Wow, what a lofty title, eh? Well, that’s where it stands in my mind: progress naturally emerges from all sorts of systems in the universe.
But first, here’s a question that needs to be answered: What is progress? Well, that’s easy: progress indicates any kind of change which isn’t aimless fluxuation but instead directed in some manner.
That’s quite the all-encompassing definition. For example, our universe’s entropy is progressively increasing. While that fits the above definition, it’s not the sort of progress I’m interested in.
In this and the next few posts I’ll expore the systems I consider to be progressive by my own personal standards: human society, evolutionary biology, and physical law itself.
Progress in Human Society
We are naturally goal-oriented, however we also formulate our own goals. Humanity only becomes progressive when we agree on goals and combine our collective effort towards accomplishing them. For most of human history, those goals primarily concerned keeping established society running and improving it whenever possible. Following the advent of word we became archivists of past knowledge, the scope of which began progressing dramatically. Societies rose and fell, the Roman Empire collapsed and Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages, but it bounced back after an infusion of Greek and Roman knowledge kicked off the Renaissance.
The major turning point occured following the development of science, at which point humans became remarkably adept at describing reality in a way which is demonstratably true. At this point humans began progressing immensely: science was an incredible benefit to societies who understood it, and knowledge of physical law let us build technology to harness its power. Science and technology have been ramping up at an accelerating pace. We live in a time where computers are designed and constructed with the aid of computers. Consumerism fuels the push to produce better and better technology in all forms.
The rate of change in human society has been increasing with time. This is because one of the many factors that the rate of change depends on is the rate of communication. Initially communication between groups of geographically disparate people was nonexistent or slow. Many times the communications channels have almost completely collapsed, such as in the afforementioned example of the Dark Ages. However, the last century has seen massive progression in the rate of communication, first with the telegraph, then the telephone, then radio. Now communication is increasingly digitized, and thus the overwhelmingly dominant factor in the rate of change becomes the speed of the underlying communications infrastructure. Like all other aspects of computing, communications speeds have been increasing exponentially. Broadband proliferation in first world countries has been staggering, and broadband providers continue to ramp up the speed as they improve their own infrastructures. Backbone links between the various systems which comprise the Internet grow increasingly vast, and more and more electronic communications systems are moving to the standardized Internet Protocol architecture.
It’s been a little more than a decade since the Internet exploded into mainstream popularity, and in that short time it’s managed to tentacle its way into all aspects of our life. The rate of change in society is increasing exponentially just as the speed of the Internet increases exponentially. Computer power is increasing exponentially as the cost of computing power decreases exponentially. The result is a more-power-for-less-money explosion which we’re in the beginnings of. Computers are also increasing the rate of change as they take on a more and more prominent role in society. They organize us, make decisions for us, and manage the explosion of available information they are helping to generate.
Human societies are unquestionably the most progressive system presently known. While nuclear weapons brought on the post-modern era and made us painfully aware of our progressively increasing destructive power, and instilled the fear that we may unleash such power on ourselves, the traditional intuitive concept of progress was questioned. The modernistic view was essentially quashed by the post-modernist movements, and technology became a Faustian bargain. Would we pay for the luxury of a technologically-enhanced life with our own lives? Nevertheless, this perpetually dangling Sword of Damocles and the post-modernist attitude it brings have not detered progress. We’ve remained modernists, even if many of us no longer feel that way.
