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What is Progress?
Risk & Progress| A hub for essays that explore risk, human progress, and your potential. My mission is to educate, inspire, and invest in concepts that promote a better future. Subscriptions are free, paid subscribers gain access to the full archive, including the Pathways of Progress and Realize essay series.
Why do we assume that technology improves with time? Could it regress? Could the progress that humanity has thus far achieved be but a fleeting efflorescence? After all, this has happened before, the Europeans of the Middle Ages lived amongst the ruins of Roman cities and the architectural wonders of an ancient civilization more technologically advanced than their own. Could future generations live in the decaying and overgrown canyons of early 21st-century cities? This may sound hyperbolic, but the point I must make is that progress is not guaranteed; it flourishes under specific conditions and absent those conditions, may stall or even reverse. Indeed, we are seeing worrying signs that progress may be sputtering in the modern world.
Defining Progress
As an amorphous concept, “progress” can be fairly difficult to define. The simplest definition, one employed in Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen’s seminal article in The Atlantic entitled “We Need a New Science of Progress,”…