Progress Studies conference
Article
Progress Studies conference is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between January 31, 2022 and November 06, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Jason Crawford’s holding a Progress Studies conference in Austin March 4-6”; “You might expect Progress Studies conference-goers to be natural accelerationists”; “the view of solar power’s prospects which I got from the Progress Studies conference was overly optimistic”. It most often appears alongside Jason Crawford, Tyler Cowen, 1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled.
Metadata
- Category: Events
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: January 31, 2022
- Last seen: November 06, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- Jason Crawford (2 shared issues)
-
- Tyler Cowen (2 shared issues)
-
- 1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled (1 shared issues)
-
- 1960s (1 shared issues)
-
- 1973 (1 shared issues)
-
- Abbott (1 shared issues)
-
- accelerationists (1 shared issues)
-
- ACX fan bulletin board Data Secrets Lox (1 shared issues)
-
- AI (1 shared issues)
-
- AMac78 (1 shared issues)
-
- Amazon (1 shared issues)
-
- Andrew Miller (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
- Nectome hiring a lab assistant for brain preservation work - ML engineer looking for work in AI alignment (and other ML engineers: 1, 2, 3) - Rob Miles needs volunteer writers for his AI alignment explainer project - Steve Hsu’s Genomic Prediction needs coders and data scientists - Rachel was my wedding photographer and is very good, hire her for your photos - Jason Crawford’s holding a Progress Studies conference in Austin March 4-6. - Lots of cool people to date - Or if dating isn’t your style, how about a nice calculus textbook?
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.
1: Comments of the week are several people saying that the view of solar power’s prospects which I got from the Progress Studies conference was overly optimistic (who could have guessed?). For example, Sol Hando on weather, Jenny Chase on costs (and more), Timothy M on potential learning curve exhaustion, and Phil Getts on the limits of batteries. Also, Erick on nuclear regulation.
In Internet slang, the opposite of a doomer is a “bloomer”. I recently got a chance to talk to the bloomers at the Progress Studies conference. They were great and I learned a lot. But as far as I could tell, the semi-official philosophy was “We need to be forward-looking rather than obsessed with some mythical better past - you know, like we were in the good old days of the 1920s, back when society could actually accomplish things.”
Inline links: Internet slang, Progress Studies conference