Progress trap

The term "progress trap" has been utilized since at least 1975, when the TimesDaily newspaper from Florence, Alabama, featured an article on the Brazilian government finding itself caught between economic development and ecological health on May 8.

In the Late Pleistocene, improved hunting techniques in vulnerable areas caused the extinction of many large prey species, leaving the enlarged populace without an adequate food supply.

Almost any sphere of technology can prove to be a progress trap, as in the example of medicine and its possibly inadequate response to the drawbacks of the high-density agricultural practices (e.g. factory farming) it has enabled.

In this scenario, humans diverge from a default interdependence with nature resulting in technical preoccupations that gradually inhibit innovative problem solving, thus compromising long-term survival.

Examples are Sumer and the Indus Valley civilization where irrigation canals slowly combined to increase soil salinity, preventing the land from supporting harvests on which populations relied.

O'Leary notes that progress traps are not limited to technology; the Medieval Church's rejection of Roger Bacon's science follows a pattern where the institution itself inhibits solutions to problems arising from its own development.

Iain McGilchrist's 2009 book The Master and His Emissary, provides neurological insight into behaviors where predominant attention to short-term interests might compromise long-term outcomes.

Aurora Picture Show, a microcinema in Houston, Texas, has released a collection of "informational videos by artists who use recent technological tools for purposes other than what they were designed to do and, in some instances, in direct opposition to their intended use".