Quotes About Advancement

The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.

Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.

PORTABLE WATCHES (1500)

TELESCOPE (1600--1610)

A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn't ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative.

Ogburn and Thomas found 148 instances of independent innovation, most them occurring within the same decade.

somewhere within a thousand years of the first cities emerging, human beings invented a whole new way of inventing.

LOGARITHMS (1614)

SLIDE RULE (1632)

MECHANICAL CALCULATOR (1645)

CALCULUS (1684, 1693)

We all see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants.

When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It's the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?

That thrust was now being expressed in new forms, based on steel-frame construction, which allowed newspaper offices and insurance buildings to rise above the towering spire of Trinity Church; and Martin imagined great structures hundreds of stories high, each a city in itself, rising across the land.

There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.

In fact, war may be just another obstacle an enlightened species learns to overcome, like pestilence, hunger, and poverty.

2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.58 (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)

the nature of progress that we know and they didn't. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

It's often said that the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well.

Charles Kenny's Getting Better.17

Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.56 In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.

Graphs like figure 5-2 display a triumph of human well-being whose magnitude the mind cannot begin to comprehend.

And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.

If we could canvass the souls of the dead children and mothers and the victims of war and starvation and disease, or if we went back in time and gave them a choice between proceeding with their lives in a premodern or modern world, we might uncover an appreciation of modernity that is more commensurate with its objective benefits.