How useful is “Progress”?

Abstract

Humans generally consider it vital to improve the state of the world by progressing, both in terms of society and technology. Some propose that this comes at the cost of making the present worse. The paper argues that this is not true; speeding up progress does not change where we are going, only how quickly we get there. Unless you are in a rush, speeding things up does not make the world much better. The main issue with accelerating progress is that it only changes how quickly we get to a destination; it does not change our overall heading or where we are going. The problem with the value of progress is that between the world of today and the world of tomorrow, very many things change. – AI-generated abstract.