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Article URL: https://goodscience.substack.com/p/progress-engineering-innovation-as Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47924967 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

Article URL: https://goodscience.substack.com/p/progress-engineering-innovation-as

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47924967

A guest post by Garett Jones and Eliah Aronoff-Spencer

Garett is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Chief Economist at Bluechip, a stablecoin rating agency. He is author of the Singapore Trilogy published by Stanford University Press.

Eliah is a Professor of Medicine and Design at UC San Diego’s Division of Infectious Diseases & Global Public Health, and the Design Lab. He directs the Center for Health Design, the CDC funded Resilient Shield, and chairs the Lancet Commission on U.S. Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age.

In 2019, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen published an Atlantic essay that quietly launched a vital new field. Progress Studies, as they named it, would document the nature of scientific, technological, and economic progress; asking why it sometimes flourishes, why it sometimes stalls. Seven years later, we believe that project is necessary but no longer sufficient. Understanding progress isn’t enough. We need to engineer it.

Progress Engineering, in our vision, will be a discipline devoted deliberately to the practice and principles of designing systems, organizations, and institutions through which innovation moves. It begins where Progress Studies ends: not with the question of what progress looks like, but how we build the conditions that make it possible, reliable, and just.

The difference matters enormously. The great innovations from Gutenberg’s press to steam power to the assembly line to IT and now AI have all involved a massive increase in the returns to scale in key industries, and each of them led to social changes that well-meaning contemporaries struggled to theorize over and to shape for the benefit of humanity.