The Promise of Progress
This year I have been focused on the history and possibilities of huge technological progress, its positive impact on humanity, and how it can be unlocked. I have been exploring this area largely through the lens of the Progress Studies movement. It's an exciting area where people study the history of technological and societal progress and how to get more of it. It was kicked off with an impactful essay from Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen.
My favorite thinker and writer in Progress Studies is Jason Crawford. He has written a lot of great blog posts and is now running a Progress Studies community, Progress Forum. This is one of those small, tight, aligned communities that feels very productive and engaging.
In this exploration, I have found my interest in philosophy growing. I have come to believe that the main blocker of progress, broadly conceptualized, is not running out of low-hanging fruit or reaching the limits of growth, as some claim, but simply that people have the wrong ideas in their heads. We need to go deep to figure out a functional worldview for modern life, one that balances safety with aggressive risk-taking in pursuit of making life great for everyone.
We in the West currently live in cultures where a neurotic, fearful, pessimistic way of reacting to modernity predominates. Our ancestors left us an inheritance of abundance and peace. We don't appreciate it because we can't break out of a pattern of obsessing over how scary and harmful technologically advanced societies can be. We only see the downsides.
In We Need a New Philosophy of Progress, my favorite essay of the year, Crawford describes what could be called the v1, v2, and v3 of philosophies of progress. v1 was the beginning of modernity in the 17th to the mid-20th century, when people were awed by the newfound trend of steady, rapid progress in quality of life delivered by science and technology. This era established the template for and the foundations of the modern, technologically advanced society. It was a little naive, though, in that it didn't fully account for the side effects of innovations like fossil fuels.
v2, starting around 1970, was when we went to the opposite extreme, focusing on the harms of modernity: pollution, deforestation, and global warming. A kind of neurotic anti-technology romanticism became dominant. Slow down, eat local and organic, downsize, and maybe we can heal Mother Nature and do our penance for our sinful hubristic growth.
So what is v3? It might be when we find the balance between the naive optimism of v1 and the reflexive pessimism of v2. When we figure out how to both grow the economy and improve the state of the environment faster than we have been. This seems like something worth trying to achieve, so I plan to remain focused on it next year and beyond.