Positive vs Normative Techno-Optimism
Discussion
Noah Smith:
"Positive techno-optimism is basically the opposite of stagnationism. In recent years, a number of thinkers have started to say that humanity has basically picked the low-hanging fruit of what the Universe can do, and that future innovation will get a lot more expensive — or even slow to a trickle. Positive techno-optimism says that no, there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit, and relative to our total GDP it’s still not that expensive to find it.
Normative techno-optimism is different. It says that more technology will make the world a better place for humanity. In fact, this kind of techno-optimism is surprisingly rare — even some of my favorite science fiction stories are implicitly or explicitly built around the idea that no matter how our capabilities improve, humans’ fundamental brutish nature will never change. As far as I can tell, this very prevalent attitude comes from the World Wars in the 20th century, in which the industrial technologies that were deployed to improve living standards before 1914 were turned to destructive purposes. There are a few people who argue that more technology makes us better people — Steve Pinker made this argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature, and I think it’s the implicit premise of Lois McMaster Bujold’s science fiction.
So that’s one distinction. For both of these, you can then define both active and passive forms of optimism. Passive optimism is basically just the belief that technology either will keep progressing at a rapid clip, and/or that it will improve human life, no matter what we do. Active optimism is the idea that technology will keep progressing and/or improve human life only if we humans take the appropriate actions to make sure this happens. Active optimism is what Gramsci and others have called “optimism of the will”. You could also call these “unconditional” and “conditional” optimism."