Technology is humanity’s most powerful lever for creating abundance, solving problems, and expanding our horizons.
Breakthrough innovations have made everything vastly cheaper today than it was hundreds of years ago. What key innovations got us here? What areas have had slow or negative progress? What improvements might we expect from future inventions? There is no existing central resource that makes it easy to explore these questions, so we decided to build one.
Our goal is to create a compendium of open source datasets that chart humanity’s progress towards a future where everyone has affordable access to health, nutrition, education, travel, information, housing, safety, and energy, and therefore have the foundation to both literally and metaphorically reach towards the stars. We hope this data will enable more quantitative analyses on progress, how innovations and policies accelerate or impede it, and where engineers, scientists, investors, and policymakers can best allocate their resources to help our world thrive.
TLDR: We’re making this chart, but for everything:
Methodology
To make the problem more tractable, we’re building open source datasets of historical costs, inventions, and policies. These data will enable deeper study of potential cause and effect relationships between technology, policy, and progress. In the first phase, we’re focused on costs of civilization’s basic substrates like energy, bits, and materials over each decade between 1900 and today. We chose to gather data on costs because lower costs increase consumption and availability, and are quantifiable, comparable, available for most goods and services, and implicitly factor in productivity gains. We welcome input on this approach.
| Production | Transmission | Preservation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energy | Fossil Fuels, Solar, Nuclear | Power Lines, Microwave, Lasers | Batteries |
| Bits | Computation, Sensors | Wired / Wireless Bandwidth | Memory |
| Material | Steel, Concrete, Plastic, Timber | Horse, Automobile, Train, Air, Ship, Rocket | Durability, Reuse, Recycle, Repair |
| Food | Plant and Harvest, Raise, or Synthesize | Horse, Automobile, Train, Air, Ship, Rocket | Refrigeration, Preservation, Vacuum Sealing |
| Life | Synthesize Molecules, Proteins, Genes, Cells | Oral, Injection, Cell Targeting | Longevity, Cryonics |
What about other types of progress?
Although the current methodology is to track the cost of important categories, we recognize that reduced cost is only a proxy for abundance, and abundance is only a piece in the larger puzzle of accomplishing the 50Y mission. Costs and availability don’t account for happiness, freedom, fairness, ecological impact, beauty, or other aspects of a thriving society. We hope to expand our focus to these other important areas in the future, and welcome contributions from those knowledgeable in metrics in any of those areas or others. Ultimately, we want to be inclusive of all visions and reliable measures of progress towards a desirable future. We’re only starting with costs in the above areas because we have experience tracking data like this, these datasets are under-studied (relative to those other factors like happiness and freedom), and we think the world would benefit from a start like this — not because we think these are the only things that matter for making the world a better place.
How you can help
We’re looking for volunteers who can help us improve our methodology, curate data, and analyze what we collect. If you’re interested in helping, please join our slack and github project. You can also follow along for updates on Twitter here.
Follow our Progress:
Get involved:
Join our slack
Contributors
D. Scott Phoenix (project lead), Peregrine Badger (deputy lead), Adam Libert, Alex Teng, Andrew Ponec, Ashley Abel, Chongxi Lai, Drew Moxon, Ela Madej, Jacob Rintamaki, Leo Nasskau, Matt King, Micol Chiesa, Melinda B. Chu, Pedro Lovatt Garcia, Robert Schmitt, Seth Bannon