Progress Studies

how do we make progress?

sari and

Is America Really Running Out of Original Ideas?

The Atlantic theatlantic.com

Johanna

Why did agriculture mechanize and not construction?

Construction Physics constructionphysics.substack.com

Johanna

Fireside Chat: A Plan for Humanity with Bryan Johnson

youtube.com

Juan Orbea

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

Ashley • Tweet

rob hardy

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

Tina He • Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective

sari

I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress

Ted Gioia open.substack.com

andrea

What is Technology? — Letters to a Young Technologist

Saffron Huang letterstoayoungtechnologist.com

Tanuj

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...

Alec Stapp

twitter.com

Johanna

"Almost without exception, everything society has considered a social advance has been prefigured first in some utopian writing." -David L. Cooperrider

rob hardy