Institute for Progress (IFP) — June 2024 Update
We’re cohosting a conference in Berkeley this fall: Progress Conference 2024! Along with the folks at the Roots of Progress Institute and a range of great partners, we’re convening folks working on scientific, technological, and industrial progress.
As a reminder, you can still apply to the Bottlenecks Summit, an unconference focused on identifying bottlenecks to abundance and scoping out ideas to overcome them.
Also, we’ve launched the Statecraft podcast! Check out the first episode, with Senior Editor Santi Ruiz and former CIA chief of base Laura Thomas. And the Macroscience podcast is up and running: Check out Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang’s conversation with Foundation for American Innovation Senior Fellow Jon Askonas on the moral debates at the heart of the progress movement.
Here’s what we’ve been working on this month:
✍️ Written Work
We’re launching a major new series: “Compute in America: Building the Next Generation of AI Infrastructure at Home.” Director of Infrastructure Policy Arnab Datta, Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter, and Senior Technology Fellow Tim Fist propose three goals for the AI infrastructure build-out:
We should build AI computing infrastructure in the United States.
We should unleash clean energy to make it happen.
We should accelerate the development of security technologies to protect the AI intellectual property of the future.
In the first essay in the series, Brian lays out the challenges to building data centers, and why they’re such energy-intensive applications.
In April, we published a report by Jordan Schneider and Arrian Ebrahimi on how to make the new National Semiconductor Technology Center a force for American tech dominance. Along with Chris Miller, they just wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post about how the NSTC can leverage research to win the chip war.
Tim Fist produced a new report, on ways a non-profit foundation could supercharge NIST’s work on emerging technologies.
“It’s time for a foundation for NIST, to give the agency the flexibility that other R&D agencies already enjoy. Much like existing foundations, a NIST foundation should not substitute for appropriations. Instead, it should provide support for activities that NIST is not well-suited to do itself.”
Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie answered seven frequently asked questions about NEPA.
🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz
The Statecraft podcast launched with this conversation about running a CIA base in Afghanistan.
Santi interviewed Non-resident Senior Fellow Chris Snyder about how he helped design the advance market commitment for the pneumococcal vaccine.
“So that really left one viable supplier, and we had to be really careful with mechanism design. If you expect 20 or 30 suppliers to come in, you're going to get competition, volume, and low prices. When you're dealing with a monopolist, it's a delicate exercise.”
President Obama’s Domestic Policy Council Director explained how agencies actually coordinate with each other (or don’t).
“My job as a DPC director was to drive the decision-making. Either we would agree at a principals meeting and send a joint recommendation to the president, or we would disagree in a principals meeting and send a decision up to the president, either on paper in a memo or in a meeting… I had to make sure President Obama had all the information that he needed to decide in that hour.”
And Matthew Meselson explained how he convinced Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon to ban military toxin research.
“It didn't take me very long to realize that one thing the United States definitely did not want is the introduction into the world of a super cheap strategic weapon. It's our interest to keep strategic weapons so expensive that nobody could afford them but us. That would be the best. The next best would be only our pals. But the idea that you could introduce a strategic weapon that anybody could have? What if you could make hydrogen bombs for a dollar a piece? Oh my God!”
🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter
In addition to kicking off our Compute in America Series with his “How to Build an AI Data Center,” Brian released a major piece on the past and future of nuclear fusion.
“Perhaps the strongest case for fusion is that fusion isn’t alone in this uncertainty about its future. The next generation of low-carbon electricity generation will inevitably make use of technology that doesn’t yet exist, be that even cheaper, more efficient solar panels, better batteries, improved fission reactors, or advanced geothermal. All of these technologies are somewhat speculative, and may not pan out — solar and battery prices may plateau, advanced geothermal may prove unworkable, etc. In the face of this risk, fusion is a reasonable bet to add to the mix.”
And he assessed the history of nuclear policy in a review of Nuclear Politics:
“Nuclear policy can be thought of as a struggle between three different groups: technological enthusiasts (who wanted to push the technology forward), cost-benefiters (who could be pro- or anti-nuclear depending on how the costs and benefits added up), and moralists (who were opposed to nuclear in principle). The path of nuclear power ultimately was a function of how these three groups took shape, gathered power, and interacted with the existing political system.”
🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang
Tim pointed out that the Elon Musk/Yann LeCun beef raises valuable questions for metascientific research.
“In the end, debates over the Platonic ideal of Science are a red herring. One might accept the progress machine learning has made in recent years and still assert that all this activity is not Science, but mere ‘commercialization’ or ‘product engineering.’ Fine. But to what end? The value of any governing structure or practice of science should be weighed pragmatically against the benefits it provides and the costs it imposes on a field.”
In anticipation of the Bottlenecks Summit, Tim called for a list of the biggest bottlenecks to scientific and technological progress, and proposed some of his own:
“Here are some of the bottlenecks I feel have been overlooked or left on the backburner, and deserve greater sunlight at the summit and elsewhere.”
📰 Media
Tim’s NIST Foundation proposal was positively cited by the Federation of American Scientists.
Alec’s observations on solar energy were cited in The Colorado Sun.
Aidan was quoted in The Daily Caller on the challenges of building out electrical transmission:
“Aidan Mackenzie — an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress with particular expertise covering energy, transportation and housing policy — agreed that logistical challenges are likely to hinder the administration’s goal for charger deployment by 2030. Specifically, he highlighted securing complementary infrastructure, like transmission lines, as likely to sap time and resources away from the effort to construct a national network of public chargers. ‘It seems like it’s going to be hard to meet this target,’ Mackenzie told the DCNF. ‘Different utility regions do not necessarily have an incentive to plan or build large capacity transmission lines that share power. They often interrupt the way that utilities want to control the generation in their region. So, I would very much expect that to be the binding constraint.’”
Alec was quoted by Utility Dive on the tradeoffs of the permitting process.
“In a 2022 analysis, the Institute for Progress argued that NEPA in its current form ‘imposes massive costs on the federal government, drags clean energy projects out for years, and generates uncertainty that stops other projects from ever getting off the ground.’ Alec Stapp, a co-founder and co-CEO of IFP and one of the authors of that report, said he advocates for a ‘strong’ permitting process that also offers certainty and efficiency. ‘I think you could describe a strong permitting process as one that provides a quick and informed answer on whether a project has government approval to be built — a very swift and certain “yes” or “no” on whether you can build this project,’ he said.”
Brian’s work on data centers was cited in a proposal from Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood for British data center policy.
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