Progress Studies

My current favorite theory about what's gone wrong since the 1970s is that we stopped innovating to maximize performance and started optimizing for energy (and resource) efficiency. Imagine all the cool shit we're gonna build once we have abundant sources of clean energy...

Progress is challenging, not due to a lack of imagination but due to the lack of a blank canvas  Maybe Mars is the blank canvas we need to bring us all together

Consider one more possibility: that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast. Imagine that the evolution of your life or our culture is like a pregnancy: It needs to reach its full term. Just as a child isn’t ready to be born after five months of gestation, the New Earth we’re creat

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anyone who prioritizes the wellbeing of the “future of humanity” in the abstract over the dignity and care of individuals in the present cannot claim that they truly care about people

Our metrics of progress have continuously abstracted: from the tangible bushels of wheat in agricultural economies (with natural physical limits), to industrial-era efficiency metrics (units/hour, machine uptime), to the nebulous productivity measures of knowledge work. Each evolution has moved us further from human-scaled, naturally bounded metric... See more