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The history of technology and the philosophy of progress.
Have we begun to lose faith in the future? The idea of ‘progress’ didn’t truly exist throughout the majority of human history. Most ages didn’t see history as an upward curve – they saw history as cyclical, full of ups and downs.
This belief only shifted around the 1500s, says Jason Crawford, founder of The Roots of Progress and the author of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. The idea that progress would automatically continue became widespread, until the first World War shattered the illusion that technology would bring peace and cooperation.
Out of this rose a counterculture concern that modernity was a mistake, that progress itself was the problem. But was it? Are we now moving backwards? How can we regain trust in pushing forward?
JASON CRAWFORD: The discourse around progress and humanity has really heated up. Are we on the right track? What are we doing? Do we even know what we’re doing? Maybe modernity was a mistake. Maybe progress itself is the problem. And maybe we should slow it down or stop it or or even go backwards. People got skeptical, fearful, doubtful of the very idea of progress in the 20th century. And we allowed that to slow down progress itself. And that was a mistake. My name is Jason Crawford. I’m the founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute and I’m writing a book called The Techno-humanist Manifesto.
I’m going to rewind to the beginning and I’m going to try to tell the story concisely. Okay. One important thing to know about the idea of progress is that it really didn’t exist through most of human history. say most peoples in most places and times didn’t see history as some kind of an upward curve. They saw history as more cyclical maybe uh full of ups and downs or perhaps they even believed in a declinist narrative a story of the past being a golden age from which we have fallen and perhaps will continue to fall. This really only changed in the west around the 15 and 1600s. At the time there was a big debate actually about whether the modern people of that era could ever surpass the huge achievements of the ancients. They were looking back to the ancient world, the Greeks and the Romans at the ideas that those people discovered, what the Romans could do with concrete, for instance, the coliseum and the aqueducts and even the pyramids of Egypt. Some people at the time had this idea. Those ancients must have been a race of moral and intellectual giants. that all we can do maybe is read the ancient texts and reread them and and try to ring as much meaning and learning as we can out of them but that we could never surpass them, learn new things, invent new things and go forward. Things started to change in the west with the voyages of discovery that started to explore and discover the world and discover entire new continents. Our knowledge was expanding. People started to think that wow maybe we could actually learn new things. Maybe we could create new inventions. If you look at the writings of Francis Bacon, this is an Englishman who lived at the end of the 1500s into the 1600s. And Bacon was one of the people who was arguing no, there’s a lot more to be discovered. And he pointed out all of the things that the ancients didn’t know about. They didn’t know about the Americas, for instance. They didn’t know about gunpowder or the magnetic compass. They didn’t know about the printing press, the Gutenberg movable type printing press, which was invented in the 1400s. Bacon said, “There’s nothing in the art of printing that is not plain and obvious. What if there are a whole lot more things like this out there to be discovered?” And he used all of this as evidence to make his case that essentially progress was possible. that if we used the right method, and he was really advocating for an empirical method in science, which was not the standard at the time, if we do this, and if we get better at doing it and put more effort into systematically collecting and and and trying to explain our observations, we’ll be able to discover new things, we’ll be able to create new inventions, and that ultimately all of this can come together to endow human life with new abilities and powers, I believe, is the phrase that he used. His prediction essentially took 200 years to come true. It wouldn’t come into full fruition until the industrial revolution. So there was a slowly building idea of progress through the 1600s, 1700s as we got advancements in science. We started to get Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. We started to get developments in chemistry, people really identifying elements and you know starting to work out the periodic table. And then with the industrial revolution, certainly by the 19th century, all sorts of new amazing things were getting invented. The railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, the light bulb. By the end of the 19th century, it’s very clear that Bacon was absolutely right. It was a reality coming into people’s homes and transforming everybody’s lives. So, this is a great example of how progress builds on itself. Progress begets progress. The long-term pattern of progress over human history is that progress accelerates. It’s not just a constant percentage, you know, growth each year. Over the long term, that percentage growth rate actually increases. Why does this happen? The fundamental reason is feedback loops. Progress begets progress. When we make progress, sometimes the invention or the new technology or infrastructure is so fundamental that it feeds back into the process of making progress itself. Think about the early industrial revolution. You’ve got coal, you have steam power, you have iron, and you have locomotives. Now, all of these things reinforce each other, right? The locomotives were made out of iron. They were powered by steam engines that were driven by coal. The locomotives were also used to transport coal and to transport iron ore and to transport finished products. Steam power was used in the manufacturing processes that created the products out of iron and so forth. So, all of these things were reinforcing each other. And you can see this even today with all sorts of things. Computers for instance, we invent uh computers and software and now they are used to power everything else in the economy. Computers are even used to design better computers, right? So technologies feed back on into themselves. World population, the better we get at supporting human life, the more population grows. The more people we have, the more brains we have working on all kinds of problems. The more scientists, the more researchers, the more inventors, the more business founders, all of these people working on uh you know all of the different problems of human life. Even I think you know most fundamentally the very idea of progress itself. There’s a a virtuous cycle between actually making progress, believing that we can make progress and then investing in progress motivated on that belief and then making even more of it. And so that is the accelerating pace of progress. Things move faster today even on a percentage basis. So by the end of the 19th century, the beginning very beginning of the 20th century, you got this, you know, very optimistic period. They really saw industrial progress and and technology and invention and science as just this almost unstoppable machine that was just, you know, making things better for everyone. There were definitely objections, you know, don’t get me wrong. there were uh people all through this entire process who who didn’t see it as such a great thing all the way from Rouso in the 1750s who was you know talking about how you know he thought that the progress of morals and society was almost inversely proportional to the progress of arts and sciences and he hadn’t even seen the industrial revolution yet so there was a lot of you know kind of romantic backlash against all of this science and technology and industry but for the most part people saw this as a good thing and I think those uh you know those kind of voices of backlash who were really in the minority for for a very long time. But what happened was people were a little naive about how progress was going and how it was going to go. One, they saw it as kind of automatic and inevitable as this this thing that was just going to definitely unfold and nothing could stop it. They thought that moral progress and social progress would also automatically inevitably unfold and go handinhand with progress in science and technology. By the end of the 19th century, people were very optimistic that this new growth of industry and expansion of trade and communication that all of it was leading to a new era of world peace, an end to war. And of course, they were terribly wrong. The world wars of the 20th century violently shattered those naive illusions. It was clear that technology had not led to an end to war. It had made war all the more terrible and destructive. It had given us machine guns, the chemical weapon, the atomic bomb. We also got a worldwide depression, the rise of totalitarianism around the globe, environmental concerns, right? Concerns about pollution and harms to human health. We ran into concerns about the risks of technology and whether new technology could create uh new safety hazards. You had these very strong countercultural voices, this kind of romantic backlash against the very idea of progress that said, “Look, maybe modernity was a mistake. Maybe progress itself is the problem, and maybe we should slow it down or stop it or or even go backwards.” I think there were some very real questions there. The costs and risks of progress are real. Progress is messy. we’re not going to get anywhere and we’re not going to do humanity any favors by denying that or by claiming that progress is sort of always and everywhere good or that we don’t need to do anything to steer it or to mitigate the problems. We absolutely do. We’re only going to create human life and flourishing and and well-being if we acknowledge the costs and risks of progress and then step up to to actually solve them uh and to move forward. I do think that we’ve seen what I hope is a temporary slowdown in scientific, technological, and economic progress over the last roughly 50 years. I didn’t believe this at first when I started hearing people talking about it, but the more I looked into the history of progress, the more I realized that I think it’s true. We’ve seen a lot of progress, of course, in information technology, in computers and software, there’s really been no slowdown there. But in manufacturing, construction, transportation, energy, all these areas, we’re still using basically the same fundamental technologies that we used in the 1960s and 70s. We’re still using fossil fuel-based electricity as our main power source. We’re still using the internal combustion engine. We’re flying on basically the same kind of planes that we flew on in the 1960s. We’re using the same basic sort of mass manufacturing, you know, factory processes. So, you know, all of this stuff has seen it’s seen improvement certainly it’s seen a lot of incremental improvement, cost improvements, safety improvements, but it hasn’t seen the kind of massive paradigm shifts that we saw in an earlier period. Consider the period from about 1870 to 1920. So, there’s a 50-year period that ended 100 years ago. In that time, we saw roughly by my count five major revolutions in different uh aspects of the economy. One, we got the invention of the electrical industry, the generator, the electric motor, the electric light bulb. Two, we got the invention of the internal combustion engine and uh the things that it made possible, the automobile and the airplane. Three, there was a revolution in information technology with telephone and radio. Four, there was a revolution in synthetic chemistry and we got things like the first synthetic plastics and synthetic fertilizer. And then there was a revolution in public health. We got the germ theory and some of its first applications with better water sanitation, new vaccines and all these things started to uh really decrease mortality rates for the first time. So five revolutions across the board. If I look at the same period 100 years later, so 1970 to 2020, I count one and maybe two revolutions. There was definitely a revolution in information technology and computers and the internet and maybe you could count one in in genetic engineering and biology. But again, those areas like energy, manufacturing, transportation, those just have not seen the same fundamental breakthroughs. I think the lesson of the relative slowdown in progress of the last 50 years is that progress is not automatic or inevitable. It doesn’t just uh barrel along. It depends on us. It depends on our choices. It depends on us believing in progress and wanting to continue to invest in it. Each new generation has to sort of pick up that torch of progress and and carry it forward. If nobody believes in the future, then uh nobody’s going to build it.
The most important thing I believe about the future is that the future can be as well off relative to the present as the present is compared to the past. In 1800, the vast majority of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, uh only a small fraction does. We’ve come such a very long way. We’ve more than doubled, you know, world uh life expectancy at birth. we are so much better compared to people a couple hundred years ago. And yet, you know, if you ask the average person back then, they didn’t think that they were living in extreme poverty. They thought it was normal because it was normal. Not having a refrigerator seems normal in when nobody has one. Not having electricity seems normal when nobody has one. Not having a toilet or indoor plumbing seems normal when nobody has it. We don’t think that we’re living in extreme poverty today. But I think that 200 years from now, the future could be so amazing if we created that those future people will look back on us and saying, “I cannot believe they lived that way.” There are so many things that we, you know, could invent in the future or are inventing right now. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, fusion energy, going back to space and creating a real space economy and settling, you know, the moon and the planets and and one day the stars. All of these things once we have them we will consider them absolutely essential even if today they seem like science fiction
