On Progress

NOVEMBER 5, 2019

We closed our last newsletter, an interview with Nicholas Carr, by asking about the nature and possibility of progress. We argued that disputes about the very idea of progress animate many debates about technology today. At the extremes, one finds both blind optimism about progress as an inexorable historical force, and nihilistic pessimism that denies progress is possible or even coherent as a concept. Most of us find ourselves between these two poles, hopeful that technology can improve our lives but cautious about its downsides. One of the Institute's goals is to get beyond these two limiting narratives to a better understanding of how to develop technology wisely.

Much of the recent discussion about progress has been framed by a spate of books by the likes of Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling, and Gregg Easterbrook. These authors cite a wealth of empirical data demonstrating the enormous gains in material welfare humanity has made in the last few centuries. They are motivated, in part, by the widespread ignorance of these facts among the general public: Rosling famously showed that we are worse than chimps at answering basic questions about the state of the world. As Carr noted in our interview, progress on the material front is difficult to dispute. One need only reflect on the boons of running water, electricity, and refrigeration to feel some gratitude for our present condition, at least in the West. This progress is not yet evenly distributed, but it is real and has causes.

Disagreements tend to emerge, however, when making normative recommendations on the basis of these trends. Pinker, Rosling, and others credit the gains we've made to the Enlightenment forces of reason, humanism, scientific inquiry, and -- to some degree -- market capitalism. In a similar vein, the Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison and economist Tyler Cowen have called for the creation of "Progress Studies," a discipline that would "study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date...[to] improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future." Collison and Cowen met with some backlash from academics in fields like Sociology and Science & Technology Studies, which have produced ample scholarship on the very historical forces that Progress Studies would examine. But the primary innovation Collison and Cowen are arguing for is not a new subject, but rather a more forcefully normative approach. "Progress Studies," they write, "is closer to medicine than biology: the goal is to treat, not merely to understand."

The ambivalence many feel around this attitude to progress stems, at least in part, from our psychology. The forces of hedonic adaptation and negativity bias prevent us from feeling viscerally what the data unambiguously show. It is difficult, each time I wash my hands or shop for groceries, to feel grateful for this plenitude to the same extent that I would feel deprived if I lost them. Happiness, to the degree measurable, has also been on the rise, but the gains have not been proportionate. This has tempted some to argue that the scientific and technological forces that have generated our material progress might be impotent, or even counterproductive, on the psycho-spiritual front. As Carr worries, "We've created, in the pursuit of comfort and convenience and choice...a digital environment...which is an impoverished version of the actual world itself."

But science, as Carr would no doubt agree, is not the enemy. Indeed, a founding premise of the Institute is that science, pointed in the right directions, is an indispensable part of improving our relationship to technology. One such direction is the gap between the concrete benefits our technology provides and the social and emotional costs it sometimes imposes. This might even be an appropriate topic for Progress Studies, should such a discipline ever coalesce. For it is not enough that things should get better; we should feel it, too.