To redefine progress

In an urgent and provocative essay in Die Zeit, journalist Georg Diez calls for a redefinition of progress in the time of AI. Taking lessons from the genesis of progressivism — a response to the Industrial Revolution and the (first) Gilded Age — we cannot now surrender the power to decide society’s future to present technologists. “A notion of progress that inspires society and supplies it with new energy, both intellectually and emotionally, must therefore be comprehensive, systemically conceived, and grand,” Diez writes (with apologies for my translation). “It must be formulated collaboratively by politics, business, science, and civil society, and it must answer the question of what technology we want — and under what terms.” I write this just as the ultimate profanity of capitalism’s coupling with technology — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — comes to the market at the absurd and obscene valuation of $2.11 trillion. Thus he, the world’s richest man, is funded and empowered to define progress…