Many of our beliefs about technology are not of the form ‘Technology T will make things better’. Typically, we do not know with certainty what the effect of a technology, or of technology tout court, is going to be. The principal problem with it is that it fails to account for risk and uncertainty. However, while capturing some important truths, the improvement account is too simple. It also fits better with the motivation underlying our interest in techno-optimism. It correctly classifies someone as a techno-optimist who firmly believes that technology (or a technology) will make the world a much better place irrespective of her beliefs regarding the overall balance of good and bad in the world. The improvement account yields more plausible results. The preponderance account seems to be the wrong account of techno-optimism given what we are interested in. I strongly suspect that this is also the question that many of the authors cited by Danaher, tech people, technology critics, and politicians are most interested in. The more important question, from a social and political point of view, is whether technology can be expected to improve the human condition or not. But this seems like a philosophical question of relatively little real-world relevance. There might be people who are interested in whether technology makes the good prevail over the bad. ![]() We need only know whether technology can be expected to make things better or worse. But to answer this question, we need not determine whether technology will make the good prevail over the bad. Arguably, the reason why it matters whether we may be optimists about technology is because we want to know whether we ought to unleash the forces of technological progress, or whether we should rather inhibit, regulate or even halt or reverse technological development. But the reason why we are interested in techno-optimism in the first place does not seem to support the preponderance account either. As such, it need not accord with ordinary language usage. Danaher’s goal is to provide a useful ameliorative analysis of techno-optimism. Deviating from ordinary language is, of course, legitimate if doing so serves the interest of one’s inquiry. But this move would be ad hoc.ĭanaher’s preponderance account thus seems to be at odds with ordinary language. To be sure, one could reject the preponderance view for individual technologies and apply it only to optimism about technology as a whole. ![]() She need only have positive expectations about their net impact on human welfare. Surely, someone who is optimistic about, say, artificial intelligence or CRISPR need not believe that these technologies will contribute to ensuring that the good prevails over the bad. The preponderance account has even more counterintuitive implications when applied to individual technologies rather than to technology as a whole. According to the preponderance account, however, we cannot classify this person as a techno-optimist until we have verified that (1) this person has any beliefs about the overall balance of good and bad in the first place, and (2) that she believes that technology contributes to tipping the overall balance in favour of the good. In fact, I would say that she need not have any beliefs about this question at all to qualify as a techno-optimist. In order to classify her as a techno-optimist, we need not know whether she thinks that technology will tip the overall balance of good and bad in the world. ![]() For instance, someone who asserts ‘I firmly believe that technology will make the world a much better place’ should definitely count as a techno-optimist. The preponderance account has a couple of implications that, in my view, speak strongly against it. I find Danaher’s case for the preponderance account unpersuasive.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |