The Assumption of Progress
Why do we, as a species, experience periods of immense change and development, but also periods of relatively fallow innovation?
Why haven't we cured all disease, fully electrified the world, and connected every human being on the planet to the internet?
Which of our systems stimulate and incentivize creativity and innovation, and which stifle them?
"Progress" can be a loaded term, as measuring it can be subjective and the metrics we use are often weighed down by dogma, ideology, and historical baggage.
There are sociological, religious, technological, scientific, legal, governmental, biological, economic, and other definitions for the concept of progress, then, but in general it refers to moving forward in some way: growing in a desired fashion toward a more refined, improved-upon state of being.
There are institutions in the modern world that exist, in part or in their entirety, to push progress of various kinds.
Organizations like the United Nations run a slew of programs meant to help more people access food and medicine and education, for instance, while the RAND Corporation is a nonprofit that focuses on progress within the (US-aligned) military and strategic-thinking world.
Whatever our focus and whatever our intended progressional destination, though, in the 21st century there's a general assumption that progress is destiny: we move forward in most things, not backward.
And this is an understandable assumption to make, as most of our recent history and fields of inquiry for which we're able to track such growth points up and to the right—progress and little else everywhere you look.
This assumption ignores, of course, the moments in which we've taken steps backward more or less wholesale, and the cases in which steps forward in one regard have been tied to steps backward in others.
Nazi scientists could claim some incredible discoveries and inventions (which is part of why other nations were so keen to recruit them after the war), but few people, today, would say they were forces of social and human progress, despite all the progress they made in science and technology.
Similarly, although hydraulic fracturing—often called "fracking"—is an impressive innovation in terms of producing more fossil fuel-based energy, it also represents a huge step backward through the lenses of ecology, sustainability, and climate change amelioration.
Moore's Law famously says that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every two years or so, which in practice means the number of vital components on a microprocessor will double at a regular, two-year-ish cadence.
This has proved to be the case (more or less) since he coined the concept back in 1965, and similar "laws" for other technologies (like Haitz's Law, which says that every decade the cost per lumen emitted by LED lights will fall by a factor of ten and the amount of light emitted will increase by a factor of 20) have likewise held up pretty well, despite—and because of—innovations that might initially seem to be orthogonal or counter to the evolution of these technologies.
A slowly developing field of progress research, though, suggests it's probably prudent to maintain a sense of discovery rather than inevitability when we're looking at the extended timeline of invention, innovation, and evolution.
Any given year, it may seem that we're stepping backward, forward, or holding still, according to the metrics we use to gauge such things in a particular field of inquiry.
Zoom out to a ten year period and that perception might be reversed or amplified, and that's even more true at a century-scale.
It's also important to remember that aforementioned issue of one person's progress being another person's regression.
If we look out into the world and assume that progress is an inevitable march forward, we may be let down by the reality that "forward" isn't an objective direction, progress isn't uniformly measured, and what we consider to be beneficial growth might not be included in the metrics used by those doing the marching and measuring.
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