Progress Is Never Done

During my visit to New York two weeks ago, I walked past The Barclays Center, home to the Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association and spotted an advertisement by Nike. It is on the giant screen in the cover photo I took: Progress is Never Done. It is part of the Nike new marketing campaign including Never Settle, Never Done after years of Just Do It. It is about having wild goals, big ambitions.

This reminds me of an infographic once shared by Bill Gates: “This is one of my favorite infographics.” Gates said. “A lot of people underestimate just how much life has improved over the last two centuries.”

Indeed, it is both encouraging and stunning how much progress the world has made in the last two hundred years, resulting in better health, better living conditions, and longer life expectancy around the world. Yet, we all know the future is not rosy. The current trends in population growth, resource depletion, climate change, pandemic, and conflicts will increasingly make the world an unstable place with potentially catastrophic results in coming decades.

People often mistake technology advancement with progress. However, technology advancement is just a mean to progress, not progress by itself. Scientists developed nuclear weapon with the purpose of stopping World War II without realizing early enough that the world is a more dangerous place with increasing numbers of countries with nuclear weapons. Chinese alchemists discovered gunpowder but suffered in the hands of the British to devastating effect during the Opium Wars. Transportation with fossil fuels is increasingly vilified for its contribution to the current climate change. However, Model T by Henry Ford 100 years ago was a miracle solution, not just for transportation but also the unmanageable "environmental" problem as well as a health and sanitary crisis created by the horse manure piles in major cities.

Technical innovations often come with unintended and unanticipated consequences. Technology innovation alone, however important it is, is not going to solve the global problems we are facing today including climate change, poverty, global population aging, regional conflicts, or pandemic. It will take visions and leaderships. We need leadership more than ever to create long term visions, rather than see the world as a zero sum game, in order for our future generations to survive and thrive on this planet.

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