Introduction: Why Progress?

Session 1 · Tue Sep 1

How can we see and defend human progress without overlooking its costs, risks, and unfinished work?

An ordinary morning

Imagine the first hour of an ordinary day at Hopkins. You wake in a heated or cooled room. Clean water arrives when you turn a handle. A small device tells you the weather, carries messages across continents, and gives you access to more books and music than any palace once held. Food has crossed farms, factories, warehouses, and roads to reach a nearby dining hall or shop.

You may notice none of this. That is partly because the systems work. Their success lets the old problems—unsafe water, unreliable light, scarce food, isolation, untreated infection—fade from view.

Jordan Dworkin’s Ordinary Abundance turns a modern apartment into a gallery of once-astonishing achievements. Jason Crawford gives the phenomenon a name: we are like fish that do not notice the water in which they swim.

But noticing progress is not the same as claiming that everything is good, that gains are shared fairly, or that new technologies are harmless. It gives us a harder question.

Here is the question this session is about: how can we see and defend human progress without overlooking its costs, risks, and unfinished work?

Open with a quick inventory: ask students to name everything that had to work for them to arrive in Shriver Hall this morning. Keep tracing answers backward—from phone to grid, breakfast to logistics, tap water to public infrastructure—until the hidden systems become visible.

Before class: get on track

Complete these three steps before Tuesday’s meeting:

  1. Read Jason Crawford’s “The Present Crisis” and “Fish in Water”.
  2. Explore Jordan Dworkin’s Ordinary Abundance. Choose one object or service and trace a three-link chain: invention → infrastructure → institution.
  3. Bring two annotations: one Crawford claim you find persuasive or provocative, and one claim you want to question.

Bring the printed readings and something to write with. This is a device-free seminar unless you are asked to use a device for a particular activity.

You do not need to prepare a polished answer to the reflection question below. The point of the in-class free-write is to record where your thinking stands at the beginning of the course.

Progress becomes invisible when it works

In “Fish in Water”, Crawford asks us to notice how industrial civilization has changed the baseline of ordinary life. Clean water, electric light, refrigeration, antibiotics, recorded music, rapid travel, and instant communication are not natural features of the world. Each is the outcome of accumulated knowledge, coordinated labor, physical infrastructure, and institutions that maintain it.

The success of these systems creates a paradox. We tend to notice them most when they fail: during a blackout, a boil-water advisory, an empty shelf, or a Wi-Fi outage. When they work, the solved problem and the solution both recede into the background.

Progress can become hardest to see precisely when it has made life easiest to take for granted.

Use your object from Ordinary Abundance. What problem did it solve? What hidden system keeps it available? Who might still lack reliable access to it?

What is Crawford's central point in “Fish in Water”?

  1. Modern technology has made ordinary life more difficult than life in the past.
  2. Industrial civilization's success makes its achievements and the problems they solved fade from awareness.
  3. Most useful technologies were created by lone inventors without supporting systems.
  4. Because modern life is abundant, society has no important problems left to solve.

Progress needs both defense and criticism

“The Present Crisis” begins from a second paradox: humanity has extraordinary scientific and technological power, yet many people distrust progress or doubt that a better future is possible. Crawford worries that a society unable to imagine improvement will become less willing to build, experiment, invest, and solve problems.

His argument is not simply “technology is good, so stop worrying.” He rejects complacency about genuine harms and risks. He also rejects the idea that acceleration is valuable for its own sake. His proposed standard is humanistic: judge science, technology, and industry by whether they expand human life, well-being, and agency.

That standard is a starting point for debate, not the course’s settled answer. We will ask throughout the semester: progress in what, measured how, produced by which institutions, distributed to whom, and at what cost?

Defending progress means taking responsibility for extending its benefits and solving the problems it creates—not denying that those problems exist.

Which is the greater danger: becoming so pessimistic that society stops trying to improve, or becoming so optimistic that it ignores harms and unequal access? What evidence would help you judge?

Which statement best captures Crawford's position in “The Present Crisis”?

  1. Any concern about technological risk is irrational pessimism.
  2. Technological acceleration is valuable regardless of its effects on people.
  3. Science, technology, and industry should be judged by whether they advance human flourishing and agency.
  4. Once a society becomes wealthy, progress continues automatically.

Main reflection question

At the start of class, you will complete a short, ungraded free-write in response to one question:

What do you think the world’s biggest unsolved problem is, and why?

There is no preferred topic and no “progress studies” answer you are expected to give. Name the problem as precisely as you can. Explain why it matters, whom it affects, and what makes it difficult to solve.

This opening piece is a baseline, not a prediction you must defend all semester. Your instructor will return it to you in the final class. You will then write a 400–600 word closing reflection asking what changed, what did not, and what the course helped you see differently.

Suggested 75-minute sequence

  • Opening reflection, before course overview or seminar discussion (20 minutes)
  • Pair introductions and one-sentence share-out from the reflection (10 minutes)
  • Ordinary-morning systems inventory (10 minutes)
  • Crawford and Dworkin discussion in small groups, then whole class (20 minutes)
  • Course arc, assignments, and device/reading practices (10 minutes)
  • Exit check and Session 2 preparation (5 minutes)

Collect the opening free-writes for return in Session 27. Describe the opening piece as ungraded; the 10% assignment culminates in the graded closing reflection. Do not evaluate students’ chosen problems. Use the range of answers to preview the course’s questions.

A lens for the semester

When the course makes a claim about progress, test it with three questions:

  1. Achievement: What human problem became easier to solve, and what evidence shows the change?
  2. System: Which ideas, people, infrastructure, incentives, and institutions produced and sustain the gain?
  3. Frontier: Who has not benefited, what costs or risks remain, and what should improve next?

This lens avoids two easy mistakes. One is to treat every remaining problem as proof that no progress has occurred. The other is to treat past gains as proof that current arrangements are good enough.

Apply the three questions to clean running water, a smartphone, or vaccination. Does the result make you more optimistic, more critical, or both?

Connections

Sets up: Session 2 tests whether our instincts about the state of the world match the evidence. Session 4 returns to ordinary abundance and asks which economic institutions produced it at scale.

Arc note: The opening and closing reflections provide the personal spine of the course. The object-system exercise supplies the analytical spine: visible benefit, hidden mechanism, and unfinished frontier. Reuse those three questions whenever students drift toward either unqualified optimism or undifferentiated pessimism.

Review cards

Work through these cards now, then Orbit will schedule them for review over the coming weeks.

Reading guide

Required

Crawford, Jason. “The Present Crisis”, Introduction to The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. The Roots of Progress, 2024.

What to look for: Track three positions: pessimism about progress, optimism that dismisses risk, and Crawford’s proposed alternative. What does he think each position gets right or wrong?

Key argument: A society needs a humanistic defense of progress—and confidence that it can shape the future—if it is to keep solving problems rather than drift toward stagnation.

Prepare to discuss: One claim you find persuasive or provocative and one you want to question.

Crawford, Jason. “Fish in Water”, Chapter 1 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. The Roots of Progress, 2024.

What to look for: Notice how Crawford moves from large measures of progress to food, clothing, light, medicine, and communication. Which everyday achievement is easiest for you to overlook?

Key argument: Industrial civilization has solved many daily problems so reliably that the solutions, the systems behind them, and even the original problems have receded from view.

Prepare to discuss: One ordinary object, service, or system that now seems more remarkable than it did before the reading.

Dworkin, Jordan. Ordinary Abundance. Interactive web exhibit.

What to look for: Move slowly through the apartment. For one item, identify the old scarcity or danger it addressed and the hidden network that makes it ordinary today.

Key argument: A modern home is a gallery of earlier generations’ difficult, cumulative achievements, even though familiarity makes those achievements seem commonplace.

Prepare to discuss: A three-link chain connecting one item to an invention, an infrastructure system, and an institution.

Next session

For Session 2 on Thursday, read the Introduction and Chapter 1 (“The Gap Instinct”) of Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund’s Factfulness.