Why We Got the Idea of Progress So Terribly Wrong?

Taking a leap forward shouldn’t be seen as a good thing if it brings us closer to annihilation

Oct 08, 2024

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Imagine you’ve spent your entire life in a house surrounded by acres of lush garden, nurturing it and relying on its resources for sustenance and joy.

But then, one day, you shift your focus to get greater yields. With time, you also start exchanging your surplus with people passing by your property for goods or services. At first, the garden still gives, but its richness begins to fade over time. You’re too busy and happy with how well things seem to be going — after all, you manage to produce more and more, and there’s no shortage of people interested in the fruits of your labour — to notice this, though.

Eventually, the changes become impossible to ignore. Flowers stop blooming, the soil turns to dust, and the animals that once thrived there disappear. The garden’s balance and abundance are gone, and you might never be able to bring it back to its former glory. You might not even be able to produce enough to sustain just yourself.

It’s perhaps quite easy to see where you went wrong in this scenario: you were so caught up with your short-term progress that you overlooked its impact on the ecosystem that keeps you afloat.

And yet, our idea of ‘progress’ often mirrors this exact mindset — focusing on how fast we can grow and how many steps forward we can take, with little regard for the long-term consequences to the systems we depend on for survival. It doesn’t matter all that much, we tell ourselves, because, well, look at all these new technologies we’re developing! And the increasing amounts of ‘stuff’ we produce! And all the zeros being added to (a few) people’s bank accounts!

But is this truly what progress is?

If you ask ChatGPT, the popular generative AI chatbot, to write one 100-word email, it will use about 519 millilitres of water, which is roughly one standard water bottle. If you ask it to do this once a week for an entire year, it will consume approximately 27 litres — equivalent to 1.43 water cooler jugs.

This finding, recently revealed by The Washington Post and researchers from the University of California, highlights a rarely discussed consequence of AI’s rapid rise: its significant environmental cost.

But it’s obviously not just water that each chatbot query consumes. It’s also electricity. According to the same estimates, generating that 100-word email requires about 0.14 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, equal to powering 14 LED light bulbs for an hour. Previous research also finds that creating a single image with an AI image generator uses pretty much the same amount of energy as charging your smartphone.

Keep in mind, though, that this is the cost of just one small prompt. The average AI user doesn’t stop at one short email or image per week or day. ChatGPT, for instance, reportedly receives more than 10 million queries per day. If you assume each is a short prompt — though many are probably longer — and do the maths, this one chatbot requires approximately 5.19 million litres of water and 1.4 million kWh of electricity daily.

To put things in perspective: that’s enough water to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools and enough electricity to power 5.8 million LED light bulbs for 24 hours straight.

If you couple this with all the resources used during chip manufacturing and training of AI models, it’s pretty evident that AI uses massive amounts of electricity and water. And the next wave of generative technologies will likely consume even more resources. Like many modern innovations, AI has the potential to make our world — and ourselves — better in some ways. However, it also comes with a heavy environmental and social cost, which, if ignored, could push us ever closer to the collapse of the world as we know it.

Only it’s still rare that this is how we talk about it.

Instead, and particularly in the West, we are often encouraged to simply enjoy the conveniences these new technologies offer and the enormous amounts of stuff we produce and be thankful that we’re not a poor peasant a few centuries ago whose life was, presumably, worse because they couldn’t ask a large language model if sour cream ever really expires or order bags of mass-produced goods for a $20 or less with just one click of a button. Meanwhile, the very real cost of all this resource extraction and consumption is treated as merely an afterthought in our economic systems, as an unpleasant externality that someone, at some point, will probably have to deal with.

But not us, and not today.

According to some of the loudest (and well-funded) voices in our world today, including populist leaders, ‘alt-right’ movements and tech evangelists, this is all necessary and positive because it’s done in the name of progress. Speeding forward without brakes is inherently good. Slowing down is inherently bad.

And we never stop to wonder, what exactly are we even progressing toward?

The Sumerians, an ancient civilisation founded in Mesopotamia, were among the first to use agriculture. However, their intensive farming practices, which started around 2,000 BCE, led to what historian Susan Wise Bauer calls ‘the first environmental disaster.’ Some argue, including Bauer herself, that this disaster may have then contributed to their civilisation’s eventual collapse.

For most of human history, we weren’t moving all that fast, though. But relatively recently, things took a different turn.

The unprecedented growth industrialised nations witnessed in the last few centuries — particularly between 1870 and 1970 — has fundamentally transformed the way we live, yes, but its material and moral improvements didn’t come without a cost. On the one hand, the rise of mass industry and production allowed us to make advancements in life expectancy and literacy and lifted billions out of utmost squalor. On the other hand, it also marginalised and exploited millions of people, destroyed other ways of living, and put us on the path toward climate change that threatens to undo some, or perhaps even all, of the improvements it helped us achieve.

Somewhere along the way, our understanding of ‘progress’ also became inextricably tied to economic growth and capitalism. And so, to keep moving forward, we (or rather the economists) believed this growth should be continued as well.

After all, as the new and growing in popularity discipline of ‘progress studies’ routinely points out, GDP per capita correlates positively with various well-being indicators, such as longevity, leisure and even moral progress. However, what these studies often leave out is that it’s also closely linked with many less desirable changes, including rising consumption of materials and energy, resource depletion, environmental pollution and wealth concentration. Even in terms of human well-being, the effects of GDP are not as clear-cut as some assume. Although some studies show that GDP per capita is associated with greater self-reported life satisfaction, once countries reach a certain level of wealth, its impact diminishes. In fact, research shows that in wealthier nations, GDP per capita tends to correlate with rising rates of depression and anxiety.

Clearly, the global political obsession — almost a religious-like worship — with GDP and economic growth and the assumption that they are always desirable and synonymous with progress distorts our understanding of what’s truly happening and can be dangerously counterproductive. But it’s also lethal to our survival as a species.

The problem isn’t just that we now have to deal with the overlapping and connected global crises unchecked growth leads to.

No, the problem is that at the rate we’re going, all the ‘progress’ we’ve made might one day be completely meaningless.

Our natural environment is neither an infinite resource nor a bottomless reservoir for waste, entirely separate from economic and other human activities. There are limits to how much we can extract, produce, and grow — limits that we continuously treat as optional and keep pushing beyond. Humanity has already surpassed six of the nine so-called planetary boundaries that keep Earth hospitable to modern life, and we’re on the verge of breaching the seventh.

In other words, Earth is now well outside the safe operating space for humanity. And that future we’re ‘progressing’ towards?

Well, it looks pretty Sumerian.

If Earth were our garden, we could simply take a walk and see the full extent of the damage we’ve inflicted. But we can’t stroll around the entire planet, can we? And too often, we fail even to notice anything is wrong. Or perhaps we just don’t want to notice.

I’m constantly reminded of how many people live inside soundproof bubbles of privilege and ignorance, perfectly oblivious to the storms — both literal and metaphorical — raging around them. But they are. I have family in Florida, which, just two weeks ago, was ravaged by Hurricane Helene and which is now bracing for another one — Hurricane Milton.

Climate change isn’t something that just happens to some polar bears or people in distant lands whose names we never bothered to learn. It happens all around the world, and it happens all the time. Yet, even those directly experiencing its devastating effects don’t always acknowledge the root cause. That’s how deeply entrenched capitalist propaganda is. Unchecked, relentless growth is progress, and progress is always good and desirable, right?

Only governments in countries where quality-of-life measures are the highest — like Switzerland or the Scandinavian nations — hardly leave everything to the markets. They treat human well-being as a necessity, not a lucky by-product of some ‘growth fairy,’ and then intentionally direct resources to improve it. Who would’ve thought that works, huh? However, the same logic should also be applied to the well-being of our planet.

In a few centuries — or even just a few decades — it won’t matter how much we boosted GDP, accelerated scientific research or AI development if we didn’t simultaneously understand these activities’ impact on both human and planetary well-being and then tried to mitigate them. All that knowledge, prosperity, and technological advancement will be meaningless if there’s no habitable planet for future generations to enjoy them on.

Progress isn’t moving forward without any consideration of what gets destroyed along the way. It also shouldn’t be seen as the reflection of our capacity to produce hundreds of flavours of yoghurt or AI chatbots that can finish our sentences or suggest meals based on what we have in our fridges.

Real progress means moving forward while satisfying the fundamental needs of as many people as possible, protecting the Earth’s resources, and respecting its limitations.

But that won’t happen unless we actively try to make it happen through a fundamental transformation of our social, political, and economic structures and unless we agree that’s what human flourishing truly means.

As Russel Baker once wrote:

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

Future generations may look back at this period of history and wonder how we couldn’t see that the terrible things we did in the name of ‘progress’ didn’t bring us closer to a better future but instead pushed us toward a planet inhospitable to human life.

It should be so painfully obvious — and yet it isn’t.

We’re very stubborn in believing that we know what brings us prosperity.

But if we keep being this stubborn, there won’t be anyone left to tell the story of all we’ve ‘achieved.’