Theories abound as to why modern human progress seems
stagnant. Here’s
a book by Tyler Cowen arguing that we should place a higher value on future
generations than we currently do. Here’s a
blog post by Scott Alexander arguing that human progress of all kinds is
subject to diminishing returns. There are those who believe that America is
less innovative today as a result of additional government regulations that
discourage innovation. There are others who believe that America lacks progress
specifically because the US government doesn’t invest heavily enough in new
technologies. Some feel that our lack of progress is a result of insufficient
virtue; others feel that our puritanical hang-ups are precisely what prevents
us from flourishing as a cosmopolitan society. Perhaps there is a grain of
truth in all of these explanations. Perhaps each theory is correct within a
certain sphere or in a certain manner of speaking.
So, we’re in no short supply of two-penny theories about why
there isn’t more human progress out there. Even so, I’d like to provide an
explanation of my own.
Frank Zappa once said, “Without deviation from the norm,
progress is not possible.” One way of thinking about progress involves noting
that every invention is a divergence from a prior norm. For example, the advent
of interchangeable parts was a divergence from the prior norm that all parts be
tailor-made and hand-made for the specific product at the specific time. The
advent of the internal combustion engine was a divergence from the prior norm
that powerful engines must be steam-powered. The advent of air travel was a
divergence from a prior norm of land and sea travel. Every new thing is new
precisely because it hasn’t existed before. It’s a challenge to the existing
way of doing things.
Not every innovation is a good one, of course. Trans fats
are universally understood to be harmful to the human body, and confer no
culinary benefits that we did not already gain from preexisting saturated and
unsaturated fat food ingredients. The widespread adoption of the use of trans
fats by the food industry was a mistake, a step in the wrong direction. We
expect new food innovations to involve supply food of better quality, and/or in
higher quantities, and/or at lower costs, with no significant nutritional
downsides. Clearly, in the case of trans fats, that’s not what happened. The
food industry adopted the wrong kind of innovation, making us all worse off.
This presents us with a relatively clear-cut model for
progress. Progress must be the adoption of new ideas, inventions, and methods
that tend to improve the quality of human life both in the long and short run.
Regress, therefore, must be the adoption of new ideas, inventions, and methods
that tend to reduce the quality of human life in the short and long run. It’s
possible for something to improve life in the short run at the expense of our
long-run quality of life, or for something to reduce our quality of life in the
short run while making things much better in the long run. In those cases, we’d
have to evaluate the relative benefits and determine whether what we’ve seen is
progress or regress. Assuming we can make such an evaluation, though, we can
say that the adoption of any new idea, invention, or method will tend to be an
example of either progress or regress.
With that in mind, consider the issues being tackled by
people like Cowen and Alexander. Their point is not that society is regressing,
but simply that it is not progressing, or not progressing as fast as we would
hope, considering the arc of human history. In other words, it’s not that society
is adopting the wrong new ideas, it’s that they aren’t coming up with enough
right new ideas. In truth, this suggests that there aren’t very many new ideas
out there; we’re not being inundated by bad ideas, but we’re not progressing
much, either.
Perhaps, therefore, there is a fundamental lack of novelty
in the world? This would be a surprising outcome, considering first that the
human population is larger and more interconnected than at any other time in
history, and second that society is more individualistic than ever before.
Wouldn’t we expect, in such a world, that society would be full of new ideas
and people pursuing them?
Indeed, we most certainly do not come away with the impression that people aren’t innovating
when we spend any time at, say GitHub, where programmers and students are
cooperatively innovating new technical methods, insights, and software technologies
almost constantly. It’s also not the impression we get when we dive deep into
the world of YouTube videos, featuring people who make all kinds of gadgets out
of common household objects, compose and perform all manner of new music,
create visual arts in stunning time-lapse, capture heroic athletic feats with
GoPro cameras strapped to their abdomens, and so on.
In light of all this, my conclusion is that people are innovating out there, but their
innovations aren’t being widely adopted. People in general aren’t looking to
change things in their own lives. We’re not looking for new kinds of music to
listen to – by which I mean totally new
sounds. We want the new songs to sound roughly like the old songs. We’re
not looking for radically new forms of transportation, as past societies
dreamed of air travel. We’re looking for our new travel innovations to be a lot
like the old ones. We don’t want the technologies of the future to put
employees out of work, we want the same employees to keep their same jobs, but
just somehow making use of new technologies. We don’t want to create a new kind
of football, we just want a better-quality version of the existing game of
football. We don’t want to live in a new kind of house, we want to live in a
house that fits in well with the other homes on our street, but maybe with
nicer doorknobs.
This might even explain the rise of Silicon Valley and the
various Internets-of-Smart-Things. A video doorknob doesn’t offer us anything
that a good old-fashioned peephole doesn’t already give us. It enables us to
have roughly the same experience we had before. The new song sounds roughly
like the old song. I remember when tablets first hit the market. I remember laughing
to myself, “So it’s a smart phone that cannot make a phone call.” The
technologies we’re inventing today are not functionally different from the old
technologies, in terms of a means-ends framework. They are, however,
beautifully presented.
If society is to progress at rates similar to what we saw
during the Industrial Revolutions or the first half of the 20th
Century, we’ll have to become more comfortable with expressions of novelty. We’ll
have to be more open to divergent musical sounds and artistic expression that
bears no resemblance to the great works of the past. We’ll have to be more
receptive to technologies that completely change our existing patterns of
behavior by offering us something more than a coffee maker with internet
connectivity, but an entirely new method of producing beverages from coffee
beans. Better yet, we ought to be open to the possibility that other beans
heretofore not roasted and brewed might also produce good breakfast beverages. We’ll
have to open to the idea that, say, Christmas can still be Christmas without a
tree or some house lights – not that those things are bad, but just that there
might be a way of celebrating Christmas that we haven’t even thought of yet.
If we want to do better as a species, then we have to be
open to what better might look like. As enamored with your own life as you
might be, you might be better off by changing
radically. If you’re not at least open to considering a radical change,
then you’re in no position to lament a lack of human progress.
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