Progress Studies
how do we make progress?
sari and
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...
"Futurism tells us more about the present than the future"
--@mattwridley nails it
Ben Reinhardttwitter.com
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... See more
Tina He • Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs
Slime Mold Time Moldslimemoldtimemold.com
Malthus was wrong.
We make MORE food than ever with LESS land than ever. Because we have one inexhaustible resource—
Human ingenuity.
