Why Progress?
Human existence has mostly been precarious, but in the last few centuries, prosperity has blossomed across much of the globe. With the arrival of prosperity, urgency and seriousness are replaced by complacency and self-indulgence. We have slowed down economic growth and technological progress. This is a serious problem. We need to build again. We need to go fast again. The implicit response of the already comfortable is: why? Why bother? We have enough. Why risk messing things up irreparably by trying to make things much better? There are good reasons.
Resilience
We need technology to conquer major global problems. Recent events have shown that, even in the richest countries, we don’t have enough. We don’t have the ability to track the spread of new viruses in real-time and we don’t have the ability to rapidly deliver cures to them. The COVID-19 pandemic walloped everybody in one way or another.
Then, of course, there is climate change. After decades of discussion, there are no realistic plans. Just a lot of money spent to chip away at the margins of the problem. We need big technological solutions and we haven’t agreed on any.
Level 5
Cataclysms aside, there are many ways our lives could be improved. As J Storrs Hall points out in Where is My Flying Car (see Jason Crawford’s excellent review), we have achieved a high quality of life and seem to now consider it the endpoint. He uses Hans Rosling’s framework of four income levels to illustrate the problem:
The miracle of the Industrial Revolution is now easily stated: In 1800, 85% of the world’s population was at Level 1. Today, only 9% is. Over the past half century, the bulk of humanity moved up out of Level 1 to erase the rich-poor gap and make the world wealth distribution roughly bell-shaped.
The average American moved from Level 2 in 1800, to level 3 in 1900, to Level 4 in 2000.
We can state the Great Stagnation story nearly as simply: There is no level 5.
Hall gives many examples of what a level 5 world could be like. Here’s a vignette of a world with ubiquitous personal flying cars:
…the restaurants, theaters, and workplaces you might want to attend—and your friends!—would be just as easily accessible with your VTOL flying car as they would be walking in a city, but perched on a mountainside among the trees 25 miles away.
This is the kind of imagination we are lacking. Breaking through limiting frames and imagining more.
A Rising Tide
Maybe it seems icky or just unimportant to want more prosperity and better technology when you already have a lot. But the history of technological progress so far shows that the toys of the rich (the first iPhone) soon become affordable tools that benefit everyone (cheap, globally ubiquitous Android phones). Technology tends to scale up, get cheaper, and propagate. Prosperity in general has grown incredibly in the last two hundred years. The excerpt in the last section showed that the world went from 85% extremely poor to only 9% extremely poor in the last two hundred years. Why can’t we go from 15% Level 4 to 50% in the next few decades, and beyond?
A Grand Project
This would be a gigantic challenge, of course. But maybe that’s what the world needs, something really hard with a really inspiring goal to strive for. Americans, in particular, seem to have turned inward and turned on each other. Maybe what’s needed is to look outward, to a better future. Something that is good for everyone. A project of building human flourishing in real life, not tearing people down on Twitter. We’ve come so far and we can’t stop now. We must progress.