Progress Towards What?

Our ideas about progress need to evolve

Most stories about growth and progress go something like this:

Imagine it is 1890, and you have just been born into a comfortable middle-class home somewhere in America.

Consider what your world is like. Your days are lit by candles and sunlight. Steam and horses are the engines of transportation. Communication is as fast as the letters you send through the mail. Heat comes only from fire and water from an outdoor pump. Arduous manual labor is the norm, and your siblings often work the same 60-hour week as your parents do. Books are read for entertainment. Books!

Now imagine yourself in 1970. Somehow you survived rampant infant mortality and infectious disease to live a long and fulfilling life. Consider everything that you’ve witnessed, all in the span of a single lifetime: You’ve seen the rise of cars, flight, mass communication, digital computing, electric everything, antibiotics, television, and atomic weapons. You’ve seen man land on the moon. Everything about your world has been transformed. To look back from 1970, that world of 1890 is one that you no longer recognize. 

This period was the golden age of progress. It was the time when we were relentless innovators—unencumbered by bureaucracy, tireless in our pursuit of progress, and fearless in our experimentation. With our science and technology we transformed the world. Nothing was safe from our spirit of invention.

But then something changed. To look back from our present day, the world of 1970 doesn’t look so different. It’s largely recognizable (okay not the hair). We still have the same screens, cars, food, clothes, and buildings. Sure, these things have all improved dramatically, but in principle they work the same way. 

Meanwhile, very few of the futuristic innovations predicted during the golden age of progress have come to pass. There are no jetpacks. No one’s cars are flying. We don’t even have robot butlers. In fact, some things have gotten worse. We have much less nuclear power, exactly when we could use it most. We even lost the supersonic jet.

Yes, we may have invented the internet and all manner of digital devices, but our day-to-day lives remain largely unchanged. The sad reality is that the impact of our modern innovations pales in comparison to the transformations of the previous age. If forced to choose, would you really pick your smartphone over indoor plumbing? 

What happened to progress? Are we destined for eternal stagnation? How can we return to the golden age of progress?

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This story is best told by Robert J Gordon in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth. He sees the rise of growth all happening from 1870-1970, as the “great inventions” of the late 19th century revolutionized the American economy. The result was a complete transformation in every aspect of our day-to-day lives.

Gordon’s explanation for our current stagnation is that this “miracle century” was a one-time event. We’ll never see that level of growth again, because things like electricity and the internal combustion engine can only be invented once. As the adoption of the great inventions began to level off, a fall in growth was inevitable. Any revolutions sparked by our modern digital and information breakthroughs can’t compare.

Gordon’s theory is a persuasive explanation for a unique period in human history. The problem is that the same story has leaked into many of our ideas about progress itself. And these ideas about progress are no longer helpful.

These ideas are at the heart of a uniquely American myth of progress. If you were an American in the 20th century, progress was just assumed. It was your birthright to live in a world of ever rising incomes and living standards. Every new generation received the full benefits of progress while accelerating even more progress for the next. The future was one of ever greater abundance. Progress itself was never questioned; it was justified by its own indisputable momentum. It just needed to keep going.

Part of the shock confronting recent generations is the realization that this progress did not, in fact, keep going. We are no longer coasting on the momentum of economic growth. We no longer see the dramatic material transformations in our daily lives. We doubt seriously if we’ll be better off than our parents were. And even the great material improvements of the past look questionable in light of the inequality and climate change that came with them.

And that’s a perfectly natural response. If your ideas about progress are anchored to a one-time “miracle century”, then progress will always be defined on those terms. This recent article by Freddie DeBoer is a good example. Freddie sees Apple’s incessant promotion of TITANIUM as yet one more piece of evidence confirming our eternal stagnation. Is a different metal the best we can do? What happened to innovation? Freddie’s advice is simple:

“I think we all need to learn to appreciate what we have now, in the world as it exists, at the time in which we actually live. Frankly, I don’t think we have any other choice. Welcome to the Forever Now.”

Yikes. These are not the ideas about progress that we need. 

It’s ultimately a theory of progress that is frozen in time, looking backwards on an age utterly unique in history. It’s based on an incomplete notion of what technology is and how it transforms every aspect of our lives. It has no imagination. And it’s completely insufficient to structure the conversations we need to be having about the type of worlds worth progressing towards.

It’s time for our ideas around progress to evolve. 

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Any definition of progress must include two things: some future state we define as “better”, and some way to measure whether we are getting closer to that state or not. Doesn’t it sound so simple?

Yet reality is infinitely complex, and defining progress that can capture all of our competing aspirations is not a viable endeavor¹. The best we can hope for is iterative improvement. From that perspective, let’s consider some of today’s flawed ideas about progress so we can improve tomorrow’s progress. In other words, let’s make some progress about progress.

1. Progress is more than measurements

The “miracle century” could only have been declared miraculous in retrospect. No goal was defined at the beginning of the century that could have been used to track the progress in reaching it. If you asked a random American at any time during the century if they thought things were getting better or worse, you would have gotten different answers depending on when you asked. “Progress” would have felt very different during the Prohibition of the 1920s, or the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the aftermath of WWII in the 1940s.

The miracle century was certainly about growth, particularly when measured by gains in living standards over time. But was it progress? Progress towards what? This may seem like an absurd question given the dramatic changes in day-to-day life, but it points to the problems of conflating growth with progress. Growth without a goal is not progress.

The definition of progress used during the miracle century appears to be a circular one. This is best progress can do when it’s conflated with growth. It defines the destination by what it is measuring: “Progress is making these measurements go up. How will we know if we’re making progress? If the measurements go up.” 

Such a definition of progress can only speak about what it can measure, and thus remain silent about anything outside of those measurements. This works fine for historical analysis, but it won’t help us think about our technological future.

Consider the current discourse around AI. Perhaps this version of progress can speak to job displacement and productivity impacts. These are things that are legible to our traditional measurements of progress. But our traditional measurements have nothing to say about any of the bigger questions that AI represents. 

For example, how much of our own agency should we cede to AI in the pursuit of rising incomes? The answer could critically determine the progress of human autonomy. But any version of progress defined by measurements cannot evaluate trade-offs concerning those same measurements.

2. Progress looks forward

There is little value in using yesterday’s progress to evaluate the progress of today, and even less when considering the progress of tomorrow. The entire point of progress is to build from the past in order to improve the future. 

Progress happens when today’s open problems become yesterday’s solved problems. This is why the question of whether you would give up your toilet for your smartphone is an absurd one. We don’t have to care about toilets because we already solved the problem of indoor plumbing. Now we get to try and solve bigger and more interesting problems. This is how progress looks forward.

Proponents of the stagnation theory make the distinction between the “world of atoms” and the “world of bits”. They point to the fact that our digital breakthroughs (the world of bits) have made very little impact on our physical reality (the world of atoms). This is particularly true when compared to the physical transformations of the “miracle century”.

This is best captured by Peter Thiel’s now-famous quote: “We were promised flying cars and all we got was 128 characters”. But this gets progress exactly backwards. The significance of social media is not based on its impact in the physical world. The significance is in the new worlds that it opens up for impact, ones that previous innovations couldn’t access. Bits can do things atoms can only dream of.

Any lineage of progress will include the possibility that the impact of an earlier achievement may never be matched. But this is not an indictment of progress; it’s how progress works. For example, should we condemn the “miracle century” for failing to match the revolutionary impact from the invention of fire? 

True progress makes it difficult to compare impacts across different eras because the current era has been so transformed.

3. Progress includes the “world of beings”

Technology doesn’t just impact the world of atoms and the world of bits. It also impacts us—the world of beings. 

This becomes more obvious as the world of bits continues to race past the world of atoms. Much of the impact of digital innovation depends on what we do with it. Physical innovation is fundamentally constrained by the laws of nature. We will never innovate our way beyond the speed of light. But the world of bits has very few physical constraints. The main constraint on digital innovation is our own imagination.

From this perspective, the biggest thing blocking progress may not be science or technology, but us. Our capacity to coordinate could be the ultimate limiting factor on how transformative our innovation can be. Any indictment of our future progress may need to start with humans.

For example, this limit of imagination defines the world of crypto. Crypto has created things like DAOs and blockchains and NFTs that work like lego blocks. They can be assembled and combined to explore entirely new modes of exchange, coordination, and finance. Crypto true believers see a vast potential to disrupt gatekeepers and unlock the best of humanity. Instead, the worst of humanity has used crypto to unlock new levels of fraud, scams, and speculation. 

You can’t blame technical innovation for crypto’s failure to achieve progress. After all, crypto is built off of decades of real mathematical breakthroughs. Rather, crypto’s future depends squarely on human imagination. The space for crypto-based innovation is enormous, but only if humans can figure out the right keys to unlock it.

The world of bits is also reshaping the world of beings in ways that we are just beginning to understand. These changes are happening so fast that today’s grandparents might realistically have more in common with humans raised during the 1890s than to their own grandchildren raised on screens.²

Digital technologies represent an entirely new medium where the message is us: our attention and our data. While most of us have little agency to impact the physical world, we have found in the digital world a space of infinite malleability and control. We can reconstruct our digital identities and allegiances without any of the pesky commitments and consequences that come with the physical world. 

For some generations, the digital world is now what feels “real”. It’s where their sense of being is most alive. By comparison, the physical world feels lonely and dangerous and, in the end, boring. To navigate the digital world is to employ values much different than what our traditional ideas of progress assume.³

Is this progress? Any notion of progress that can’t account for the world of beings is by definition incomplete.

4. Progress defines a better future

All of the three previous ideas can be summarized by a simple question, one we should all be asking when it comes to progress.

“Progress towards what?”

Progress isn’t just measuring things that we want more of. It’s about defining a future that we want to grow towards.

Progress isn’t just about comparing our current world with our past. It’s about asking how we can build a better future world based on our current one. 

Progress isn’t just about our material world. It’s about understanding all of the future worlds that we want to create.

Ultimately, we need to start thinking about the kinds of future worlds that are worth making progress towards. This isn’t just a technological question, but one that is inherently philosophical. Technology expands the possibilites of what we can do, but it cannot tell us what we ought to do. To consider this question in all of its depth requires engaging fully with the much messier realms of religion and politics and values.

Coming up with a viable definition of progress confronts us with impossible questions: What does a “better” future with technology look like? How could we even decide on such a thing? Is it even possible? If not, what does that mean for our ability to make sure technology takes us somewhere we actually want to go?

The entire notion can seem absurd, but that’s only because we’re so used to excluding questions of value from any discussion of technology and progress.

Yet these are the questions that we need to start answering. Our ideas about progress need to evolve so we can better define what progress means. We won’t be able to make the progress we want until we can answer the question: “progress towards what?”.

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1. At least for this article! I hope to tackle this more fully in the future.

2. Anton Barba-Kay makes a similar point in his book “The Web of Our Own Making”.

3. They may, in fact, choose smartphones over indoor plumbing…which may tell us something about progress.