Sam Bowman
Sam is the Founder of Works in Progress, a magazine of new and underrated ideas in science, technology and economics, which was acquired by Stripe in 2022. He is head of publishing at Stripe where he also oversees Stripe Press.
Sunrise Sessions
Congratulations, humanity - you did it! We solved scarcity. Food, water, energy, and shelter? Infinite. Everyone has what they need. But instead of utopia, things are… weird. The old rules don’t work. People are restless. Governments are scrambling to justify their existence. The economy? Well, what even is an economy when everything is abundant? This thought experiment throws us 50 years into a post-scarcity world where we wrestle with the real challenges of abundance. How do people find purpose when survival isn’t the game anymore? Does ambition still exist? How do we decide who gets what when there's no pressing need to fight over resources? And do we actually want to live in a world without scarcity, or does struggle make us who we are? This isn’t a history lesson. It’s a test run of the future. And you, the audience, are here to help figure out how to make it work (or why it might all go horribly wrong).
Sam Bowman will describe how science, energy, infrastructure and housing unlock the entrepreneurship and innovation that drives progress. Drawing on Stripe Press's and Works in Progress's most popular books and articles, the talk will explain why cities are such powerful engines of progress, what has gone wrong with how we do science, how expensive energy holds back innovation, and how fixing these things can get us a world of abundance, prosperity, and peace. And he will argue that this is much more achievable than is commonly thought: that we can build a popular coalition in favour of progress and dynamism.