Techno-optimists believe technology leads to progress and solutions, while techno-pessimists see disruption and unintended consequences. As it relates to climate change, techno-optimists prioritize technology-based solutions while techno-pessimists emphasize societal and behavioral change. It is important to find common ground between techno-optimism and techno-pessimism when evaluating the impacts of technology.
Has technology improved the human condition or actually made it worse?
Is technology the cause of challenges like climate change or its solution? Both?
Once a community has decided that a challenge like climate change is real and urgent the next step of deciding what to actually do is not as straightforward as individual actors might like. For a global problem where we need alignment between many different stakeholders it is essential to be able to hold on to and discuss fundamental differences in worldview without resorting to personal attacks.
Let’s look, for instance, at the gridlock that can form in the distance between a techno-optimist perspective and a techno-pessimist perspective. You are probably either a techno-optimist or a techno-pessimist and don’t even know it.
Techno-optimism is the view that technology ultimately leads to progress and improvements in human life through new opportunities and novel solutions to existing problems.
Techno-pessimism on the other hand sees “progress” as an illusion and points to suffering caused by disruption from new technology and its unintended consequences.
On the topic of climate change for instance: techno-optimists generally prioritize the development and implementation of technology-based solutions like renewable energy, carbon capture and storage, and improved efficiency. They emphasize the potential for new industries and jobs in the blue green economy.
Techno-pessimists on the other hand would point to the technology of the Industrial Revolution and its core dependency on fossil fuels as the very cause of climate change. They might argue for prioritizing societal, political, and behavioral change such as carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, or degrowth. Techno-pessimists might emphasize the jobs, livelihoods, and communities that have been destroyed by industrialization and will be destroyed by a transition to a renewable energy system.
On a scale from total techno-optimist to complete techno-pessimist, where do you think you fall? How did you come to that perspective? How confident are you in your view? How fixed is your position on that spectrum?
Both techno-optimists and techno-pessimists can point to discrete examples that support their view - either from their personal experience or from the news of their local communities - but there is no definitive method to aggregate and compare the evidence for the positive and negative impacts of technology. That would involve culturally mediated value judgements and a calculus of intersubjective comparison of benefit and harm that would be impossible to find consensus on. So are we doomed to disagree?
Well, let’s back up. How did we get into a situation where camps have to form around such simplified views that flatten all “technology” into one thing and then into either intrinsically “good” or “bad”?
In an information ecosystem with so little capacity for nuance is it possible to avoid black and white thinking when it comes to thinking about the impact of technology on human lives?
Is it possible to imagine a world in which we as a globalized, interconnected human community are able to speak and listen more precisely and inclusively about what we value and what purposes we would like technology to serve?
Or maybe that is a kind of optimism of mine we can discuss and debate.