What Makes Progress Worth Having
Years ago, I moved from a crowded city to rural Alaska. The shift felt less like changing addresses and more like crossing eras. In the city, life often seemed contingent on speed, polish, and knowing the hidden rules. Traffic jams, low-wage jobs, and depersonalization created the sense that if you were not somehow exceptional, you were replaceable.
Then I arrived somewhere that felt, in certain ways, fifty years behind and several truths ahead.
People seemed valued here in a way that was not contingent on being superhuman. Life felt worth more simply because it was life.
That contrast has stayed with me, especially now, as conversations about artificial intelligence, automation, and technological progress accelerate. We are rightly fascinated by what new systems can do. But I keep returning to a quieter question:
What makes progress worth having?
The Default User
Years ago, I attended a training that used a simple example: the color of a bandage.
For a long time, the “neutral” bandage in many stores was designed to match only certain skin tones. If it matched yours, you likely never noticed. If it did not, you did.
That small object reveals something large: systems are often built around an invisible default user. The people who fit the default move through the world with less friction. Others are asked to adapt, explain themselves, or absorb the inconvenience.
Researchers like Timnit Gebru have helped illuminate how this same pattern appears in technology. Data systems, hiring tools, facial recognition, predictive models, and automated processes can reproduce hidden assumptions about who is “normal,” who is trustworthy, who has access, and who belongs.
The math may be new. The blind spots are old.
Slow Internet, Full Lives
I saw this firsthand working at a rural university campus.
Distance education promised access. In many ways, it delivered. But the promise often collided with reality. Some students lived with unreliable or painfully slow internet. Many balanced parenting, work, caregiving, and subsistence activities alongside coursework. What looked like procrastination from a distance could be the lived geometry of a full and demanding life.
I remember consoling a student who was near tears because a technical issue prevented her from taking an exam by the deadline. She did not need a lecture about time management. She needed someone to understand the context and help translate it into institutional language. I reached out to the instructor to explain the situation and ask for a workaround.
That moment taught me something no dashboard can:
The same rule lands differently depending on what it lands on.
Equality says same deadline.
Equity asks what conditions surround it.
Optimization Is Not Flourishing
As AI systems become more capable, we risk confusing optimization with wellbeing.
A system can maximize output while degrading life. It can improve efficiency while increasing loneliness. It can personalize content while fragmenting attention. It can automate decisions while removing dignity.
Stuart Russell has warned that highly capable systems pursuing poorly specified objectives can produce unintended outcomes with unsettling efficiency. If we tell a machine to “make people happy,” what exactly do we mean?
Joy? Meaning? Belonging? Relief? Sedation?
The danger is not only malicious intent. It is literal competence aimed at vague goals.
Likewise, Tristan Harris has argued that technologies optimized for engagement can reshape attention, emotion, and social trust. A system does not need to hate humanity to erode it. It may only need to chase the wrong metric at scale.
Technology That Supports Life
I am not anti-technology. I have seen its gifts.
Researchers like Ethan Mollick have explored how AI can support education through tutoring, personalized practice, and simulation-based learning. Used wisely, these tools could lower barriers, expand access, and help learners who have historically been underserved.
That possibility matters.
But we should be clear about the goal.
The goal is not to replace life.
The goal is to support it.
Technology should help secure the baseline conditions that make human flourishing possible:
clean air and water
nourishing food aligned with values and culture
stable housing conducive to mental health
education and skill-building
room for creativity
meaningful work
time to think
social belonging
dignity
If our systems become more powerful while ordinary life becomes less livable, we should question whether that is progress at all.
Raise the Floor
Much of modern culture celebrates raising the ceiling: faster tools, bigger markets, higher productivity, smarter machines.
But civilizations are often judged by their floor.
How do ordinary people live?
How much friction does daily life contain?
How easy is it to recover from setbacks?
Can people remain human without being optimized into exhaustion?
The future will bring astonishing capabilities. Some of them will be wonderful. Some will be destabilizing. Most will be mixed.
Our task is not simply to accelerate. It is to steer.
Not every breakthrough deserves deployment. Not every efficiency deserves adoption. Not every capability deserves celebration.
We should measure innovation not only by what systems can do, but by whether life becomes more livable, meaningful, and humane.
That is the kind of progress worth having.