What is Progress?
And why we need to talk about it.
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 for all. Subscriptions and new essays are free and always will be. Paid subscribers gain access to the full archives.
Why do we assume that technology must improve? 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 our future generations end up living in the decaying and overgrown canyons of early 21st-century cities? This may sound hyperbolic, but the point I must impress 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 stalling 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,” defines…
