Progress Conference 2025

A Statecraft Fall Roundup

This is my second time attending the Progress Conference (and its second year running). Suffice to say, I have strong preferences about how conferences should be structured and run, and each year I’ve attended this conference, I’ve been wowed (and both times I’ve learned new tricks for hosting vibrant intellectual events). Brilliant people, excellent venue, the right balance of structure and serendipity, high production value. Get your tickets early for next year.

Democrats Could Learn a Lot from the Progress Movement

Here are my impressions:

1. There was more political diversity than among abundance advocates who tend to lean a bit left and mostly aspire to be a faction within the Democratic Party. The progress movement/studies umbrella includes such people but also many who lean right and/or libertarian and don’t have much use for the Democrats.

2. There was an entrepreneurial, as opposed to technocratic, feel to the crowd and many of the discussions, not least because there were quite a few startup founders and VCs present. That’s not to say there weren’t quite a few policy wonks too, but the entrepreneurial vibe helped give a sense of people creating progress, rather than twisting policy dials to help it along.

3. There was a fierce and generalized techno-optimism to the crowd that far surpassed what you see in Democratic-oriented abundance circles where it tends to be focused on favored goals like clean energy. These are people who deeply believe in the potential of technological advance and the process of scientific discovery that leads to such advance—”the endless frontier” if you will.

A Culture of Progress

Mokyr would be a great speaker for the Progress Conference. Still, the agenda that brings together frontier entrepreneurs, science and tech policy leaders, and authors is more future-oriented and action-oriented than disinterested historical analysis. In that sense, the Progress Conference is not the annual meeting of Industrial Revolution scholars, rather it is a modern form of the “culture of growth” that Mokyr studied as part of the Industrial Revolution. Lighthaven is kind of an “enlightenment salon” of the singularity. Loose networks of substacks are a modern take on the “Republic of Letters”.Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort.

The immediate reaction was mostly negative. There were the usual gripes that “progress” was problematic because it could imply that some cultures/times/places/ideas were better than others. But there were also more specific objections: weren’t historians already studying progress? Wasn’t business academia already studying innovation? Are you really allowed to just invent a new field every time you think of something it would be cool to study? 

It seems like you are. Five years later, Progress Studies has grown enough to hold its first conference. I got to attend, and it was great. 

The objections failed because Progress Studies is the same type of field as Gender Studies: the Studying serves as the nucleus of a network of scientists, activists, entrepreneurs and journalists working to produce radical change. [...]

It’s popular to blame environmentalists and government regulators for this, and they do deserve part of the blame, but the speakers at the conference urged us to also blame existing nuclear companies, who lobby the government to add more and more burdensome safety regulations so they can charge more and keep out competitors. Again, this isn’t a war between economy-boosters and sympathetic activists who want some other good. It’s just dumb laws and regulatory capture hurting everybody. [...]

You might expect Progress Studies conference-goers to be natural accelerationists, but the mood was more subdued. Most of the people I talked to (again, maybe there was an unintentional bias) were worried about safety, understood intelligence explosion dynamics, and didn’t really know where this whole thing was going. Most continued to awkwardly support AI anyway, out of some generic loyalty to Progress. “Within ten years, AI progress could threaten the future of the human race - and if we fight really hard, we can bring that down to five!” I mock them, but I have a little of this impulse in me too, and will always be a little suspicious of anyone who doesn’t. [...]

Most of the victories discussed at the conference have nothing to do with Progress Studies. The solar industry, the self-driving car industry, etc, don’t even know it exists. Even the YIMBYs, whose leading representatives did attend, predate the field. 

My theory is that it all came from the same wellspring. Silicon Valley gathered all the pro-tech people together in one place, a lot of them became rich, and some of them spent their wealth reflecting on the nature of technological advance. This created a critical mass of people who were all talking to each other and motivated to see things that other people were missing. This isn’t the whole story: non-Silicon-Valley economists like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers helped build the foundational narrative. But it’s the story that makes the most sense for “why now”. 

I mocked the people in 2019 who thought a conference could affect the Gods Of Straight Lines. But it seems like maybe there was something - an idealized spiritual conference in 1971 between Ralph Nader, Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, hippies, protectionists, and all those people - that knocked them off their thrones once. So who knows? 

I’m definitely making the same mistake of which I half-accused Tyler Cowen - going off vibes in a notoriously difficult field. But at least at this conference, the vibes were good.

The Bleeding Edge of Progress

I recently toured Zipline’s South San Francisco headquarters, where young engineers were testing and building the same aircraft which continue to save lives in Africa and now also perform package and food deliveries in Japan and the United States. More than a thriving startup, it was a reminder that Silicon Valley began with hardware—and that the Bay Area still sits at the bleeding edge of technological progress. […]

If Zipline represents California at its best, the rest of the state too often shows it at its worst: a tangle of local vetocracies, procedural fetishism, and civic exhaustion. That contrast—between creation and decay—was on my mind at the Progress Conference in Berkeley ten days ago.

Hosted by the The Roots of Progress, founded by my friend Jason Crawford, the conference gathered writers, scientists, investors, founders, and academics in a shared spirit of techno-humanist optimism. This was a group with widely divergent views in other realms, but united by a common premise: that human progress must be celebrated, better understood, and hastened. It’s not hyperbolic to say that the fate of the free world depends on our ability to get our act together. Yet, in an age of cynicism and stasis, a belief in the future seems almost like a radical act.

Ordinary Progress Is Extraordinary

The Progress movement aims not only to combat cynicism by spreading awareness of these almost miraculous trends, but also to research ways to accelerate progress and achieve human flourishing. As a result, the Progress Conference was unlike any other I’ve attended. Academic conferences tend to be cautious, formal, and hyperspecialized. PhD researchers are trained not to make any overly ambitious claims that might go beyond the data, and interdisciplinary work is often disincentivized given the opportunity cost of mastering and advancing one specific niche. By contrast, the Progress Conference embraced San Francisco Bay–area start-up culture. It was an interdisciplinary gathering of researchers, policy experts, and entrepreneurs, ambitious yet casual. People spoke about progress over beanbag chairs and bonfires, not podiums and lecture halls. [...]

There may be large flaws in each of these ideas, and I don’t have the technical ability to evaluate them. What I can confidently say as a psychologist, however, is that the Progress Conference was filled with an atmosphere of optimism and ingenuity that is sorely lacking in most places. Human flourishing is ultimately measured not just by material comfort or technological advancement but by psychological well-being and a sense of purpose. It is inspiring to be surrounded by people who believe in progress and want to do their part in contributing to the betterment of our society and our species. How much better would life be if we all did that?

Seven Thoughts on AI Scientists

Last week I had the privilege of attending the 2025 Progress Conference, which brought together a diverse cadre of people working on progress, metascience, artificial intelligence, and related fields. I was surprised by how optimistic the median attendee was about AI for science. While some people inside science have been excited about the possibilities of AI for a while, I didn’t expect that representatives of frontier labs or think tanks would expect scientific progress to be the biggest near-term consequence of AI.

Inside the Minds Building the Future: Notes from the Progress Conference 2025

I attended the Progress Conference in Berkeley, California, for the second consecutive year, focusing on the emerging field of Progress Studies. It was at the Lighthaven Center run by a thoughtful group of effective altruists and rationalist thinkers. The attendees were a thoughtful group of tech founders, scientists, economists, policy thinkers, government officials, and some superannuated corporate types (me). Keynotes included Sam Altman (OpenAI), Mike Kratsios (US OSTP advisor to the President), Blake Scholl (of Boom), Jennifer Pahlka (of Recode America), and more.

[…] I send my gratitude to all the attendees who indulged me with their works, ideas, and dreams. I have not named specific people due to the quasi-Chatham house rules, but this cast of characters made the conference fun in a reflective and chatty way. A final observation was that SF is booming now, as the default center of global AI, and Berkeley was its outpost of weirdness and variant thinking.

Reflections on the Progress Conference 

For an intellectual gathering in the Bay Area, I expected the tone to be what I remembered from living and working in San Francisco in the 2010’s. Well to the left of center, with a universal assumption that everyone present must be a “progressive” and partisan Democrat. Anxious about perceived existential threats. Eager to signal virtue, and afraid to offend.

Instead I found something more interesting and more difficult to describe. The discussions were unassuming, civil, and largely apolitical. The lack of performative virtue signaling was notable, and even the subject of occasional jokes. The event was family-friendly, with childcare provided throughout — something I’ve never seen at a conference before — yet I don’t think I’d call it “pro-natal;” the issue was not front and center. It felt like a bunch of people just being normal, sharing an unspoken agreement that there’s some version of “a good life” that the vast majority of us wanted to take part in. Perhaps “Pragmatic Optimism” is the best label I can give.

Report from Progress Conference 2025 in Berkeley 

I was in Berkeley at Lighthaven for the Progress Conference, a two-day gathering on how to accelerate progress in society. I got to take part and help out a bit. It’s a really great conference, with lots of attendees saying it’s the best conference they’ve been to. I had an amazing time and was genuinely honored at the chance to work with these guys. [...]

A big part of what I do for a living is advise people on how to make their conferences better. I wanted to use the Progress Conference as a case study for ways to do a conference right and also to help clarify a vision of how conferences can and should be even better.

Thread on X.

Many great things about the @rootsofprogress conference this weekend, but I want to take a moment to give a shout out to excellent execution of an oft-overlooked event items that most planners and organizers get wrong: the name badge. [...]

Might this the best conference name tag ever designed? Let’s go through its characteristics.

1. It’s double-sided. That might seem obvious, but a lot of conferences just print on one side. I guess that saves a few cents, but it means half the time the badge is useless.

2. It’s on a lanyard that’s the right length. It came to mid-torso for most people, making it easy to see and catch a glimpse of without looking at people in a weird way.

3. it’s a) attractive and b) not on a safety pin so people actually want to wear it.

4. Most importantly, the most important bit of information--the wearer’s first name--is printed in a maximally large font across the top. You could easily see it from 10 feet away. Again, it might seem obvious... but I go to a lot of events with 14 point printed names. The other information is fine to have in smaller fonts. Job title, organization, location... those are all secondary items. The most important thing is the wearer’s name, and the most important part of that is the first name.

5. After all of the utilitarian questions have been answered... it’s attractive. The color scheme and graphic branding is consistent with the rest of the conference. But I stress, this is the least important part of the badge.

Why does all this matter? Because the best events are those that are designed to facilitate maximal interaction and introduction between people (and to meet IRL people you know online). That’s the case with unconferences, or events with a lot of social/semi-planned time.

And how to not mess up beneficial AI deployment. AI to accelerate science, how to secure free speech in an AI-enabled world, AI to break through government inertia, and discussions on how fast and in what ways AI will re-shape our world more broadly

Agenda-setting and improving the policy-readiness of ideas, the abundance policy agenda, and pro-progress policy implementation at the city, state, and federal level. Case studies in policy, from the pending lawsuit against the NRC, to freedom cities and how we might apply federal leverage to drive local policy change

Biotech approaches to longevity, discussions about specific bottlenecks in longevity, visions for the FDA in the age of AI, AI's potential for accelerating innovation, fertility and its impact on population growth or decline, healthcare reform focused on prevention rather than treatment, and more broadly, a positive vision for a world where we regularly live to be 100

Innovations in aerospace, defense, supply chain, industrials, manufacturing, and other deep-tech industries. Other topics may be the importance of founders and their impact on policy, how to invest in American Dynamism, and how AI will shape these industries and the jobs of the future

Once you purchase your ticket, you'll be able to see the exact address on the Luma registration page & we'll email it to you. Lighthaven is just south of downtown Berkeley/UC Berkeley. 

There is no parking on site, and parking in the neighborhood streets is limited. We recommend either Ride Share services or taking public transport: Ashby BART is 0.9 miles from Lighthaven and Downtown Berkeley BART 1.2 miles, a nice walk past UC Berkeley and through residential neighborhoods.

If you drive, you can park at the Telegraph Channing Parking Garage (15 min walk from campus). 

The dress code is nice casual. Make sure to bring layers: some of the events, including keynotes and fireside chats, will be in the outdoor auditorium, weather permitting. Plus, we’ll be hanging out in the nice outdoor spaces late on Friday night. Bring fleece or down layers to stay comfy as you chat!

Yes! Kids under 12 years old are welcome if accompanied by a parent at all times.

We also have childcare available on-site on Friday and Saturday. (For 2026 we hope to expand this to progress-related activities and curriculum).

If/when your kids are with you, we expect you will pleaes ensure your kids aren’t disruptive to any sessions; if they become unhappy, please take them outside immediately as any noises will negatively impact the session recordings.  

Yes: Lighthaven offers a strong wifi throughout the venue, indoors and outside. There are also extension cords galore, so you can recharge your devices.

We don't want cost preventing people from attending the event. If you need financial support, please complete the open application here. There's a section that asks for what kind of financial support you need, and a "what else?" question where you can provide additional info to help us decide on the level of support we can provide. 

Later this summer, we'll invite all registered attendees to private Slack channels, including one on travel & logistics, where you can post to find roommates.

Yes, we have some basic terms and conditions, which include general waivers, photo and video policies, and code of conduct around sharing what you learn at the event. You'll need to agree to these terms and conditions when you register for the event. 

We’ll put together an attendee directory this summer. You’ll receive a link to a survey, where you can share your interests, goals for the conference, topics you’d like to discuss, etc. We’ll pull all that together into a searchable database to help you discover people you want to make sure you meet at the conference.

Join the Progress Studies Slack! We’re setting up dedicated channels for the conference, so people can chat with each other and we can share quick updates with everyone.

Tickets are non-refundable; the ticket price only covers a part of the cost of putting on this conference. If you must cancel and would like your money back, rather than donating it to our organization and supporting the conference, email us at progress-conference@rootsofprogress.org. 

Nope, all tickets get you access the whole event. There is not a separate ticket for just Friday and Saturday, for example. The ticket price only covers a part of the cost of putting on the conference, even considering only the two main days.