Progress: good, or bad? Bad, thought Confucius, who for hundreds of years taught Japan to seek its ideals in the ancient past. Good, thought 19th-century modernizers, who redirected the nation's gaze to the future.
Prominent among modernizers was Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901), for whom civilization and progress were one and whose 1875 book, "An Outline of a Theory of Civilization," dazzles us with a bright future indeed: "Instead of cannons, men will build telescopes; schools will replace jails; soldiers and criminals will be seen only in old pictures. ... The whole country will be like one family, each household like a temple. The parents will be the head priests and the children their disciples."
How naive that sounds today. Progress foundered on 20th-century rocks: war, revolution, nuclear catastrophe, ecological catastrophe. It advances apace all the same, unstoppable. Sometime around 2045 something extraordinary will happen — a "singularity." The machines we've built to serve us will think better than we do. Who will be serving whom?