What's Holding Up Progress?
Conference notes from Scott Alexander and Lynn Kiesling; an essay by Packy McCormick; Will Rinehart on the 1990s vs. today; John Cochrane on Europe
Scott Alexander reports on a “progress studies” conference.
Self-driving taxis have a big advantage over self-driving self-owned-cars: they can operate 24-7 and never have to park. If you can switch half the car-using population to robotaxis, you can convert half the parking lots into green space or homes. Nobody wants to ban self-driving car ownership, but some people do want to nudge the marginal commuter into robotaxis so they can reclaim slightly-more-than-half of the parking lots instead of slightly-less.
I predict that there will be a tipping point at which driving your own car will be considered a scary thing to do relative to riding in a driverless car.
Scott covers many other conference topics, including energy and AI.
are ideas getting harder to find? Packy McCormick… highlighted the argument that ideas themselves are not scarce, but that many past innovations remain untapped due to regulatory, economic, and cultural barriers.
people are building companies based on ideas from the 1950s and 1960s.
This is a very real thing. Earlier this week, I met with Tyler Hayes at Atom Limbs to see the robotic prosthetic he and his team are building. After he slipped the cuff on my arm and as we were waiting for the system to boot up, he asked what I was working on. I told him about this essay, and the ideas from the 1950s and 1960s idea. He laughed. “A lot of our work,” he said, “is based on this book from 1967.
The consensus that produced the Clinton-era framework no longer exists. The techlash is real. The sense that we got this wrong and we didn’t regulate quick enough has been driving the politics of AI. You can see it at every level of government, in statehouses, in government agencies, and in Congress. Tech needs to be reined in.
…internet platforms and e-commerce sites flourished in the United States because the government kept to its core competencies, working to “ensure competition, protect intellectual property and privacy, prevent fraud, foster transparency, and facilitate dispute resolution, not to regulate.”
…The experience of the last decade with social media has irrevocably shifted the politics of tech regulation at all levels of government. Constraint has given way to more muscular policy agendas.
In the 1990s, Kiesling reminds us, Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies found a receptive audience of what Postrel called dynamists. Today, the people that she called stasists are in ascendance.
Of course, it is even worse in Europe. John Cochrane writes,
Every bit of economics says that the common market, the European Union, and the euro should have boosted European economies. Why should one, big, integrated market languish 30% or so behind the US, and now fall behind? The hard to quantify drag of over regulation is an obvious answer.
What holds up progress are people who can raise their status by holding up progress.
substacks referenced above: @
@https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/techne/welcome-to-the-techlash-2/
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In the absence of something better to do, people will erect toll booths both actual and metaphorical because it is easier than matching supply to demand. One of the chief purposes of government is to manage this process, to limit the number of toll booth builders. Our government promises the ever shrinking trickle of young people that they can Build Their Own Tollbooth and to continuously petition the government for more opportunities to erect tollbooths.
This perhaps becomes more complicated when we consider international relations. The US in my view is happy with European overregulation and some elements of the spastic Chinese method of government because it limits competition. It creates a big sucking effect for capital; to the extent that other places are poor destinations for investment, the US is happy to be the marginal winner. This also helps to explain why deregulation in the US has run into limits of motivation.
Why would you care about going to war with an army of tollbooth operators to build high speed rail in the US when China can build another one in a more high productivity industrial region for significantly less money? The counter-argument to that is that in the US, you can at least in theory will own the railway, whereas in China the government will always reserve the right to expropriate you.
"What holds up progress are people who can raise their status by holding up progress."
That is key. That is what must change if our societies are to reach their potential.