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- Technology
Devon Erikson
The source of lasting change is really technological progress, and everything is downstream from that. What we frequently see is that technological progress will often make things worse for a little while and then make things better than they were before.
I think we had a moment like that in the industrial revolution where technological progress briefly turned all of the children of the lower class into factory labor slaves and polluted the cities so horribly that people would go to the seaside for their health. Then, technology progressed and things got better than they had been before the industrial revolution. When we're talking about the social environment or information media, we've seen this with radio and television making things briefly worse and then the internet making things better. We've seen it with the internet as well, where with the internet and social media itself, there's an era of briefly making things worse where people get caught in these dopamine loops posting things on Instagram for likes, and eventually we're going to figure out how to deal with that and we are going to be better off.
I think a lot of the people who are anti-technology, anti-growth, anti-progress, only see some of the short-term harm and some of the short-term scary change. They say, "No, we must put a stop to this." They don't understand that when you're first starting out anything it's hard and it's risky and it's dangerous and there's a lot of unknowns and it's scary. But that doesn't mean you go back and hide in your hole. It means you, one by one, work the problems that you see in front of you and try to solve them. Humanity has always grown out of its problems.