Remember the Past to Build the Future

My talk at Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend 2022 (bad audio quality, sorry).

Progress has become invisible: the infrastructure that makes our way of life possible is mostly hidden; the problems that industrial civilization has solved are now forgotten. To have a bold vision of the future we need to remember the past and understand the present.

We actually did get the four-hour workday

Interview with Elle Griffin of The Post (video that I can’t embed here, with transcript). “The history, present, and future of work and leisure…. how work has changed over the last 200 years, the decline in working hours and the rise of leisure hours, the shift from blue-collar to white-collar work, the dream of liking what you do, how much we work today, and where we go from here.”

The content is similar to “Why didn’t we get the four-hour workday?,” with a few asides on other topics, such as “consumerism.”

Live from the Table with Noam Dworman

ChatGPT, self-driving cars, and other thoughts on AI. Also, Amazon.

Toward a New Philosophy of Progress

A talk I gave in June 2022, video was just published. This is basically a spoken version of my article “We need a new philosophy of progress”:

Enlightenment thinkers were tremendously optimistic about the potential for human progress—not only in science and technology but also in morality and society. This optimism lasted through the 19th century, but in the 20th century, after the World Wars, it gave way to fear, skepticism, and distrust. Now, in the 21st century, this outlook is worsening. We need a new way forward: a new philosophy of progress. What events and ideas challenged human progress? How can we put it back on a sound foundation? And how can we establish a positive, ambitious vision for the future?

As always, find all my talks and interviews on my speaking page.