The limits of progress

This original article by Dan Polansky briefly investigates the limits of human progress. Use your critical faculties when reading it; it contains analysis not traced to sources, although one that aims to be as if obvious at least to some readers, depending on general background knowledge currently available to a modern mind. There is a subjective element to this article; a different author would take a different stance.

Initial considerations

Human progress can happen in multiple domains:

Technological progress: more capable technology. Thus, we have ships, steam engine, trains, cars, aircraft, power plants, electrical appliances, computers, the Internet, etc., greatly increasing human capabilities, step by step.
Scientific progress: more accurate or complete scientific theories, serving as better models of the world. Thus, we have progressed from Ptolemaic astronomy to Kepler, Newton and Einstein. We have progressed from Darwinian theory to modern synthesis, and we have a better map of all species in existence.
Political progress: more participation on the government, less oppression and more political freedoms. However, some could see monarchy as a real progress.
Reduction of violence, whether within a state or between states. This can be seen as part of political progress.
Cultural creativity progress: more cultural creativity in literature, paintings, music, dances, movies, games, etc.

A key observation is that most progress in various domains is enabled by technological progress, which enables a larger human population and also scientific instruments, a camera to take pictures and movies, musical instruments to make more elaborate music than singing along can make, printing of books for easier dissemination, technical means of democracy, etc. Limits of that progress are examined in article The limits of technological potential. Given our current scientific understanding of the world and our current technology, the technological progress seems to be brief, too likely to be stopped or even reverted in centuries to come. More detail on this question is in that article and for that article.

The limits of human scientific knowledge are given not only by technology but also by human capacity to understand. Even if large population of humans can be sustained on the Earth for next 1,000 years, there is no fundamental guarantee that, say, physics is going to be able to make substantial progress over that period.

The limits of political progress are also given not only by technology. There is no infinite series of deep improvements to be made, a tautology. Beyond mere triviality, the political progress does not need to last for the next 1,000 years.

The limits of cultural progress are also given not only by technology. Culture is not only produced but also consumed by humans. Beyond certain amount of cultural output, the capacity for consumption given by a single human brain and the number of brains becomes overstretched. Thus, ever more cultural forms can be produced but there will be hardly anyone to pay any attention to the output.

Testability

Assertions about the existence of limits and their absence have relatively poor testability, especially compared to such scientific theories as Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics, both of which are plentifully threatened by refutation by a range of observation and experiments.

However, there is still a contrast:

The statement "there will be no thermonuclear energy production on the Earth" is refutable by possible future events.
The statement "there will eventually be thermonuclear energy production on the Earth" is much harder to refute; it would seem refuted by an extinction of humankind, but even that would be logically inconclusive since another species could appear later to develop such production. It would be nearly conclusively refuted by no such development occurring before the Earth becomes uninhabitable for living things.

Above, we see that the negative possibilistic hypotheses, whatever their merits, more run the risk of being refuted or sooner so than their positive variants. This would suggest that negative hypotheses, even if wrong, have more of a scientific character, from the falsificationism point of view.

Both negative and positive hypotheses can be made more equally testable by being stated in time-bound terms, e.g. "by year 2050". Even then, the negative version has better refutability since it can be refuted as soon as the thermonuclear capability arrives. There seems to be something more scientific about the negative hypotheses. There could be a deeper and more general investigation about the strengths and weaknesses of Popperian falsificationism that is here employed.

A case study of hyperoptimism

A certain kind of hyperoptimism can be discerned from an article linked below, in the following sentences. This will be useful to frame a discussion.

"But, if we only do more research and science we can achieve anything we want. [...] Nothing is impossible."
We can't. If we want to fly to the next star, as some do, we can't. If we want to get energy from a thermonuclear reactor on the Earth, as many do and seems much more realistic, this may still be impossible.
"During my 35 years on this earth I have witnessed unprecedented technological and scientific progress."
He has not. He has seen certain advances but they were not unprecedented in their scale. The inventions of the automobile and the aircraft are much deeper than the invention of computing and the Internet. As for science, there was already Einsteinian physics, and that was already not so deep an improvement on Newtonian physics as the latter was on previous physics, especially on Ptolemaic astronomy. There was probably a huge scientific progress in some quantitative sense, but one must not be mislead by fractal phenomena: a tree that grows increasingly more and increasingly tinier branches and subbranches does not thereby achieve absolute growth out of its bounds.
"I lack a sense of optimism and the idea that we as humans can achieve anything we want."
That is because humans can't achieve anything they want, fortunately. If they could, someone would surely come up with the idea that threatening to destroy the entire universe would be a nice bargaining tool to have. It is only a mild exaggeration to say that human wants, desires and dreams are unlimited and not necessarily good, in sharp contrast to possibilities. The history has no shortage of humans dreaming of expanding their kingdoms and empires and dominating the world. Destructive desires and cruelty are revealed in behaviors of children, suggesting they are no adult aberrations. Some limits on human possibilities are a bliss, not a curse.
"the limit of human progress really isn't about technological achievements or scientific progress. It really isn't even about intelligence and creativity. This suggests that the limit of human progress is really all about our limited ability to feel empathy and compassion."
Untrue. The limits of technological achievements are deep and serious. Human empathy and compassion are far from endless, but they alone can do nothing to overcome technological limits.
'I think this quote by Carl Sagan illustrates this problem quite well: "It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses, more confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent.'
Untrue. No superhuman or posthuman species can overcome fundamental physical limits and reach Alpha Centauri (the Earth's nearest star), not even superhuman artificial intelligence, if any. One must assume deep breakthroughs in our physical understanding of the world to believe these sorts of things.
"Do you think we can solve the great problems of this world with more science and research?"
The great problem of this world, the civilization on the Earth, is the sustainability or longevity of the civilization. This problem, if it can be solved, cannot be solved merely with more science and research; it will require policy interventions. Scientific and technological advances will be useful as long as the problem is soluble. If the problem is not soluble, the civilization will revert to a much more primitive state or disappear.

From a sane down-to-earth perspective, the above quoted notions are not credible, as is documented in the article on the limits of technological progress. The terminology of science, which is supposed to be a rational enterprise, is borrowed by pseudo-scientific fantasy called "science-fiction" to create irrational and implausible fantasies of human capability and possibilities, sometimes not even under the guise of "science-fiction" but rather as "future studies".

Books

Unlimited Progress: The Grand Delusion of the Modern World by Dennis Knight Heffner, 2010 -- decent book on first impression, containing general analysis as well as specific details in various domains such as transportation
Entrepreneurship and Economic Progress by Randall Holcombe, 2007 -- cornucopian implausibilities

The limits of progress

Initial considerations

Testability

A case study of hyperoptimism

See also

Books

Further reading