We keep telling ourselves that history is moving forward. But what if “forward” is something we invented?

We keep telling ourselves that history is moving forward. But what if “forward” is something we invented?

A young professional moves to London.

She has a smartphone with more computing power than entire institutions once possessed. She can speak instantly to someone in Australia, work for a company on another continent, order dinner in seconds and ask an artificial intelligence to explain quantum mechanics before breakfast.

And then half her income disappears in rent.

Rory Sutherland jokes that she has not moved to London at all.

She has moved to nineteenth-century Russia.

The joke works because the contradiction is obvious.

We live in a world of extraordinary technological sophistication, yet some of the relationships underneath it can look remarkably old.

So what exactly has progressed?

That question is harder than it first appears.

The Story We Tell Ourselves

Modern Western culture has a favourite story.

The past was primitive.

The present is more advanced.

The future should be better still.

Science will improve.

Medicine will improve.

Technology will improve.

Society will improve.

And when they do not, we assume either that something has gone wrong or that we need a better solution.

• More research.

• Better policy.

• More innovation.

• Better management.

• Smarter technology.

• More AI.

The alternative is usually the opposite cry:

• Everything is getting worse.

• Society is collapsing.

• Technology is destroying us.

• Young people have no future.

• The good times have gone.

Optimism and pessimism seem to be opposites.

But both rely on the same hidden idea:

Life ought to be going somewhere.

The optimist thinks we are getting there.

The pessimist thinks we have lost the way.

What if the road itself is the illusion?

Progress Depends on the Question

There are many genuine improvements in human life.

• Anaesthesia works.

• Antibiotics work.

• Clean water saves lives.

• Aircraft cross oceans.

• A message can cross the world in less than a second.

• Scientific knowledge accumulates.

But there is a subtle difference between saying:

We know more than we used to

and saying:

Humanity has progressed.

Progress requires a measure.

Say Britain has improved since 1850.

• Improved in what way?

• Life expectancy?

• Infant mortality?

• Literacy?

• Housing?

• Community?

• Family life?

• Access to nature?

• Working hours?

• Mental wellbeing?

• A sense of belonging?

Choose one measure and progress may look undeniable.

Choose another and the picture may look less impressive.

The numbers can still be correct.

The problem begins when we mistake the thing measured for the whole of life.

Every Solution Has an Edge

Science cannot work without boundaries.

A medical study must decide who belongs in the trial, what is being tested, what counts as success and how long the study will last.

That is not a weakness.

It is what makes the study possible.

Then the research leaves the controlled setting and enters ordinary life.

Real people bring families, jobs, fears, money, habits, other illnesses, expectations and histories.

The research did not fail.

Life simply continued beyond the boundary of the study.

Engineering works the same way.

Imagine a river that floods. Nearby communities need electricity and irrigation.

Build a dam.

• The dam works.

• It controls water.

• It generates power.

• It supports farming.

But the river also carries sediment, supports fish, replenishes wetlands and shapes the lives of people far downstream.

So does the dam work?

Yes.

And perhaps no.

It depends on where we draw the line around the question.

Environmental assessments try to make that line larger.

They should.

But no assessment can include everything.

Eventually someone has to say:

Our study stops here.

Life does not.

The Front Creates the Back

There is another way to look at this.

High only makes sense because there is low.

Easy exists because there is difficult.

Success creates the possibility of failure.

Development creates underdevelopment.

Progress creates backwardness.

A thing has a front because it has a back.

This does not mean suffering is imaginary.

• Hunger hurts.

• Cold is real.

• Disease kills.

But the categories we use to organise experience depend partly on comparison.

Consider a medieval king.

1. He had no electricity.

2. No antibiotics.

3. No refrigerator.

4. No telephone.

5. No central heating.

6. No motor car.

7. No television.

8. No flushing lavatory.

Measured against an ordinary household today, he appears astonishingly deprived.

Yet nobody describes Edward III as one of medieval England’s poor.

The condition is real.

The category depends on the frame.

So does progress.

AI Looks Like the Future

Artificial intelligence gives us a perfect example because everyone seems determined to place it on a historical road.

One side sees salvation.

The other sees disaster.

Perhaps both positions are too grand.

I use AI regularly.

It has improved my writing.

More interestingly, it has shown me weaknesses in work I had previously thought was perfectly good.

That is useful.

But AI also needs a physical world.

1. Electricity.

2. Chips.

3. Data centres.

4. Cooling. (In space, it must also survive etreme heat).

5. Infrastructure.

Then efficiency enters the story.

Surely, if AI becomes more efficient, it will use fewer resources?

Perhaps.

The nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons noticed something odd about steam engines.

More efficient steam engines used less coal to perform a particular task.

So coal consumption should have fallen.

Instead, cheaper steam power encouraged people to use steam for more things.

Demand expanded.

Total coal consumption could rise.

Today we call this Jevons’ paradox.

AI may behave in the same way.

If an AI task suddenly requires one-tenth of the energy, we might save ninety per cent.

Or we may discover a hundred new jobs for cheap AI.

Efficiency does not automatically mean lower total consumption.

But there is a second lesson hidden inside Jevons.

The Steam Future That Never Quite Happened

Jevons was writing in a world dominated by coal and steam.

From inside that world, more efficient steam suggested more steam.

And for a while that was exactly what happened.

But steam did not continue along one endless rising curve.

1. Steam cars appeared and vanished.

2. Electric motors took over many industrial jobs.

3. Internal combustion transformed road transport.

4. Most ships abandoned direct steam propulsion.

Yet steam itself never really disappeared.

Nuclear power stations still use steam.

Some nuclear-powered ships still use steam turbines.

Steam did not die.

It changed its place in the system.

Jevons tells us what may happen when something becomes cheaper.

He does not tell us how long we shall continue wanting that thing in its present form.

The same may be true of AI.

AI is already a label for many different activities.

• Language.

• Prediction.

• Image generation.

• Pattern recognition.

• Automation.

• Scientific modelling.

• Some of these may expand.

• Some may vanish.

• Some may become so ordinary that we stop calling them AI.

• Others may eventually be done in ways we cannot yet describe.

The people of the steam age could see steam spreading everywhere and imagine more steam.

We can see AI spreading everywhere and imagine more AI.

Both observations may be sensible in their own time.

Neither tells us where life is going.

Sometimes Progress Just Moves the Smoke

Industrial countries offer another example.

During the Industrial Revolution, pollution sat close to the people consuming the goods.

• Factories filled Western cities with smoke.

• Workers performed dangerous jobs nearby.

• Over time, regulation improved.

• Working conditions improved.

• Cleaner technologies appeared.

These were real achievements.

But globalisation also allowed some dirty, dangerous and labour-intensive work to move overseas.

The products still arrive.

The smoke appears somewhere else.

Measure pollution inside Britain and things may look much better.

Measure the pollution associated with British consumption and some of it returns.

Move the boundary and the meaning of progress changes.

Again, the point is not that trade is bad.

The point is that a local improvement can look very different when the frame becomes larger.

The Elephant That Wasn’t Real

There is an old Indian story about the philosopher Shankara.

He had been teaching a king that the apparently separate world we experience does not possess quite the independent reality we imagine.

The king decided to test him.

An angry elephant was released towards Shankara.

Shankara ran.

He climbed a tree.

The king was delighted.

If the elephant was ultimately unreal, why had the philosopher run away?

Shankara’s reply was essentially this:

the king had seen a non-real Shankara run from a non-real elephant and climb a non-real tree.

So where was the contradiction?

It sounds like a philosophical joke.

But it carries a useful point.

When the elephant charges, climb the tree.

If the roof leaks, repair it.

If someone is hungry, feed them.

If an illness can be treated, treat it.

This is not an argument for passivity.

It asks a different question.

Before we can tell the story, we have already divided experience into things.

• There is the elephant.

• There is the man.

• There is the tree.

• There is danger.

• There is escape.

• There is before.

• There is after.

Perhaps the mind does more than simply observe reality.

Perhaps it also helps divide reality into the separate pieces through which we understand it.

You do not need to accept any religious philosophy to appreciate the possibility.

Our categories may be useful.

They may even be necessary.

But they may not be the whole story.

Problems Need Preferences

We often imagine that problems simply exist.

We discover them.

We solve them.

Then we move forward.

But before something can become a problem, we must already prefer one condition to another.

• The roof leaks.

• We prefer it dry.

• Someone is ill.

• We prefer them healthy.

• A road is dangerous.

• We prefer it safer.

That is enough reason to act.

We do not need a theory of human progress before doing something useful.

But solving one problem does not mean existence itself is moving towards a solved condition.

Repair the roof.

Eventually it will need repairing again.

Cure one disease.

People live long enough to encounter another.

• Invent faster transport.

• People begin travelling farther.

• Invent labour-saving technology.

• We rapidly discover new work to fill the time saved.

None of this means the solution failed.

The mistake may be expecting a final solution to life.

There probably is not one.

Perhaps the Graph Is the Problem

This is not pessimism.

Pessimism depends on progress almost as much as optimism does.

The optimist sees history moving upwards.

The pessimist thinks the line is falling.

Both believe in the line.

Perhaps the graph is the problem.

Life contains birth and death.

Love and separation.

Health and illness.

Creation and destruction.

Peace and violence.

Intelligence and stupidity.

We prefer some conditions to others.

That is enough reason to act.

Preference does not prove that history has a destination.

Our Children Will Inherit Their World

It is tempting to ask whether our children will inherit a better world or a worse one.

Perhaps they will simply inherit their world.

Some things will be easier.

Some harder.

They will possess abilities we once regarded as science fiction.

They may lose things we barely noticed because we assumed they would always exist.

They will solve some of the problems we leave behind.

Their solutions will create circumstances their own children will have to negotiate.

That does not remove our responsibility.

Quite the opposite.

We do not need to believe that humanity is marching towards perfection before planting a tree whose shade we will never sit beneath.

We simply plant the tree.

Life Is Not Going Anywhere

Modern society has become accustomed to treating existence as a project.

• Targets.

• Outcomes.

• Growth.

• Development.

• Solutions.

• Milestones.

• Improvement.

When things go badly, somebody has failed.

When things go well, we call it progress.

But perhaps life is not an object travelling along a road while we stand outside judging its performance.

We are part of what is happening.

Our measurements are part of what is happening.

Our judgements are part of what is happening.

Even the person who appears to be doing the judging is part of what is happening.

That does not mean we stop acting.

The elephant comes.

• We climb the tree.

• The roof leaks.

• We repair it.

• Someone suffers.

• We help if we can.

• A technology creates a problem.

• We try another solution.

• Then something else happens.

We can continue doing all of this without requiring history to prove that it is advancing.

The optimist need not prove that everything is getting better.

The pessimist need not prove that everything is getting worse.

Tomorrow does not have to be another stage in humanity’s journey towards completion.

It can simply be tomorrow.

• Life changes.

• Things arise.

• Things disappear.

• Every front has a back.

• Every boundary leaves something outside it.

We climb the tree when the elephant charges.

And climb down when it has passed.

Life is not going anywhere.

Life is.