Ted Gioia (thanks again to Steve for letting me know about his blog on Substack) wrote a great post about Progress. How does technology impact human flourishing? What about health and culture? Read the post and let me know what you think. After posing his seven questions Gioia comes to these hypotheses:

1. Progress should be about improving the quality of life and human flourishing. We make a grave error when we assume this is the same as new tech and economic cost-squeezing.
2. There was a period when new tech improved the quality of life, but that time has now ended. In the last decade, we’ve seen new tech harming the people who use it the most—hence most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.
3. There was a time when lowering costs improved quality of life—raising millions of people out of poverty all over the world. But in the last decade, cost-squeezing has led to very different results, and is increasingly linked to a collapse in the quality of products and services. Some people get richer from these cost efficiencies, and a larger group move into more intensely consumerist lifestyles—but none of these results (crappy products, super-rich elites, mass consumerist lifestyles, etc.) deserve to be called progress.
4. The discourse on progress is controlled by technocrats, politicians and economists. But in the current moment, they are the wrong people to decide which metrics drive quality of life and human flourishing.
   
5. Real wisdom on human flourishing is now more likely to come from the humanities, philosophy, creative and artistic spheres, and the spiritual realm, rather than technocrats and politicians. By destroying these disciplines, we actually reduce our chances at genuine advancement.
   
6. Things like music, books, art, family, friends, the inner life, etc. will increasingly play a larger role in quality of life (and hence progress) than gadgets and devices.
   
7. Over the next decade, the epicenter for meaningful progress will be the private lives of individuals and small communities. It will be driven by their wisdom, their core values, and the courage of their convictions—none of which will be supplied via virtual reality headsets or apps on their smartphones.

I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress