His philosophy doesn't resonate with me. Broadly speaking, since the industrial revolution scientific and technological progress has been about increasing productivity and available energy. This has had profoundly positive effects on our lives but in a developed country it's not obvious that becoming another order of magnitude more productive will automatically lead to people having even better lives.<p>In the advanced countries of the world there is no shortage of material and energy abundance, our intractable problems are things like isolation, obesity, inequality, and a lack of purpose, and the mental and physical ailments which accompany them. If there is a technological solution to these things it's not obvious. In some cases, technology <i>is</i> the problem. In others the problem stems from how we order our society, but there are no serious and thoughtful proposals about how to reorder it.
I hate to say it, but the tech industry is the roadblock.<p>Most of what happens is far off, remote, unobservable, unlearnable. People cannot understand what is happening on the things they deal with the most. Everything is black box apps powered by vast cloud data centers. Humanity has zero chance to find their footing in this world, to comprehend what goes on about them.<p>Tech is to blame, tech is the problem, and there are so many simple basic remedies tech could be trying to deliver, to make General Systems Research to make computers general again, to make what happens in the computer knowable again. New frameworks, new systems, not no-code for developers, but no-code for users, to watch & adjust data percolating through systems.<p>We are no where, we've gone further into the dark, we've made it worse, and we, we techies, are to blame for letting corporations misuse our sharp keen selves for these shitty disprogressive ends.
The problem is not with progress. The problem is with denial of a dilema. Human baseline nature is unable to handle much more progress.
Meaning, we are already very close to the killer drone dilema, and as even small crisis like the Covid virus have shown, once we come under pressure we fall apart. We can pretend all we want in good times, that we are strong and cohesive and we have good captains steering the ship. But in the bad times, its revealed these are just play actors, standing with unconnected steering wheels in light opera uniforms on deck of breaking vessels.<p>To think that handing more dangerous technology to such a unpatched humanity solves problems instead of just upping the stakes in a dangerous game, instead of patching the holes in our heads first, is contraproductive. We need to tame ourselves, before we are able to advance. Thus we need a realistic assesement of all our behaviour, a solid patching holding up to crisis and a almost stoic with apps as result, before progress can continue. Our hands are to flimsy for the tools we can make.<p>PS: " Automnomous suicide drones in city XXXXXX due to progress" should be the real title.
> Stop climate change and prevent pandemics and so there are all these terrible things that people are worried about and if we can just not have them, then maybe that’s a bright future, but that’s not actually a better future than today. It’s just avoiding a worse one.<p>He should study the notion of priority before thinking about philosophy. That's much more in its abilities.<p>> Here’s the case as clearly and concisely as I can make it. Consider the 50-year period that ended about 100 years ago, from 1870 to 1920, let’s say. In this period, we got by my count, five major innovations.<p>Between 1870 and 1920 one had WW1. So maybe there wasn't much progress on peace ?<p>> One is the burden of regulation, which has grown enormously.<p>Regulation is progress in handling innovation.
The main problem with humanity is the lack of wisdom, not the lack of progress. Discovering something is nice, but if you are not able to handle it, it is of no use. When antibiotics were discovered, it made a great improvement on health of people. But instead of using it in a wise way, it was grossly overused, resulting in widespread resistance, slowly undoing all it positive effects. And that is how it basically has gone with every discovery.
An ultra individualist complaining about progress of the non-individual a.k.a the common.<p>The problem has been solved already, there is nothing new to discover here. The capitalist economy is the driving the current state of technological progress. It used to have an accelerated pace compared to pre-capitalist economies and it has now reached it's limits.<p>You may like it, you may dislike it, it doesn't matter. It is what it is. It is a mode of production, a mode of progress and it produces it's artifacts.<p>Like every tool, when you try to do something bigger, it becomes obsolete, unusable, unsustanable. You can't build a skyscraper with a shovel.<p>You may disagree with what a better tool will be. You may be emotionally attached to your tool and may not want to abandon it. That's ok. Just dont helusinate over putting an addon to your shovel that will help us build a skyscraper and sell it as the solution.<p>This kind of philosophy is not new at all, it is 300 years old.
"Progress" in the innovation sense comes from many places. Once something has been successful somewhere, it gets copied elsewhere. No one government controls innovation. The author does not seem to get this. (For an overview of the copying process, see "How Asia Works" by Studwell. It's a good study on how various Asian countries became part of the developed world.)<p>The "Roots of Progress" organization he comes from is basically him.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://rootsofprogress.org/" rel="nofollow">https://rootsofprogress.org/</a>
What changed in early 1970s is the energy crisis. Economic growth before 1973 was about finding new ways to burn more and more fossil fuels to make stuff: US GDP increased 2.1x between 1953 and 1973 while final energy consumption increased 2.01x, barely any improvement in energy efficiency (4.5% in 20 years).<p>Between 2001 and 2021, GDP indeed grew less, by only 46.5%, but energy consumption grew by only 1.8%, resulting in 44% growth in energy efficiency.<p>Same trend is the case worldwide. Progress is slow because we have moved from extensive to intensive economy, learning how to do more with less.
I like the techno optimism of this guy.<p>Max Roser's work is more holistic and maybe more important:<p>"Measuring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals:"<p><a href="https://sdg-tracker.org/" rel="nofollow">https://sdg-tracker.org/</a><p><a href="https://www.maxroser.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.maxroser.com/</a>
Natural selection only works if the organism is allowed to die. I think the same is true for institutions and the cultural elite. Part of the stagnation, if you buy it's existence, is a slowing of the rate of death of institutions. I partially buy these arguments but life extension is such a stupid non-goal because it'll only calcify the elite leadership important institutions.<p>Within a year or two we will have an AI ethics governing body whose members may live to 150. I find that concerning
Wow! I have been surprised two times, once when listening to the podcast:
Someone who seems to grasp some global understanding not given to most and articulate them (the central role that progress plays in our society, the progress having peaked, the need to study and understand the notion of progress) being so short-sighted and individualistic that he fails to even take into account the nature of progress itself. He wants and believes in a brighter future (I do to) but what he is advocating for leads us to catastrophy, I am all for progress, but I think we really need progress on moral standing, a progress in mindset etc... Basically a progress of ideas and spirituality, and NOT more technical/technological progress!<p>My second surprise was to see this heavily tech-oriented community not bite into this bait and remain very critical without falling into cynicism, this makes me hopeful that something can be done about this. A lot has been said to highlight the shortsightedness of the guest speaker's argument and even more could be said, but I want to ask something else, what are we doing about this? What can we do as techies/engineers to address this madness?
1870 to 1920 is compared to the last 50 years yet internal combustion, planes, electricity, vaccines, fertilizers, radio, telephone etc. hadn't really achieved much by 1920, not compared with what they grew into.<p>Model T Ford's are remembered as the car that kicked off the century of the car, not its peak.<p>Carbon fibre, solar power or one of a million other technologies that have started to catch on in the last few decades could revolutionise the world. It's a bit silly trying to predict them in advance. What did the future look like in 1920? Zeppelin's?<p>Though if I was going to predict one, solar power (renewables more generally) seems a very effective counter to all his complaints. Something that was pushed forward by centralised beaurocracy and government regulation at every turn and is providing the cheapest, most abundant energy in history.
Its good to have somebody root for progress. A monoculture of doom cannot possibly serve us well. But if that advocacy is done in a poor way it only serves to highlight how justified the critical view of technosolutionism.<p>There are at least three areas where I find his world view lacking.<p>First, its not historically informed. There was another astonishing period of progress and it did not end well: the broader GreacoRoman period. It was arguably even more revolutionary as it cultivated the basic mental modes required for science. Yet that world did not land smoothly on an s-curve, it collapsed completely. Yes, collapse is an accessible end-state today as well. If it turns out we cannot learn from the disasters of the past we have every reason to worry they will be repeated.<p>Which brings to the second point. You cant separate the scientific and technological universe from socio-economic organization. There are countless ways one can mobilize society for a while (eg slave labor that frees elites for higher pursuits) but long-term stable progress must, by definition, be based on fundamentally fair and distributive societies that dont chew on themselves.<p>Third, there are objective, physical and biological constraints that limit progress. The universe and our planet dont owe us a boundless canvas for us to realize any bizarre mental construct or obsession. What is on offer is already vast, but it does not extend in all directions. Learning to identify the naturally available growth options will be key for sustainable development.<p>I also think he misunderstands the role of digital tech. It is true that its impact so far has been marginal, even regressive, and pales in comparison to the major breakthroughs of 19th and 20th centuries. But its true nature is really human knowledge augmentation, similar to the invention of writing, the invention of mathematical proof etc. If we could liberate tech from the psychopaths and the sick economic system that supports them, it could lead to a enormous boost of global ingenuity and productivity. The tech dividend is still to be seen.
I see only three paths of progress:<p>a) space colonization (however that may work, I don't think there's a way)<p>b) embracing stagnation (in <i>all</i> countable units, except perhaps transistors)<p>c) buildup to violent collapse (which may or may not be followed by something capable of written history)<p>b in particular goes far beyond just "a sufficiently large number of people don't procreate", because if it's not somewhat evenly distributed, all future generations will be descendants of high-reproduction ancestors and you're back at square one.