The Progress Forum

• My AMA (ask me anything)
• Are Technologies Inevitable? (Matt Clancy)
• Comparing process improvement in manufacturing and construction: Duco vs Drywall (Brian Potter)

Announcements

• An optogenetic retinal prosthesis (via @maxhodak_)
• The Atlantic Progress Summit, LA, Dec 13 (via @DKThomp). There is a community meetup planned around this
• A new mRNA vaccine against all known influenza virus subtypes (via @ScottEHensley)
• Waymo One is opening to the public in San Francisco (via @Waymo)
• AI plays Diplomacy (via @ml_perception). See Zvi Mowshowitz’s take

Links

• Kevin Esvelt on how to prevent the next pandemic. In the inagural issue of the new Asterisk Magazine
• Guinea worm disease is close to being eradicated (via @redouad)
• Tyler Cowen on falling inequality

Queries

• Concrete visions/narratives for technology over the next 20-30 years?) (@nabeelqu)
• What’s the best economic case for space?
• Examples of path-dependency in technology? (@_brianpotter)
• Who should Milan Cvitkovic meet in London or Oxford? (@MWCvitkovic)
• Anyone know about the early history of semiconductor research?
• Who would you like to see speak at Peter Diamandis’s Abundance360 Summit? (@PeterDiamandis)
• Suggested reading on the issue of preindustrial child abandonment?
• What’s the most interesting thing/person/event in the world right now? (@pmarca)

Quotes

• Turn-of-the-century horsesharing programs
• The spirit of applied science, on the eve of the era of synthetic chemistry
• Questions that arose when converting wood-burning houses to coal
• If you like privacy, be glad you were born after indoor plumbing
• The rapid transformation from containerization took everyone by surprise
• Top athletes don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it (@mbateman)
• Applying a theory to make predictions is not a matter of naive “extrapolation”
• US-Russian relations, 1960s

Tweets & retweets

• The challenges of long-distance transportation of hydrogen
• Well-being as value-fulfillment
• Hot takes cool down in prediction markets
• When you make it harder to exit something, you make it harder to enter
• Civil asset forfeiture delenda est
• Americans are an amazing people, but perfectionist (@yashevde)
• A potential US rail strike would cause major supply chain disruptions (@typesfast)