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Every major leap in human progress has this in common | Jason Crawford: Full Interview
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November 19, 2025
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“Progress happens when we choose to make it happen. It happens through choice and effort. And ultimately, to make progress happen, we have to believe in it.”
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Up next, We are living through a slowdown in human progress | Jason Crawford ►
Humanity’s progress is neither automatic nor inevitable – from the printing press to the Industrial Revolution, and today’s digital age, every leap in technology has reshaped what’s possible for our civilization.
Jason Crawford traces the history and philosophy behind these breakthroughs, revealing the forces that drive innovation and the risks that come with unchecked advancement.
Read the video transcript ►
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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.
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