Cowen writes...
“For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.”
Can you please explain why the goal should be to speed up the knowledge explosion?
We already have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, an ever present existential threat that we typically consider too boring to bother discussing, perhaps because we haven’t the slightest clue how to rid ourselves of these weapons. And so, we’re ignoring that threat, while we race to develop AI and genetic engineering as fast as possible, new potential existential scale technologies which we also have no idea how to make safe.
Is this evidence of a species that is mature enough to benefit from ever more, ever greater powers, delivered at an ever greater pace, without limit?
https://progressforum.org/posts/zNx24zqq2kg45CuTb/our-relationship-with-knowledge
You write, “Again, maybe it’s the pathological contrarian in me, but I have to call bullshit on all of this—moral progress does exist, man’s nature has changed and can change again”
It depends on what time frame we’re discussing. Certainly the human body and mind can continue to evolve as it always has. But neither have changed meaningfully for thousands of years, and are unlikely to do so for a long time to come.
Man’s nature is that we are made of thought psychologically. The content of thought changes all the time, but the nature of thought does not. The content of thought reflects the nature of thought, and so we see the same kinds of themes recur over and over. So long as the nature of thought, how it operates, remains static the human condition is unlikely to change in a fundamental manner.
Does moral progress exist? To know that we’d have to remove the scientific and resulting economic progress, and see how people act without such benefits. My guess is that the starving people of tomorrow will act pretty much like the starving people of the past.