I have always found it somewhat troubling as a scientist and critical thinker, due to the implication that “progress” is always of the good kind. “Progress,” in my mind, has always simply been a transition from one state of being to another that was forced, influenced, or otherwise coerced by some mechanism, and that transition can lead to good or bad consequences, or at the very least consequences unintended by the architects of said mechanism. The vector is the unspoken (and most important) variable. – Mike Gallo