Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?
Humans barely live to 100 years, and &quot;each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” I don&#x27;t think we need to invent further volatility than what producing new children already does.<p>Every advocate of Progress I&#x27;ve read or spoken to sees it as managing and extracting value from other people - and not establishing a basic stability from which others can be free to actualize and thrive. Even basic income is really about putting the managers of such a scheme at the centre of it, and it&#x27;s to the point where even the very word &#x27;free&#x27; is triggering. I&#x27;d argue that belief in Progress is not a benevolent, charitable, or altruistic sentiment.<p>It&#x27;s said that change is the only constant, and I can sympathize with the idea that people imagine by aligning themselves to change for its own sake, they percieve themselves as aligning to the most powerful force in the universe, and are therefore on the right side of history. But the archeological record shows humans have made physical structures that are several thousands of years old, and as a human value, <i>stability</i> has a very long track record. So much so that the artifacts of stability outlast human culture&#x27;s ability to remember them through periods of constant change, which suggests to me that what progress really reduces to is just leveraging chaos in a single lifetime for ephermeral, symbolic, materialist power.<p>The axiom that history itself is a force of progress is a pretty big leap of faith, and I think the iterated logic of that idea is designed to unmoor people from a stabilizing belief in the existence of truth. In that sense, I would say Crawford and Cowen are just iterating the ideology of that axiom, and people who place themselves at the centre of solutions for &#x27;all humanity&#x27; are really just expressing an infinite will to power <i>over</i> all of humanity.  Progress isn&#x27;t a thing, it&#x27;s the artifact of an ideology.<p>When someone tells you they represent change, what they tend to mean is they&#x27;re here to take your stuff, and they&#x27;ve already moralized it to themselves, regardless of what you might believe. We should absolutely rethink the meaning of progress, but we should start with whether it is desirable at all, how much, compared to what, at what cost, and whether to build on our inheritance of stability, or continue to destroy it for the temporary feelings of power the destruction provides. There are thoughtful ways to engage this, if only we can get past merely litigating ideas and start actually using them to navigate and locate truth.