Rethinking Required: Complex Systems Are a Fundamental Barrier to Human Progress

The systems we design, manage, and interact with become increasingly complex. Whether these are our economic systems of production and trade, local conflicts spiralling into regional catastrophes, or even the capacity of our governments to deal with unpredictable social tipping points and environmental disasters - wicked problems are here to stay. Even well-intentioned interventions have the potential to cause cascading negative effects in the future. If we are to move forward in this “fog of war,” we must rethink our approach and transplant learnings from complexity science into boardrooms, parliaments, and the vocabulary of both experts and citizens. The newly forming “progress studies” field is a new opportunity to do exactly that, if it stays away from technological universalism and takes steps beyond diagnosing the problem and into sense-making and action. After providing an alternative definition of this new transdisciplinary field, I will address the common criticisms of it and assumptions made in my following research. We will then cover my learnings on the current state of complexity science, existential risk, economics, and history, and what we can do to move forward. This journey will take us from the Subak irrigation system in rural Indonesia to the famous project Cybersyn and aggregate thoughts and evidence from thinkers such as Donella Meadows, Nassim Taleb, Slavoj Žižek, and others who have been tackling the issue of progress and complexity in their work throughout the last decades.