E3 part 1: Five Faces of Progress: A Conceptual Framework for Historical Change | Prof. Tyson Retz |

When one of the large AI companies announces that their new model will bring us "closer to AGI" (Artificial General Intelligence), what notion of progress, if any, are they invoking? 

When advocacy groups protest technological solutions to areas including AI or climate change for example, which historical narratives inform their concerns? These are not merely rhetorical choices—they reflect fundamentally different assumptions and values regarding human improvement that have competed across centuries. By examining the implicit philosophies that underlie the genealogies of these ideas , we can better understand why the idea of progress remains so contested and occupies consequential terrain in contemporary debates.

Professor Tyson Retz, Assistant Professor at the University of Stavenger and author of Progress and the Scale of History, has mapped five distinct periods regarding Western and non-Western ideas of progress. From ancient societies where "time destroyed things rather than improved them," through the Enlightenment's vision of progress as "history itself, the forward movement of humanity," to industrial optimism and postwar development economics, each age embedded specific claims about what counts as advancement and who decides.

Professor Retz highlights how the scale  in both spatial and chronological terms at which we view history,  determines whether progress appears real or illusory. In other words, the same evidence looks very different depending on whether you're examining one lifetime or one millennium, one technology, the entire natural world, or "humanity as a whole." This approach importantly reveals how ideas debated in contemporary discourse often inherit contested frameworks without recognizing their intellectual inheritance.

Questions to Consider Based on This Episode 

• Which of Prof. Retz's five categorical periods (No Progress, Absolute Progress, Relative Progress, Everybody’s Progress or Anti Progress) most closely mirrors your own assumptions about technological progress?
• In the current era, what would it mean to advocate for improvement without adopting one of these inherited frameworks?
• How do policy leaders and thought leaders transmit progress narratives without naming them as such?

Connection to the show,  Notions of Progress

This conversation establishes a unique historical architecture for examining how progress thinking shapes contemporary discourse and themes we'll explore throughout Notions of Progress. Understanding where our frameworks come from is the first step toward recognizing what they enable us to see, and what they often overlook.