☀️ My chat (+transcript) with economist Noah Smith on technological progress

Some signs of tech progress are obvious: the moon landing, the internet, the smartphone, and now generative AI. For most of us who live in rich countries, improvements to our day-to-day lives seem to come gradually. We might (might), then, forgive some of those who claim that our society has not progressed, that our lives have not improved, and that a tech-optimist outlook is even naïve.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with economist Noah Smith about pushing the limits in areas like energy technology, how geopolitical threats spur innovation, and why a more fragmented industrial policy might actually be an advantage.

Smith is the author of the popular Noahpinion Substack. He was previously an assistant finance professor at Stony Brook University and an economics columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

In This Episode

* Recognizing progress (1:43)

* Redrawing the boundaries of energy tech (12:39)

* Racing China in research (15:59)

* Recalling Japanese economic history (20:32)

* Regulating AI well (23:49)

* Rethinking growth strategy in the EU (26:46)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation

Recognizing progress (1:43)

Pethokoukis: Noah, welcome to the podcast.

Smith: Great to be here!

Not to talk about other podcast guests, but I will very briefly — Last year I did one with Marc Andreessen and I asked him just how tech optimistic he was, and he said, “I'm not sure I'm an optimist at all,” that the most reasonable expectation is to expect the future to be like the past, where we have a problem building things in the real world, that some of our best ideas don't necessarily become everything they could be, and I think a perfectly reasonable baseline forecast is that, for all our talk about optimism, and “let's go,” and “let's accelerate,” that none of that happens. Does that sound reasonable to you or are you more optimistic?

I'm optimistic. You know, a few years ago we didn't have mRNA vaccines. Now we do. And now we have a magical weight loss drug that will not only make you lose weight, but will solve half your other health problems for reasons we don't even understand yet.

So much inflammation.

Right. We didn't even have that a few years ago. That did not exist. If you told someone that would exist, they would laugh at you. A magic pill that not only makes you thin, but also just solves all these other health issues: They would laugh at you, Scott Alexander would laugh at you, everyone would laugh at you. Now it's real. That's cool.

If you had told someone a few years ago that batteries would be as insanely cheap as they are, they would've been like, “What? No. There's all these reasons why they can't be,” but none of those reasons were true. I remember because they did actually say that, and then batteries got insanely cheap, to the point where now Texas is adding ridiculous amounts of batteries for grid storage. Did I predict that was going to happen? No, that surprised me on the upside. The forecasters keep forecasting sort of a leveling off for things like solar and battery, and they keep being wrong.

There's a lot of other things like reusable rockets. Did you think they'd get this good? Did you think we'd have this many satellites in the low-earth orbit?

AI just came out of nowhere. Now everyone has this little personal assistant that's intelligent and can tell them stuff. That didn't exist three years ago.

So is that, perhaps, growing cluster of technologies, that's not just a short-term thing. Do you think all these technologies — and let's say particularly AI, but the healthcare-related stuff as well — that these taken together are a game-changer? Because people always say, “Boy, our lives 30 years ago didn't look much different than our lives today,” and some people say 40 years ago.

But that’s wrong!

Yes, I do think that is wrong, but that people's perception.

When I was a kid, people didn't spend all day looking at a little screen and talking to people around the world through a little screen. Now they do. That's like all they do all day.

But they say that those aren't significant, for some reason, they treat that as a kind of a triviality.

Like me, you're old enough to remember a thing called “getting bored.” Do you remember that? You’d just sit around and you're like, “Man, I’ve got nothing to do. I’m bored.” That emotion just doesn't exist anymore — I mean, very fleetingly for some people, but we've banished boredom from the world.

Remember “getting lost?” If you walk into that forest, you might get lost? That doesn't happen unless you want to get lost, unless you don't take your phone. But the idea that, “Oh my God, I'm lost! I'm lost!” No, just look at Google Maps and navigate your way back.

Being lost and being bored are fundamental human experiences that have been with us for literally millions of years, and now they're just gone in a few years, just gone!

Remember when you didn't know what other places looked like? You would think, “Oh, the Matt