The Motion of Progress

Ambition, Deconstruction, and Execution

We live in a society where progress is taken for granted. We have powerful tailwinds dating back to the entrepreneurial roots of the United States, a startup among empires in the 18th century. The virtuous and brave will tap into the vibrant agency that has painted the American Dream; they’ll contribute to the vision of the future. This spirit of progress is powered by a common motion.

The motion of progress is ambition, deconstruction, and execution.

Ambition sets a vision and seeds the will required to achieve it. It’s a lofty goal, a beautiful tomorrow, a uniting cause. Imagining a new government of the people, by the people, for the people was hard and heretical, but it was also compelling. It was something that people would commit their lives to. The same goes for the moon landing or a world of unlimited energy.

Science fiction novels often paint a beautiful picture of far off futures full of incredible technology. Storytelling is an essential component of progress, and it is the reason why optimists are such a necessary component of a flourishing society. Particularly, the genre of optimist who thinks that we can get to the good future, as opposed to a good future - the specific optimist is much more useful than the general optimist. 

Specific optimists will describe a specific future - one with abundant nuclear energy or sleek solarpunk aesthetics. In order to reach that future, we can begin to pick it apart, or deconstruct it, into what must be true to fulfill that vision. This is the essential next step, because it starts to uncover direction and highlights the distinctions between our current world and this world of progress. This is the part of the motion that makes the problem tractable - if you don’t understand how a building becomes a building, how will you make it such that buildings are built in a more beautiful way?

The more concretely you deconstruct a problem, the more tractable it becomes. This is a strategy known as Divide and Conquer, which is commonly used in software engineering for managing complexity. Understanding the systems and subsystems down to the atomic, useful unit is how we begin to not just see a resplendent future, but to get there, too. The best science fiction novels do some degree of deconstruction as well, even going so far as to recommend a mechanism of action in the best case. Submarines, synthetic meat, and many other revolutionary technologies were dreamed up by science fiction authors.

Deconstruction and systematic understanding are required to repair a system, which can also be a form of progress. This is a good nod to the motion of progress - although the desired state may be straightforward and unambitious, you can conceive of a sufficiently complex system, like a government, where repairing it may be extremely difficult. In the case of the government, those who try to repair things often don’t deeply understand the system, which means traction is very difficult.

In ambitious futures, we often imagine things that don’t exist, and when we deconstruct those things we realize that we may not have the capabilities to achieve even the intermediate states - yet. This has always been the case with new technology, we don’t have it until we have it. It may sound obvious, but when you reflect back on how valuable your phone is as a supercomputer in your pocket, and think about the last time you went to the bank or whipped out a map, you realize that our lives are continuously transformed and that radical positive transformation is not just positive but surprisingly common.

It does, however, require us to operate on the frontiers. More precisely, it requires us to de-risk the frontiers, by making things that are improbable or seemingly impossible, common. If we understand, for example, that in order to have a space-faring civilization, we need spaceships, then we don’t just want to make a rocket, we want to make cheap, reusable rockets which launch frequently. 

One of the most effective methods of de-risking technologies on the frontier is to parallelize developments and discoveries. By investing in multiple approaches simultaneously, you can begin to explore the tradeoffs of different mechanisms, which may inform a particular strategy. There comes a time where you have to commit to one technology or another, but until you concretely achieve an intermediate goal, there’s likely room to explore alternative approaches.

Progress is not a given. Progress is willed out of the present by people who either understand or unwittingly participate in the motion of progress. The most effective actors participate in the full motion, tying together the stories, the systems, and the execution. Dream your vivid utopias, inspect and understand them, and build.