A short history of progress
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 by driving a whole herd over a cliff had made too much. Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success. The twentieth-century´s runaway growth has placed a murderous burden on the planet. A Short History of Progress argues that this modern predicament is as old as civilisation. Only by understanding the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated since the Stone Age can we recognise the inherent dangers, and, with luck, and wisdom, shape its outcome.
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What Hacker News says
- If you're a fan of Burke, you'll probably appreciate Ronald Wright's 2004 Massey Lectures on "The History of Progress":
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-2004-cbc-massey-lectures-...
Based on a book of the same title:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/short-history-of-progress/ocl...
- Best book on the subject I read is Wright's "A Short History of Progress" https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Progress-Ronald-Wright/... Jared Diamond's "Collapse" is in a similar vein, but less cleanly written.
- A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright is another good one that touches on this quite a bit.
https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Progress-Ronald-Wright/...
- A Short History of Progress.
- If so then what a colossal waste of our planetary carbon budget. I don't know what the backend on this app is (maybe it was done properly i really hope so) but surely there is a solution which maintains or surpasses the accuracy of an LLM and uses <1% of the compute resources.
Like a small vision model combined with the size/measurements data from the AR sensors modern phones come with and an open source caloric values database should achieve the 90% accuracy they are claiming.
Ronald Wright writes about "progress traps" in A Short History of Progress. It's been awhile since I read that but I think about it more and more these days with AI products on the rise.
- > I don't think it's that many people aspire to be a landlord.
I think it was a reference to this famous quote:
> John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. -- Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
