We are living through a slowdown in human progress | Jason Crawford

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“People got skeptical, fearful, doubtful of the very idea of progress in the 20th century and we allowed that to slow down progress itself.”

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Have we begun to lose faith in the future? The idea of ‘progress’ didn’t truly exist throughout the majority of human history. Most ages didn’t see history as an upward curve – they saw history as cyclical, full of ups and downs.

This belief only shifted around the 1500s, says Jason Crawford, founder of The Roots of Progress and the author of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto.

The idea that progress would automatically continue became widespread, until the first World War shattered the illusion that technology would bring peace and cooperation. Out of this rose a counterculture concern that modernity was a mistake, that progress itself was the problem. But was it? Are we now moving backwards? How can we regain trust in pushing forward?

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About Jason Crawford:

Jason Crawford is the founder of The Roots of Progress, where he writes and speaks about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. He is also the creator of Progress Studies for Young Scholars, an online learning program for high schoolers; and a part-time adviser and technical consultant to Our World in Data, an Oxford-based non-profit for research and data on global development.

Previously, he spent 18 years as a software engineer, engineering manager, and startup founder. From 2013–2018, he was co-founder & CEO of Fieldbook, a hybrid spreadsheet-database. He has also been an engineering manager at Flexport, Amazon, and Groupon, and a co-founder or early employee at other startups. Before that, he was a research engineer at D. E. Shaw Research, working on a new supercomputing architecture for computational biochemistry.

He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.