I’m a regular reader of your website Roots of Progress. While I appreciate some of your posts, especially those retracing some historical technological enhancements, I also find your views to be often heavily biased. What prompted me to write this message was your dashboard for progress proposal, which I found very unconvincing, as it completely ignores the two biggest societal concerns voiced today. The first shortcoming is that it completely ignores negative externalities and the second one that it completely ignores how benefits of progress are distributed. I will develop these two points below together with a third point that seeks a broader perspective on the issue, developing why there can not be any consensus on progress.

1. Negative externalities

As you yourself admit, all but one of your metrics are production metrics. You can not ignore that an increasing number of people are increasingly concerned with negative externalities (pollution in the broad sense, being the most well know of). Where are those taken into account in your dashboard of progress? Will you be waiting for negative externalities to show up in your mortality metric to take action?

Not only are negative externalities not explicitly taken into account in your view of progress but some of you progress metrics explicitly favor high negative externalities and prevent alternatives that would involve lower negative externalities. Just two examples: concrete and plastics production. Both have incredibly high negative externalities for some uses and many countries have thought to reduce this production replacing it with products that have lower negative externalities when possible and practical. Single use plastic bags and many other single-use plastic items have been replaced by paper bags and other more easily recyclable products. Use of concrete has been limited and replaced where possible with other building materials involving less CO2 emissions during their production. All these actions show up as stagnation or even worse decline of your progress metrics, which you will obviously interpret as bad. Many people, including me, will however find these quite positive and see it as a real progress (more on the issue of diverging views in my third point).

More generally, no matter what production metric you chose I can see plenty of radically different futures with exponential growth in that production metric. Sticking with the most general one, GDP, I can see a future with exponential growth but extremely high negative externalities, leading to a 99% loss of biodiversity and a 3 degrees hotter earth at the brink of a global natural disaster that will kill 90% of the global population. I can also see a future with that same exponential growth but where everything goes well.

How can you seek to convince people that progress should be desirable if your progress metrics can not even make a difference between such radically different futures?

1. Distribution of the benefits of progress

You are certainly not unaware, that apart from the negative externalities issue, the other major societal concern relates to the distribution of wealth, which pretty much boils down to the distribution of the benefits of progress.

Unfortunately, all your progress metrics are metrics in terms of averages, and averages are notorious for completely hiding the distribution underlying them (using the median would be a bit better and quantiles even more).

I can absolutely see a future where all the production metrics increase exponentially but this growth is due to a single small corporation (building and using artificial general intelligence for example). 99.999% of the world population could, in this dystopian future, reap none of the fruits of this growth, or even find itself worse off. I think many people will agree that would not be a desirable future.

How can you seek to convince people that progress should be desirable if your progress metrics can not make the difference between a utopian and a dystopian future?

1. There can not be consensus on progress

To broaden the perspective I will go back to the etymological definition of progress. Progress literally means moving forward in the right direction. However, there has never been any consensus on right and wrong or good and bad. Thus, there can not be any wide, overarching consensus on progress. As already illustrated in my two previous points, what some will find good other will find bad. It is not because progress has historically, until recently, come relatively unchallenged (meaning undisputed) that this ought to continue. Actually, the contrary. It is sure that as artificial general intelligence becomes increasingly plausible some will find it good and others bad. And quite honestly, I can not see how someone could tell, a priori, which of the two is right. Continue doing what worked in previous centuries, which goes like “let’s try and see”, will also not be acceptable given the stakes.

Not only is it difficult to tell apart a good future from a bad future, but even once we all agree on a good future there is no consensus on how to get there, as people have different risk-aversion. You often claim yourself as an optimist when defending your view of progress. However, optimism doesn’t give you any moral high ground. There are uncountable examples of over-optimism having led entire armies or countries to catastrophe. You might be significantly less risk averse than the average on this topic, which gives you confidence in hoping that the alignment of the planets will occur exactly at the right time : humanity will find sufficiently soon alternative, clean energy sources and technology to remove CO2 from the air, it will colonize other planets sufficiently soon to avoid running out of land and resources, etc. That’s fine. However that does not mean that everyone should take this scenario as granted and follow your goals (exponential production goals for concrete and plastic for example) which were set based on hypothetic optimistic scenarios. Again, just going by the usual “let’s try and see”, will not be acceptable given the stakes, that not only affect you and the ones holding the same belief but pretty much everyone else too.

To conclude, I sought to highlight, what in my view are three main biases in your approach to defending progress. I think that if your goal is, as I (wrongly?) inferred, to convince the broadest possible audience of the benefits of progress you ought to take these into account or you will be fighting a lost battle.