# Progress Towards What?: Our ideas about progress need to evolve

> R.B. Griggs argues that the dominant American story of progress, anchored in the 1870-1970 "miracle century" described by economist Robert J. Gordon and in the resulting stagnation narrative, is a backward-looking theory that conflates growth with progress. He offers four corrections: progress is more than measurements, progress looks forward, progress must include the "world of beings" (how technology changes humans) alongside the worlds of atoms and bits, and progress requires defining a better future. All four reduce to one question, "Progress towards what?", which Griggs insists is philosophical and value-laden rather than merely technological.

- Author: R.B. Griggs
- Published: 2023-12-18
- Genre: essay
- Original: https://www.techforlife.com/p/progress-towards-what
- This edition: https://rbgriggs.com/essays/progress-towards-what
- License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
- Cite as: Griggs, R.B. (2023). "Progress Towards What?." Tech for Life. https://www.techforlife.com/p/progress-towards-what. AI-readable edition: https://rbgriggs.com/essays/progress-towards-what

## Thesis

Growth without a goal is not progress; because technology can tell us what we can do but not what we ought to do, a useful idea of progress must define the future worth progressing towards.

## The argument in brief

1. **The standard story.** Someone born in 1890 would, by 1970, have seen cars, flight, electricity, antibiotics, television, atomic weapons and the moon landing. Since 1970, by contrast, daily life looks largely the same, and promised futures (jetpacks, flying cars, robot butlers) never arrived.
2. **Gordon's explanation.** Griggs credits economist Robert J. Gordon's *The Rise and Fall of American Growth* with the best telling: the "great inventions" drove a one-time "miracle century" (1870-1970) that cannot be repeated.
3. **The problem.** Griggs finds Gordon persuasive as history but argues that the story has leaked into our ideas of progress itself, producing a uniquely American myth of progress. He cites Freddie deBoer's advice to accept the "Forever Now" as an example of the resulting resignation, and calls it a theory of progress "frozen in time" that "has no imagination."
4. **Defining progress.** Any definition needs a future state defined as "better" and a way to measure approach to it. Because reality is complex, the best we can do is iterate: "let's make some progress about progress."
5. **Four corrections.** Progress is more than measurements; progress looks forward; progress includes the world of beings; progress defines a better future.
6. **The upshot.** Asking "progress towards what?" forces engagement with religion, politics and values, the realms usually excluded from talk about technology and progress.

## Key claims

- Griggs argues that the miracle century could only be called miraculous in retrospect; no goal was set in advance, and whether things felt better would have depended on when one asked (Prohibition, the Depression, the aftermath of World War II).
- "Growth without a goal is not progress." A measurement-based progress cannot weigh questions such as how much agency to cede to AI in pursuit of rising incomes.
- Progress happens when today's open problems become yesterday's solved problems, so asking whether one would trade indoor plumbing for a smartphone is "an absurd" question.
- Against the stagnation view, captured in the Peter Thiel line Griggs quotes about being promised flying cars, Griggs argues that the significance of the digital lies in the new worlds it opens, not its physical impact: "Bits can do things atoms can only dream of."
- Failing to match an earlier era's impact is not an indictment of progress; the miracle century itself did not match the invention of fire.
- Digital innovation has few physical constraints, so its main constraint is human imagination and the human capacity to coordinate, which may be "the ultimate limiting factor." Crypto illustrates this: built on real mathematical breakthroughs, it was used mostly for fraud, scams and speculation.
- Digital technology is reshaping humans so fast that today's grandparents may have more in common with people raised in the 1890s than with their screen-raised grandchildren (a point Griggs notes Anton Barba-Kay also makes in *The Web of Our Own Making*).
- For some generations the digital world feels most "real," and navigating it employs values very different from those traditional ideas of progress assume.
- "Technology expands the possibilites of what we *can* do, but it cannot tell us what we *ought* to do."

## What is distinctive about this view

Debates about progress usually split between those who measure gains in growth and living standards and stagnation theorists who say those gains have stalled. Griggs rejects the shared assumption that progress is something measured by material change. Adding the "world of beings" to atoms and bits, he turns the debate from "how much?" to "toward what?", which recasts progress as a normative and philosophical question rather than an economic one.

## Objections and replies

- **"The material record speaks for itself; modern innovation really is smaller."** Griggs accepts Gordon's history but denies that cross-era comparisons of impact measure progress, since true progress transforms the era so much that impacts become hard to compare.
- **"Digital technology has not changed physical life, so it is not real progress."** Griggs replies that this gets progress "exactly backwards": the significance of bits lies in the new domains they open, including their effects on human beings.
- **"Defining a 'better future' is impossible or absurd."** Griggs acknowledges that it raises "impossible questions," but argues that it seems absurd only because questions of value are habitually excluded from discussions of technology.

## Key concepts

- **Progress towards what?**: Griggs's central question for any claim of progress. It insists that progress must name a better future state and a way to measure movement toward it, rather than simply counting more of something or comparing the present to the past.
- **Myth of progress (American)**: Griggs's term for the 20th-century American assumption that ever-rising incomes and living standards were a birthright, a progress "justified by its own indisputable momentum" and never questioned. Its failure to continue partly explains recent generations' disillusionment.
- **Circular definition of progress**: The definition that results when progress is conflated with growth: progress means making the measurements go up, and we know we are progressing when the measurements go up. Griggs argues it can say nothing about what lies outside its measurements, including trade-offs involving those measurements.
- **World of beings**: Griggs's addition to the familiar distinction between the "world of atoms" (physical reality) and the "world of bits" (digital technology): the world of human beings themselves, which technology also transforms. Any notion of progress that cannot account for it is, he says, "by definition incomplete."

## Questions this essay answers

### Has technological progress stagnated since 1970?
In "Progress Towards What?" (2023), R.B. Griggs grants Robert J. Gordon's account that the 1870-1970 "miracle century" of great inventions was unique, but argues that treating it as the yardstick for progress is a mistake. That yardstick conflates growth with progress, looks backward rather than forward, and ignores how digital technology opens new worlds and transforms human beings.

### What does R.B. Griggs mean by "progress towards what?"
In "Progress Towards What?," R.B. Griggs argues that any definition of progress needs a future state defined as better and a way to measure approach to it. Merely making measurements go up is circular. Asking "progress towards what?" forces us to define the future worth building, a question he calls inherently philosophical.

### What is the "world of beings"?
R.B. Griggs introduces the "world of beings" in "Progress Towards What?" as a third domain alongside the "world of atoms" and the "world of bits." Technology changes humans themselves, their attention, identities and values, especially as digital life becomes what feels "real" to some generations. Griggs argues that any notion of progress that ignores this world is incomplete.

### Why does R.B. Griggs say growth is not the same as progress?
In "Progress Towards What?," R.B. Griggs argues that "growth without a goal is not progress." A growth-based definition can only speak about what it measures, so it cannot evaluate trade-offs such as how much human agency to cede to AI in exchange for higher incomes.

### Is the smartphone versus indoor plumbing comparison fair?
R.B. Griggs calls it absurd in "Progress Towards What?" because progress means solved problems stop needing attention, freeing us to tackle bigger ones. In a footnote, however, he notes wryly that some generations may in fact choose smartphones over indoor plumbing, which "may tell us something about progress."

## Connections to other essays

- [The Case for (Im)material Progress](/essays/the-case-for-immaterial-progress) returns to the question of whether things are better, and what material progress may have cost.
- [Calling All Philosophers...](/essays/calling-all-philosophers) supplies the argument, linked from this essay, that technology questions are inherently philosophical.
- [Homo Digitalis](/essays/homo-digitalis) develops the idea that digital immersion is changing human nature, the "world of beings."
- [What Does a Good Digital Life Look Like?](/essays/what-does-a-good-digital-life-look) takes up what a better future with digital technology could mean in practice.

## Original text

The full text of the essay as published by R.B. Griggs.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jtp2!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fabd1792a-982d-416f-b357-b5dddae5447f_1792x1024.webp)

Most stories about growth and progress go something like this:

Imagine it is 1890, and you have just been born into a comfortable middle-class home somewhere in America.

Consider what your world is like. Your days are lit by candles and sunlight. Steam and horses are the engines of transportation. Communication is as fast as the letters you send through the mail. Heat comes only from fire and water from an outdoor pump. Arduous manual labor is the norm, and your siblings often work the same 60-hour week as your parents do. Books are read for entertainment. Books!

Now imagine yourself in 1970. Somehow you survived rampant infant mortality and infectious disease to live a long and fulfilling life. Consider everything that you’ve witnessed, all in the span of a single lifetime: You’ve seen the rise of cars, flight, mass communication, digital computing, electric everything, antibiotics, television, and atomic weapons. You’ve seen man land on the moon. Everything about your world has been transformed. To look back from 1970, that world of 1890 is one that you no longer recognize. 

This period was the _golden age of progress_. It was the time when we were relentless innovators—unencumbered by bureaucracy, tireless in our pursuit of progress, and fearless in our experimentation. With our science and technology we transformed the world. Nothing was safe from our spirit of invention.

But then something changed. To look back from our present day, the world of 1970 doesn’t look so different. It’s largely recognizable (okay not the hair). We still have the same screens, cars, food, clothes, and buildings. Sure, these things have all improved dramatically, but in principle they work the same way. 

Meanwhile, very few of the futuristic innovations predicted during the golden age of progress have come to pass. There are no jetpacks. No one’s cars are flying. We don’t even have robot butlers. In fact, some things have gotten worse. We have much less nuclear power, exactly when we could use it most. We even lost the supersonic jet.

Yes, we may have invented the internet and all manner of digital devices, but our day-to-day lives remain largely unchanged. The sad reality is that the impact of our modern innovations pales in comparison to the transformations of the previous age. If forced to choose, would you really pick your smartphone over indoor plumbing? 

What happened to progress? Are we destined for eternal stagnation? How can we return to the golden age of progress?

* * *

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7-Uz!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa917a686-0211-4a49-bba8-f0e327eba52d_1022x1500.jpeg)

This story is best told by Robert J Gordon in his book _The Rise and Fall of American Growth_. He sees the rise of growth all happening from 1870-1970, as the “great inventions” of the late 19th century revolutionized the American economy. The result was a complete transformation in every aspect of our day-to-day lives.

Gordon’s explanation for our current stagnation is that this “miracle century” was a one-time event. We’ll never see that level of growth again, because things like electricity and the internal combustion engine can only be invented once. As the adoption of the great inventions began to level off, a fall in growth was inevitable. Any revolutions sparked by our modern digital and information breakthroughs can’t compare.

Gordon’s theory is a persuasive explanation for a unique period in human history. The problem is that the same story has leaked into many of our ideas about progress itself. And these ideas about progress are no longer helpful.

These ideas are at the heart of a uniquely American _myth_ of progress. If you were an American in the 20th century, progress was just _assumed_. It was your birthright to live in a world of ever rising incomes and living standards. Every new generation received the full benefits of progress while accelerating even more progress for the next. The future was one of ever greater abundance. Progress itself was never questioned; it was justified by its own indisputable momentum. It just needed to keep going.

Part of the shock confronting recent generations is the realization that this progress did not, in fact, keep going. We are no longer coasting on the momentum of economic growth. We no longer see the dramatic material transformations in our daily lives. We doubt seriously if we’ll be better off than our parents were. And even the great material improvements of the past look questionable in light of the inequality and climate change that came with them.

And that’s a perfectly natural response. If your ideas about progress are anchored to a one-time “miracle century”, then progress will always be defined on those terms. [This recent article by Freddie DeBoer](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/whats-left-for-tech) is a good example. Freddie sees Apple’s incessant promotion of TITANIUM as yet one more piece of evidence confirming our eternal stagnation. Is a different metal the best we can do? What happened to innovation? Freddie’s advice is simple:

> “I think we all need to learn to appreciate what we have now, in the world as it exists, at the time in which we actually live. Frankly, I don’t think we have any other choice. Welcome to the Forever Now.”

Yikes. These are not the ideas about progress that we need. 

It’s ultimately a theory of progress that is frozen in time, looking backwards on an age utterly unique in history. It’s based on an incomplete notion of what technology is and how it transforms every aspect of our lives. It has no imagination. And it’s completely insufficient to structure the conversations we need to be having about the type of worlds worth progressing towards.

It’s time for our ideas around progress to evolve. 

* * *

Any definition of progress must include two things: some future state we define as “better”, and some way to measure whether we are getting closer to that state or not. Doesn’t it sound so simple?

Yet reality is infinitely complex, and defining progress that can capture all of our competing aspirations is not a viable endeavor[1](#footnote-1). The best we can hope for is iterative improvement. From that perspective, let’s consider some of today’s flawed ideas about progress so we can improve tomorrow’s progress. In other words, let’s make some progress about progress.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hUGG!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb092523c-1a50-4ea2-90fb-4895a75b581c_1024x1024.webp)

**1\. Progress is more than measurements**

The “miracle century” could only have been declared miraculous in retrospect. No goal was defined at the beginning of the century that could have been used to track the progress in reaching it. If you asked a random American at any time during the century if they thought things were getting better or worse, you would have gotten different answers depending on when you asked. “Progress” would have felt very different during the Prohibition of the 1920s, or the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the aftermath of WWII in the 1940s.

The miracle century was certainly about growth, particularly when measured by gains in living standards over time. But was it progress? Progress towards what? This may seem like an absurd question given the dramatic changes in day-to-day life, but it points to the problems of conflating growth with progress. Growth without a goal is not progress.

The definition of progress used during the miracle century appears to be a circular one. This is best progress can do when it’s conflated with growth. It defines the destination by what it is measuring: “Progress is making these measurements go up. How will we know if we’re making progress? If the measurements go up.” 

Such a definition of progress can only speak about what it can measure, and thus remain silent about anything outside of those measurements. This works fine for historical analysis, but it won’t help us think about our technological future.

Consider the current discourse around AI. Perhaps this version of progress can speak to job displacement and productivity impacts. These are things that are legible to our traditional measurements of progress. But our traditional measurements have nothing to say about any of the bigger questions that AI represents. 

For example, how much of our own agency should we cede to AI in the pursuit of rising incomes? The answer could critically determine the progress of human autonomy. But any version of progress defined by measurements cannot evaluate trade-offs concerning those same measurements.

**2\. Progress looks forward**

There is little value in using yesterday’s progress to evaluate the progress of today, and even less when considering the progress of tomorrow. The entire point of progress is to build from the past in order to improve the future. 

Progress happens when today’s open problems become yesterday’s solved problems. This is why the question of whether you would give up your toilet for your smartphone is an absurd one. We don’t have to care about toilets because we already solved the problem of indoor plumbing. Now we get to try and solve bigger and more interesting problems. This is how progress looks forward.

Proponents of the stagnation theory make the distinction between the “world of _atoms_” and the “world of _bits_”. They point to the fact that our digital breakthroughs (the world of _bits_) have made very little impact on our physical reality (the world of _atoms_). This is particularly true when compared to the physical transformations of the “miracle century”.

This is best captured by Peter Thiel’s now-famous quote: “We were promised flying cars and all we got was 128 characters”. But this gets progress exactly backwards. The significance of social media is not based on its impact in the physical world. The significance is in the new worlds that it opens up for impact, ones that previous innovations couldn’t access. Bits can do things atoms can only dream of.

Any lineage of progress will include the possibility that the impact of an earlier achievement may never be matched. But this is not an indictment of progress; it’s how progress works. For example, should we condemn the “miracle century” for failing to match the revolutionary impact from the invention of fire? 

True progress makes it difficult to compare impacts across different eras because the current era has been so transformed.

**3\. Progress includes the “world of beings”**

Technology doesn’t just impact the world of _atoms_ and the world of _bits_. It also impacts us—the world of _beings_. 

This becomes more obvious as the world of _bits_ continues to race past the world of _atoms_. Much of the impact of digital innovation depends on what we do with it. Physical innovation is fundamentally constrained by the laws of nature. We will never innovate our way beyond the speed of light. But the world of _bits_ has very few physical constraints. The main constraint on digital innovation is our own imagination.

From this perspective, the biggest thing blocking progress may not be science or technology, but us. Our [capacity to coordinate](https://techforlife.substack.com/p/our-coordination-paradox) could be the ultimate limiting factor on how transformative our innovation can be. Any indictment of our future progress may need to start with humans.

For example, this limit of imagination defines the world of crypto. Crypto has created things like [DAOs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization) and [blockchains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain) and [NFTs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token) that work like lego blocks. They can be assembled and combined to explore entirely new modes of exchange, coordination, and finance. Crypto true believers see a vast potential to disrupt gatekeepers and unlock the best of humanity. Instead, the worst of humanity has used crypto to unlock new levels of fraud, scams, and speculation. 

You can’t blame technical innovation for crypto’s failure to achieve progress. After all, crypto is built off of decades of real mathematical breakthroughs. Rather, crypto’s future depends squarely on human imagination. The space for crypto-based innovation is enormous, but only if humans can figure out the right keys to unlock it.

The world of _bits_ is also reshaping the world of _beings_ in ways that we are just beginning to understand. These changes are happening so fast that today’s grandparents might realistically have more in common with humans raised during the 1890s than to their own grandchildren raised on screens.[2](#footnote-2)

Digital technologies represent an entirely new medium where the message is us: our attention and our data. While most of us have little agency to impact the physical world, we have found in the digital world a space of infinite malleability and control. We can reconstruct our digital identities and allegiances without any of the pesky commitments and consequences that come with the physical world. 

For some generations, the digital world is now what feels “real”. It’s where their sense of being is most alive. By comparison, the physical world feels lonely and dangerous and, in the end, boring. To navigate the digital world is to employ values much different than what our traditional ideas of progress assume.[3](#footnote-3)

Is this progress? Any notion of progress that can’t account for the world of _beings_ is by definition incomplete.

**4\. Progress defines a better future**

All of the three previous ideas can be summarized by a simple question, one we should all be asking when it comes to progress.

“Progress towards what?”

Progress isn’t just measuring things that we want more of. It’s about defining a future that we want to grow towards.

Progress isn’t just about comparing our current world with our past. It’s about asking how we can build a better future world based on our current one. 

Progress isn’t just about our material world. It’s about understanding all of the future worlds that we want to create.

Ultimately, we need to start thinking about the kinds of future worlds that are worth making progress towards. This isn’t just a technological question, but one that is [inherently philosophical](https://techforlife.substack.com/p/calling-all-philosophers). Technology expands the possibilites of what we _can_ do, but it cannot tell us what we _ought_ to do. To consider this question in all of its depth requires engaging fully with the much messier realms of religion and politics and values.

Coming up with a viable definition of progress confronts us with impossible questions: What does a “better” future with technology look like? How could we even decide on such a thing? Is it even possible? If not, what does that mean for our ability to make sure technology takes us somewhere we actually want to go?

The entire notion can seem absurd, but that’s only because we’re so used to excluding questions of value from any discussion of technology and progress.

Yet these are the questions that we need to start answering. Our ideas about progress need to evolve so we can better define what progress means. We won’t be able to make the progress we want until we can answer the question: “progress towards what?”.

* * *

[1](#footnote-anchor-1)

At least for this article! I hope to tackle this more fully in the future.

[2](#footnote-anchor-2)

Anton Barba-Kay makes a similar point in his book “The Web of Our Own Making”.

[3](#footnote-anchor-3)

They may, in fact, choose smartphones over indoor plumbing…which may tell us something about progress.