# Contested concept: progress

_**What you are reading**: one contested-concept page in Deliberus's deliberation graph. Deliberus maps human reasoning — including claims that are contested, mistaken, or extreme — so that disagreement can be examined precisely. A claim's presence here is not an endorsement: the graph records that someone argued it, how it connects to other reasoning, and how far scrutiny has gotten. The metadata on this page describes the state of that scrutiny, not the truth of the claim._

---

- **Contestedness**: criterion
- **Diagnosis**: The disagreement is about whether the lack of a known optimum justifies continuing or demands limits. It also concerns whether freedom from work counts as gain or as loss of meaning.
- **Canonical**: `/concept/progress` (data: `/concept/progress.json`)

## Senses in use
- **Progress is valuable only up to an unknown optimum. Beyond it, it erodes the conditions for a life worth living, such as meaningful work and human sense-making. Not knowing where the limit lies does not mean no limit exists.** — used in 7 claim(s)
- **Progress is good because it frees humans from labor and improves life, so it should continue without a stopping point, including freeing us from kernels and math.** — used in 5 claim(s)

## Claims using this term
- [Not knowing where to stop [progress] does not mean there is no point beyond which we have gone too far.](/claim/claim_05b8d36809ff.md) _(sense: Progress is valuable only up to an unknown optimum. Beyond it, it erodes the conditions for a life worth living, such as meaningful work and human sense-making. Not knowing where the limit lies does not mean no limit exists.)_
- [My position is not "stop today." Nor tomorrow. Nor should we have stopped last year. Nor after cancer is cured. Nor before that, surely. [T…](/claim/claim_19868cb44e92.md) _(sense: Progress is valuable only up to an unknown optimum. Beyond it, it erodes the conditions for a life worth living, such as meaningful work and human sense-making. Not knowing where the limit lies does not mean no limit exists.)_
- [Progress has undoubtedly improved human life.](/claim/claim_22e37d5ae3fd.md) _(sense: Progress is good because it frees humans from labor and improves life, so it should continue without a stopping point, including freeing us from kernels and math.)_
- [Progress should free us from this too [the work that AI is taking over, such as writing GPU kernels]. From GPU kernels. And from math. From…](/claim/claim_43510198d843.md) _(sense: Progress is good because it frees humans from labor and improves life, so it should continue without a stopping point, including freeing us from kernels and math.)_
- [The best plowman in 10th-century England is no more an argument against modern agriculture than Liu [Shengyu Liu, a kernel engineer at Deep…](/claim/claim_6b52f389f830.md) _(sense: Progress is good because it frees humans from labor and improves life, so it should continue without a stopping point, including freeing us from kernels and math.)_
- [[Never stopping progress] is just as bad as stopping too soon.](/claim/claim_75e444e5c894.md) _(sense: Progress is valuable only up to an unknown optimum. Beyond it, it erodes the conditions for a life worth living, such as meaningful work and human sense-making. Not knowing where the limit lies does not mean no limit exists.)_
- [Progress freed us from the fields and the factories.](/claim/claim_775f39f2582b.md) _(sense: Progress is good because it frees humans from labor and improves life, so it should continue without a stopping point, including freeing us from kernels and math.)_
- [I don't claim to have an answer here [to the dilemma of where to stop progress]. I do not even know whether this dilemma has an answer at a…](/claim/claim_8168ebf5db02.md) _(sense: Progress is valuable only up to an unknown optimum. Beyond it, it erodes the conditions for a life worth living, such as meaningful work and human sense-making. Not knowing where the limit lies does not mean no limit exists.)_
- [The problem with drawing any arbitrary line [for where to stop progress] is that, once you draw it, it becomes impossible to feel entirely …](/claim/claim_98de14dd588d.md) _(sense: Progress is valuable only up to an unknown optimum. Beyond it, it erodes the conditions for a life worth living, such as meaningful work and human sense-making. Not knowing where the limit lies does not mean no limit exists.)_
- [Taken to its limit, the logic [that progress has improved life and we lack a criterion for the optimum, so we should keep going] breaks dow…](/claim/claim_a14d03d426b6.md) _(sense: Progress is valuable only up to an unknown optimum. Beyond it, it erodes the conditions for a life worth living, such as meaningful work and human sense-making. Not knowing where the limit lies does not mean no limit exists.)_
- [The best course is simply to keep going.](/claim/claim_b9d7845c99eb.md) _(sense: Progress is good because it frees humans from labor and improves life, so it should continue without a stopping point, including freeing us from kernels and math.)_
- [If you start sanding down a mountain's rough edges you will have a nice hill at first but if you never stop, eventually you'll find yoursel…](/claim/claim_de40fbfb7436.md) _(sense: Progress is valuable only up to an unknown optimum. Beyond it, it erodes the conditions for a life worth living, such as meaningful work and human sense-making. Not knowing where the limit lies does not mean no limit exists.)_