Is progress always good? A response to Steven Pinker

Meaning and purpose in the age of technology.

Written by Noah Carl and Bo Winegard.

In a recent podcast discussion between Steven Pinker and the Triggernometry hosts, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, the following exchange took place:

Kisin: People talk about a crisis of meaning and a crisis of purpose. Do you recognise that as a thing that exists?

Pinker: I recognise that people say that. I have argued, admittedly not terribly successfully, that there are enormous opportunities for meaning and purpose, namely improving human well-being on a global scale. If we made people richer and healthier and longer-lived, with better experiences, more knowledgeable, safer, less likely to get killed in wars and genocides and street crime, what’s so meaningless about that? …

Kisin: If people are getting richer and safer, and yet they feel like they’re drifting more and they’re more alienated and they’re less connected to others … wouldn’t that be evidence for the fact that, perhaps, the human condition is incapable of simply enjoying constant improvement and needs some kind of struggle and fight or whatever that might be?

Pinker: It is true that we tend to pocket our gains and fail to appreciate them … If people struggle for a worthy cause, a noble crusade, a holy war and they die in the millions, well so much the worse for feeling that you’re part of a holy crusade. We’re better off with a little bit of anomie and alienation.

When Pinker is subsequently pressed on whether people become nihilistic when they lack a sense of purpose, he does concede “there’s some of that”. Yet he maintains that people can find a great deal of purpose in “improving the state of the country and improving the state of the world”.

While we have great respect for Pinker, we find his answers to the Triggernometry hosts’ questions unsatisfying. This isn’t because we believe there currently is a “crisis of meaning” in the West. Such talk is overblown. After all, the countries of Western Europe and the Anglosphere have the highest levels of happiness and life satisfaction as measured in surveys. Meanwhile, suicide rates have fallen or remained stable over the last few decades. The spike in mortality caused by “deaths of despair” is largely confined to the US, as evidenced by the growing gap in life expectancy between the US and other major Western economies.

Rather, we find Pinker’s answers unsatisfying because they seem to be based on an unrealistic model of human nature (which is surprising given Pinker’s obvious expertise in that domain). In short, it cannot be taken for granted that economic growth and technological progress will continue to raise human well-being in perpetuity. And it is far from implausible that a crisis of meaning could arise in the not-so-distant future, owing to technological developments that are already underway.

Some quotations

Suppose that everyone on earth enjoyed a millionaire’s standard of living. Suppose there was no crime and no war. Suppose all our material needs were met and every intellectual problem was solved. Would this be a desirable world in which to live? For some, perhaps. But many would face profound ennui. There would be nothing left to work on, nothing left to strive for, nothing left to argue about.

The notion that human beings need some kind of struggle or hardship to give our lives meaning – that we need challenges to meet and obstacles to overcome – is hardly novel. Many philosophers have remarked on it over the years, including Pascal, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Camus.

In the Pensées, Blaise Pascal asks us to consider a king “attended with every pleasure he can feel”. He notes that if the king "be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy and more unhappy than the least of his subjects”. In the Conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide, Pangloss states that “when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it”. To which Martin replies, “Let us work without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.” In the Vanity of Existence, Arthur Schopenhauer suggests that “we take no delight in existence except when we are struggling for something”. In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche informs us that “the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!” And in the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus observes that “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart”.

Several contemporary thinkers have made similar remarks. In his book The Human Zoo, biologist Desmond Morris notes that “in the midst of material plenty there is much behavioral deprivation”. During his famous interviews with the journalist David Frost, former President Nixon states, “What makes life mean something is purpose, the goal, the battle, the struggle – even if you don’t win it.” In his manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski asks us to consider a man “who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it”. He notes of the man that “at first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized”. And in his book Tribe based on ethnographic research with American war veterans, the writer Sebastian Junger opines that “humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary”.

Nassim Taleb arguably formalised the idea with his concept of “anti-fragility”. Many systems, he notes, appear to benefit from harm, stress, error, disorder and variability – at least over a certain range. They need those things, becoming vulnerable or decrepit without them. And this is true not just of ecosystems, financial systems and political systems, but of humans too (we are, after all, biological systems). Taleb suggests that many ancient traditions, such as religious fasting and other forms of asceticism, can be understood as a manifestations of anti-fragility.¹

The downsides of technology

There is no law of nature that says new technologies necessarily raise human well-being. Sometimes they make us worse off. There are various mechanisms by which this can happen: externalities; unintended consequences; network effects; tragedies of the commons; races to the bottom; evolutionary mismatch.

Humans have never had more knowledge about diet, nutrition and exercise. Yet today, more than a billion people worldwide are obese. They’re so fat they are putting their own health at risk, while rendering themselves physically unattractive to other members of their species. Why? Mass transportation and labour-saving devices have drastically reduced the amount of physical activity we’re required to take. Meanwhile, advances in production have made food so plentiful and so palatable that a sizeable fraction of the population is essentially addicted to eating.

The obesity epidemic represents a clear case of evolutionary mismatch. Humans did not evolve in an environment of abundant and delicious food. We evolved in one of scarcity. Our ancestors had to spend much of their time foraging, fishing, hunting, preparing and cooking food whose texture was often tough or gritty and whose taste was generally bland. As a consequence, they did not evolve mechanisms for self-regulating the consumption of highly palatable food. Instead, they passed on a tendency to gorge on such food whenever it became available.

Social media is another technology that has made many people’s lives worse. In his recent book The Anxious Generation, psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues persuasively that it lies behind the decline in teenage mental health since the early 2010s. As young people flocked to apps like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok (whether through peer pressure or their own volition) they became lonelier, more physically isolated, more sleep deprived, more anxious and less happy. The impact on girls was particularly negative, Haidt notes, because they are more sensitive to the relentless social comparison that such apps encourage.

It’s true that young people have always compared themselves to their peers –and experienced emotions like envy, jealously and resentment as a result. But the scale and intensity of comparison is now different. On social media, you’re comparing yourself not just with a few dozen people at your school, but with their friends and their friends’ friends. You’re judged mainly on superficial characteristics like physical attractiveness, which means the plainer-looking cannot compensate for their dull appearance by being kind, funny, loyal, intelligent or hard-working. And you’re not merely judged subjectively; you’re ranked and rated by cold, quantitative metrics. All this is undoubtedly exacerbated by social media’s “winner take all” effect, whereby a small number of accounts generate almost all the engagement.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that a recent study by Leonardo Bursztyn and colleagues found that US college students were willing to pay to deactivate their accounts so long as their peers did the same. As the authors note, this implies that social media apps impose negative externalities on non-users. When the authors account for these externalities, they find that the apps reduce aggregate welfare. In other words, the average student would be better off if the apps didn’t exist but, conditional on them existing, is better off being a user.

The harms of modern food production and social media illustrate the general principle that having access to more resources – more nourishment, more connectivity – isn’t necessarily a good thing.² However, they probably aren’t about to provoke a full-blown crisis of meaning, especially since there are workarounds for both problems: the obese can try dieting, get gastric bypass surgery or go on Ozempic; young people can have their smartphones taken away or their access to social media restricted. It’s also true that neither problem is primarily one of ennui, or lack of purpose.

One technology that does have the potential to strip many people’s lives of purpose is artificial intelligence. We do not have in mind some far-fetched scenario where superintelligent robots enslave the human race or gradually turn us into paperclips. We are referring to the possibility that AI becomes better than humans at most or all tasks that involve intellectual creativity – music and film production, coding, journalism, science, law etc. In such a world, humans would have vast amounts to consume but very little to contribute, beyond inputting prompts. And while this might prove salutary for people who are satisfied with consuming, it would be detrimental for those who relish the creative process itself. (Any intellectually creative person who claims otherwise is kidding themselves.)

Judging by the extremely negative response to a recent Apple ad, many internet users are already keenly aware of the potential for new technology to detract from the creative process. The ad in question depicts an assemblage of traditional artistic objects (such as books, paints and musical instruments) being crushed by an industrial press – its point being to highlight the thinness of the latest iPad. Yet tablets merely threaten the designers of guitars and the organisers of concerts; they’re not designed to replace musicians themselves. AI, on the other hand, could end up replacing musicians. Computers can already generate photo-realistic images on demand. How soon until they can do the same for catchy, memorable songs?

Of course, people have been lamenting the human costs of technological development ever since the much-derided Luddite movement of the 19th century. And the typical response is to point out that individuals who are employed in whichever activity is being mechanised can be put to productive use doing something else. Before the industrial revolution, 80% of the population worked in agriculture; today only a few percent do. But this response isn’t very compelling when it comes to intellectually stimulating jobs. Losing one’s livelihood as a musician only to become a “prompt engineer” involves moving from a more meaningful activity to a less meaningful one. Technology is meant to automate the boring stuff, the drudge work – not the tasks that give us most enjoyment.

Consider a scientist who becomes engrossed in a certain problem. He works on it for many years before finally figuring out the answer. And when he does, he gets a profound sense of satisfaction. Would he have been better off if the answer had been available on day one, so that he had never had a problem to work on? Would he have preferred to spend all those years reading or gardening or playing video games, rather than figuring out the answer to his problem? Surely not. The truth is that many people don’t get meaning from passively consuming; they get meaning from meeting challenges, overcoming obstacles and figuring out answers to problems.³

They also derive meaning from indulging their sense of wonder and contemplating the unknown. Consider the excitement explorers must have felt during the Age of Discovery, sailing to far-away lands where few Europeans had ever set foot before. Even their countrymen who stayed behind were able to share in this excitement when the explorers returned home and regaled them with tales of their adventures. Today, there are no mountains or jungles or deserts left to traverse, and practically every square metre of the earth’s surface is extensively documented in aerial photographs. We are not pretending these early expeditions were easy; in addition to enduring cramped conditions, bland food and physical labour onboard ship, many seafarers succumbed to illness or were slaughtered by natives. But there was a genuine spirit of adventure – a feeling that you were journeying into the unknown. Fast forward a few hundred years, and we have GPS, satellite phones and queues at the summit of Everest.

People queueing to reach the top of Mount Everest. Source.

This highlights a kind of paradox at the heart of human civilisation. As society gets richer and more technologically advanced, there are fewer opportunities to advance human civilisation yet further. And as we enter the era of AI and robotics, it seems plausible that most of these future advancements will be automated anyway. Humans may eventually pass their time engaged in various forms of leisure, such as video games based in virtual reality. If the virtual reality becomes sufficiently immersive, we will have succeeded in inventing something like the Matrix.

Interestingly, the writers of that film were no strangers to the issues we have been discussing. You may recall the scene where Agent Smith says to Morpheus:

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program … Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

Evolutionary psychology

Since humans spent most of our evolutionary history living in bands of hunter-gatherers, it is reasonable to assume that our psychology is largely adapted to that way of life. Which makes it pertinent to ask: what gave our hunter-gatherer ancestors meaning?

Scratching out a living was hard. Recurrent adaptive problems like evading predators, hunting large mammals, and fending off outsiders made cooperation among group members essential. Indeed, sociality is one of the two defining characteristics of our species, along with intelligence. This has led some evolutionary psychologists to argue that we evolved to find in meaning in “coalitional value” - that what gave our ancestors meaning was being valuable to their coalition. Hence our self-esteem rises when we feel more valued by our fellow group members and falls when we feel less valued.

A large body of evidence supports the latter proposition, including both experiments and observational data. Being told you were excluded from a group task on the basis of others’ preferences, as opposed to a random lottery, prompts significant declines in self-evaluation. Meanwhile, becoming unemployed or feeling burdensome in old age are among the strongest predictors of depression risk. (The higher status of elderly people, and their continued role in food production, may account for the lower rates of old-age depression seen in traditional societies.) In addition, suicide rates typically decline during war time, most likely because war fosters social cohesion and gives people a sense of purpose.

While coalitional value is partly tied to social status and therefore zero-sum, it also has a nonzero-sum element: individuals in one group can all perceive themselves as having greater coalitional value than individuals in some other group. Imagine a band of hunter-gatherers that has great success in foraging thanks to the skills and industry of its members, versus one that achieves little success because its members are always bickering. Or compare two industrial countries with very different rates of drug addiction. This means that the average coalitional value, and hence the fulfilment people achieve, varies between societies and within the same society over time.

What about the eccentric loner-genius, who works on something obsessively for no other reason than his own personal fulfilment? Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman has rejected at least three major prizes, including the $1 million Clay Prize, because he’s “not interested in money or fame”. (He once told a journalist, “You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms.”) Does this contradict coalitional value theory? Even if it does, it doesn’t contradict our more important claim that people derive meaning from meeting intellectual challenges. In any case, there are individual differences in all traits, so even if most people do require some kind of external validation for their efforts, a small minority may not. The existence of homosexuals does not disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Coalitional value theory is broadly consistent with the quotations adduced at the start of this essay, and arguably provides additional scientific grounding for them. It predicts that humans will be most satisfied with their lives when they feel useful, valuable and necessary – regardless of whether their leisure time or their consumption possibilities are maximised.

Happiness research

One indicator that you are useful, valuable and necessary is having a lot of money, which not only serves as a medium of exchange but also confers status. Coalitions exist at different scales and among the most important is the immediate family. Hence individuals with more money tend to feel more valued by their family, as well as by prospective partners if they aren’t married. At the individual level, there’s a clear positive relationship between income and life satisfaction measured by a simple survey item. What’s more, it appears to be causal: lottery winners experience sustained rises in life satisfaction relative to those who played the lottery but didn’t win.

Interestingly, the effect of income on emotional well-being (measured by questions like, “Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?”) is weaker and flattens out at a lower quantile of the income distribution. So while the rich evaluate their lives more favourably than the middle-class, they do not enjoy substantially greater emotional well-being. In a highly-cited 2010 study by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, Americans with an income of $60,000 per year reported the same “positive affect” the day before as those with an income of $160,000 per year.

The relationship between income and life satisfaction is often stronger at the country level: GDP per capita (logged) is highly correlated with average life satisfaction.⁴ So the richest, most technologically advanced countries are indeed the happiest. Since people in the rich world presumably face fewer challenges and obstacles than their counterparts in developing countries, this could be said to contradict our claim that human beings need some kind of struggle or hardship to give our lives meaning. However, we are not suggesting the specific challenges and obstacles faced by people in today’s developing countries are particularly conducive to meaning, only that some challenges and obstacles are.

What’s interesting is that if we track life satisfaction over time in the richest countries, we find that it has remained largely flat. The General Social Survey has been gauging happiness in the US since the early 1970s, and the average level now is no greater that it was back then. It’s the same story in the World Values Survey, which has been measuring life satisfaction since the early 1980s. Looking at seven advanced countries that were included in the first wave, only South Korea saw a small rise in life satisfaction, while several others saw small declines. Finland’s living standards almost doubled over the relevant time period but its life satisfaction remained entirely unchanged.⁵ In some developing countries, by contrast, growth in living standards has been associated with rising life satisfaction.

Even more intriguing is evidence that people in small-scale or “primitive” societies sometimes report higher life satisfaction than their counterparts in rich countries. Last year, Eric Galbraith and colleagues published a study on 19 populations “living in close contact with nature, on the fringes of globalized mainstream society”. Their main finding is shown in the chart below. Average life satisfaction across the 19 populations was much higher than would be predicted from the country-level relationship between income and life satisfaction, and some populations reported higher levels than global frontrunners like Norway and Denmark. Another study by Tomasz Frackowiak and colleagues compared happiness among Hadza hunter-gatherers and Poles, finding it to be greater among the Hadza.

Source.

How should we interpret the evidence from happiness research? On the one hand, the most technologically advanced countries are the happiest, and developing countries have become happier as they’ve undergone economic development. Plus, income has a causal impact on life satisfaction at the individual level. On the other hand, the countries that were most technologically advanced in the 1970s and 1980s have not become happier over time, and could be less contented than some small-scale societies.

The fact that income has a causal impact at the individual level, and yet rich countries have not become happier over time, suggests the effect of income works partly or largely through relative status – in line with the Easterlin paradox. So being richer improves your life satisfaction because it enhances your position or rank, not only (or even mainly) because it allows you to buy more goods and services. On this interpretation, the country-level association arises in part because people in developing countries compare themselves to their counterparts in the rich world, who have higher status (and thus greater coalitional value) from the perspective of the “global group”.

It’s often taken for granted that opportunities for meaning and purpose have expanded over the course of history, as human civilisation has advanced. And to a large extent they have. Technological progress has not only freed people from the drudgery of agricultural labour, but has allowed them to apply their creativity in entirely new domains. You couldn’t be an electric guitarist, a rocket designer or a computational biologist until the 20th century. For practically all of human history, these vocations didn’t exist because the technologies on which they depend simply hadn’t been invented yet.

However, this doesn’t mean we are on some teleological path to inexorably greater fulfilment. What seems plausible is that opportunities for meaning and purpose have expanded at some points in history and contracted at others. The transition to settled societies may have engendered a loss of meaning for most ordinary people, as the freedom and variety of hunter-gatherer life was replaced by the comparative monotony of farm work. It also seems likely that different eras have afforded more or less meaning to different kinds of people. Men of great courage and physical strength may have thrived in Antiquity; those with deep religious convictions may have floundered during the Scientific Revolution. All this is to say that there’s no reason why current developments in AI have to make us better off. In fact, they will plausibly make us worse off.

Conclusion

In the discussion we quoted at the beginning, Pinker gives what we consider unsatisfying answers to his interlocutors’ questions about meaning, purpose and the human need for struggle. Unsatisfying why? They seem to rest on an unrealistic model of human nature, whereby human well-being is maximised when we face no danger, conflict or hardship – when all our material needs are met and every intellectual problem is solved.

As many philosophers and contemporary thinkers have remarked, humans need some kind of struggle to give their lives meaning. This struggle needn’t be a “holy war” where they “die in the millions”. It could be anything that makes them feel necessary – anything that makes them feel useful to their family, their community, their nation etc. Humans are social animals who evolved to find meaning in the value we provide to our fellow group members.

Technological developments that are already underway, especially in fields like AI, threaten to strip meaning from many people’s lives by superseding them in precisely those domains where they obtain coalitional value. And putting such people to work elsewhere may not alleviate their lost fulfilment, since the tasks in which they were previously engaged were the most intellectually stimulating to begin with. It is likewise naive to imagine that money will offer adequate compensation, as its effect on happiness works partly or largely through social rank.

Humans don’t just value the products of our intellect – institutions, gizmos, works of art. We also value the process of applying our intellect. So far from enhancing our well-being, a world in which future civilisational advancements are largely automated could give rise to profound ennui. And even if we eventually adapt, the transition period won’t be easy.

Noah Carl and Bo Winegard are the Editors of Aporia.

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1. As Rob Henderson writes, “Now we have a world without danger, a world of near-total safety, but has it led to more satisfaction? The answer appears to be no.”

2. Other examples of technologies that have or could make our lives worse are discussed in Future Imperfect by David Friedman.

3. While Pinker no doubt gets some degree of satisfaction from his hobbies, we submit that he gets much more satisfaction from his vocation as a brilliant science communicator. Would Pinker be better off if someone trained an AI to write books in his exact literary style, so there was no need for him to ever write another? We don’t believe so.

4. This is true when using data from the Gallup World Poll, though not when using data from latest wave of the World Values Survey.

5. Finland’s stagnant life satisfaction can hardly be blamed on mass immigration, since the country has had very little.