From Progress Studies to Progress [A Ministry of the Future]

Back in July 2019 Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen called for a science of progress in an article in The Atlantic. The article generated a fair response, some in favor, some pushing back – Collison has collected some of the responses here – and people have begun conversing and gathering around the idea of progress studies. The purpose of this post is to take a quick look at what has been going on and a somewhat more considered look at what needs to happen if an interest in progress studies is to yield discernible progress.

A movement begins

Let’s begin with a passage from Collison and Cowen, “We Need a New Science of Progress”:

By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”

Before digging into what Progress Studies would entail, it’s worth noting that we still need a lot of progress. We haven’t yet cured all diseases; we don’t yet know how to solve climate change; we’re still a very long way from enabling most of the world’s population to live as comfortably as the wealthiest people do today; we don’t yet understand how best to predict or mitigate all kinds of natural disasters; we aren’t yet able to travel as cheaply and quickly as we’d like; we could be far better than we are at educating young people. The list of opportunities for improvement is still extremely long.

Note the magnitude of the phenomena they point out: “the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.” And so forth. The words are easy to comprehend, and those two paragraphs are relatively short. But they’re talking about human life on earth, all of it, going forward. They go on:

Those are major challenges. A lot of progress can also come from smaller advances: Thousands of lesser improvements that together build upon one another can together represent an enormous advance for society. For example, if our discoveries and inventions improve standards of living by 1 percent a year, children will by adulthood be 35 percent better off than their parents. If they improve livelihoods at 3 percent a year, those same children will grow up to be about 2.5 times better off.

After some discussion of what Progress Studies would be like, they observe:

An important distinction between our proposed Progress Studies and a lot of existing scholarship is that mere comprehension is not the goal. When anthropologists look at scientists, they’re trying to understand the species. But when viewed through the lens of Progress Studies, the implicit question is how scientists (or funders or evaluators of scientists) should be acting. The success of Progress Studies will come from its ability to identify effective progress-increasing interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions. In that sense, Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.

Given the scope of phenomena entailed in Progress Studies, just what would treatment entail?

Moreover, treatment is of course oriented toward the future. Thinking about the future is tricky. It is one thing for a physician to devise a treatment plan for an ailment that is well studied. It is quite something else to steer a society into a future that is unknown and unknowable. How do you devise and execute a treatment plan for that? I don’t know, but I’m sure that studying what has already happened, however necessary and useful it may be, is not sufficient. Something else is required, something more like fiction. Imagine a hundred futures, each in detail, pick the ones we like, and figure out how to keep on one of those courses.

How do you play chess with the Devil?

* * * * *

Jason Crawford is one of the people who was energized by the article. He hadsbeen blogging about The Roots of Progress since March 2017, and has been working on Progress Studies full-time, aided in part by a November grant from Cowen’s Emergent Ventures fund. While he’s continued blogging he’s also been organizing, and has put together Progress Studies for Young Scholars, which is an online summer program in the history of technology aimed at high school students. He also hangs out at a Progress Studies Slack, started by Jasmine Wang, who also maintains a database of people interested in Progress Studies.

Crawford recently gave an overview of the current state of the emerging progress studies movement:

I have no intention of summarizing it here as I’ve got other fish to fry, but I will note five things:

• Progress Studies, as called for by Collison and Cowen, is about the organization, creation, and dissemination of scholarly research on progress. It calls on a wide range of investigation in the social and behavioral sciences, history, and the humanities.
• However, Progress Studies also has a practical focus. Thus we need a dedicated journal, a general interest magazine, think tanks, and institutionalized sources of funding (foundations).
• Progress Studies encompasses social and cultural factors as well as technology.
• Progress Studies is a long-term effort, requiring decades.
• Progress Studies is not politically partisan and has participants with a variety of ideological commitments.

Note that last point, that Progress Studies does not seem to be particularly partisan. That’s important. It is quite possible that the long-term possibilities for success in America depends on it as partisan politics seems dangerously deadlocked.

Rekindling will and desire, a political problem

In April of this year venture capitalist Marc Andreessen delivered himself of a St. Crispin’s Day speech in the form of an essay, “It's Time to Build”. He started with America’s confused and anemic response to the coronavirus pandemic and went on to a general condemnation of rot at the core of Western society:

You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life. … The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. … And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

Let’s repeat, throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life, that’s the range of Andreessen’s complaint. And the problem? We’re afflicted with inertia, we’ve lost the desire to build, achieve, improve, we’ve got no will. That’s an indictment as abstract as it is broad. Just who is this “we”, each of us individual by individual, each and every one of us, is Andreessen thinking about institutions and organizations, about a collectivity? Yes, I know that Andreessen is speaking figuratively and thus that these questions are beside the point. I ask them as a way of dwelling on and digging into what he’s saying.

If the goal of Progress Studies is to treat as well as understand, is this what we’re talking about treating? Socio-cultural will and desire?

That is not primarily about technology or science. It may, it does, affect our conduct of science and technology. But it is different kind of problem. And if indeed progress is being foregone through lack of will and desire, then studying the practice of science and technology isn’t sufficient to diagnose much less plan and address a treatment program.

Marc Andreessen is hardly the only one singing that song. Ross Douthat has been telling us that the Western world is decadent, not in a moral sense so much as a sense of cultural exhaustion and ennui. Here’s a passage from a recent piece in The New York Times, which derives from his most recent book, The Decadent Society:

Everyone knows that we live in a time of constant acceleration, of vertiginous change, of transformation or looming disaster everywhere you look. Partisans are girding for civil war, robots are coming for our jobs, and the news feels like a multicar pileup every time you fire up Twitter. Our pessimists see crises everywhere; our optimists insist that we’re just anxious because the world is changing faster than our primitive ape-brains can process.

But what if the feeling of acceleration is an illusion, conjured by our expectations of perpetual progress and exaggerated by the distorting filter of the internet? What if we — or at least we in the developed world, in America and Europe and the Pacific Rim — really inhabit an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which stalemate rather than revolution stamps our politics; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private life alike; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, consistently underdeliver?

That’s a political problem, no?

Ezra Klein wrote a response to Andreessen: Why we can’t build. He attributed the problem to a politically fractured nation, nothing that “Andreessen is uncharacteristically underestimating the appetite for building”. There’s plenty of desire in Washington, DC, but it’s tangled up in an institutional maze “in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. […] America’s system of checks and balances requires unusual and even extraordinary levels of consensus to pass legislation.” He argues that our current political polarization makes compromise difficult, and without compromise, little can be built.

Should Progress Studies extend itself to the study of politics? Should its efforts at treatment extend into practical politics? The logic of the argument I have built so far suggests that the answer must be Yes. But I hesitate to say it. Yet Progress Studies cannot do everything and be everywhere. Can it?

Toward a Ministry of the Future

Beyond this I feel that we need a vision for the future. No, correct that, not A vision, but visions, plural. Citing the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, Cowen and Collins acknowledged a role for science fiction in thinking about the future. I’m sure science fiction writers would agree.

Thus we have Samuel R. Delany in The Paris Review, 2011:

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.

More recently, Kim Stanley Robinson in The New Yorker:

… science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling.

Science-fiction writers don’t know anything more about the future than anyone else. Human history is too unpredictable; from this moment, we could descend into a mass-extinction event or rise into an age of general prosperity. Still, if you read science-fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen. Often, science-fiction traces the ramifications of a single postulated change; readers co-create, judging the writers’ plausibility and ingenuity, interrogating their theories of history. Doing this repeatedly is a kind of training. It can help you feel more oriented in the history we’re making now. This radical spread of possibilities, good to bad, which creates such a profound disorientation; this tentative awareness of the emerging next stage—these are also new feelings in our time.

He has a new novel coming out in the fall, The Ministry for the Future. According the publisher’s blurb, the Ministry became established in 2025 for the purpose of advocating “or the world’s future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future.” Having enjoyed Robinson’s cautiously optimistic New York 2140 a great deal – it’s what the title indicates, a portrait of New York City and a world of advanced (though not gee-whiz) technology where the oceans have risen 50 feet – I’m looking forward to this next one.

And here’s what I’m thinking: What would the Progress Studies community have to do to bring about a Ministry of for the Future by 2025? Of course, it is possible that once I’ve read the book, I won’t like Robinson’s proposal. Set that aside. We are going to need something like it and we are going to need it soon. How do we get there? Start researching and writing scenarios that get us from here to there. Don’t worry about how “realistic” or “practical” the scenarios are. As long as they don’t require faster than light travel, the miraculous discovery of cold fusion power, help from super-intelligent aliens (pilots or passengers in the UFOs in those recent videos?), funding from Jeff Bezos or any other supernatural events we’re good.

Many high schools have a model UN program. What would a model Ministry of the Future Program look like. And I don’t mean ten years from now when the real thing is up and running, I mean right now as part of an effort to bring the real thing into existence. How would it relate to the current Progress Studies for Young Scholars program? I know, a working Ministry of the Future is a long way from 10s, 100s, 1000s of imaginative high school students, and more, interacting and dreaming over the internet about the future. But we have to start somewhere.

We have to start somewhere.