Progress: Fluke or trend?

But in order to care about progress studies, we have to believe that the last few centuries of unprecedented progress didn’t just randomly happen because of a lucky break, and they weren’t a short-term acceleration of growth that will soon inexorably return to pre-industrial levels. There has to be a goal: namely, the next 200 years of progress. This whole endeavor is premised on that.

This feels backwards. Isn't one of the goals of progress studies to answer exactly this question? Seems like in order to care about progress studies, I need to have uncertainty about questions like these, and certainty would actually make me less interested in a field like progress studies. If I didn't have uncertainty about questions like these, then progress studies as a field is again really not very interesting.

I think this matters because I think the whole point of a field like progress studies is to set up epistemic processes that could (if that is actually the truth) could come to the realization that progress was indeed just a fluke. Understanding the dynamics of progress (including whether progress is a fluke or not) is the whole point of progress studies in my point of view! 

the difference between a fluke (or a bubble) and a trend is simply timescale. There are intra-day trends that look like spikes on a weekly graph.

I suspect the rate of change of human institutions and typical experiences is likely to remain somewhat high - fluctutating, but not reverting to pre-Enlightenment rates. Whether it's "progress" or just "change" is a matter of framing. The fundamental drivers of connectivity and quantity of potential trading partners (intellectually as well as materially) won't go away.

And unsustainable situations will eventually stop. A precipitous drop in population and trust (war or other mass disruption) removes that primary driver, and probably reverts a lot of changes to systems more sustainable in more difficult resource situations. I hope it's a smooth increase until the heat death of the universe. But that's not the bulk of my probability estimate.

I think that progress is a trend, and its a strong trend. There is an incentive to invent new things in any kind of competition, because it gives you an advantage. The united nations couldn't pass a bill banning progress. The future will be higher tech. 

Of course, progress towards higher tech is not necessarily a good thing. We can guide progress towards the good outcomes.

I think that there is a lot of powerful tech waiting to be invented. We will see more progress in the next 200 years than the last 200. 

I think that progress is likely to end within 200 years. Because once you have superintelligent AI, anything that can be invented will be invented quickly. After that, material resources grow as a sphere of tech expanding at near light speed.

It seems like what you're calling "progress studies" is what was called "modern history" until about 1960 and is derisively termed "Whig history" in the field these days. The basic premise is that material wealth went exponential in Europe starting around the 17th century, that this process (called "progress") gave Europe the means to travel to and dominate the rest of the world, and that the central questions of modern history are what happened to initiate this "progress", how it works, whether it will continue, and what forms it will take. Despite the change in academic fashions, these questions remain crucially important.

I tend to agree with what you call the "materialist" position. A barrel of oil has more energy than a decade of manual labor; without fossil fuels it is expensive to smelt metals and all but impossible to make useful semiconductors. Progress as we know it today is entirely dependent on metal (e.g. wires) and semiconductor-based computers. In principle nuclear power may be sufficient, but that's an open question at this point.

I wondering if an hint of answer could be found by exploiting the fact that economic growth (which should be closely related to progress?) has been differential across the world over the past century. For example, you might argue that China and India are experiencing the same levels of economic growth as did Europe earlier in the 20th century. If this is the case, I would study how different indicators varies with the economic growth in Asia and Europe to find out if these indicators can explain the growth (or are explained by the growth). You could say look at whether energy (oil/gas/electricity/coal etc) usage is a leading or lagging indicator, and do something similar with "ideas" (patents/degrees/companies/advanced products). This should give some indication of what the most important factors of growth have been historically, and if they have been consistent in different parts of the world.