What Are We Building? Friday #1: What Does Progress Actually Mean?

The children’s book starts with a world shouting one word: “Hurry.” People are earning more, buying more, working to get ahead—and some are simply working to have enough.

That distinction matters. I do not think there is anything noble about telling someone who is struggling to pay rent or feed a family that they should stop caring about money. Survival comes first. But once we move beyond survival, I think adults have to ask a question we usually avoid: what exactly are we trying to make all this progress for?

From What Are We Building? — the question that becomes the adult series: not how to have more than someone else, but what we can make possible together.

We are very good at measuring motion

We measure income, productivity, home values, company growth, output, speed, market share, test scores, followers, transactions, and efficiency. Those measurements are useful because they tell us whether something changed.

What they do not automatically tell us is whether the change made life better.

A company can become more efficient while its employees become more exhausted. A city can become more valuable while fewer of the people who work there can afford to live there. Technology can save hours of labor without anyone actually receiving more free time. A neighborhood can gain expensive homes while losing the places that made people love the neighborhood in the first place.

None of those outcomes is inevitable. That is exactly the point. “More” and “better” are not synonyms.

Progress needs a destination

If I drive faster but I am headed in the wrong direction, speed is not progress. It just gets me to the wrong place sooner.

I think the same is true of economies, technology and institutions. Faster systems, smarter machines and higher output can create enormous possibilities. But the tool cannot decide the purpose.

That is one reason the thinking machine in What Are We Building? is intentionally not the hero. It can help people grow food, build homes, manage numbers and do heavy work. When Nia asks whether it can make people faster, the answer is easy: yes. Her next question is harder: “But what should we be doing?”

That question belongs to us.

The strongest argument for the way we measure things now

There is a reason societies focus so heavily on growth, productivity and wealth. More productive economies can support better medicine, infrastructure, housing, education and technology. Competition can produce innovation. Profit can signal that people value something. Rising incomes can materially improve lives.

I do not think we should throw those measurements away. A society with no concern for production or resources would quickly discover that good intentions cannot manufacture medicine, maintain bridges or feed millions of people.

The problem begins when a measurement quietly becomes the mission.

If the number goes up, we call it success. But success for whom—and success at what?

Technology is about to make the question harder to avoid

AI makes this conversation more urgent because it could change the amount of human effort required for many kinds of work.

For most of history, producing more usually required more human labor, more time, more physical effort, or more specialized knowledge. Increasingly, machines can absorb pieces of that burden.

That creates an extraordinary opportunity. It also creates a choice.

If technology allows ten people to produce what once required twenty, do we use that gain only to demand even more output from the ten who remain? Do the benefits flow mostly to whoever owns the system? Do we shorten the workweek? Do we lower costs? Do we create entirely new kinds of work? Do we spend more time caring for children, elders, communities and the Earth?

There is no automatic answer. Technology does not resolve the values question. It exposes it.

Maybe a richer definition of progress is possible

I would like us to become better at measuring things that are harder to put on a scoreboard.

Can people afford a safe place to live? Do parents have time with their children? Are rivers cleaner than they were ten years ago? Are people healthier? Can a teacher live near the school where she teaches? Are older people connected to community or isolated? Do young people believe there is a future worth building?

Those questions do not replace economic measures. They complete them.

A strong economy matters. So does what the strength is for.

What Are We Building?

The book eventually moves from a competitive question—how can we have more than them?—to a collaborative one: what can we make possible together?

I think that is where this Friday series begins.

Not with a blueprint. Not with a political party. Not with an assumption that I have figured out the ideal economic system.

With a question.

We inherited institutions designed for earlier technologies, earlier problems and earlier ideas about what a successful life should look like. Now we are gaining tools powerful enough to change many of those assumptions.

Before we simply use those tools to move faster, I would like us to spend some time deciding where we actually want to go.

Read the Free Illustrated Book

Pass the Pencil

If you could add just three things to the way we measure progress—three outcomes you would want society to care about as much as economic growth—what would they be?

That is the question I’m carrying into next Friday.