I run A Happier World, an Effective Altruism inspired YouTube channel.

I just published a video on technological stagnation, broadly summarizing the relevant chapter from Will MacAskill's book What We Owe The Future. I thought this video was relevant for people interested in progress studies. If I'm wrong, don't hesitate to remove this video from your forum.

Would love to hear what you think. Feel free to use it in any events you organize!

Thanks to Sarah Emminghaus for helping write the script!

Transcript

Sources are marked with an asterisk. Text might differ slightly in wording from the final video.

Imagine you’re an 1870s rural farmer…

Imagine you’re a typical person in the 1870s USA. You’d probably be a rural farmer. For light you use candles, for transport the horse, for communication an unreliable postal service. You have very little time for leisure. Around 1 in 5 of your children die in their first year.*

Now you wake up 50 years later in the roaring 20’s. You finally have electricity. You’re one of the lucky people with a car. You communicate using a telephone. Less than a tenth of all children die before the age of 5.*

Another 50 years later and you find yourself in the 1970’s. You’ve got refrigerators, central heating and flush toilets. Your household owns two cars and you watch a man land on the moon on television. You get to enjoy a 40 hour workweek and vacations, for which you can use the airplane.

And now you’re back in the 2020’s. Comparatively speaking, not much has changed. You have a microwave now. Sure, the internet and smartphones are massive achievements. But aside that domain there isn’t much difference. Progress seems to have slowed.

Why is progress slowing down?

It now takes a lot more effort to make as much progress as we did a century ago. Take physics: In 1905 Einstein revolutionised the discipline, it’s the year he came up with the theory of special relativity and the famous e=mc². Today progress in the field is much harder. The Large Hadron Collider cost around 5 billion dollars and needed thousands of people to operate it. It helped us discover the Higgs Boson, which is great but nothing in comparison to Einstein’s contribution.

According to a conservative estimate by Stanford and LSE economists, if we want to double our level of technological advancement, we need four times as much research effort compared to our previous doubli...

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