Progress and Cons

Epistemic status: Reflections on ProgressCon 2026, written up over the following weeks. Quotes are reconstructed from memory. Artistic license taken. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. – Ecclesiastes 1:18 “I’m sure you’ve all heard about the math stuff that OpenAI released earlier this week.” It is Thursday, October 8, 2026, and the CEO of a bio lab automation startup is giving us a tour of their San Francisco office. “Raise your hand if you think that’s a good thing.” A dozen hands shoot up out of thirty visitors. Along with ten more, my arm rises weakly to half-join them. “Raise your hand if you think it’s not a good thing.” I look around. A couple of quiet chuckles. No hands. He leads us through the kitchen and the standard startup office space and into the room with the robots. They are simple 3 foot by 2 foot by 2 foot boxes, set on four rows of desks. They have been chosen because they are cheap (only a couple thousand dollars each) and run on open source software on a Raspberry Pi, which means they can be modified arbitrarily. Inside are six standard 96-well plates (8 by 12 rows of tiny plastic tubes). Above them hangs a simple robot arm with one available motion: pipetting. He shows us a series of janky bright green 3D-printed contraptions that they attach to the arm. The pipetting mechanism is connected to gears and levers that translate the energy into whatever they want. It turns out, most of biology is just moving small quantities of liquid between test tubes, mixing them, heating them up, and cooling them down. They 3D print everything. Claude is really good at 3D modeling now, so if they want a new part or to change something on an existing part, they just tell Claude, and it changes the model and prints a new one. They have 3D printers in all their labs around the world. When they design a new tool, they don’t have to rely on supply chains in China, they just send the design to all the labs and print