

* Turing Award Goes to 2 Pioneers of Artificial Intelligence - NYT

* ChatGPT for President! Presupposed content in politicians versus GPT-generated texts - Arxiv

* Chat-GPT4 Does Enhance Creativity. But Human Ego Can Hamper its Potential - SSRN

▶ Biotech/Health

* Alzheimer's could be treated by enhancing the brain's own immune cells - NA

* Will NIH Cuts Boost Public Health—or Destroy It? - Free Press

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

* Many Chinese See a Cultural Revolution in America - NYT

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* On the US AI Safety Institute - Hyperdimensional

* What is Vibe Coding? - AI Supremacy

* In defense of Gemini - Strange Loop Canon

* Economic Uncertainty in the US Economy - Conversable Economist

Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The 2020s have so far been marked by pandemic, war, and startling technological breakthroughs. Conversations around climate disaster, great-power conflict, and malicious AI are seemingly everywhere. It’s enough to make anyone feel like the end might be near. Toby Ord has made it his mission to figure out just how close we are to catastrophe — and maybe not close at all!

Ord is the author of the 2020 book, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Back then, I interviewed Ord on the American Enterprise Institute’s Political Economy podcast, and you can listen to that episode here. In 2024, he delivered his talk, The Precipice Revisited, in which he reassessed his outlook on the biggest threats facing humanity.

Today on Faster, Please — The Podcast, Ord and I address the lessons of Covid, our risk of nuclear war, potential pathways for AI, and much more.

Ord is a senior researcher at Oxford University. He has previously advised the UN, World Health Organization, World Economic Forum, and the office of the UK Prime Minister.

In This Episode

* Climate change (1:30)

* Nuclear energy (6:14)

* Nuclear war (8:00)

* Pandemic (10:19)

* Killer AI (15:07)

* Artificial General Intelligence (21:01)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Climate change (1:30)

. . . the two worst pathways, we're pretty clearly not on, and so that's pretty good news that we're kind of headed more towards one of the better pathways in terms of the emissions that we'll put out there.

Pethokoukis: Let's just start out by taking a brief tour through the existential landscape and how you see it now versus when you first wrote the book The Precipice, which I've mentioned frequently in my writings. I love that book, love to see a sequel at some point, maybe one's in the works . . . but let's start with the existential risk, which has dominated many people's thinking for the past quarter-century, which is climate change.

My sense is, not just you, but many people are somewhat less worried than they were five years ago, 10 years ago. Perhaps they see at least the most extreme outcomes less likely. How do you see it?

Ord: I would agree with that. I'm not sure that everyone sees it that way, but there were two really big and good pieces of news on climate that were rarely reported in the media. One of them is that there's the question about how many emissions there'll be. We don't know how much carbon humanity will emit into the atmosphere before we get it under control, and there are these different emissions pathways, these RCP 4.5 and things like this you'll have heard of. And often, when people would give a sketch of how bad things could be, they would talk about RCP 8.5, which is the worst of these pathways, and we're very clearly not on that, and we're also, I think pretty clearly now, not on RCP 6, either. So the two worst pathways, we're pretty clearly not on, and so that's pretty good news that we're kind of headed more towards one of the better pathways in terms of the emissions that we'll put out there.

What are we doing right?

Ultimately, some of those pathways were based on business-as-usual ideas that there wouldn't be climate change as one of the biggest issues in the international political sphere over decades. So ultimately, nations have been switching over to renewables and low-carbon forms of power, which is good news. They could be doing it much more of it, but it's still good news. Back when we initially created these things, I think we would've been surprised and happy to find out that we were going to end up among the better two pathways instead of the worst ones.

The other big one is that, as well as how much we'll admit, there's the question of how bad is it to have a certain amount of carbon in the atmosphere? In particular, how much warming does it produce? And this is something of which there's been massive uncertainty. The general idea is that we're trying to predict, if we were to double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial times, how many degrees of warming would there be? The best guess since the year I was born, 1979, has been three degrees of warming, but the uncertainty has been somewhere between one and a half degrees and four and a half.

Is that Celsius or Fahrenheit, by the way?

This is all Celsius. The climate community has kept the same uncertainty from 1979 all the way up to 2020, and it’s a wild level of uncertainty: Four and a half degrees of warming is three times one and a half degrees of warming, so the range is up to triple these levels of degrees of warming based on this amount of carbon. So massive uncertainty that hadn't changed over many decades.

Now they've actually revised that and have actually brought in the range of uncertainty. Now they're pretty sure that it's somewhere between two and a half and four degrees, and this is based on better understanding of climate feedbacks. This is good news if you're concerned about worst-case climate change. It's saying it's closer to the central estimate than we'd previously thought, whereas previously we thought that there was a pretty high chance that it could even be higher than four and a half degrees of warming.

When you hear these targets of one and a half degrees of warming or two degrees of warming, they sound quite precise, but in reality, we were just so uncertain of how much warming would follow from any particular amount of emissions that it was very hard to know. And that could mean that things are better than we'd thought, but it could also mean things could be much worse. And if you are concerned about existential risks from climate change, then those kind of tail events where it's much worse than we would've thought the things would really get, and we're now pretty sure that we're not on one of those extreme emissions pathways and also that we're not in a world where the temperature is extremely sensitive to those emissions.

Nuclear energy (6:14)

Ultimately, when it comes to the deaths caused by different power sources, coal . . . killed many more people than nuclear does — much, much more . . .

What do you make of this emerging nuclear power revival you're seeing across Europe, Asia, and in the United States? At least the United States it’s partially being driven by the need for more power for these AI data centers. How does it change your perception of risk in a world where many rich countries, or maybe even not-so-rich countries, start re-embracing nuclear energy?

In terms of the local risks with the power plants, so risks of meltdown or other types of harmful radiation leak, I'm not too concerned about that. Ultimately, when it comes to the deaths caused by different power sources, coal, even setting aside global warming, just through particulates being produced in the soot, killed many more people than nuclear does — much, much more, and so nuclear is a pretty safe form of energy production as it happens, contrary to popular perception. So I'm in favor of that. But the proliferation concerns, if it is countries that didn't already have nuclear power, then the possibility that they would be able to use that to start a weapons program would be concerning.

And as sort of a mechanism for more clean energy. Do you view nuclear as clean energy?

Yes, I think so. It's certainly not carbon-producing energy. I think that it has various downsides, including the difficulty of knowing exactly what to do with the fuel, that will be a very long lasting problem. But I think it's become clear that the problems caused by other forms of energy are much larger and we should switch to the thing that has fewer problems, rather than more problems.

Nuclear war (8:00)

I do think that the Ukraine war, in particular, has created a lot of possible flashpoints.

I recently finished a book called Nuclear War: A Scenario, which is kind of a minute-by-minute look at how a nuclear war could break out. If you read the book, the book is terrifying because it really goes into a lot of — and I live near Washington DC, so when it gives its various scenarios, certainly my house is included in the blast zone, so really a frightening book. But when it tried to explain how a war would start, I didn't find it a particularly compelling book. The scenarios for actually starting a conflict, I didn't think sounded particularly realistic.

Do you feel — and obviously we have Russia invade Ukraine and loose talk by Vladimir Putin about nuclear weapons — do you feel more or less confident that we'll avoid a nuclear war than you did when you wrote the book?

Much less confident, actually. I guess I should say, when I wrote the book, it came out in 2020, I finished the writing in 2019, and ultimately we were in a time of relatively low nuclear risk, and I feel that the risk has risen. That said, I was trying to provide estimates for the risk over the next hundred years, and so I wasn't assuming that the low-risk period would continue indefinitely, but it was quite a shock to end up so quickly back in this period of heightened tensions and threats of nuclear escalation, the type of thing I thought was really from my parents' generation. So yes, I do think that the Ukraine war, in particular, has created a lot of possible flashpoints. That said, the temperature has come down on the conversation in the last year, so that's something.

Of course, the conversation might heat right back up if we see a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. I've been very bullish about the US economy and world economy over the rest of this decade, but the exception is as long as we don't have a war with China, from an economic point of view, but certainly also a nuclear point of view. Two nuclear armed powers in conflict? That would not be an insignificant event from the existential-risk perspective.

It is good that China has a smaller nuclear arsenal than the US or Russia, but there could easily be a great tragedy.

Pandemic (10:19)

Overall, a lot of countries really just muddled through not very well, and the large institutions that were supposed to protect us from these things, like the CDC and the WHO, didn't do a great job either.

The book comes out during the pandemic. Did our response to the pandemic make you more or less confident in our ability and willingness to confront that kind of outbreak? The worst one that saw in a hundred years?

Yeah, overall, it made me much less confident. There'd been general thought by those who look at these large catastrophic risks that when the chips are down and the threat is imminent, that people will see it and will band together and put a lot of effort into it; that once you see the asteroid in your telescope and it's headed for you, then things will really get together — a bit like in the action movies or what have you.

That's where I take my cue from, exactly.

And with Covid, it was kind of staring us in the face. Those of us who followed these things closely were quite alarmed a long time before the national authorities were. Overall, a lot of countries really just muddled through not very well, and the large institutions that were supposed to protect us from these things, like the CDC and the WHO, didn't do a great job either. That said, scientists, particularly developing RNA vaccines, did better than I expected.

In the years leading up to the pandemic, certainly we'd seen other outbreaks, they’d had the avian flu outbreak, and you know as well as I do, there were . . . how many white papers or scenario-planning exercises for just this sort of event. I think I recall a story where, in 2018, Bill Gates had a conversation with President Trump during his first term about the risk of just such an outbreak. So it's not as if this thing came out of the blue. In many ways we saw the asteroid, it was just pretty far away. But to me, that says something again about as humans, our ability to deal with severe, but infrequent, risks.

And obviously, not having a true global, nasty outbreak in a hundred years, where should we focus our efforts? On preparation? Making sure we have enough ventilators? Or our ability to respond? Because it seems like the preparation route will only go so far, and the reason it wasn't a much worse outbreak is because we have a really strong ability to respond.

I'm not sure if it's the same across all risks as to how preparation versus ability to respond, which one is better. In some risks, there's also other possibilities like avoiding an outbreak, say, an accidental outbreak happening at all, or avoiding a nuclear war starting and not needing to actually respond at all. I'm not sure if there's an overall rule as to which one was better.

Do you have an opinion on the outbreak of Covid?

I don't know whether it was a lab leak. I think it's a very plausible hypothesis, but plausible doesn't mean it's proven.

And does the post-Covid reaction, at least in the United States, to vaccines, does that make you more or less confident in our ability to deal with . . . the kind of societal cohesion and confidence to tackle a big problem, to have enough trust? Maybe our leaders don't deserve that trust, but what do you make from this kind of pushback against vaccines and — at least in the United States — our medical authorities?

When Covid was first really striking Europe and America, it was generally thought that, while China was locking down the Wuhan area, that Western countries wouldn't be able to lock down, that it wasn't something that we could really do, but then various governments did order lockdowns. That said, if you look at the data on movement of citizens, it turns out that citizens stopped moving around prior to the lockdowns, so the lockdown announcements were more kind of like the tail, rather than the dog.

But over time, citizens wanted to kind of get back out and interact more, and the rules were preventing them, and if a large fraction of the citizens were under something like house arrest for the better part of a year, would that lead to some fairly extreme resentment and some backlash, some of which was fairly irrational? Yeah, that is actually exactly the kind of thing that you would expect. It was very difficult to get a whole lot of people to row together and take the same kind of response that we needed to coordinate the response to prevent the spread, and pushing for that had some of these bad consequences, which are also going to make it harder for next time. We haven't exactly learned the right lessons.

Killer AI (15:07)

If we make things that are smarter than us and are not inherently able to control their values or give them moral rules to work within, then we should expect them to ultimately be calling the shots.

We're more than halfway through our chat and now we're going to get to the topic probably most people would like to hear about: After the robots take our jobs, are they going to kill us? What do you think? What is your concern about AI risk?

I'm quite concerned about it. Ultimately, when I wrote my book, I put AI risk as the biggest existential risk, albeit the most uncertain, as well, and I would still say that. That said, some things have gotten better since then.

I would assume what makes you less confident is one, what seems to be the rapid advance — not just the rapid advance of the technology, but you have the two leading countries in a geopolitical globalization also being the leaders in the technology and not wanting to slow it down. I would imagine that would make you more worried that we will move too quickly. What would make you more confident that we would avoid any serious existential downsides?

I agree with your supposition that the attempts by the US and China to turn this into some kind of arms race are quite concerning. But here are a few things: Back when I was writing the book, the leading AI systems with things like AlphaGo, if you remember that, or the Atari plane systems.

Quaint. Quite quaint.

It was very zero-sum, reinforcement-learning-based game playing, where these systems were learning directly to behave adversarially to other systems, and they could only understand the kind of limited aspect about the world, and struggle, and overcoming your adversary. That was really all they could do, and the idea of teaching them about ethics, or how to treat people, and the diversity of human values seemed almost impossible: How do you tell a chess program about that?

But then what we've ended up with is systems that are not inherently agents, they're not inherently trying to maximize something. Rather, you ask them questions and they blurt out some answers. These systems have read more books on ethics and moral philosophy than I have, and they've read all kinds of books about the human condition. Almost all novels that have ever been published, and pretty much every page of every novel involves people judging the actions of other people and having some kind of opinions about them, and so there's a huge amount of data about human values, and how we think about each other, and what's inappropriate behavior. And if you ask the systems about these things, they're pretty good at judging whether something's inappropriate behavior, if you describe it.

The real challenge remaining is to get them to care about that, but at least the knowledge is in the system, and that's something that previously seemed extremely difficult to do. Also, these systems, there are versions that do reasoning and that spend longer with a private text stream where they think — it's kind of like sub-vocalizing thoughts to themselves before they answer. When they do that, these systems are thinking in plain English, and that's something that we really didn't expect. If you look at all of the weights of a neural network, it's quite inscrutable, famously difficult to know what it's doing, but somehow we've ended up with systems that are actually thinking in English and where that could be inspected by some oversight process. There are a number of ways in which things are better than I’d feared.

So what is your actual existential risk scenario look like? This is what you're most concerned about happening with AI.

I think it's quite hard to be all that concrete on it at the moment, partly because things change so quickly. I don't think that there's going to be some kind of existential catastrophe from AI in the next couple of years, partly because the current systems require so much compute in order to run them that they can only be run at very specialized and large places, of which there's only a few in the world. So that means the possibility that they break out and copy themselves into other systems is not really there, in which case, the possibility of turning them off is much possible as well.

Also, they're not yet intelligent enough to be able to execute a lengthy plan. If you have some kind of complex task for them, that requires, say, 10 steps — for example, booking a flight on the internet by clicking through all of the appropriate pages, and finding out when the times are, and managing to book your ticket, and fill in the special codes they sent to your email, and things like that. That's a somewhat laborious task and the systems can't do things like that yet. There's still the case that, even if they've got a, say, 90 percent chance of completing any particular step, that the 10 percent chances of failure add up, and eventually it's likely to fail somewhere along the line and not be able to recover. They'll probably get better at that, but at the moment, the inability to actually execute any complex plans does provide some safety.

Ultimately, the concern is that, at a more abstract level, we're building systems which are smarter than us at many things, and we're attempting to make them much more general and to be smarter than us across the board. If you know that one player is a better chess player than another, suppose Magnus Carlsen's playing me at chess, I can't predict exactly how he's going to beat me, but I can know with quite high likelihood that he will end up beating me. I'll end up in checkmate, even though I don't know what moves will happen in between here and there, and I think that it's similar with AI systems. If we make things that are smarter than us and are not inherently able to control their values or give them moral rules to work within, then we should expect them to ultimately be calling the shots.

Artificial General Intelligence (21:01)

Ultimately, existential risks are global public goods problems.

I frequently check out the Metaculus online prediction platform, and I think currently on that platform, 2027 for what they would call “weak AGI,” artificial general intelligence — a date which has moved up two months in the past week as we're recording this, and then I think 2031 also has accelerated for “strong AGI,” so this is pretty soon, 2027 or 2031, quite soon. Is that kind of what you're assuming is going to happen, that we're going to have to deal with very powerful technologies quite quickly?

Yeah, I think that those are good numbers for the typical case, what you should be expecting. I think that a lot of people wouldn't be shocked if it turns out that there is some kind of obstacle that slows down progress and takes longer before it gets overcome, but it's also wouldn't be surprising at this point if there are no more big obstacles and it's just a matter of scaling things up and doing fairly simple processes to get it to work.

It’s now a multi-billion dollar industry, so there's a lot of money focused on ironing out any kinks or overcoming any obstacles on the way. So I expect it to move pretty quickly and those timelines sound very realistic. Maybe even sooner.

When you wrote the book, what did you put as the risk to human existence over the next a hundred years, and what is it now?

When I wrote the book, I thought it was about one in six.

So it's still one in six . . . ?

Yeah, I think that's still about right, and I would say that most of that is coming from AI.

This isn't, I guess, a specific risk, but, to the extent that being positive about our future means also being positive on our ability to work together, countries working together, what do you make of society going in the other direction where we seem more suspicious of other countries, or more even — in the United States — more suspicious of our allies, more suspicious of international agreements, whether they're trade or military alliances. To me, I would think that the Age of Globalization would've, on net, lowered that risk to one in six, and if we're going to have less globalization, to me, that would tend to increase that risk.

That could be right. Certainly increased suspicion, to the point of paranoia or cynicism about other nations and their ability to form deals on these things, is not going to be helpful at all. Ultimately, existential risks are global public goods problems. This continued functioning of human civilization is this global public good and existential risk is the opposite. And so these are things where, one way to look at it is that the US has about four percent of the world's people, so one in 25 people live in the US, and so an existential risk is hitting 25 times as many people as. So if every country is just interested in themself, they'll undervalue it by a factor of 25 or so, and the countries need to work together in order to overcome that kind of problem. Ultimately, if one of us falls victim to these risks, then we all do, and so it definitely does call out for international cooperation. And I think that it has a strong basis for international cooperation. It is in all of our interests. There are also verification possibilities and so on, and I'm actually quite optimistic about treaties and other ways to move forward.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* Tech tycoons have got the economics of AI wrong - Economist

* Progress in Artificial Intelligence and its Determinants - Arxiv

* The role of personality traits in shaping economic returns amid technological change - CEPR

▶ Business

* Tech CEOs try to reassure Wall Street after DeepSeek shock - Wapo

* DeepSeek Calls for Deep Breaths From Big Tech Over Earnings - Bberg Opinion

* Apple’s AI Moment Is Still a Ways Off - WSJ

* Bill Gates Isn’t Like Those Other Tech Billionaires - NYT

* OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son Are AI’s New Power Couple - WSJ

* SoftBank Said to Be in Talks to Invest as Much as $25 Billion in OpenAI - NYT

* Microsoft sheds $200bn in market value after cloud sales disappoint - FT

▶ Policy/Politics

* ‘High anxiety moment’: Biden’s NIH chief talks Trump 2.0 and the future of US science - Nature

* Government Tech Workers Forced to Defend Projects to Random Elon Musk Bros - Wired

* EXCLUSIVE: NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with Trump’s orders - Science

* Milei, Modi, Trump: an anti-red-tape revolution is under way - Economist

* FDA Deregulation of E-Cigarettes Saved Lives and Spurred Innovation - Marginal Revolution

* Donald Trump revives ideas of a Star Wars-like missile shield - Economist

▶ AI/Digital

* Is DeepSeek Really a Threat? - PS

* ChatGPT vs. Claude vs. DeepSeek: The Battle to Be My AI Work Assistant - WSJ

* OpenAI teases “new era” of AI in US, deepens ties with government - Ars

* AI's Power Requirements Under Exponential Growth - Rand

* How DeepSeek Took a Chunk Out of Big AI - Bberg

* DeepSeek poses a challenge to Beijing as much as to Silicon Valley - Economist

▶ Biotech/Health

* Creatine shows promise for treating depression - NS

* FDA approves new, non-opioid painkiller Journavx - Wapo

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* Another Boffo Energy Forecast, Just in Time for DeepSeek - Heatmap News

* Column: Nuclear revival puts uranium back in the critical spotlight - Mining

* A Michigan nuclear plant is slated to restart, but Trump could complicate things - Grist

▶ Robotics/AVs

* AIs and Robots Should Sound Robotic - IEEE Spectrum

* Robot beauticians touch down in California - FT Opinion

▶ Space/Transportation

* A Flag on Mars? Maybe Not So Soon. - NYT

* Asteroid triggers global defence plan amid chance of collision with Earth in 2032 - The Guardian

* Lurking Inside an Asteroid: Life’s Ingredients - NYT

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

* An Ancient 'Lost City' Is Uncovered in Mexico - NYT

* Reflecting on Rome, London and Chicago after the Los Angeles fires - Wapo Opinion

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* I spent two days testing DeepSeek R1 - Understanding AI

* China's Technological Advantage -overlapping tech-industrial ecosystems - AI Supremacy

* The state of decarbonization in five charts - Exponential View

* The mistake of the century - Slow Boring

* The Child Penalty: An International View - Conversable Economist

* Deep Deepseek History and Impact on the Future of AI - next BIG future

Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist, is based on the idea that we, as a society, are failing to meet our potential: Inefficiency, overregulation, and an overabundance of caution is robbing us of the world we might be living in.

Nicole Kobie shares some of my frustrations in her recent book, The Long History of the Future: Why tomorrow’s technology still isn’t here. She explores the evolutionary history of past technologies and why we just can’t seem to arrive at the future we’ve all been waiting for.

Today on Faster, Please — The Podcast, I chat with Kobie about the role of regulators, the pace of progress, and what careers in journalism have taught us about innovation hype

Kobie is a science and technology journalist whose articles appear in publications fromTeen Vogue, toNew Scientist, toGQ. She is the futures editor forPC Pro and a contributing editor forWired. She is based out of London.

In This Episode

* Repeating history (1:42)

* The American system of innovation (7:12)

* The cost of risk-aversion (16:10)

* The problem dynamic (20:28)

* Our future rate of change (23:34)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Repeating history (1:42)

I'm supposed to forget that I basically wrote the same version of this story a year ago . . .

Pethokoukis: I wrote a book about a year ago, and I wrote that book out of frustration. I was frustrated, when I originally started writing it in 2020, that, how come we already didn't have a vaccine for Covid? And then I started thinking about all the other technologies that we didn't have, and it was that frustration that led me write my book.

I'm guessing there was a frustration that led you to write your much better-written book.

Kobie: So I think it's really interesting that you start with Covid vaccines because here, out in the UK, the vaccine that was developed here — this is not something of my area of expertise, but obviously all journalists ended up having to write about Covid quite a bit — but the reason we managed to create a vaccine so quickly (they usually take several years) is because we have this vaccine platform that they'd been coming up with, and they kind of had this virus in their heads of, “Oh, it would probably be this type of a virus, and if we were to design a system that would help us design a vaccine really quickly, what would it look like?” And they had it mostly done when everything hit, so actually we got quite lucky on that one. It could have been a lot worse, we could have been much further behind.

But you're right, I have been writing about technology for a very long time and I keep hearing things about AI, things about driverless cars, and you just feel like you're writing the same headline time after time after time because news has such a short memory. I'm supposed to forget that I basically wrote the same version of this story a year ago, and that every year I'm writing about driverless cars and how they're going to be here imminently, and then 10 years goes by and I'm like, “Maybe I should have renewed my license.” That sort of a thing. And I find that very frustrating because I don't like hype. I like having the reality of the situation, even if it's a bit pessimistic, even if it's not the most happy scenario of what could happen with technology. I'd rather know the downsides and have a better sense of what is actually going to happen. So it really came out of that.

I was writing a section for a British computing magazine called PC Pro, a future section, and it's a very cynical magazine a lot of the time, so I kind of got used to writing why things weren't going to happen and I had this whole list of these different technologies that I'm not necessarily pessimistic about, but I could see why they weren't going to happen as quickly as everyone has said. So just put it together in a book. So a little bit the same as you, but bit of a different story.

So that phenomenon, and I wonder, is it partly sort of a reporter's problem? Because most reporters you have a certain . . . you don't want to write the same story over and over again. I think a lot of reporters have a soft spot for novelty. I think that's not just true with technology, I think it's with economic theories, it's with a lot of things. Then you have the founders or technologists themselves, many of whom probably would like to raise money and to continue raising money, so they're going to hype it, but yet, history would suggest that there's nothing new about this phenomenon, that things always take longer to get from the breakthrough to where it is a ubiquitous technology, everything from electrification, to PCs, to the internal combustion engine.

Is there an actual problem or is it really a problem of our perceptions?

I think it is a problem of perception. We have this idea that technology happens so quickly, that development happens so quickly, and it does, especially something like a smartphone. It went from being something you heard about to something you carried with you in a matter of years — very, very quickly. Of course, the technologies that make up a smartphone took many, many, several decades, a long, long time.

The problem with a lot of innovation and development, especially when it's things like things like AI, they start as almost a philosophical, academic idea. Then they become science and we start to work out the science of how something's going to work. And then you have to engineer it and make it work physically. And then you have to commercialize it. And for every single different aspect of a technology, that's what you're kind of doing. That is a very long road involving very different people. And the academics are like, “Yeah, we solved this. I wrote a paper about this ages ago, a hundred years ago we were talking about AI.” And then the scientists who are doing stuff in the lab, they can make it work in the lab, they can make it work in theory, they can do that in-the-lab bit, and that's amazing. We read about those breakthroughs. Those are the kinds of things that make really great headlines and journalists love those kinds of stories because, hey, it's new. And then you've got engineers who've actually got to physically build it, and that is where the money really needs to come in because this is always harder. Building anything is harder than you think it's going to be. It doesn't matter what it is, it's always harder because you've got the real world, you're out of the lab and you have to think about all of the things that the scientists who were very smart people did not think about.

And then you've got to try to come up with a way to make it work for people, and people are hard. You need to think about regulators, you need to think about business models, and all of that sort of thing. There's a lot of problems in all of that, and a lot of the time, the innovation isn't about that original academic idea. It's about how you're going to bring it to market, or how you're going to make it safe, and all of those kinds of things. There's so much to think about with even the smallest piece of technology.

The American system of innovation (7:12)

It's too easy for people to just kind of jump up and say, “Well, it's corporations being evil. That's the problem.” Well sometimes, yeah. “It's governments being too heavy-handed and regulators being too tight. That's the problem.” Well, it is until your plane crashes, then you definitely wish that those aviation regulators were stricter, right?

I'm old enough to remember in the 1990s, I remember writing stories when I was a reporter about AI. There was a huge AI boom in the 1990s which then kind of fizzled out, and then it sort of came up again. So I've certainly heard about the hype about technologies, and when people talk about hype, often they'll point out the Internet Boom — but to me, that's, again, really just a case of things taking longer than what people expected because all the big moneymaking ideas in the 2010s about how to use the internet and apps — these are not new ideas. These are all ideas people had in the ’90s, but what they lacked was bandwidth to make them work out, and we also lacked the smartphones, but the idea of ordering things online or the sharing economy, the technology wasn't there.

Sometimes the problem is that the technology just isn't there yet. Is there an actual problem — you're in Great Britain — is there a problem with the American system of innovation, which, the stylized version of that would be: government funds lots of basic research on the kinds of questions that businesses would never really do their own — even though they do a lot of R&D, they don't do that kind of R&D because it's not immediately commercial — and that creates this stock of knowledge that then businesses can use to commercialize, see what people will actually buy as a way of valuing it., does it pass the market test, and then we end up with stuff that businesses and consumers can use — that, ideally, is the American system.

Is that a good system? Can that system be improved? What is your contention?

It depends what you're making. If you're making a consumer product, I think yeah, that works decently well. You can see in some ways where it doesn't work, and you can see in some ways where it does work, and to me that's where regulation and the government needs to sit, is to try to push things the right way. Obviously, social media probably needed something helping it along the way at some point so it didn't go down the road that we have now. Smartphones are pretty good, they're a pretty great technology, we're used to using them, there's some issues with surveillance and that sort of thing, but that kind of worked pretty well.

But it depends on the technology. Like I mentioned, these Covid vaccines. Here in the UK, that wasn't a project that was funded by corporations. It definitely got out in the world and was mass-produced by them quickly, which was great, but it was something that came through the academic world here and there was a lot of government funding involved. Of course, the UK has a very strong academic system, and an academic network, and how you get funding for these things.

It depends on the product, it depends what you're trying to buy, and this is the issue when you come into things like transport: so driverless cars, or goofy ideas like hyperloop, or flying taxis and things like that. Is that a consumer product? Is that public transport? How are we deciding what the value is in this? Is it just about how much money it makes for Google, or is it about how it solves problems for cities? And we probably need it to do both, and walking that line to make sure that it does both in a way that works for everybody is very difficult, and I don't think we have easy answers for any of that, partially some of this stuff is so new and partially because we're not very good at talking about these things.

It's too easy for people to just kind of jump up and say, “Well, it's corporations being evil. That's the problem.” Well sometimes, yeah. “It's governments being too heavy-handed and regulators being too tight. That's the problem.” Well, it is until your plane crashes, then you definitely wish that those aviation regulators were stricter, right? So it depends on what the technology is, and we just use technology to cover such a range of innovation that maybe we need some different ways of talking about this.

Flying cars has become such the example, but the reason there isn't a flying car, some might blame regulation, but I think, whether it's regulations were too heavy for some reason, or the technology wasn't there, it didn't make economic sense. And even though there's been a lot of flying taxi startups, it still may not make economic sense. So who determines if it makes economic sense? Does the government determine or do you need to raise money and then try out a product, then the entrepreneur realizes it doesn't make economic sense, and then the company collapses?

To me, that's what I see as the American system, that somebody has an idea, maybe they base the idea off research, and then they try the idea, and they raise money, and then they actually try to create a product, and then the thing fails, and, well, now we know. Now we know that's probably not ready.

Is there a different way of doing it? What country does it better?

I think China does, and I think that's because companies in China and the government are much more linked, and they serve each other. That's not necessarily a good thing, to be clear, especially not for the wider world, all of the time, but China has driverless cars and they're out on the roads. It's not that they work better than the ones in the US, they don't, but there's less of a concern about some of the negative impacts. Where you fall on where that sits, that's kind of up to individuals. Personally, I think a driverless car shouldn't be on the road if it's not perfectly safe, if it's not a really trusted technology, and I am willing to wait for that because I think it is a thing that is worth waiting for, or ensuring that we can actually build it in a way that's affordable. But they're out on the roads in China, they're being tested, you can catch a robot taxi there.

But that should be a worse system because it sounds like you're very skeptical about how safe they are. The fact that they're only on the roads in this country in certain places, in certain cities, there's a slow rollout — that should be a better system.

Personally, I think it is. Now, if you live in San Francisco or you live in the places that are kind of being treated as test labs for these vehicles, you might not be a fan of them, and there's been a lot of pushback in San Francisco around this, especially because it's taken so long and they can actually be quite disruptive to the cities when they don't work out, and it's not like you, as somebody who lives locally, gets compensated because you get delayed on your way to work because a Waymo car got on the way of your bus, or whatever.

But I think that we do need to be slower with technology, and I think that there's nothing wrong with taking a bit of time to make sure that we get it right. It is very likely that, in the next couple of years, there are going to be cities that have these air taxis. To a certain extent, they're just electric helicopters that are cheaper and easier to fly, and we already have those to get people above traffic to get between places. That's an idea that already exists. This isn't a huge, massive leap forward. It is going to happen in cities where people are a little bit less afraid of disrupting everybody. But again, I'm not sure that that's right for people. That might be right for the company; so all of the various aviation companies that are trying this, they're going to end up flying for the first time in cities like Dubai and places like that that aren't worried about what everyday people on the ground think, they don't really care what you think. A place like New York or LA, it's going to be a little bit tougher to convince people that they should have to suffer the safety implications of this if one of these things crashes, because people in the US have a really great ability to be able to speak out about these technologies, and better government regulations, and things like that.

I think it is a very tough question and I think it is almost impossible to get it perfectly, so the question is more about getting it to be good enough, and to me, what I think that requires is good communication between companies and regulators. And in aviation, that is pretty good— you will not talk to any company that is making the so-called “flying cars” and the air taxis. They all go on about how well they work with regulators and how much they appreciate the support of regulators, and I think that's a good thing, but regulators are probably also maybe not making it as easy as it could be to develop a new technology because one of the problems with these companies is that it takes a certain length of time to come up with this idea and how the technology is going to work, and then you have to get all these different certifications, and it is a long road — and this is good, you want to make sure the plane works, but by the time you're certified, the technology has come along enough that now you're out-of-date and your technology is out-of-date, so you want to drop a new piece of technology, a new battery, a new idea, AI, and whatever. To a certain extent you have to come back to the beginning, and now you're behind again, and by the time you get everything certified, that's out-of-date again. So we probably do need to come up with faster ways of looking at new technologies and finding new ways of letting these companies safely work in a new technology into an existing design, new things like that.

The cost of risk-aversion (16:10)

I don't want to talk about this really wide-ranging AI stuff. I want really specifics now, now that we're starting to apply this stuff and we have really specific AI models that work in a very specific way, let's talk about that.

Isn't that kind of the big story, that the reason we don't have some of these technologies is because we've been — at least in the United States — we've been wildly risk-averse. That's the whole story of nuclear energy: We became very risk-averse, and now we're sitting here worried about climate change when we have an established technology that, had we not paused it, we would've had 50 years of improvements, and when we talk about small nuclear reactors, or microreactors, or even fusion, we're 50 years behind where we could be. So don't some of these tech folks have a point that there was a proper reaction in the ’50s and ’60s about regulation and the environment and then we had an overreaction, now it's become just very hard to build things in this country and get them deployed, whether it's flying taxis or nuclear reactors. Now we're going to have this debate about AI. Does does that sound logical to you?

I’m not sure that that is always what is holding these things back. The thing that has been holding AI back is just processing power. Jeffrey Hinton was working on all of these ideas in the ’90s, and he couldn't make it work because the technology wasn't there, and it has taken us this long to get to a point where maybe some of these systems are starting to do useful things. And it is being deployed, it is being used and we should do that.

But some people don't want it deployed, they would like to pause it. You've described this ideal that we've been developing this, and the technology's not there yet, it repeatedly took longer than what people expected, I think you correctly know. And now we're at the point where it seems to maybe be there, and now the second it's there, they're like, “Stop it. Let's slow down.” That's sort of the exact problem you've identified.

Yeah, I do think it is fair to be concerned about the impact of this huge technology. When the whole internet thing happened, we probably should have been slightly more afraid of it and slightly more careful, but you can kind of solve a lot of problems along the way and kind of, “Oh, okay, we need to think about safety of children online — probably should have thought of that a little bit sooner,” and things like that. There's problems that you can kind of solve as you go along, but I think the biggest problem with the discussion and the debate around AI now is we're talking about this huge range of technology. AI is not one thing. So when you say, “AI is here now,” well, AI has been here for decades, it's been doing things for decades, it's not new, but we're talking about a very specific type of AI, we're talking about generative AI that is run by large language models.

Personally, I have absolutely no problem with a large language model generating an AI response to an email so I can just hit a button and say, “Yeah, thanks, that sounds good” without having to type it all out. No one is scared of that. Lots of people are concerned about if you start rolling this out in government widely, which is what the UK government is planning at the moment, and you're letting AI make decisions and reply to people. You're going to get some problems, you're going to get people getting letters from their doctor that are incorrect, or people getting turned down for benefits, and things like that when they should be getting those benefits.

That doesn't mean we can't use AI, it just means we need to think about what are all the downsides. What are the ways that we can mitigate those downsides? What are the ways we can mitigate those risks? But if you ask anyone at an AI developing company now, “Well, how are we going to fix this?” They're like, “Oh, the AI will do it.” Well, how? I just want to specific answer. How are you going to use the AI? What's it actually going to do? What problems do you see and how are you going to fix those problems? Very specific. I don't want to talk about this really wide-ranging AI stuff. I want really specifics now, now that we're starting to apply this stuff and we have really specific AI models that work in a very specific way, let's talk about that. And I think people are capable of having that conversation, but we just really gloss over the details with this one a lot.

The problem dynamic (20:28)

We need more nuance, really, and realize that there aren't villains, this isn't us versus them, it doesn't need to be like this.

So do you view as sort of the problem players here, are they regulators, are they technologists, are they entrepreneurs? Is it the public — which, again, has a very poor understanding of technology, what technology can do. A lot of people I know, when they first tried ChatGPT, they were a little disappointed because they figured, after watching all these sci-fi movies, “I thought computers were already supposed to be able to do this.”

I don't want to say who are the villains, but who are the problem players and what do you do about it?

I mean this in the nicest way possible, but I think that framing is the problem.

Good, that’s fine, attack my framing, that is totally permitted!

I think all of this would be better if we didn't have an “us versus them” thing. I think it's great that OpenAI is trying to develop this technology and is trying to make it useful and to make it work in a way that we might benefit from it. That's what they say they're trying to do, they're trying to make a lot of money while doing it. That's great. That's how this all works. That's fine. Regulators are keeping a close eye on it and want more information from them, and they want to know more about what they're doing, and what they're planning, and how these things are going to work. That seems fair. That's not OpenAI battling regulators, that's not regulators slapping down OpenAI.

Journalists have a lot of blame on this because of the way we frame things. Everything is a battle. Everything is people going head-to-head — no, this is how this is supposed to work. Regulators are supposed to keep them in check. That can be very difficult when you are trying to regulate a very, very new technology. How could you possibly know anything about it? Where are you going to get your information from? From the company themselves. That kind of brings in some inherent challenges, but I think that's all surmountable.

It's kind of like this idea that you're either a Luddite, and you hate AI, and you think it's evil, or you're completely pro-AI and you just can't wait to have your brain uploaded — there's a lot of nuance and variety of what people actually think in between. I think what you mentioned about ChatGPT and how, when you go use it the first time, you're kind of like, “Huh, this is it, hey?”

I think that is the number one thing: Everyone should go use it, and then you're going to be half impressed that this machine is talking to you, that this system can actually chat with you, but then also a little bit disappointed because it's making things up, it's incorrect, it's a bit silly sometimes, that sort of a thing. Personally, I look at it and I just go, I wouldn't trust my business to this. I wouldn't trust the running of a government to a system that operates like this.

Could it write some letters to help the NHS out here not have to have a person sit and type all of these things out, or to send more personalized letters to people so they get better information, and things like that? Yeah, that sounds good. Is that going to completely change how government operates? No. So we need to be a bit more honest about the limitations. We need more nuance, really, and realize that there aren't villains, this isn't us versus them, it doesn't need to be like this. But I see why you think there's villains.

Our future rate of change (23:34)

I think we're really bad at tracking change mentally. We want to see a big, dramatic change and then we look back and we're like, “Whoa . . . This is all very different.”

That was just more my provocative framing. This is a question that you may not like at all, but I'm still going to ask it: You've looked at all these technologies. Do you think that the world of 2035 will look significantly different? The difference between the world of 2025 versus 2015, whatever that change has been, do you anticipate a bigger change between 2025 and 2035, whether because of energy, AI, rockets, flying cars, CRISPR. . . ?

I think it will be different, but I don't think it's going to be as different. I'm kind of thinking back to when I was a kid and how we all lived life pre-internet and things like that, and things were genuinely different, and that gap between that and now is such a big difference. I think about my kid, when she's an adult, how different is it going to be? I think it's going to be different. I think we're going to look back at conversations like this and be like, “Oh gosh, we were naive. How could we have thought this, or not thought this?”

Do I think that no one is going to be working because AI is going to do all work? No, I don't think it's going to be capable of that. Do I think that things like medicine could be really changed by technologies like CRISPR? I really hope so. I think we spend a lot of time talking about things like AI without seeing some of the really big-picture stuff. I write a lot of business technology stories, and it's a lot about how we can improve productivity by a few points, or it might impact a few thousand jobs — let's talk about some bigger things. Let's talk about how we can really change life. Let's talk about how we could work less. I would love to be able to see people actually working three or four days a week instead of these five-day weeks and still maintain productivity and still maintain salaries. I love that idea. I don't think that's going to happen. I think the changes are going to be small and incremental ones.

I think we'll have a lot better transport options. I think all this driverless technology, even if we don't end up with the driverless cars that we fantasize about, it’s definitely going to get applied to public transportation in some really good ways. I'm hoping that medicine will change. I'm worried about the climate change side of it because we are not putting our technology and our innovation into that, the mitigations for that, and I really think that that's where we need some very creative thinking for how we're going to deal with all of this.

So 10, 15, 20 years from now, I think life is going to be relatively the same, but I think in certain industries it's going to be really, really different — but I think I'm still going to be working five days a week sitting in front of a computer, more often than not.

That’s because we're grinders, we love to grind.

I don't, I do not, no.

My last question, I'm not sure if this is quoted in the book, I think it was a Bill Gates quote, “We overestimate what we can accomplish in two years,” or “We underestimate what we can accomplish in 10 years,” something like that. Is that sort of the phenomenon, that there's an announcement and we figure everything's going to be different in 10 years, and then it isn't, and then we look back in 10 years, we're like, “Whoa, actually, there has been a lot of change!”

I think we're really bad at tracking change mentally. We want to see a big, dramatic change and then we look back and we're like, “Whoa,” like you say, “What happened? This is all very different.”

I think we're so focused on the here and now all of the time, we're so thinking about what's going to happen in the next quarter for our company or within the next year with our family, or our careers and things like that, that it's very easy for us to just get caught up in the day-to-day, and I think it is a good thing to look back. That's one of the reasons I wanted to write my book as a history. If you look back, we were talking about flying cars in the ’50s, we were talking about AI . . . the mid-’50s is when this idea kind of really came to life. It takes a long time, but also we've done a lot in that time. There's been a huge amount of change and a huge amount of technologies that have started to enable all of this, and all of that is really positive.

I can get accused of being a bit of a cynic because I'm like, “Where are driverless cars?” But if we manage to make driverless cars happen by 2035, I don't think that that's bad that it took that long. That's just how long it took — and hey, now we have driverless cars. Creating technology is sometimes just going to take longer than we want it to, and that's okay. That's not that the technology is wrong, that's just that we're bad at predicting timelines. I never know how long it's going to take me to finish a story, or get ready in the morning or, whatever, so I'm not surprised that these world-changing technologies were bad judges of that, too.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* Trump’s Arrival Brightens U.S. Outlook, Darkens Everyone Else’s - WSJ

* Coup d’États, Institutional Change, and Productivity - SSRN

* I, Google: Estimating the Impact of Corporate Involvement on AI Research - SSRN

▶ Business

* How Chinese A.I. Start-Up DeepSeek Is Competing With Silicon Valley Giants - NYT

* OpenAI’s Stargate Deal Heralds Shift Away From Microsoft - WSJ

* Oracle Takes Run at Cloud’s Big Three With Trump-Backed AI Pact - Bberg

* Remote work matters, but culture is the elephant in the room - CEPR

* Why Mark Zuckerberg Is Ditching Human Fact-Checkers - Wired

* OpenAI spars with Elon Musk over $500bn Stargate project - FT

* How Oracle Plays Cheaply in AI - WSJ

▶ Policy/Politics

* Who Is Russell Vought? Probably the Most Important Person in Trump 2.0. - NYT Opinion

* Bannon berates Musk over his attacks on Trump’s AI infrastructure project - Politico

▶ AI/Digital

* When A.I. Passes This Test, Look Out - NYT

* Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027 - Ars

* Elon Musk’s Silence on AI Risks Is Deafening - Bberg Opinion

* Worry About Sentient AI—Not for the Reasons You Think - IEEE

* There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race - MIT

▶ Biotech/Health

* Sam Altman-backed Retro Biosciences to raise $1bn for project to extend human life - FT

* Scientists Complete First Comprehensive Map of Human DNA Recombination - The Debrief

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* Private companies aim to demonstrate working fusion reactors in 2025 - Science

* How Trump’s executive orders could tilt US energy markets - E&E News

* Trump’s Dream of Energy Dominance Relies on Canada - Bberg Opinion

* The Wind Industry Is Putting on a Brave Face - Heatmap

▶ Space/Transportation

* Beam me to the stars: Scientists propose wild new interstellar travel tech - Space

* The Hyperloop: A 200-Year History of Hype and Failure - MIT Press

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

* What Los Angeles Can Learn From Another Great American City That Burned - NYT Opinion

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* What if AI timelines are too aggressive? - Understanding AI

* Trump's executive orders: Five big takeaways - Noahpinion

* Open-Source AI and the Future - Hyperdimensional

* 'ChatGPT' Robotics Moment in 2025 - AI Supremacy

* The Big Problem Paradox - Conversable Economist

Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Big changes are happening: space; energy; and, of course, artificial intelligence. The difference between sustainable, pro-growth change, versus a retreat back into stagnation, may lie in how we implement that change. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Virginia Postrel about the pitfalls of taking a top-down approach to innovation, versus allowing a bottom-up style of dynamism to flourish.

Postrel is an author, columnist, and speaker whose scholarly interests range from emerging technology to history and culture. She has authored four books, including The Future and Its Enemies (1998) and her most recent, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (2020). Postrel is a contributing editor for the Works in Progress magazine and has her own Substack.

In This Episode

* Technocrats vs. dynamists (1:29)

* Today’s deregulation movement (6:12)

* What to make of Musk (13:37)

* On electric cars (16:21)

* Thinking about California (25:56)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Technocrats vs. dynamists (1:29)

I think it is a real thing, I think it is in both parties, and its enemies are in both parties, too, that there are real factional disagreements.

Pethokoukis: There is this group of Silicon Valley founders and venture capitalists, they supported President Trump because they felt his policies were sort of pro-builder, pro-abundance, pro-disruption, whatever sort of name you want to use.

And then you have this group on the center-left who seemed to discover that 50 years of regulations make it hard to build EV chargers in the United States. Ezra Klein is one of these people, maybe it's limited to center-left pundits, but do you think there's something going on? Do you think we're experiencing a dynamism kind of vibe shift? I would like to think we are.

Postrel: I think there is something going on. I think there is a real progress and abundance movement. “Abundance” tends to be the word that people who are more Democrat-oriented use, and “progress” is the word that people who are more — I don't know if they're exactly Republican, but more on the right . . . They have disagreements, but they represent distinct Up Wing (to put it in your words) factions within their respective parties. And actually, the Up Wing thing is a good way of thinking about it because it includes both people that, in The Future and Its Enemies, I would classify as technocrats, and Ezra Klein read the books and says, “I am a technocrat.” They want top-down direction in the pursuit of what they see as progress. And people that I would classify as dynamists who are more bottom-up and more about decentralized decision-making, price signals, markets, et cetera.

They share a sense that they would like to see the possibility of getting stuff done, of increasing abundance, of more scientific and technological progress, all of those kinds of things. I think it is a real thing, I think it is in both parties, and its enemies are in both parties, too, that there are real factional disagreements. In many ways, it reminds me of the kind of cross-party seeking for new answers that we experienced in the late ’70s and early ’80s, where . . . the economy was problematic in the ’70s.

Highly problematic.

And there was a lot of thinking about what the problems were and what could be done better, and one thing that came out of that was a lot of the sort of deregulation efforts that, in the many pay-ins to Jimmy Carter, who's not my favorite president, but there was a lot of good stuff that happened through a sort of left-right alliance in that period toward opening up markets.

So you had people like Ralph Nader and free-market economists saying, “We really don't need to have all these regulations on trucking, and on airlines, and these are anti-consumer, and let's free things up.” And we reaped enormous benefits from that, and it's very hard to believe how prescriptive those kinds of regulations were back before the late ’70s.

The progress and abundance movement has had its greatest success — although it still has a lot to go — on housing, and that's where you see people who are saying, “Why do we have so many rules about how much parking you can have?” I mean, yes, a lot of people want parking, but if they want parking, they'll demand it in the marketplace. We don't need to say, “You can't have tandem parking.” Every place I've lived in LA would be illegal to build nowadays because of the parking, just to take one example.

Today’s deregulation movement (6:12)

. . . you've got grassroots kind of Trump supporters who supported him because they're sick of regulation. Maybe they’re small business owners, they just don't like being told what to do . .. . and it's a coalition, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens.

You mentioned some of the deregulation in the Carter years, that's a real tangible achievement. Then you also had a lot more Democrats thinking about technology, what they called the “Atari Democrats” who looked at Japan, so there was a lot of that kind of tumult and thinking — but do you think this is more than a moment, it’s kind of this brief fad, or do you think it can turn into something where you can look back in five and 10 years, like wow, there was a shift, big things actually happened?

I don't think it's just a fad, I think it’s a real movement. Now, movements are not always successful. And we'll see, when we saw an early blowup over immigration.

That's kind of what I was thinking of, it's hardly straightforward.

Within the Trump coalition, you've got people who are what I in The Future and Its Enemies would call reactionaries. That is, people who idealize an idea of an unchanging America someplace in the past. There are different versions of that even within the Trump coalition, and those people are very hostile to the kinds of changes that come with bottom-up innovation and those sorts of things.

But then you've also got people, and not just people from Silicon Valley, you've got grassroots kind of Trump supporters who supported him because they're sick of regulation. Maybe they’re small business owners, they just don't like being told what to do, so you've got those kinds of people too, and it's a coalition, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens.

It's not just immigration, it's also if you wanted to have a big technological future in the US, some of the materials you need to build come from other countries. I think some of them come from Canada, and probably we're not going to annex it, and if you put big tariffs on those things, it's going to hamper people's ability to do things. This is more of a Biden thing, but the whole Nippon Steel can't buy US Steel and invest huge amounts of money in US plants because, “Oh no, they're Japanese!” I mean it's like back to the ’80s.

Virginia, what if we wake up one morning and they've moved the entire plant to Tokyo? We can't let them do that!

There’s one thing about steel plants, they're very localized investments. And we have a lot of experience with Japanese investment in the US, by the way, lots of auto plants and other kinds of things. It’s that sort of backward thinking, which, in this case, was a Biden administration thing, but Trump agrees, or has agreed, is not good. And it's not even politically smart, and it's not even pro the workers because the workers who actually work at the relevant plant want this investment because it will improve their jobs, but instead we get this creating monopoly. If things go the way it looks like they will, there will be a monopoly US Steel supplier, and that's not good for the auto industry or anybody else who uses steel.

I think if we look back in 2030 at what's happened since 2025, whether this has turned out to be a durable kind of pro-progress, pro-growth, pro-abundance moment, I'll look at how have we reacted to advances in artificial intelligence: Did we freak out and start worrying about job loss and regulate it to death? And will we look back and say, “Wow, it became a lot easier to build a nuclear power plant or anything energy.” Has it become significantly easier over the past five years? How deep is the stasis part of America, and how big is the dynamist part of America, really?

Yeah, I think it's a big question. It's a big question both because we're at this moment of what looks like big political change, we're not sure what that change is going to look like because the Trump coalition and Trump himself are such a weird grab bag of impulses, and also because, as you mentioned, artificial intelligence is on the cusp of amazing things, it looks like.

And then you throw in the energy issues, which are related to climate, but they're also related to AI because AI requires a lot of energy. Are we going to build a lot of nuclear power plants? It's conceivable we will, both because of new technological designs for them, but also because of this growing sense — what I see is a lot of elite consensus (and elites are bad now!) that we made a wrong move when we turned against nuclear power. There's still aging Boomer and older are environmentalist types who still react badly to the idea of nuclear power, but if you talk to younger people, they are more open-minded because they're more concerned with the climate, and if we're going to electrify everything, the electricity's got to come from someplace. Solar and wind don't get you there.

To me, not only is this the turnaround in nuclear, to me, stunning, but the fact that we had one of the most severe accidents only about 10 years ago in Japan, and if you would have asked anybody back then, they're like, “That's the death knell. No more nuclear renaissance in these countries. Japan's done. It's done everywhere.” Yet here we are.

And yet, part of that may even be because of that accident, because it was bad, and yet, the long-run bad effects were negligible in terms of actual deaths or other things that you might point to. It's not like suddenly you had lots of babies being born with two heads or something.

What to make of Musk (13:37)

I’m glad the world has an Elon Musk, I'm glad we don't have too many of them, and I worry a little bit about someone of that temperament being close to political power.

What do you make of Elon Musk?

Well, I reviewed Walter Isaacson's biography of him.

Whatever your opinion was after you read the biography, has it changed?

No, it hasn't. I think he is somebody who has poor impulse control, and some of his impulses are very good. His engineering and entrepreneurial genius are best focused in the world of building things — that is, working with materials, physically thinking about properties of materials and how could you do spaceships, or cars, or things differently. He's a mixed bag and a lot of these kinds of people, I say it well compared.

What do people expect that guy to be like?

Compared to Henry Ford, I'd prefer Elon Musk. I’m glad the world has an Elon Musk, I'm glad we don't have too many of them, and I worry a little bit about someone of that temperament being close to political power. It can be a helpful corrective to some of the regulatory impulses because he does have this very strong builder impulse, but I don't think he's a particularly thoughtful person about his limitations or about political concerns.

Aside from his particular strange personality, there is a general problem among the tech elite, which is that they overemphasize how much they know. Smart people are always prone to the problem of thinking they know everything because they're smart, or that they can learn everything because they're smart, or that they're better than people because they're smart, and it's just like one characteristic. Even the smartest person on earth can't know everything because there's more knowledge than any one person can have. That's why I don't like the technocratic impulse, because the technocratic impulse is like, smart people should run the world and they tell you exactly how to do it.

To take a phrase that Ruxandra Teslo uses on her Substack, I think weird nerds are really important to the progress of the world, but weird nerds also need to realize that our goal should be to create a world in which they have a place and can do great things, but not a world in which they run everything, because they're not the only people who are valuable and important.

On electric cars (16:21)

If you look at the statistics, the people who buy electric cars tend to be people who don't actually drive that much, and they're skewed way to high incomes.

You were talking about electrification a little earlier, and you've written a little bit about electric cars. Why did you choose to write about electric cars? And it seems like there's a vibe shift on electric cars as well in this country.

This is the funny thing, because this January interview is actually scheduled because of a July post I had written on Substack called “Don't Talk About Electric Cars!”

It’s as timely as today's headlines.

The headline was inspired by a talk that I heard Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster (been around forever) give at a Breakthrough Institute conference back in June. Breakthrough Institute is part of this sort of UP Wing, pro-progress coalition, but they have a distinct Democrat tilt. And this conference, there was a panel on it that was about how to talk about these issues, specifically if you want Democrats to win.

She gave this talk where she showed all these polling results where you would say, “The Biden administration is great because of X,” and then people would agree or disagree. And the thing that polled the worst, and in fact the only thing that actually made people more likely to vote Republican, was saying that they had supported building all these electric charging stations. Celinda Lake's opinion, her analysis of that, digging into the numbers, was that people don't like electric cars, and especially women don't like electric cars, because of concerns about range. Women are terrified of being stranded, that was her take. I don't know if that's true, but that was her take. But women love hybrids, and I think people love hybrids. I think hybrids are very popular, and in fact, I inherited my mother's hybrid because she stopped driving. So I now have a 2018 Prius, which I used to take this very long road trip in the summer where I drove from LA to a conference in Wichita, and then to Red Cloud Nebraska, and then back to Wichita for a second conference.

The reason people don't like electric cars is really a combination of the fact that they tend to cost more than equivalent gasoline vehicles and because they have limited range and you have to worry about things like charging them and how long charging them is going to take.

If you look at the statistics, the people who buy electric cars tend to be people who don't actually drive that much, and they're skewed way to high incomes. So I live in this neighborhood in West LA, and it is full of Priuses — I mean it used to be full of Priuses, there's still a lot of Priuses, but it's full of Teslas and it is not typical. And the people in LA who are driving many, many miles are people who have jobs like they’re gardeners, or their contractors, or they're insurance adjusters and they have to drive all around and they don't drive electric cars. They might very well drive hybrids because you get better gas mileage, but they're not people who have a lot of time to be sitting around in charging stations.

I think what's happened is there's some groups of people who are see this as a problem to be solved, but then there are a lot of people who see it as more symbolic than not. And they let their ideal, perfect world prevent improvements. So instead of saying, “We should switch from coal to natural gas,” they say, “We should outlaw fossil fuels.” Instead of saying, “Hybrids are a great thing, great invention, way lower emissions,” they say, “We must have all electric vehicles.” And what will happen, California has this rule, it has this law, that you're not going to be able to sell [non-]electric vehicles in the state after, I think it's 2035, and it's totally predictable what's going to happen: People just keep their gasoline cars longer. We’re going to end up like Cuba with a bunch of old cars.

I swear, every report I get from a think tank, or a consultancy, or a Wall Street bank, for years has talked about electric cars, the energy transition, as if it was an absolutely done deal, and maybe it is a done deal over some longer period of time, I don't know, but to me it sort of gets to your point about top-down technocratic impulse — it seems to be failing.

And I think that electric cars are a good example of that because there are a lot of people who think electric cars are really cool, they're kind of an Up Wing thing, if you will. It's like a new technology, there’ve been big advances, and exciting entrepreneurs . . . and I think a lot of people who like the idea of technological progress like electric cars, and in fact, the adoption of electric cars by people who maybe don't drive a whole lot but have a lot of money, it's not just environmental, cool, or even status, it's partly techno-lust, especially with Teslas.

A lot of people who bought Teslas, they're just like people who like technology, but the top-down proclamation that you must have an electric vehicle, and we're going to use a combination of subsidies and bans to force everybody to have an electric vehicle, really doesn't acknowledge the diversity of transportation needs that people have.

One way of looking at electric cars, but also the effort to build all these chargers, which has been a failure, the effort to start to creating broadband connectivity to all these rural areas — which isn't working very well — there was this lesson learned by people on the center-left, and Ezra Klein, that there was this wild overreaction, perhaps, to environmental problems in the ’60s and ’70s, and the unintended consequence here is that one, the biggest environmental problem may be worse because we don't have nuclear power and climate change, but now we can't really solve any problems. So it took them 50 years, but they learned a lesson.

My concern is to look at what's going on with some of the various Biden initiatives which are taking forever to implement, may be wildly unpopular — will they learn the risk of this top-down technocratic approach, or they'll just memory hold that and they'll move on to their next technocratic approach? Will there be a learning?

No, I'm skeptical that there will be. I think that the learning that has taken place — and by the way, I hate that: “a learning,” that kind of thing. . .

That's why I said it, because it’s kind of delightfully annoying.

The “learning,” gerund, that has taken place is that we shouldn't put so much process in the way of government doing things. And while I more or less agree with that, in particular, there are too many veto points and it is too easy for a very small group of objectors to hold up, not just private, but also public initiatives that are providing public goods.

I think that the reason we got all of these process things that keep things from being done was because of things like urban renewal in the 1960s. And no, it was not just Robert Moses, he just got the big book written about him, but this took place every place where neighborhoods were completely torn down and hideous, brutalist structures were built for public buildings, or public housing, and these kinds of things, and people eventually rebelled against that.

I think that yes, there are some people on the center-left who will learn. I do not think Ezra Klein is one of them, but price signals are actually useful things. They convey knowledge, and if you're going to go from one regulatory regime to another, you'll get different results, but if you don't have something that surfaces that bottom-up knowledge and takes it seriously, eventually it's going to break down. It's either going to break down politically or it's just waste a lot of money. . . You have your own technocratic streak.

Thinking about California (25:56)

Everybody uses California fires as an excuse to grind whatever axe they have.

But listen, they'd be the good technocrats.

Final question: As we're speaking, as we're doing this interview, huge fires raging sort of north of Los Angeles — how do you feel about the future of California? You live in California. California is extraordinarily important, both the American economy and to the world as a place of culture, as a place of technology. How do you feel about the state?

The state has done a lot of shooting itself in the foot over the last . . . I moved here in 1986, and over that time, particularly in the first decade I was there, things were going great, the state was kind of stupid. I think if California solves its housing problem and actually allows significant amounts of housing to be built so that people can move here, people can stay here, young people don't have to leave the state, I think that will go a long way. It has made some positive movement in that direction. I think that's the biggest single obstacle.

Fires are a problem, and I just recirculated on my Substack something I wrote about understanding the causes of California fires and what would need to be done to stop them.

You’ve got to rake that underbrush.

I wrote this in 2019, but it's still true: Everybody uses California fires as an excuse to grind whatever axe they have.

Some of the Twitter commentary has been less-than-generous toward the people of California and its governor.

One of the forms of progress that we take for granted is that cities don't burn regularly. Throughout most of human history, regular urban fires were a huge deal, and one of the things that city governments feared the most was fire and how were they prevented. There's the London fire, and the Chicago fires, and I remember, I just looked up yesterday, there was a huge fire in Atlanta in 1917, which was when my grandparents were children there. I remember my grandparents talking about that fire. Cities used to regularly burn — now they don't, where you have, they call it the “urban wildlife,” I forget what it's called, but there's a place where the city meets up against the natural environment, and that's where we have fires now, so that people like me who live in the concrete are not threatened. It's the people who live closer to nature, or they have more money, have a big lot of land.

It's kind of understood what would be needed to prevent such fires. It's hard to do because it costs a lot of money in some cases, but it's not like, “Let's forget civilization. Let's not build anything. Let's just let nature take its course.” And one of the problems that was in the 20th century where people had the false idea — again, bad technocrats — that you needed to prevent forest fires, forest fires were always bad, and that is a complete misunderstanding of how the natural world works.

California has a great future if it fixes this housing problem. If it doesn't fix its housing problem, it can write off the future. It will be all old people who already have houses.

On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

▶ Business

* Google Thinks It Has the Best AI Tech. Now It Needs More Users. - WSJ

* Anduril Picks Ohio for Military Drone Factory Employing 4,000 - Bberg

* A lesson for oligarchs: politics can be deadly - FT Opinion

* EU Needs Deregulation to Keep Up with Trump, Ericsson CEO Says - Bberg

▶ Policy/Politics

* Europe’s ‘super-regulator’ role is under threat - FT Opinion

* Biden’s AI Data Center and Climate Contradiction - WSJ Opinion

* After Net Neutrality: The Return of the States - AEI

* China Has a $1 Trillion Head Start in Any Tariff Fight - WSJ

▶ AI/Digital

* She Is in Love With ChatGPT - NYT

* Meta AI creates speech-to-speech translator that works in dozens of languages - Nature

* AI-designed proteins tackle century-old problem — making snake antivenoms - Nature

* Meta takes us a step closer to Star Trek’s universal translator - Ars

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* Chris Wright backs aggressive build-out of the US power grid - EEN

* We Have to Stop Underwriting People Who Move to Climate Danger Zones - NYT Opinion

* Has China already reached peak oil? - FT

* Molten salt nuclear reactor in Wyoming hits key milestone - New Atlas

▶ Space/Transportation

* SpaceX catches Super Heavy booster on Starship Flight 7 test but loses upper stage - Space

* Blue Origin reaches orbit on first flight of its titanic New Glenn rocket - Ars

* Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn Rocket Lifts Off on First Flight - NYT

* Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket reaches orbit in first test - WaPo

* Blue Ghost, a Private U.S. Lunar Lander, Launches to the Moon - SciAm

* Human exploration of Mars is coming, says former NASA chief scientist - NS

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* TikTok is just the beginning - Noahpinion

* Unstable Diffusion - Hyperdimensional

* Progress's First Principles - Risk & Progress

* How Trump, China & Trade Wars Will Affect the Global AI Landscape in 2025 - AI Supremacy

* After the Green New Deal - Slow Boring

* Washington Must Prioritize Mineral Supply Results Over Political Point Scoring - Breakthrough Journal

Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Farmer is the Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems at Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking. Before joining Oxford in 2012, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute, where he studied complex systems and economic dynamics. During the 1990s, he took a break from academia to run a successful quantitative trading firm using statistical arbitrage strategies.

Farmer has been a pioneer in chaos theory and complexity economics, including the development of agent-based models to understand economic phenomena. His work spans from housing markets to climate change, and he recently authored Making Sense of Chaos exploring complexity science and economic modeling.

In This Episode

* What is complexity economics? (1:23)

* Compliment or replacement for traditional economics (6:55)

* Modeling Covid-19 (11:12)

* The state of the science (15:06)

* How to approach economic growth (20:44)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

What is complexity economics? (1:23)

We really can model the economy as something dynamic that can have its own business cycles that come from within the economy, rather than having the economy just settle down to doing something static unless it's hit by shocks all the time, as is the case in mainstream models.

Pethokoukis: What does the sort of economics that people would learn, let's say, in the first year of college, they might learn about labor and capital, supply-demand equilibrium, rational expectations, maybe the importance of ideas. How does that differ from the kind of economics you are talking about? Are you looking at different factors?

Farmer: We’re really looking at a completely different way of doing economics. Rather than maximizing utility, which is really the central conceptual piece of any standard economic model, and writing down equations, and deducing the decision that does that, we simulate the economy.

We assume that we identify who the agents in the and economy are, who's making the decisions, what information do they have available, we give them methods of making the decisions — decision-making rules or learning algorithms — and then they make decisions, those decisions have economic impact, that generates new information, other information may enter from the outside, they make decisions, and we just go around and around that loop in a computer simulation that tries to simulate what the economy does and how it works.

You've been writing about this for some time. I would guess — perhaps I'm wrong — that just having more data and more computer power has been super helpful over the past 10 years, 20 years.

It's been super helpful for us. We take much more advantage of that than the mainstream does. But yes, computers are a billion times more powerful now than they were when Herb Simon first suggested this way of doing things, and that means the time is ripe now because that's not a limiting factor anymore, as it was in the past.

So if you're not looking at capital and labor per se, then what are the factors you're looking at?

Well, we do look at capital and labor, we just look at them in a different way. Our models are concerned about how much capital is there to invest, what labor is available. We do have to assign firms production functions that tells, given an amount of capital and labor and all their other inputs, how much can the firms produce? That part of the idea is similar. It's a question of the way the decision about how much to produce is made, or the way consumers decide how much to consume, or laborers decide at what price to provide their labor. All those parts are different.

Another difference — if I'm understanding it correctly — is, rather than thinking about economies that tend toward equilibrium and focusing how outside shocks may put an economy in disequilibrium, you're looking a lot more at what happens internally. Am I correct?

We don't assume equilibrium. Equilibrium, it has two senses in economics: One is supply equals demand. We might or might not run a model where we assume that. In many models we don't, and if that happens, that's great, but it's an outcome of the model rather than an assumption we put in at the beginning.

There's another sense of equilibrium, which is that everybody's strategy is lined up. You've had time to think about what you're doing, I've had time to think about what I'm doing, we’ve both come to the optimal decision for each of us to make, taking the other one into account. We don't assume that, as standard models typically do. We really can model the economy as something dynamic that can have its own business cycles that come from within the economy, rather than having the economy just settle down to doing something static unless it's hit by shocks all the time, as is the case in mainstream models. We still allow shocks to hit our models, but the economy can generate dynamics even without those shocks.

This just popped in my head: To whom would this model make more intuitive sense, Karl Marx or Adam Smith?

Adam Smith would like these models because they really allow for emergent behavior. That is, Smith's whole point was that the economy is more than the sum of its parts, that we get far more out of specializing than we do out of each acting like Robinson Crusoes. Our way of thinking about this gets at that very directly.

Marx might actually like it too, perhaps for a different reason. Marx was insightful in understanding the economy as being like, what I call in the book, the “metabolism of civilization.” That is, he really did recognize the analogy between the economy and the metabolism, and viewed labor as what we put together with natural resources to make goods and services. So those aspects of the economy are also embodied in the kind of models we're making.

I think they both like it, but for different reasons.

Compliment or replacement for traditional economics (6:55)

There are many problems where we can answer questions traditional methods can't even really ask.

The way I may have framed my questions so far is that you are suggesting a replacement or alternative. Is what you're suggesting, is it one of those things, or is it a compliment, or is it just a way of looking at the world that's better at answering certain kinds of questions?

I think the jury is out to find the answer to that. I think it is certainly a compliment, and that we're doing things very differently, and there are some problems where this method is particularly well-suited. There are many problems where we can answer questions traditional methods can't even really ask.

That said, I think time will tell to what extent this replaces the traditional way of doing economics. I don't think it's going to replace everything that's done in traditional economics. I think it could replace 75 percent of it — but let me put an asterisk by that and say 75 percent of theory. Economists do many different things. One thing economists do is called econometrics, where they take data and they build models just based on the data to infer things that the data is telling them. We're not talking about that here. We're talking about theories where economists attempt to derive the decisions and economic outcomes from first principles based on utility maximization. That's what we're talking about providing an alternative to. The extent to which it replaces that will be seen as time will tell.

When a big Wall Street bank wants to make a forecast, they're constantly incorporating the latest jobless claims numbers, industrial production numbers, and as those numbers get updated, they change their forecasts. You're not using any of that stuff?

Well, no. We can potentially could ingest any kind of data about what's going on.

But they're looking at big, top-down data while you're bottom-up, you're sort of trying to duplicate the actual actors in the economy.

That is true, but we can adjust what's at the bottom to make sure we're matching initial conditions. So if somebody tells us, “This is the current value of unemployment,” we want to make sure that we're starting our model out, as we go forward, with the right level of unemployment. So we will unemploy some of the households in our model in order to make sure we're matching the state of unemployment right now and then we start our simulation running forward to see where the economy goes from here.

I would think that the advent of these large language models would really take this kind of modeling to another level, because already I'm seeing lots of papers on their ability to . . . where people are trying to run experiments and, rather than using real people, they're just trying to use AI people, and the ability to create AI consumers, and AI in businesses — it would have to be a huge advance.

Yes. This is starting to be experimented with for what we do. People are trying to use large language models to model how people actually make decisions, or let's say, to simulate the way people make decisions, as opposed to an idealized person that makes perfect decisions. That's a very promising line of attack to doing this kind of modeling.

Large language models also can tell us about other things that allow us to match data. For example, if we want to use patents as an input in our modeling — not something we're doing yet, but we've done a lot of studies with patents — one can use large language models to match patents to firms to understand which firms will benefit from the patents and which firms won't. So there are many different ways that large language models are likely to enter going forward, and we're quite keen to take advantage of those.

Modeling Covid-19 (11:12)

We predicted a 21.5 percent hit to UK GDP in the second quarter of 2020. When the dust settled a year later, the right answer was 22.1. So we got very close.

Tell me, briefly, about your work with the Covid outbreak back in 2020 and what your modeling said back then and how well it worked.

When the pandemic broke out, we realized right away that this was a great opportunity to show the power of the kind of economic modeling that we do, because Covid was a very strong and very sudden shock. So it drove the economy far out of equilibrium. We were able to predict what Covid would do to the UK economy using two basic ideas: One is, we predicted the shock. We did that based on things like understanding a lot about occupational labor. The Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles tables about things like, in a given occupation, how close together do people typically work? And so we assumed if they worked closer together than two meters, they weren't going to be able to go to their job. That combined with several other things allowed us to predict how big the shock would be.

Our model predicted how that shock would be amplified through time by the action of the economy. So in the model we built, we put a representative firm in every sector of the economy and we assumed that if that firm didn't have the labor it needed, or if it didn't have the demand for its product, or if it didn't have the inputs it needed, it wouldn't be able to produce its product and the output would be reduced proportional to any of those three limiting factors.

And so we started the model off on Day One with an inventory of inputs that we read out of a table that government statistical agencies had prepared for each sector of the economy. And we then just looked, “Well, does it have the labor? Does it have demand? Does it have the goods?” If yes, it can produce at its normal level. If it's lacking any of those, it's going to produce at a lower level. And our model knew the map of the economy, so it knew which industries are inputs to which other industries. So as the pandemic evolved day by day, we saw that some industries started to run out of inputs and that would reduce their output, which, in turn, could cause other industries to run out of their inputs, and so on.

That produced quite a good prediction. We predicted a 21.5 percent hit to UK GDP in the second quarter of 2020. When the dust settled a year later, the right answer was 22.1. So we got very close. We predicted things pretty well, industry by industry. We didn't get them all exactly right, but the mistakes we made averaged out so that we got the overall output right, and we got it right through time.

We ran the model on several different scenarios. At the time, this was in April of 2020, the United Kingdom was in a lockdown and they were trying to decide what to do next, and we tested several different scenarios for what they might do when they emerged from the full lockdown. The one that we thought was the least bad was keeping all the upstream industries like mining, and forestry, and so on open, but closing the downstream, customer-facing industries like retail businesses that have customers coming into their shop, or making them operate remotely. That was the one they picked. Already when they picked it, we predicted what would happen, and things unfolded roughly as we suggested they would.

The state of the science (15:06)

Mainstream models can only model shocks that come from outside the economy and how the economy responds to those shocks. But if you just let the model sit there and nothing changes, it will just settle down and the economy will never change.

I'm old enough to remember the 1990s and remember a lot of talk about chaos and complexity, some of which even made it into the mainstream, and Jurassic Park, which may be the way most people heard a little bit about it. It's been 30 years. To what extent has it made inroads into economic modeling at central banks or Wall Street banks? Where's the state of the science? Though it sounds like you're really taking another step forward here with the book and some of your latest research.

Maybe I could first begin just by saying that before Jurassic Park was made, I got a phone call and picked up the phone, and the other end of the line said, “Hi, this is Jeff Goldblum, have you ever heard of me?” I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Well, we're making this movie about dinosaurs and stuff, and I'm going to play a chaos scientist, and I'm calling up some chaos scientists to see how they talk.” And so I talked to Jeff Goldblum for about a half an hour. A few of my other friends did too. So anyway, I like to think I had a tiny little bit of impact on the way he behaved in the movie. There were some parallels that it seemed like he had lifted.

Chaos, it's an important underlying concept in explaining why the weather is hard to predict, it can explain some forms of heart arrhythmias, we use it to explain some of the irregular behavior of ice ages. In economics, it was tossed around in the ’90s as something that might be important and rejected. As I described in the book, I think it was rejected for the wrong reasons.

I'm proposing chaos, the role it plays in here is that, there's a debate about business cycles. Do they come from outside? The Covid pandemic was clearly a business cycle that came from outside. Or do they come from inside the economy? The 2008 financial crisis, I would say, is clearly one that came from inside the economy. Mainstream models can only model shocks that come from outside the economy and how the economy responds to those shocks. But if you just let the model sit there and nothing changes, it will just settle down and the economy will never change.

In contrast, the kinds of models we build often show what we call endogenous business cycles, meaning business cycles that the model generates all on its own. Now then, you can ask, “Well, how could it do that?” Well, basically the only plausible way it can do that is through chaos. Because chaos has two properties: One is called sensitive dependence on initial conditions, meaning tiny changes in the present can cause large changes in the future; but the other is endogenous motion, meaning motion that comes from within the system itself, that happens spontaneously, even in very simple systems of equations.

Would something like consumer pessimism, would that be an external shock or would something more internal where everybody, they're worried about the futures, then they stop spending as much money? How would that fit in?

If the consumer pessimism is due to the fear of a nuclear war, I would say it's outside the economy, and so that's an external shock. But if it's caused by the fact that the economy just took a big nose dive for an internal reason, then it's part of the endogenous dynamics

I spent many years as a journalist writing about why the market's going up, the market's going down, and by the end of the day, I had to come up with a reason why the market moved, and I could — I wasn't always quite confident, because sometimes it wasn't because of a new piece of data, or an earnings report, they just kind of moved, and I had no real reason why, even though I had to come up . . . and of course it was when I was doing that was when people started talking about chaos, and it made a lot of intuitive sense to me that things seem to happen internally in ways that, at least at the time, were utterly unpredictable.

Yeah, and in fact, one of the studies I discuss in the book is by Cutler, Poterba, and Summers — the Summers would be Larry Summers — where they did something very simple, they just got the 100 largest moves of the S&P index, they looked up what the news was the next day about why they occurred in the New York Times, and they subjectively marked the ones that they thought were internally driven, versus the ones that were real news, and they concluded they could only find news causes for about a third of them.

There is always an explanation in the paper; actually, there is one day on the top 12 list where the New York Times simply said, “There appears to be no cause.” That was back in the ’40s, I don't think journalists ever say that anymore. I don't think their paper allows them to do it, but that's probably the right answer about two-thirds of the time, unless you count things like “investors are worried,” and, as I point out in the book, if the person who invests your money isn't worried all the time, then you should fire them because investors should worry.

There are internal dynamics to markets, I actually show some examples in the book of simple models that generate that kind of internal dynamics so that things change spontaneously.

How to approach economic growth (20:44)

I'm not saying something controversial when I say that technological change is the dominant driver of economic growth, at least for the economy as a whole.

You recently founded a company, Macrocosm, trying to put some of these ideas to work to address climate change, which would seem to be a very natural use for this kind of thinking. What do you hope to achieve there?

We hope to provide better guidance through the transition. We're trying to take the kind of things we've been doing as academics, but scale them up and reduce them to practice so they can be used day-in and day-out to make the decisions that policymakers and businesspeople need to make as the transition is unfolding. We hope to be able to guide policymakers about how effective their policies will be in reducing emissions, but also in keeping the economy going and in good shape. We hope to be able to advise businesses and investors about what investments to make to make a profit while we reduce emissions. And we think that things have changed so that climate change has really become an opportunity rather than a liability.

I write a lot about economic growth and try to figure out how it works, what are the key factors. . . What insights can you give me, either on how you think about growth and, since I work at a think tank, the kind of policies you think policy makers should be thinking about, or how should they think about economic growth, since that seems to be on top-of-mind in every rich country in the world right now?

I'm not saying something controversial when I say that technological change is the dominant driver of economic growth, at least for the economy as a whole. And we've spent a lot of time studying technological change by just collecting data and looking for the patterns in that data: What does the technology cost through time and how rapidly is it deployed? We've done this for 50 or 60 technologies where we look at past technological transitions, because typically, as a technology is coming in, it's replacing something else that's going out, and what we've seen are a couple of striking things:

One is, many technologies don't really improve very much over time, at least in terms of cost. Fossil fuels cost about the same as they did 140 years ago once you adjust for inflation. In fact, anything we mine out of the ground costs about the same as it did a hundred years ago.

In contrast, solar energy from solar photovoltaic panels costs 1/10,000th what it did when it was introduced in the Vanguard satellite in 1958. Transistors have been going down at 40 percent per year, so they cost about a billionth of what they did back in 1960. So some technologies really make rapid progress, and the economy evolves by reorganizing itself around the technologies that are making progress. So for example, photography used to be about chemistry and film. Photography now is about solid-state physics because it just unhitched from one wagon and hitched itself to another wagon, and that's what's happening through the energy transition. We're in the process of hitching our wagon to the technologies that have been making rapid progress, like solar energy, and wind energy, and lithium ion batteries, and hydrogen catalyzers based on green energy.

I think we can learn a lot about the past, and I think that when we look at what the ride should be like, based on what we understand, we think the transition is going to happen faster than most people think, and we think it will be a net saving of money

So then how do you deal with a wild card, which I think if you look at the past, nuclear power seems like it’s super expensive, no progress being made, but, theoretically, there could be — at least in the United States — there could be lots of regulatory changes that make it easier to build. You have all these venture capital firms pouring money into these nuclear startups with small reactors, or even nuclear fusion. So a technology that seems like it's a mature technology, it might be easy to chart its future, all of a sudden maybe it's very different.

I'm not arguing we should get rid of nuclear reactors until they run their normal lifetime and need to be gotten rid of, but I think we will see that that is not going to be the winning technology in the long run, just because it's going to remain expensive while solar energy is going to become dirt cheap.

In the early days, nuclear power had faced a very favorable regulatory environment. The first nuclear reactors were built in the ’50s. Until Three Mile Island and Chernobyl happened, it was a very regulatorily friendly environment and they didn't come down in cost. Other countries like France have been very pro-nuclear. They have very expensive electricity and will continue to do so.

I think the key thing we need to do is focus on storage technologies like green hydrogen. Long-term storage batteries have already come down to a point where they're beginning to be competitive; they will continue to do so. And in the future, I think we'll get solid-state storage that will make things quite cheap and efficient, but I don't think small modular reactors are going to ever be able to catch up with solar and wind at this point.

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Micro Reads

▶ Economics

* United States Economic Forecast - Deloitte

* The Hidden Threat to National Security Is Not Enough Workers - WSJ

▶ Business

* DOGE Can’t Do It All. Here’s What It Can Do. - Politico

* AI Startup Perplexity Closes Funding Round at $9 Billion Value - Bberg

▶ Policy/Politics

* US Homeland Security chief attacks EU effort to police AI - FT

* The Trump Bump: The Republican Fertility Advantage in 2024 - IFS

* House unveils AI ‘road map’ but punts on setting priorities - Wapo

* Did Tariffs Make American Manufacturing Great? - Cato

▶ AI/Digital

* Call ChatGPT from any phone with OpenAI’s new 1-800 voice service - Ars

* Homo-Silicus: Not (Yet) a Good Imitator of Homo Sapiens or Homo Economicus - SSRN

* Is AI finally ready to replace your doctor? - NS

* The Age of Quantum Software Has Already Started - WSJ

* This is where the data to build AI comes from - MIT

* The New AI Stock Pickers Are Destined to Disappoint - Bberg Opinion

▶ Clean Energy/Climate

* Fusion Start-Up Plans to Build Its First Power Plant in Virginia - NYT

* Will the World's First Nuclear Fusion Power Plant Be Built in Virginia? Here's Why We're Skeptical - SciAm

* The deepest hole on Earth: Inside the race to harness unlimited power from our planet's core - SF

* Dubai transforms into walkable city with air-conditioned paths - New Atlas

* Oklo inks record deal for using nuclear to power data centers - E&E

▶ Robotics/AVs

* AI Robots Are Coming, and They’ll Be Made in Asia - Bberg Opinion

▶ Space/Transportation

* Boeing Starliner crew’s long awaited return delayed to March - Wapo

▶ Up Wing/Down Wing

* What Could Go Right? The Best News of 2024 - The Progress Network

▶ Substacks/Newsletters

* Why Don’t EU Firms Innovate? The Hidden Costs of Failure - Conversable Economist

* Why Did the Industrial Revolution Happen? - Oliver Kim

* One Down, Many To Go - Hyperdimensional

* The Experience Curve - Risk & Progress

* The case for clinical trial abundance - Slow Borin

* Nuclear Waste: Yes, In (or Under) My Backyard - Breakthrough Journal

* Answer Time: Can We Imagine Pluralistic Futures? - Virginia’s Newsletter

* What just happened - One Useful Thing

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