Episode 4: The Road to Anti-Progress with Professor Tyson Retz (Part 2)
When leading AI companies such as Anthropic warn of "civilization" level risks from AI advances arriving within 1-2 years [1] , Professor Retz's framework invites us to ask: which historical narratives of progress implicitly shape these positions? Though many predicted breakthroughs promise unprecedented benefits across the technological spectrum, their arrival is often couched in apocalyptic terms. These warnings moreover reflect fundamental shifts in how we understand human agency and advancement, one that Professor Retz traces to his 5 characteristic framework including "Anti-Progress" thinking.
In Part 2 of our conversation with Professor Tyson Retz, Associate Professor at the University of Stavanger and author of Progress and the Scale of History, we explore the final three categories of his framework: Relative Progress (19th century recognition that "progress for some meant decline for others"), Everybody's Progress (the post-war project to measure and export development globally through neoliberal frameworks), and Anti-Progress (contemporary skepticism driven by environmental crisis and expanded temporal scales that minimize human action).
Professor Retz reveals how Japan's rapid modernization inspired marginalized communities worldwide (e.g. The African-American associations led by Marcus Garvey) , how Chinese iconoclasm as seen in the May 4th movement proposed "complete destruction of the past to create the future," and why Hayek's rejection of "historicism" led to the paradox that free markets require regulation to stay deregulated. Most provocatively, he introduces Peter Haff's 'technosphere'—the theory that technology has evolved into a self-perpetuating system with agency separate from human intentions. This fundamentally challenged whether humans remain purposeful historical actors.
Yet Professor Retz closes on an optimistic note: beyond the Enlightenment's specific conception of progress lies an enduring spirit—the drive to inspire collective action to make the world better. Understanding these competing frameworks doesn't resolve which vision is correct, but it reveals why progress remains such contested terrain in contemporary debates about technology, climate, and human advancement.
Questions to Consider Based on This Episode
• Which contemporary large societal questions associated with technological progress operate within Retz's "Anti-Progress" framework without recognizing their intellectual inheritance?
• Has the speed of technological innovation evidenced in recent advances in AI increasingly compressed the temporal scales through which we can assess the rate of progress?
•Alternatively, if big history, deep history, and the Anthropocene minimize individual human agency by expanding temporal scales to billions of years, what room remains for purposeful action toward improvement?
Connection to Notions of Progress
Part 2 completes Professor Retz's genealogy of progress thinking, providing the contemporary context for understanding how today's debates about AI, climate policy, and technological pre-determination inherit centuries of frameworks . Where Part 1 established the lead up to the Enlightenment which many view as the actual birth of progress consciousness, Part 2 demonstrates the evolution of this idea from that point forward to the present.
References
Episode 5: The Sophists - A Fifth Century Enlightenment Movement? (Part 1)
