Progress Studies
how do we make progress?
sari and
Progress Studies
World's Hardest Problems
Sustainability + Human Development Is the food we eat scalable, sustainable, healthy, nutritious and tasty? Is the air we breathe clean? Is the water we drink pure? Is there a way to produce energy that is relatively abundant, cheap and clean? Is there a way to reverse or mitigate climate chan...
docs.google.com
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...
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
