Breakthrough Dialogue 2022: Progress Problems

It might feel strange today to study, let alone celebrate, progress. Covid has upended every aspect of modern society while proving more difficult to confront than techno-optimists initially hoped and exacerbating pre-existing cultural divisions. If many experts feel confident that humanity will avoid worst-case climate change scenarios, plenty others in the expert class and the general public remain terrified of future warming. Whatever our modern energy, agricultural, and industrial systems have gotten us, they have done so at some significant ecological cost. And this wealth and abundance remain inequitably distributed in rich countries and are stubbornly out of reach to billions of people around the world.

The dance between peril and progress is not new. But something about the last few years of cascading democratic crises, polarizing culture wars, intensifying ecological anxiety—lately all backgrounded by the global pandemic—have also witnessed, perhaps counterintuitively, a surge in interest in progress. How best to investigate and interrogate the nature of historic and contemporary progress are the goals of this year’s Breakthrough Dialogue, which we will host this June under the theme “Progress Problems.”

Some claim that progress is entirely an illusion, arguing that technology has disenchanted the world and present-day abundance has been borrowed from the future and can't be sustained. Others see acknowledgement of historical progress as a distraction, undermining our determination to tackle present-day problems. And it is true that human progress is not utopia. Solving the old problems has created new problems.

But the new problems are better than the old problems. Living on a warming planet is better than living without electricity, heating, or transportation fuels. A pandemic that has overwhelmingly taken its toll among the elderly is the result of large populations living much longer lives and is, by almost all accounts, a better problem to have than living in a world in which very significant percentages of children did not survive to adulthood and women routinely died in childbirth.

The benefit of acknowledging how much progress human societies have made, and all the ways that most of us are blessed to have been born into this world, and not at almost any other time in the past, is that doing so allows us to study and learn from progress, not just to celebrate all that those who came before accomplished but think about how those achievements might point the way to better addressing the challenges of our present and future.

How best to understand and, hopefully, compound this progress? Are the institutions that drove progress in the past still with us and, if they are, have they adapted to be able to sustain progress today? Should scholars of progress pay more attention to historic trends or present-day arrangements and distributions? How should long-term forecasts, even unlikely worst-case scenarios, inform present-day initiatives and policy? Do truly existential risks present novel impediments to human flourishing, or were such threats always lurking in the background?

Paradigm Award
This year the Breakthrough Institute will proudly honor Dr. Charles Kenny as the recipient of the 2022 Breakthrough Award.