| Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of the Future In Five Questions. This week I spoke with Caleb Watney, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank whose goal is to “accelerate and shape the direction of scientific, technological, and industrial progress.” Caleb discussed why he thinks America’s future depends on actively recruiting the world’s best scientific minds into a “superteam,” why federal scientists should be paid more — and the prescience of his favorite 1959 post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? When Alabama wants to build a college football team, they don’t limit themselves to high schools in their own state. They’ve built a bonafide superteam year after year after year by proactively recruiting the top football players from around the country (and around the globe). The U.S. should do the same and proactively, aggressively recruit the world’s top scientists and engineers. We’re used to thinking of immigration policy as a very reactive domain. “Build it, and they will come.” But that hasn’t always been our attitude. The rise of the U.S. as a scientific superpower was based on the active recruitment of the best scientific minds from Europe to form the backbone of the Manhattan and Apollo projects. Canada, Japan, the U.K., Singapore, and China all have launched deliberate programs to recruit foreign scientists to their shores. The U.S. already has the good fortune to be the preferred destination for many of the world’s best and brightest, and we should take the (extremely basic) step of letting them stay in the U.S. after they’ve graduated from our universities. But we could do more to actively recruit a superteam by sending out our own talent scouts. This matters not only for American leadership, but for the global advancement of science — when young mathematicians are able to move to the U.S., they can end up being six times as productive. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I love the vibe and the experience of being on trains, but the hard physics and economics of high-speed rail are sobering. HSR faces a fundamental challenge: the bumpiness of the Earth. To maintain high speeds, HSR requires incredibly straight and level tracks. Any deviation means slowing down or subjecting passengers to uncomfortable forces. This translates to enormously expensive construction costs, especially in mountainous regions, requiring billions for tunnels and viaducts. Maintenance becomes a constant, costly battle against physics. Japan replaces entire sections of track every few years — an enormous, ongoing expense. Meanwhile, aviation continues to improve in efficiency and environmental impact. Electric planes are on the horizon for short routes, and synthetic fuels might be able to make longer flights carbon-neutral. HSR may be a viable option for very specific transportation corridors, such as the Northeast between D.C. and Boston, but its limitations mean it's not the transformative technology for the whole country that many envision. What book most shaped your conception of the future? I’ve always loved the 1959 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel “A Canticle For Leibowitz” by Walter Miller. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, in their tireless efforts to preserve scientific knowledge through ages of darkness, embody a profound faith in the redemptive power of human ingenuity. Their mission suggests that even in the face of catastrophic setbacks, the accumulation and application of knowledge remains a worthy pursuit. But Miller's optimism isn't naive. The cyclical nature of the novel's narrative — the rise, fall, and rebirth of civilization — serves as a sobering reminder that progress isn't inevitable or irreversible. It's a call for stewardship of our technological capabilities, a theme that's increasingly relevant in our era of rapid AI development. What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? It is difficult for the government to make wise decisions about technology when the state capacity to build, implement, analyze, accelerate or govern advanced technologies is so sparse. We could start building this capacity in a few ways. In the early 2000s, Congress authorized several financial regulatory agencies, including the [Securities and Exchange Commission] and the [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation], to create separate pay scales, recognizing that private sector salaries made it difficult to attract and retain skilled professionals. Today we need a similar approach for technical and scientific roles across the federal government. Imagine if working as a data scientist for the Department of Energy were even half as well-compensated as a similar role at Google or Facebook. We need to rethink our institutional structures, too. The success of non-profit agency foundations for the [National Institutes of Health] and [Center for Disease Control] provides a blueprint. Why not extend this model to other crucial but often overlooked agencies like [the National Institute of Standards and Technology]? What has surprised you the most this year? First, the complete lack of interest by our political establishment in learning lessons from the Covid crisis. We have the technical capacity to scale up our wastewater monitoring systems, develop broad multiplex tests and have prototype vaccines ready for each of the 26 known viral families that cause human disease — but we don’t have the political will at the moment. Operation Warp Speed was a massive success, and no one wants to claim political credit for it. But it has demonstrated a promising model for mobilizing the power of the federal government and the private sector to solve big challenges that we could use again. Second, the extent to which “AGI” has gone mainstream. Ivanka Trump tweeted out Leopold Aschenbrenner’s treatise on AI and geopolitics, “Situational Awareness,” anticipating a world where we achieve AGI by 2027. Regardless of whether or not you believe in the continuation of AI scaling laws, our political system is waking up to the potential, and a U.S. government that is paying attention has massive implications. Jack Clark from Anthropic recently noted that “the challenge of AI policy relates to trying to stabilize this leviathan that has been woken.” Third, but related to the second point, nuclear energy is having a comeback moment in the United States. Microsoft reportedly plans to bring Three Mile Island back online to help address the “gargantuan amount of power needed for data centers for AI,” and the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan that shut down in 2022 has plans to reopen. I am skeptical that there will be much appetite for new nuclear buildout without a more extensive reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but still, it has been a pleasant surprise to see the retrofuturist icons of energy abundance having a moment in the sun.
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