Progress Studies

once we had machines to do labor, we could afford to stop treating humans like machines.

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

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Progress is mostly about what does not happen. Progress means a 92-year-old who did not die today, a boy who was not robbed on his way to school, a 12-year girl who is not married to a 30-year old man, etc. What did not happen does not make the news. The best parts of civilization don’t get headlined.

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...