The moment every civilization fears: the growth plateau

The discourse around progress and humanity has really heated up

Are we on the right track? What are we doing? Do we even know what we're doing? Maybe modernity was a mistake. Maybe progress itself is the problem

And maybe we should slow it down or stop it or even go backwards

People got skeptical, fearful, doubtful of the very idea of progress in the 20th century

And we allowed that to slow down progress itself. And that was a mistake

My name is Jason Crawford. I'm the founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute

and I'm writing a book called The Technohumanist Manifesto. I'm going to rewind to the beginning, and I'm going to try to tell the story concisely

Okay. One important thing to know about the idea of progress is that it really didn't exist through most of human history

I'd say most peoples in most places and times didn't see history as some kind of an upward curve

They saw history as more cyclical, maybe, full of ups and downs

Or perhaps they even believed in a declinist narrative, a story of the past being a golden age from which we have fallen and perhaps will continue to fall

This really only changed in the West around the 15th, 1600s. At the time, there was a big debate, actually, about whether the modern people of that era could ever surpass the huge achievements of the ancients

They were looking back to the ancient world, the Greeks and the Romans, at the ideas that those people discovered

What the Romans could do with concrete, for instance. The Colosseum and the aqueducts and even the pyramids of Egypt

Some people at the time had this idea. Those ancients must have been a race of moral and intellectual giants

that all we can do maybe is read the ancient texts and reread them

and try to wring as much meaning and learning as we can out of them, but that we could never surpass them, learn new things, invent new things, and go forward

Things started to change in the West with the voyages of discovery

that started to explore and discover the world and discover entire new continents

Our knowledge was expanding. People started to think that, wow, maybe we could actually learn new things

Maybe we could create new inventions. if you look at the writings of Francis Bacon

This is an Englishman who lived at the end of the 1500s, into the 1600s

And Bacon was one of the people who was arguing, no, there's a lot more to be discovered

And he pointed out all of the things that the ancients didn't know about

They didn't know about the Americas, for instance. They didn't know about gunpowder or the magnetic compass

They didn't know about the printing press, the Gutenberg movable type printing press

which was invented in the 1400s. Bacon said, there's nothing in the art of printing that is not plain and obvious

What if there are a whole lot more things like this out there to be discovered? And he used all of this as evidence to make his case that essentially progress was possible

That if we used the right method, and he was really advocating for an empirical method in science

which was not the standard at the time. If we do this, and if we get better at doing it and put more effort into systematically collecting

and trying to explain our observations, we'll be able to discover new things

will be able to create new inventions, and that ultimately all of this can come together to endow human life with new abilities and powers I believe is the phrase that he used His prediction essentially took 200 years to come true

It wouldn't come into full fruition until the Industrial Revolution. So there was a slowly building idea of progress through the 1600s, 1700s

As we got advancements in science, we started to get Newton's theory of universal gravitation

We started to get developments in chemistry, people really identifying elements and starting to work out the periodic table

And then with the Industrial Revolution, certainly by the 19th century, all sorts of new amazing things were getting invented

The railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, the light bulb. By the end of the 19th century, it's very clear that Bacon was absolutely right

It was a reality coming into people's homes and transforming everybody's lives

So this is a great example of how progress builds on itself. Progress begets progress

The long-term pattern of progress over human history is that progress accelerates. It's not

just a constant percentage growth each year. Over the long term, that percentage growth rate

actually increases. Why does this happen? The fundamental reason is feedback loops

Progress begets progress. When we make progress, sometimes the invention or the new technology or

infrastructure is so fundamental that it feeds back into the process of making progress itself

Think about the early industrial revolution. You've got coal, you have steam power, you have iron

and you have locomotives. Now, all of these things reinforce each other, right? The locomotives were

made out of iron. They were powered by steam engines that were driven by coal. The locomotives

were also used to transport coal and to transport iron ore and to transport finished products

Steam power was used in the manufacturing processes that created the products out of iron

and so forth. So all of these things were reinforcing each other. And you can see this

even today with all sorts of things. Computers, for instance, we invent computers and software

and now they are used to power everything else in the economy. Computers are even used to design

better computers, right? So technologies feed back on into themselves. World population

the better we get at supporting human life, the more population grows. The more people we have

the more brains we have working on all kinds of problems. The more scientists, the more researchers

the more inventors, the more business founders, all of these people working on all of the

different problems of human life. Even, I think, most fundamentally, the very idea of progress

itself. There's a virtuous cycle between actually making progress, believing that we can make

progress, and then investing in progress motivated on that belief, and then making even more of it

And so that is the accelerating pace of progress. Things move faster today, even on a percentage

basis. So by the end of the 19th century, the beginning, very beginning of the 20th century

you got this very optimistic period. They really saw industrial progress and technology and

invention and science as just this almost unstoppable machine that was just, you know

making things better for everyone. There were definitely objections. You know, don't get me

wrong. There were people all through this entire process who didn't see it as such a great thing

All the way from Rousseau in the 1750s who was talking about how he thought that the progress of morals in society was almost inversely proportional to the progress of arts and sciences And he hadn even seen the Industrial Revolution yet So there was a lot of you know kind of romantic backlash against all of this science and technology

and industry. But for the most part, people saw this as a good thing. And I think those

you know, those kind of voices of backlash were really in the minority for a very long time

But what happened was people were a little naive about how progress was going and how it was going

to go. One, they saw it as kind of automatic and inevitable as this thing that was just going to

definitely unfold and nothing could stop it. They thought that moral progress and social progress

would also automatically, inevitably unfold and go hand in hand with progress in science and

technology. By the end of the 19th century, people were very optimistic that this new growth of

industry and expansion of trade and communication, that all of it was leading to a new era of world

peace, an end to war. And of course, they were terribly wrong. The world wars of the 20th century

violently shattered those naive illusions. It was clear that technology had not led to an end to war

It had made war all the more terrible and destructive. It had given us machine guns

the chemical weapon, the atomic bomb. We also got a worldwide depression, the rise of totalitarianism

around the globe, environmental concerns, concerns about pollution and harms to human health

We ran into concerns about the risks of technology and whether new technology could create new safety hazards

You had these very strong countercultural voices, this kind of romantic backlash against the very idea of progress

that said, look, maybe modernity was a mistake. Maybe progress itself is the problem

And maybe we should slow it down or stop it or even go backwards

I think there were some very real questions there. The costs and risks of progress are real

Progress is messy. We're not going to get anywhere and we're not going to do humanity any favors by denying that

or by claiming that progress is sort of always and everywhere good

or that we don't need to do anything to steer it or to mitigate the problems. We absolutely do

We're only going to create human life and flourishing and well-being if we acknowledge the costs and risks of progress

and then step up to actually solve them and to move forward

I do think that we've seen what I hope is a temporary slowdown in scientific, technological, and economic progress over the last roughly 50 years

I didn't believe this at first when I started hearing people talking about it, but the more I looked into the history of progress, the more I realized that I think it's true

We've seen a lot of progress, of course, in information technology, in computers and software

There's really been no slowdown there. But in manufacturing, construction, transportation, energy

all these areas were still using basically the same fundamental technologies that we used in the 1960s and 70s

We're still using fossil fuel-based electricity as our main power source. We're still using the internal combustion engine

We're flying on basically the same kind of planes that we flew on in the 1960s

We're using the same basic sort of mass manufacturing, you know, factory processes

So, you know, all of this stuff has seen, it's seen improvements, certainly

It's seen a lot of incremental improvement, cost improvements, safety improvements. But it hasn't seen the kind of massive paradigm shifts that we saw in an earlier period

Consider the period from about 1870 to 1920 So there a 50 period that ended 100 years ago In that time we saw roughly by my count five major revolutions in different aspects of the economy One we got the invention

of the electrical industry, the generator, the electric motor, the electric light bulb. Two

we got the invention of the internal combustion engine and the things that it made possible

the automobile and the airplane. Three, there was a revolution in information technology with

telephone and radio. Four, there was a revolution in synthetic chemistry and we got things like the

first synthetic plastics and synthetic fertilizer. And then there was a revolution in public health

We got the germ theory and some of its first applications with a better water sanitation

new vaccines, and all these things started to really decrease mortality rates for the first time

So five revolutions across the board. If I look at the same period 100 years later, so 1970 to 2020

I count one and maybe two revolutions. There was definitely a revolution in information technology and computers and the internet. And maybe you could count one in genetic engineering and biology. But again, those areas like energy, manufacturing, transportation, those just have not seen the same fundamental breakthroughs

I think the lesson of the relative slowdown in progress of the last 50 years is that progress is not automatic or inevitable

It doesn't just barrel along. It depends on us. It depends on our choices. It depends on us believing in progress and wanting to continue to invest in it

Each new generation has to pick up that torch of progress and carry it forward

If nobody believes in the future, then nobody's going to build it. The most important thing I believe about the future is that the future can be as well off

relative to the present as the present is compared to the past. In 1800, the vast majority of the world lived in extreme poverty

Today, only a small fraction does. We've come such a very long way

We've more than doubled world life expectancy at birth. We are so much better compared to people a couple hundred years ago

And yet, you know, if you ask the average person back then, they didn't think that they were living in extreme poverty

They thought it was normal because it was normal. Not having a refrigerator seems normal when nobody has one

Not having electricity seems normal when nobody has one. Not having a toilet or indoor plumbing seems normal when nobody has it

We don't think that we're living in extreme poverty today. But I think that 200 years from now, the future could be so amazing if we create it

that those future people will look back on us and saying, I cannot believe they lived that way. There are so many things that we could invent in the future

or are inventing right now. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, fusion energy, going back to space and creating a real space economy and settling the moon and the planets

and one day the stars. All of these things, once we have them, we will consider them absolutely

essential, even if today they seem like science fiction