• If we continue to measure and optimize progress against a narrow set of metrics—metrics focused primarily on economic and military growth, which do not account for everything on which our existence depends—our progress will remain immature and humanity will continue its blind push toward a civilizational cliff edge. 
• The progress narrative is the pervasive idea within our culture that technological innovation, markets, and our institutions of scientific research and education enable and promote a general improvement in human life. This article questions the accuracy, incentives, and risks of this narrative, examining the reasons that the idea has held such a central role in shaping the development of our global civilization.
• it is often driven by an honest desire to see positive change in the world.
• Even if we are living longer, many measures of the quality of life we are living are in decline. Our educational outcomes are in many ways deteriorating, even if access to education is improving. At a global level, despite the common narrative, it is not clear at all that poverty is actually reducing. And the tools of violence have increased vastly in scale of impact since the end of World War II; we now routinely create the kind of weaponry previously reserved for dystopian science fiction. 
• An assessment of these side effects helps us to open our eyes a little more widely, so that we may glimpse a fraction more of the complex reality that is generally omitted from the simplified narrative of progress. 
• Our idea of progress needs to mature. If humanity is to survive and thrive into the distant future, we must transform and elevate the very idea of progress into something truly good and worthy of our shared pursuit and aspiration.
• we must account for the endless ripple of cause-and-effect beyond our immediate goals.
• We must factor both the upsides and the downsides that will continue to impact reality long after the technologists of today are gone. 
• For our idea of progress to be mature, it must take account of its side effects and plan to resolve them in advance—it must internalize its externalities.
• The possibility of a mature kind of progress is both grounded and optimistic. It’s a proposal that the human capacity for both wisdom and ingenuity is far greater than we currently imagine. We are capable of holding the unknowable complexity of reality at the very center of how we take action in the world, and mitigating the consequences of the gaps in our knowledge in advance. This enables a real kind of progress that reduces suffering, builds a better understanding of the universe and our place within it—and increases our chances of both surviving and thriving into the distant future.
• In the modern era, it has become common practice to mine toxins such as lead from deep within the planet and transfer them, via consumer products, into our bloodstream.
• It is humbling to realize that we are unlikely ever to fully appreciate the extent of the effects caused by our overconfidence in our tools and technologies.
• The vast majority of harmful chemicals and technologies of all kinds have not been successfully banned, often despite overwhelming scientific data about their harms; air pollution, for instance, is one of the world’s leading causes of death, and yet very few of the contributing chemicals or producers have been banned.

• In all of the cases noted above, for at least a brief time, we thought that each product was a positive and desirable innovation.^[22] Among both experts and members of the broader public, each one was seen as a beneficial tool for the management of a problem we wanted to solve—as a form of progress. As it turned out, our conception of progress in these cases was naive. Humanity was deficient in broader awareness and understanding of other highly consequential effects of their use. This article suggests that the same phenomenon—naivety of the totality of a technology’s effects—is true more often than not for the technologies that we create. As technological advancement accelerates, we must also factor the joint problems of the increased scale of impact and speed of deployment. The consequences of side effects of new technologies grow as their power and reach increase.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   
• It would be reasonable to suggest, for example, that in the near future we will think of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) associated with domestic carpets and construction materials much as we think of DDT now.
• No matter how much money you have, and no matter where you build your doomsday bunker, you can no longer avoid the diseases of the anthropocene.
• While the intention to control toxic substances in the environment is obviously worthy of support, it’s also important to note that in our evolutionary environment, the amount of these substances was zero. There were no synthetic chemicals in the biosphere that produced intelligent life.
• The market demands the chemical for a purpose, and so the default position is, in effect, that each chemical is safe up to a limit until proven otherwise. A market pressure exists for the safety limit to be above zero.
• We are all exposed together. Legislation fails to be a meaningful lever under such circumstances. These impacts are driving us toward a civilizational death by a thousand cuts.
• Some of the externalities of new technologies we plan for and understand, and some we fail to anticipate in advance. Many hoped that social media would connect people and build digital communities; in the West at least, we took no action to account for how it would also drive political polarization, damage mental health, and present a useful vector for disinformation and psychological warfare.
• In many cases, it has been proven that manufacturers knew of the negative side effects of their technologies long before the issues came to light.^[32] Despite knowing, they either did nothing to mitigate risks, or in some cases actively hid or destroyed evidence of their awareness to avoid punishment.^[33]
• In the past, the tools we made had effects that were bounded by the scale of their power and the breadth of their distribution, and so the consequences of inadequate design and planning impacted the world at a slower rate. Now, we live in a deeply interconnected global civilization in which events in one place have the potential to rapidly and meaningfully impact life elsewhere. A virus emerging in Wuhan can shut down the world. Newly published software is available to anyone on Earth with an Internet connection. In this world, the unforeseen consequences of new technologies can become global long before we have fully understood them.
• The vast majority of the most consequential and difficult problems we face—climate change, nuclear war, species extinction—are the unintended outcomes of humans attempting to solve other problems.
• The problems the world faces today are not caused by our inability to achieve our goals—they are a direct result of our success. They are a result of how destructive we are in the pursuit of our goals.
• By defining progress too narrowly, we can call the positive outcomes in the here and now “progress,” while conveniently ignoring the harms occurring elsewhere. What we call progress is, in many cases, simply the enactment of harms elsewhere in time and space.
• In developmental psychology, an inability to see the world through any lens other than that of our own narrow goals or interests is a trait associated with immaturity.^[
• Applying this framework of maturity, it can be said that our current definition of progress is immature. It fails to view the world from a broader set of perspectives. It harms much that we both value and need. A mature perspective on progress must factor how the changes we make will impact the wider world beyond our immediate intentions, over time.
• Progress worth believing in—progress that is really about increasing betterment, increasing the goodness in the world—must still be able to be considered “good” once it has taken account of all perspectives and externalities.

26 more annotations...