No, I have a very mundane, standard definition of progress. One of the many negative effects of our society's pathological individualism is this idea that copyi

No, I have a very mundane, standard definition of progress. One of the many negative effects of our society's pathological individualism is this idea that copying an idea is intrinsically immoral. In fact, copying is necessary to innovation and innovation is pointless without more copying. Ever notice that basically all cars have 90% identical feature sets while only a small handful of special features differentiate any particular model from the rest of the market? How did that situation come about? Did God come down from heaven in 1970 with some stone tablets describing an AMC Pacer and declare "Here is the basic idea of the automobile. Now go forth and add superficial features to this design"? Of course not. What happened was that manufacturers competed for many decades, incrementally adding new features. And when one manufacturer found a feature that succeeded in the market, other manufacturers copied it. This is how technology advances: by building on past success.