leadership

Do you have a mobile phone? If so, is it a smart phone? You know, a phone that has more computing capacity than the NASA teams that sent American astronauts to the moon and brought them back in the late 60’s. Some of you may not know what was available before those smart phones so the next few questions may not make immediate sense to you. Still read on as it will soon speak to you. How would many of you feel if you had to go back to the digital phones of the first decade of the second millennium? With many of them, most notably with a BlackBerry, you could send and receive emails, accomplish a number of tasks, and talk to people. Very few Apps were available. Paying bills, banking, booking a hotel or airline tickets, GPS navigation, watching television series or movies, consulting books, taking and editing pictures or videos, paying for groceries or restaurant bills, calculating your mortgage payments as you considered purchasing a house or apartment, dating, ordering food, ordering a car ride service, reading a newspaper, and a plethora of other tasks that are normal today were either impossible or really challenging.

What about analog phones before that? Texting and calling were the only things you could do. Would you go back to that?

If you like your smart phone or if you hate it but cannot see how you could function without it, it is fair to imply that you embraced or at least accepted progress.

What about cars? What about dial-up internet access? What about the advances in computers? What about fiber optics? What about flat screen TVs? What of the newest drugs to treat cancers, diabetes, auto-immune diseases, and genetic diseases? What would a large part of the population do without Amazon? While it is certainly true that all of the above come at a cost, would you be OK to go back to what was there before? If not, whatever that “not” is, you choose progress.

All that progress came from research, science, and people like you, thinking that it is always possible to do better. Dreamers like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Watson and Crick, Alexander Graham Bell, and Pasteur still, to this day, influence all of our lives. They used science to induce progress. But wait, what if they were simply the hands of God? What if all their inspiration came from the Supreme Guide? Then we should look at progress and science as good things, created by God. Things that must have been designed to make us better people. Isn’t curing diseases part of the plan for humans to be happier? Isn’t it benevolent to use progress to reduce suffering?

Progress is usually meant to improve our lives. Yet, we can also associate progress with terrible things. Those smart phones we love also make us stupid. We do not remember the phone numbers of the people we love. We depend on those devices to remind us to reach out to our friends for their birthdays. People have dinner together, on a round table, with great food served by hard-working people, but cannot look into each others’ eyes because they are too busy with another part of their lives, the one that lives on a screen.

We spend more time trying to connect our devices to our cars’ entertainment system than actually driving properly, with eyes on the road. We order food kits rather than learn to cook and create something that may reveal skills we never knew we were able to develop. We avoid talking to people because texting is cooler, and significantly less involving. We freely call people names and destroy their lives online because we never face them or even consider that what we read about them may be wrong.

Does this mean that progress is bad? Well, it is not always only good.  In 19^th century London (UK), detritus was everywhere, most of the human excrement was left in the streets and found their way to the Thames.   People lived in disease-ridden filth.   Do people in London today want to go back to 19th century London? Probably not yet, who would like housing in London to be more affordable? Advances in medicine have saved millions of lives, we all have a friend or relative that is still here today because of it. Yet advancements are increasingly expensive and demanding on the system with some people having no true access to those advances. Computers have initially brought increases in productivity yet; it is more and more questioned because each of us using computers must do more than before. In fact, the productivity paradox depicts a bleaker picture when comparing the incredible advances of computing capabilities and the overall productivity of industrialized countries.

While there are disadvantages associated with progress, we mostly benefit from it. And progress being progress, we also evolve our abilities to deal with the less positive consequences.

By 1720, Nantucket Island was the hub of whaling in America. In 1853, American whaling reached its peak and employed around 70,000 people. At that time, it is estimated that the total population in what is now the USA was roughly 23 million. In today’s numbers, it would mean that over 1 million people were employed in whaling. While in 1853 there were over 900 whaling vessels, by 1895, only 51 remained in all the USA. The last whaling ship in the US was sent out in 1927. Progress can bring dramatic changes, and the population did adapt.

In 1950, we had over 1,340,000 switchboard operators in the US. By 1991, they were all gone. What about video store operators? Have you seen a milkman lately? How about typesetters? What about photo developing? How many music record stores are left today?

Things change constantly. Moore’s law states that computer chips double in transistor capacity every 2 years. This last comment certainly brings up the concept of “programmed obsolescence” for many. And with it the idea that much progress has been the result of increased profits, market shares, competitive advantages, and other means to generate revenue. Our economy is founded on growth. Reducing costs may lead to growth in profits. Increasing demand may also yield more profits. Scarcity brings prices up and potential profits. It may therefore be fair to say that progress is an economic phenomenon driven by greed rather than need. Afterall, the Middle Ages span over a thousand years and comparatively to the 500 years that followed (Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, Early Modern Period, and the Industrial Era), few meaningful innovations were made (eyeglasses, gunpowder, windmills, clocktowers, building techniques, printing machines, and agriculture).  Could we still live in that way? Of course. Would we want to live that way? The average life expectancy during that period was 30 to 35 years. And it was rough, really awful at most times. Close to 70% of the US population was over 35 in 2024. In 1024, those people would be dead already. Is that progress?

We can dispute the fact that a number of innovations may have caused more pain than benefits. When I asked AI to list innovations that have had more negative impacts than positives, it spat back, social media, Opioids, Automotive technology, Fast Fashion, e-cigarettes, and others. In each case, the net benefit can be argued on both sides. The point is that progress comes not only with positives. Same as if we chose to live in the Middle Ages.

Progress is in Nature. The universe is still expanding after billions of years following the Big Bang. Species on Earth keep evolving as Nature changes. That is progress. We age, we learn, we change. Progress is part of life; it happens whether we want it or not. So, while some of it may not yield all the positive initially intended, it seems more productive to embrace it and work with it than just wait and see.

If we agree with this, we must briefly revisit what drives progress. Even if we accept that a considerable number of developments are motivated by economic growth or tenet, what drives progress is science and research. Eyeglasses were invented around the year 1000 after an Arab scholar and astronomer suggested that smoother glass could help people with visual impairment. It was based on observation, reflection, and empirical data. The steam engine, the telephone, the light bulb, the airplane, the automobile, the computer, the transistor, and the internet were all created following scientific discoveries of fundamental and applied science. Science is progress.  Science is looking for answers and often finds them. Just like progress, it makes mistakes, and it searches for ways to explain and fix them. Everyone has the right to criticize science yet all of us benefit from science every minute of every day. Science actually makes it easier to question and vilify it since websites and social media are using science as a structure for their existence.  Science is everywhere around us. It is the reason we have smart phones with the computing capacity of thousands on NASA scientists of the 1960’s in our pocket. Science is an integral part of progress, even for Mother Nature.

Here is an example of Mother Nature’s use of science.  The peppered moth’s original color was a mix of grey tones.  It allowed the moth to mimic the color of tree bark and “hide” from birds, their predator. The moth thrived.  Then came the industrial Revolution (progress) and soot was produced in such quantities that tree bark was covered in black.  As a result, the darker individuals of the peppered moth were less detectable than their lighter cousins.  Consequently, the now prominent peppered moth was darker in color.  The lighter individuals, more easily detectable by their predators, faded away until coal was replaced by cleaner energy sources (more progress).  Tree barks went back to their “natural” color and the lighter moth “returned” at the demise of the darker ones.  This is one of many demonstrations of natural selection, science.

Progress is ineluctable, our environment ever changing.  To survive, we adapt.  And if we want to use this example as a way to explain that going backwards is a good thing, let us not forget that the return of the “original” peppered moth was caused by the progress in sources of energy.  Otherwise, the dark moth would have continued to prevail on the basis of the environmental reality.  The point is that everything changes and progresses.

So, progress. Is this a bad or a good thing? Why do we embrace progress and, at the same time, vilipend and disparage several of its implications?  Sometimes, it is important to spend the time to understand what a word, a concept, or an idea means, so we can put it in the correct perspective.