An interview with Foresight for their Existential Hope library.
Jason envisages a future marked by dynamic, continuous progress, encapsulated in the concept of protopia. This vision diverges from a traditional notion of a utopia, and instead embraces a reality of constant, incremental improvement. In Jason’s view, progress is a journey, not a destination. It’s a series of small, significant steps that, over time, lead to profound transformations in our world.
Central to Jason’s perspective is the transformative potential of AI, paralleling historical technological leaps like the steam engine and personal computing. He views AI as a catalyst for a new era in human history, one that could redefine societal structures by making high-quality services accessible to a broader demographic. This democratization of resources, akin to services becoming as affordable as a Netflix subscription, could bridge societal gaps. However, Jason emphasizes that this protopian future requires collective agency, responsibility, and a balanced understanding of our role in shaping it. He believes that progress accelerates over time, with each innovation building upon the last, thus speeding up future advancements.
This is a talk I’ve given before. This recording has subtitles in Portuguese for what that’s worth. The question period begins about 31 minutes in.
A 2023 year-in-review piece in which I am briefly quoted:
… 2023 was the year millions of people first used a generative AI program (such as ChatGPT), the next great platform for economic productivity. Though too soon to assess its impact, AI has the potential to become as powerful a change agent as the internal combustion engine, mass manufacturing, electricity, and computing itself, says Jason Crawford, a technology historian and founder of The Roots of Progress. “In the most extreme scenario, which I still think is pretty speculative but not impossible, it is the next big thing in human history – after agriculture and the Industrial Revolution.”
I went on Giuliano Giacaglia’s podcast to discuss stagnation, how progress happens, progress in energy, nuclear energy, progress in agriculture, and where inventions are created.
I think what really made me come around to this point of view is studying the history of progress and basically deciding that it’s not about bits versus atoms. It’s about the fact that we’ve had progress in only bits when we really should have had progress in both bits and atoms at the same time bits, atoms, cells and joules…
We actually can make progress on all fronts at once. And the proof of this is really the late 19th and early 20th century. In the 50 years from 1870 to 1920, just to pick a relatively arbitrary time period, we had, by my count, approximately five major revolutions or big breakthroughs on five fronts.
Timestamps:
]]>I was a guest on the podcast Luminary.fm:
]]>Our conversation with Jason centers around progress and the history of technology. We cover the relationship between human civilization and technology, assorted inventions, and lessons to consider in the development and implementation of future technologies. We also talk about why progress matters, how things went wrong in the 20th century, and Jason’s idea of a new philosophy of progress. Jason has encyclopedic knowledge of diverse topics which made this an especially rich conversation.
We covered the history of progress, the future of economic growth, and the relationship between progress and risks from AI:
Former Prime Movers Lab Futurist Ramez Naam moderates a panel with The Roots of Progress Founder Jason Crawford, Idea Machines Host Ben Reinhardt, and Prime Movers Lab Venture Partner Amy Kruse to discuss the fundamental research that the US needs to invest in and how it will impact the economy.
The conversation is an excerpt from the Prime Movers Lab Breakthrough Science Summit hosted in Scottsdale, Arizona on October 27th, 2022.
As always, see all my talks and interviews here.
]]>I had the pleasure of talking to Jim O’Shaughnessy for the Infinite Loops podcast. We discussed whether humans deserve progress, how to make progress cool, the two types of optimism, and more.
Contents:
Also on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other links on the show page.
]]>I got invited to speak at Learning Night Boston and give an intro to progress studies: why study progress, and why do we need a new philosophy of progress? There are then a few minutes of Q&A. (It was in a bar and the audio quality is poor, sorry.)
]]>I was interviewed by Sean Speer for the Hub Dialogues podcast, they ran it as “Make the future bright again: Jason Crawford on building a new philosophy of progress.” An excerpt:
… when the counterculture arose especially around the ’60s, I think what happened was a lot of people looked at that and they looked at these very techno-optimist folks, who were also very authoritarian. And they rejected the authoritarianism, and they also rejected the notion that we even wanted progress. They said, “If this is progress, if this is what progress consists of, if it consists of individuals losing autonomy, then we don’t want the authoritarianism and we don’t want the progress, let’s just throw all of it out.” There was this false dichotomy between technological and industrial progress, on the one hand, and individualism and autonomy on the other hand. One of the great tragedies of the 20th century is that things were set up that way, such that if you wanted to push back against authoritarianism, you were pushing back against progress as well.
Listen or read the transcript at the show page.
]]>My talk at Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend 2022 (bad audio quality, sorry).
Progress has become invisible: the infrastructure that makes our way of life possible is mostly hidden; the problems that industrial civilization has solved are now forgotten. To have a bold vision of the future we need to remember the past and understand the present.
Interview with Elle Griffin of The Post (video that I can’t embed here, with transcript). “The history, present, and future of work and leisure…. how work has changed over the last 200 years, the decline in working hours and the rise of leisure hours, the shift from blue-collar to white-collar work, the dream of liking what you do, how much we work today, and where we go from here.”
The content is similar to “Why didn’t we get the four-hour workday?,” with a few asides on other topics, such as “consumerism.”
ChatGPT, self-driving cars, and other thoughts on AI. Also, Amazon.
A talk I gave in June 2022, video was just published. This is basically a spoken version of my article “We need a new philosophy of progress”:
Enlightenment thinkers were tremendously optimistic about the potential for human progress—not only in science and technology but also in morality and society. This optimism lasted through the 19th century, but in the 20th century, after the World Wars, it gave way to fear, skepticism, and distrust. Now, in the 21st century, this outlook is worsening. We need a new way forward: a new philosophy of progress. What events and ideas challenged human progress? How can we put it back on a sound foundation? And how can we establish a positive, ambitious vision for the future?
As always, find all my talks and interviews on the speaking page of this site.
]]>Jason Feifer, one of the creators of Pessimists Archive, did a podcast episode on his show Build for Tomorrow about what people in 1923 thought about the year 2023:
… there was one, one prediction, one prediction that absolutely dominated the conversation, one prediction from one man that led to a national debate, and that prediction was this. In the year 2023, electricity will have made the world so efficient and so prosperous that people will only need to work four hours a day.
I’m one of two guests in this episode, discussing how this did and didn’t come true and why. Listen or read the transcript on the show page.
]]>We talk about the need to study progress, tackle the question of whether progress makes humans any happier, optimism and solutionism, and some more.
Timestamps:
Also on Apple, Spotify, and Substack.
On optimism, progress in technology, drivers of stagnation, and how to think about innovation.
Here’s a teaser, about William Crookes and his “alarmism” about the fertilizer crisis (which I covered in depth in the MIT Tech Review). Show page, Apple podcasts.
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