Progress, Not Regress
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Before 1985, you’d have had no idea how long it would take to install a program on your computer—or to save a file, or to complete an online form. (To be fair, there were no online forms.) Consider the history of the progress bar, then discuss with your team: what other activities and interactions in life would benefit from a progress bar?
In the decades of computing past when users were constantly left in the dark during loading; they had no way of knowing whether their machines had just crashed or were simply taking some time to think. So in 1985, a computer science student named Brad A. Myers presented a paper on “percent-done progress indicators,” which he had found to be helpful in reassuring users that their computers weren’t about to crash and burn. Myers asked 48 fellow students to run searches on a computer database, with and without a progress bar for guidance. (He used a capsule that filled from left to right — like a giant thermometer from a charity drive, tipped on its side.) Then he had them rate their experience. Eighty-six percent said they liked the bars. “People didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate,” Myers says. “They still preferred the progress bar to not having anything at all.” So, in many ways, the progress bar is like the "close the door" button on elevators; they are just there to make anxious people feel a little better.
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Bars are not the only way to pass time. Explore the following alternatives to the standard progress bar, then discuss with your team: what are the advantages and disadvantages of each approach?
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indeterminate progress bar | splash screen | console output | skeleton screen | throbber
The indeterminate progress bar is one that continues looping or pulsing, implying "I'm working on it." Users can only feel the benefit of knowing the computer didn't crash, but have no idea it will take 1 minute or 10 hours.
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Advantages:
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Reduced "Bounce" Rates: It reassures users that the app hasn't crashed or frozen "zombie state."
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Visual Continuity: It maintains a sense of movement, which makes the wait feel shorter.
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Ease of Implementation: From a dev perspective, it's significantly easier to code.
Disadvantages
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Increased Anxiety: Because there is no "finish line" in sight, users can become frustrated during long waits.
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Lack of Control: Users cannot estimate if they have time to grab a coffee or stay put.​
A splash screen is the initial, often branded, loading screen that appears when a mobile app or software launches, typically displaying a logo, app name, or loading animation. Used to enhance user experience during app initialization, they should be simple, bold, and adhere to a 1-3 second rule to avoid frustration.
Advantages:
system feedback: user feel relief that the program is starting smoothly.
brand perception: premium branding space, to give users a feel for the brand according to the brand guidelines.
perceived performance: if it starts out slow and ends fast, people feel it is actually faster.
Disadvantages:
friction and wait time: frequent users feel it is like a speedbump on a smooth ride.
double loading trap: a splash screen then it goes into a throbber, making people feel even worse.
​skeleton vs loading screen: some users prefer knowing the app template better than the branding, giving the feeling that app is entering more quickly.
Console Output
A console application is a program which runs in an command prompt window. On the right, is an example of a console application. Console programs do not have the flash, nor the event-driven capabilities of a Windows application, however, they still have their place. For example, where screen space is limited such as a bank ATM, or a device with a very simple display type.
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When you give input through keyboard (standard input device) it’s called console input and when you get output on VDU (monitor, standard output device) it’s called console output.
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Windows Console Commands: The command interpreter running in the console is also called "Command Prompt" or "MS-DOS Prompt" (in older versions of Windows).
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Besides the keyboard an application input can come from many other places, such as file, microphone, barcode reader and others. The output of a program may be on the console (on the screen), as well as in a file or another output device, such as a printer.
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​Console output provides developers with immediate feedback. During the development process, print statements allow developers to quickly check if specific parts of the code are executing as expected. This quick feedback loop accelerates the development cycle, enabling developers to iterate rapidly and address issues promptly. While console output might appear basic, its role in software development is far from trivial. From debugging and logging to providing immediate feedback and aiding in the learning process, console output is an indispensable tool for developers. As projects evolve, developers often replace or supplement console output statements with more sophisticated logging tools, marking a transition from development aids to essential components of a robust software system.
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Skeleton Screen is a placeholder that displays during content loading. It typically mimics the layout of the final page, providing users with a visual structure before the actual content appears. Skeleton screens improve user experience by reducing perceived wait times.
Skeleton screens that leverage motion that moves from left to right (e.g. a wave or shimmer like animation, much like Facebook or Google uses) are perceived as shorter in duration than skeletons that pulse (opacity fading in and out)
Skeleton Screen
Throbber
A throbber, also known as a loading icon, is an animated graphical control element used to show that a computer program is performing an action in the background, such as downloading content, conducting intensive calculations, or communicating with an external device. In contrast to a progress bar, a throbber does not indicate how much of the action has been completed.
Some progress bars continue to inch along even when a process is actually stuck; the idea is to encourage people not to give up. Explore the idea of placebo buttons—such as the “close door” buttons on elevators that almost never close the doors, or pedestrian crossing buttons that don’t have any impact on traffic lights—then discuss with your team: when, if ever, is it okay to mislead people so that they feel better about a process?
The Misconception: All buttons placed around you do your bidding.
The Truth: Many public buttons are only there to comfort you.
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You press the doorbell button, you hear the doorbell ring. You press the elevator button, it lights up. You press the button on the vending machine, a soft drink comes rattling down the chute.
Your whole life, you’ve pressed buttons and been rewarded. It’s conditioning at its simplest – just like a rat pressing a lever to get a pellet of food.
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​The thing about buttons, though, is there seems to be some invisible magic taking place between the moment you press them down and when you get the expected result. You can never really be sure you caused the soft drink to appear without opening up the vending machine to see how it works. The problem here is that some buttons in modern life don’t actually do anything at all. The magic between the button press and the result you want is all in your head. You never catch on – because you are not so smart.
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According to a 2008 article in the New Yorker, close buttons don’t close the elevator doors in many elevators built in the United States since the 1990s. In some elevators the button is there for workers and emergency personnel to use, and it only works with a key.
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​Computers and timers now control the lights at many intersections, but at one time little buttons at crosswalks allowed people to trigger the signal change. Those buttons are mostly all disabled now, but the task of replacing or removing all of them was so great most cities just left them up. You still press them though, because the light eventually changes.
In an investigation by ABC news in 2010, only one functioning crosswalk button could be found in Austin, Texas; Gainsville, Fla.; and Syracuse, NY.
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In many offices and cubicle farms, the thermostat on the wall isn’t connected to anything. Landlords, engineers and HVAC specialists have installed dummy thermostats for decades to keep people from costing companies money by constantly adjusting the temperature. According to a 2003 article in the Wall Street Journal, one HVAC specialist surmised that 90 percent of all office thermostats are fake (others say it’s more like 2 percent).
Some schemes can be quite elaborate. For instance, one airport discovered that, if planes parked further away so that people had to walk longer to baggage claim, they complained less about waiting for their bags once they got there. They were happier moving along than idling at the carousel, even if the total wait time was the same. Can you think of other situations in which people could be tricked into feeling less impatient?
SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.
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Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags. So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.
Designers have discovered that progress bars in apps make users more likely to complete tasks such as surveys and applications. Discuss with your team: is it okay to design interfaces that persuade people to complete actions? Is there a point past which nudging becomes manipulation?
Many popular games from Pokémon to World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy as a method of measurement to assess your power level and progression within games, as you gained points in the form of experience points (XP). However, what’s interesting in these games is they speed at which the progress bars fill are designed to be faster in the beginning and slower as you advance. This gives users a sense of satisfaction early on by rewarding them with quick progression at the start of their journey with the game, as a way to keep them playing. Once users have invested sufficient time or money and have essentially become hooked, progression slows and requires more time investment. However, despite this slowdown, the rewards tend to be larger later on, offering additional incentives to continue playing. The strategy is used to quickly reward new players, reducing the risk of early abandonment at a point when they have invested less.
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A survey was set up and created three different progress indicator conditions with variable speeds, to examine their impact on user task completion rates.
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Condition 01 (Constant Rate):
A progress indicator that moved at a constant, steady rate as users went through the survey. -
Condition 02 (Fast-to-Slow):
A progress indicator that moved fast at the beginning of the survey and then slowed as users neared completion. -
Condition 03 (Slow-to-Fast):
A progress indicator that moved slow at the beginning of the survey and then fast as users neared completion.
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Users were most likely to complete the task when the progress feedback started off fast and then slowed towards the end of the task (was encouraging) with a breakoff rate of 11.3%. When progress was shown at a steady, consistent rate they had an average breakoff rate of 14.4%. Surprisingly, this indicated that showing progress can actually have a negative effect on user completion rates and can be discouraging. If users feel they are progressing slower than expected, they have a worse experience and are more likely to quit the task.
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This is linked to the endowed progress effect. This is a psychological phenomenon where people are more motivated to complete a task if they feel they have already made some progress towards it, even if that progress is artificially created.
Endowment progress effect works like this. Although both groups had the same number of washes to complete before redeeming a free wash, Group 02 had a higher redemption rate than Group 01. By implementing the endowment progress effect you can encourage higher completion rates.
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​The success of progress bars in games has transferred to other applications with a term in UX that is also known as gamification. For example, duolingo, linked in and even fitness apps all use this method to encourage users to stick to their program. While the design of progress bars and help the company with consumer loyalty, we should be aware of its drawbacks; designers have the potential to exploit users’ psychological triggers potentially leading to compulsive behaviour and forming addictions by gamifying these systems. For example, encouraging spending more money by locking or severely slowing progress unless users pay money, a tactic often seen in free to play gaming models, is a fine line between unethical usage of these seemingly harmless graphical elements. There may be a temptation to mislead users into thinking they have made more progress towards a goal then what they actually have. Designers must balance the psychological triggers they tap into with a commitment to honesty and user well-being. So, how important is the word progress? Are we evaluating progress based on our own improvement and happiness or measuring ourselves against others? It's all a matter of perception.
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In 1994, the developers of Namco’s Ridge Racer added an Easter egg to their loading screens—a version of the studio’s classic Galaxian game. Google Chrome does something similar: its Dinosaur Game appears when your device goes offline temporarily. In the real world, some restaurants now encourage diners to play games on table-mounted payment terminals (for a fee) while waiting for their food. Discuss with your team: should more processes come with these kinds of “auxiliary games” to help people pass the time?
What do you do during loading screen-time? Gaze at the screen in a stupefied torpor? Believe it or not, according to video game legal specialist David Hoppe, Namco nabbed a patent on loading screen minigames 20 years ago, a patent that is due to expire later this year.
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"Namco holds a dubious patent on 'auxiliary games' that play while the main game loads," writes Hoppe. "Namco's patent, U.S. Patent 5,718,632, was filed in 1995 and is thus set to expire in 2015."
When Namco developed arcade racing game Ridge Racer for the PlayStation system back in 1994, the company became frustrated by the long load times on the new CD-ROM technology.
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He says that the patent probably ought not have been allowed in the first place. "Patents exist to incentivize innovation and progress. The general requirements for patentability are that the subject matter be patentable, and that the invention is useful, novel and non-obvious. Certainly an auxiliary game is useful for passing the time while the main game loads. However, the patent would seem to fail on the later two points, since interactive loading screens had already been in use prior to Namco's patent." So, once the patent expires, maybe developers will developers will create funky mini-games to fill up our time when the game loads?
"There's nothing fun about getting kicked offline—unless you have a friendly T-Rex to keep you company, that is," explains Chrome UX engineer Edward Jung on the motivation behind Chrome’s offline Dino game. First design iterations of the dino character, code name Project Bolan. This article is a Q&A with its creators from the Chrome Design team—Edward, as well as Sebastien Gabriel and Alan Bettes—to learn more about the dinosaur’s journey from the Cretaceous period to the modern browser.
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How did you come up with the idea of running T-Rex?
Sebastien: The idea of “an endless runner” as an easter egg within the “you-
are-offline” page was born in early 2014. It’s a play on going back to the "prehistoric age” when you had no Wi‑Fi. The cacti and desert setting were part of the first iteration of the “you-are-offline” page, while the visual style is a nod to our tradition of pixel-art style in Chrome’s error illustrations.​​​
Alan: The new easter egg was submitted in September 2014, under the guise of a page redesign. How did the launch go?
Edward: It was the first time I'd written a game, so I had a lot to figure out—jump physics, collision detection, and cross-platform compatibility. The first iteration played terribly on older Android devices, so I ended up having to rewrite the whole thing. But by December 2014, the game had scaled to all platforms.
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We can imagine that the Chrome Dino got quite popular.
Edward: Yes! There are currently 270 million games played every month, both on laptop and mobile. It also got to the point where we had to give enterprise admins a way to disable the game because school kids—and even adults who were supposed to be working—really got into it.
Sebastien: We also created the chrome://dino URL, where folks can play the game without going offline. The page offers an “arcade mode” so players can train for the best results in a full-window experience.
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You currently have a special edition of the game out. Can you tell us more about that?
Alan: Over the years, the game got a few upgrades, like pterodactyls and night mode. The latest one rolled out this week: a special “anniversary edition” for Chrome’s 10th birthday.
How long does it take to beat the game?
Edward: We built it to max out at approximately 17 million years, the same amount of time that the T-rex was alive on Earth… but we feel like your spacebar may not be the same afterwards.
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You can’t know if you’re there yet without some way to measure progress; the same is true for entire societies. Learn about the following socioeconomic indicators with your team: what do they try to measure? Then look up the numbers corresponding to your country and discuss with your team: how accurately do they reflect what it’s like to live there? And how should we decide what the end—or goal—of a society is?​
Gross Domestic Product | Gross National Income | Gini Coefficient
Human Development Index | Multidimensional Poverty Index | Labor Productivity
Happiness Index | Passport Index | Big Mac Index
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​Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the total market value of all of the final goods and services which are produced and rendered during a specific period of time (usually a year) by a country or countries. The major components of GDP are consumption, government spending, net exports (exports minus imports), and investment. Changing any of these factors can increase the size of the economy. For example, population growth through mass immigration can raise consumption and demand for public services, thereby contributing to GDP growth. However, GDP is not a measure of overall standard of living or well-being, as it does not account for how income is distributed among the population. A country may rank high in GDP but still experience jobless growth depending on its planned economic structure and strategies. Dividing total GDP by the population gives an idealized rough measure of GDP per capita.
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Comparing GDP and GDP per capita, we see that the largest economies does not have the highest average and that great disparity exists. So, it's hard to determine which country actually provides citizens more opportunities to be happy and have the happiest citizens.
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The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of income or wealth inequality, ranging from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (maximum inequality). It was developed by Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini. The Gini coefficient measures the inequality among the values of a frequency distribution, such as income levels. A Gini coefficient of 0 reflects perfect equality, where all income or wealth values are the same. In contrast, a Gini coefficient of 1 (or 100%) reflects maximal inequality among values, where a single individual has all the income while all others have none.
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According to GINI, Scandinavia and Australia and Canada enjoy greater equality than leading global economies by size such as the US and China.
The Human Development Index (HDI) for 2026 measures countries’ achievements in health, education, and standard of living, with scores ranging from 0 to 1, categorizing nations from low to very high human development. The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite measure developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to assess a country’s average achievements in three key dimensions: a long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living. It combines life expectancy at birth, mean and expected years of schooling, and gross national income per capita, using a geometric mean to produce a single score between 0 and 1. Higher scores indicate better overall human development. The index does not take into account several factors, such as the net wealth per capita or the relative quality of goods in a country. This situation tends to lower the ranking of some of the most developed countries, such as the G7 members and others.
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The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) measures poverty by capturing overlapping deprivations in health, education, and living standards, going beyond income alone. The MPI is a comprehensive measure of poverty that considers multiple dimensions of well-being rather than focusing solely on income or consumption. It was developed in 2010 by the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and is published annually alongside the Human Development Report. Unlike traditional poverty measures, the MPI accounts for both the incidence (how many people are poor) and the intensity (how many deprivations each poor person experiences) of poverty.
Labor productivity is a key indicator of US economic health, measuring how efficiently workers produce goods and services. It is calculated as the ratio of total output to total labor hours worked. Factors such as technological advancements, investments in capital, and employee skills can enhance labor productivity. Over time, labor productivity has grown due to innovations, work experience, and investments in worker efficiency and equipment. Despite recent challenges, such as a decline in real productivity for U.S. manufacturers, there are strategies to improve productivity, including investing in artificial intelligence and technology.
Happiness Index
The Happiness Index is a measure of subjective well-being that evaluates how people perceive their own life satisfaction across multiple dimensions, typically on a scale from 0 to 10. The Happiness Index is a survey-based tool designed to assess happiness, well-being, and quality of life in various domains such as health, work, social support, governance, and community life. It originated from the Bhutanese Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index, introduced in 1972, which prioritized happiness over purely economic growth and measured multiple quantitative and qualitative factors. The modern version gained prominence with the World Happiness Report, first published in 2012 by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
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The Happiness Index serves multiple purposes:
A passport index is a ranking system that evaluates passports based on the travel freedom they provide to their holders. It measures how many countries a passport holder can visit without needing a visa, assigning a score based on this access. The Henley Passport Index is one of the most recognized passport indices, ranking passports globally according to the number of destinations accessible without a prior visa.
The Big Mac Index is an informal economic indicator that compares the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac across countries to assess whether currencies are overvalued or undervalued relative to the U.S. dollar. The Big Mac Index was created by The Economist in 1986 as a lighthearted way to illustrate purchasing power parity (PPP), which is the idea that identical goods should cost the same in different countries when expressed in a common currency (like the U.S. dollar). McDonald’s Big Mac was chosen because it is sold in many countries with consistent ingredients, making it a simple proxy for a “basket of goods”.
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The Big Mac index was introduced in The Economist in September 1986 by Pam Woodall as a semi-humorous illustration of PPP and has been published by that paper annually since then. Although the Big Mac Index was not intended to be a legitimate tool for exchange rate evaluation, it is now globally recognised and featured in many academic textbooks and reports. The index also gave rise to the word burgernomics.
The purpose of the Big Mac index is to calculate an implied exchange rate between two currencies. In order to calculate the Big Mac index, the price of a Big Mac in a foreign country (in the foreign country's currency) is divided by the price of Big Mac in a base country (in the base country's currency). Typically, the base country used is the United States.
For example, using figures from July 2023:
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In Switzerland, a Big Mac costs 6.70 Swiss francs.
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In the U.S., a Big Mac costs US$5.58.
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The implied exchange rate is 1.20 francs per dollar, that is 6.70 francs/$5.58 = 1.20
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This index, like all others, is not perfect. The Big Mac (and virtually all sandwiches) vary from country to country with differing nutritional values, weights and even nominal size differences.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics suggests that closed systems always grow more disordered over time. Left to themselves, things get messier: your room won’t clean itself. Yet many people take for granted that the world as a whole should become better over time. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., a quote that may have preceded and certainly outlived him. But it turns out that this idea that the world improves over time may be a relatively new one (alternate link). Discuss with your team: is the world growing better? Be sure to check out the artist Will Crawford’s answer to this question in this 1909 painting. What would a painting with the same title look like today?
How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? We might think the world is constantly or "somewhat" progressing, but in the past people thought it was on a path predestined by God. The idea of progress only emerged in the in the 200 years between Columbus and Newton. The idea of progress is relatively new. As science progressed and with the Enlightenment, people's admiration and strict adherence to the the past crumbled. The modern world began when people resolved to do so.
Why might people in the past have been hesitant to embrace the idea of progress? The main argument against it was that it implies a disrespect of previous generations. As the historian Carl Becker noted in a classic work written in the early 1930s, “a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress ... until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known.”​ The motto of the Royal Society, which was founded in 1660 in London, was in nullius verba—“on no one’s word.”
Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend, “The rapid progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.” The increasing disrespect for ancient learning was paired with a conviction that human progress over the long haul was a desirable and feasible objective. But, needless to say, different authors meant different things when they thought about progress. Some thought about moral improvement, others about less tyrannical and more benevolent rulers.
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By the 18th century, the idea of economic progress had taken firm root. Adam Smith felt in 1776 that “the annual produce of the land and labour of England ... is certainly much greater than it was a little more than a century ago at the restoration of Charles II [in 1660] ... and [it] was certainly much greater at the restoration than we can suppose it to have been a hundred years before.”
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​However as progress evolved and accelerated, changing our lives dramatically, the downsides of progress surfaced. Many of whom stress the costs of technological advances. During the Industrial Revolution, many writers, following the lead of Thomas Malthus, were convinced that unrestrained population growth would undo the fruits of economic growth, a belief that still had adherents in the late 1960s, such as Paul Ehrlich. Nowadays, unsubstantiated fears of monstrosities created by genetic engineering (including, God forbid, smarter people, drought-resistant crops, and mosquitoes that don’t transmit malaria) threaten to slow down research and development in crucial areas, including coping with climate change.​
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This turn of the century artwork is titled "Surely the World is Growing Better" features a battle scene with advance technology such as submarines, airships and battleships. Not the usual bright and beautiful futuristic images we would have imaged. Perhaps this foreshadows World War I with its caricatures of nationalism. Wonder if this is influenced by the Russo-Japanese War of the same period.
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Will Crawford was an American artist known for his illustrations that appeared in magazines such as Collier's and The
Saturday Evening Post during the early 20th century. He was particularly skilled at capturing the essence of daily life, often focusing on scenes of urban and rural America. Crawford's work often featured a sense of humor and whimsy, making his illustrations both charming and relatable to a wide audience. His detailed and expressive drawings showcased his talent for capturing the human experience in a way that resonated with viewers. Crawford's art continues to be celebrated for its timeless appeal and nostalgic charm.
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In our generation, how will we define progress? How will we measure progress? What is our progress bar? - I believe our generation has a passion for sustainability, thus environmental protection and biodiversity should be taken into account. Additionally, the adoption of technology and AI might be something that benchmarks development in the developing and developed countries, whether that means an increased productivity or reduced employment, the future is unclear. With social media, academic pressures, new global order - our standards for happiness are transitioning.
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