Techno-optimism – the belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity – is in vogue once more.
In 2022, a clutch of pseudonymous San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) scenesters published a Substack post entitled “Effective Accelerationism”, which argued for maximum acceleration of technological advancement. The 10-point manifesto, which proclaimed that “the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness” was imminent, quickly went viral, as did follow-up posts.
Effective accelerationism, or “e/acc”, exploded from being a fringe movement dedicated to pushing back against AI extinction-fearing “doomers” to being namechecked by major Silicon Valley CEOs such as Garry Tan, the CEO of start-up accelerator Y Combinator; Sam Altman, head of OpenAI; Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer; and Elon Musk.
In 2023, Andreessen issued his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, expanding beyond the e/acc’s focus on AI to encompass all questions of technological progress. “We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology,” he writes, yet previously and for hundreds of years, we had glorified it. The enemies of techno-optimism are, he says, statism, economic planning and socialism. Andreessen tells us: “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential … It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag.”
And last year saw the release of the Techno-Humanist Manifesto from the Roots of Progress Institute and Jason Crawford, who makes similar arguments for the liberatory power of technology, while also arguing that anything that can be for profit should be.
But where is the left in all this?
One would think that in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the market flounder and the state rise to the occasion with responses such as Operation War Speed’s vaccine development and rollouts, the left would be crowing about how it produced technological progress far better than all this market fundamentalism.
It was the embrace of varieties of economic planning that produced the innovation needed to defeat the virus. For decades, large firms had gotten out of the business of vaccine development because it was insufficiently profitable. The mRNA vaccine delivery vehicle that is now recognized as revolutionary for the life sciences far beyond Covid had been sitting on the shelf for about a decade, spurned by uninterested, risk-averse investors.
At the start of the pandemic, big pharma remained wary that transmission might fizzle out and they’d be left having spent billions on a white elephant. Instead, it was the advance purchase agreements, subsidies and coordination of the government – which does not need to turn a profit – via the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (Barda) and Operation Warp Speed that delivered the vaccine and saved the world.
Meanwhile, free-market driven distribution of PPE, ventilators, medical fridges and oxygen had produced little more than corruption, bottlenecks and irrational allocation to those who could pay the highest price – not allocation where it was most needed. It was only when the White House deployed the Defense Production Act to enable the government to takeover distribution that the market’s deadly mess was cleared up.
The left should be proudly flaunting the record of governments around the world in responding to Covid
The left should be proudly flaunting the record of governments around the world in responding to Covid. It should make the case that all major technological and scientific advancements are best delivered by governments. And it should make the case that we – the people – should embrace faith in technological progress that is rooted in public investment.
In other words, the left should be the real techno-optimists. But instead, in recent years, there has been a growing skepticism of technology on the contemporary left – from cynicism about space-faring to fear of genetic engineering and opposition to nuclear power.
The left should be calling for government intervention to ensure decarbonization of data centers for AI. It should demand that we direct machine-learning research to prioritize the solving of grand scientific challenges such as prediction of protein folding instead of than bad fantasy-art fabrication and plagiarism. But instead, the most popular leftwing tech podcast calls for degrowth of generative AI and data centers due the latter’s carbon intensity.
Progressives could be reminding the world of Neil Armstrong’s warning about the privatization of space – while still cheering on SpaceX’s work to develop reusable rocketry, radically reducing the cost of humans and payloads escaping our planet’s gravity well, all the better to deliver the space and planetary science we need to monitor and solve so many ecological challenges.
We could be explaining how space colonization, a worthwhile multigenerational, perhaps millennia-long endeavor, will be public sector led or it will not happen, due to the risible likelihood of it being profitable. Musk won’t get to mars without Nasa. But instead the left declares space-faring to be settler-colonialism, oddly equating lifeless rocks with indigenous peoples.
Environmentalists and green NGOs should be celebrating research into genetically modified crops that if successful will reduce pesticide use, nitrogen pollution, and land-use change. But instead, anti-GMO campaign groups vandalized an Italian research trial of rice-blast-resistant arborio (risotto) rice this summer, while Greenpeace successfully convinced a Filipino court to overturn approval of commercial cultivation of Golden Rice, a variety modified to combat vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness and even death in tens of thousands of children annually in Asia.
This leftwing technophobia is something of an historic aberration. Traditionally, the left had always been enthusiastic about the potential of technology for liberation, to release us from drudgery and boundlessly expand our degrees of freedom – so long as technology was unfettered from the irrationality of profit and hierarchy and yoked to egalitarian reason. Prometheus plus Spartacus, as mid-century Marxist Hal Draper put it.
We sometimes forget that the Communist Manifesto was itself a techno-optimist declaration of intent. It was a critique of capitalism but it was also a celebration of the new technologies, both industrial and social, that this system had set loose.
From Karl Marx’s enthusiasm for the Industrial Revolution through to British Labour prime minister Harold Wilson’s call to harness the “white heat” of the Scientific Revolution, the conventional left position was that its programme would enable society to surpass the technological progress of mere capitalism. The point was not to retreat from capitalism, but instead to advance from it. We the people would develop the “forces of production” much more rapidly through conscious, democratic planning (albeit to greater or lesser degrees of such planning, depending on the flavour of leftist) rather than leaving such development to the fetters imposed by the risk-averse, poorly coordinated and unconscious anarchy of the market.
The left should be the real techno-optimists. But instead, in recent years, there has been a growing skepticism of technology on the contemporary left
Scientific, technological and industrial development would not only be faster, but broader, for the left would share the fruits of development with all humanity as rapidly as economic capacity would allow, rather than limiting their spread to those locations and populations where such production was profitable. A virtuous circle was then supposed to emerge as a result: with ever more humans benefiting from such progress, ever more humans would be able to contribute to science, engineering, medicine and agronomy, resulting in yet more progress. Liberation would beget ever accelerating liberation.
It was instead the counter-Enlightenment right – aristocrats, the church, Burkean critics of the French Revolution – who were horrified at how technology and industry constantly revolutionized society, washing away ancient traditions and endlessly transforming social relations. The industrial engineering of the factory and the “social engineering” of democracy were the same thing to the reactionary, anti-modernist mind. The children of the Radical Enlightenment, both liberals and socialists, also made little distinction between social and technological progress, but thought them good, and were intent on carrying out French revolutionary Georges Danton’s commandment: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!” (“Audacity; yet more audacity; always audacity!”)
Today, however, that leftwing optimism and confidence about humanity’s capacity for superior, entwined social, scientific and technological progress – once political economy was thoroughly democratized, has been lost, especially on the environmental left. It has been replaced by a techno-scepticism and cynicism about progress that varies from a soft neo-Luddism through to a more thoroughgoing Malthusian opposition to further economic development, prompted by a fear that we have long since outstripped the carrying capacity of the planet. Many believe industrial modernity was a mistake.
(Note that these contemporary neo-Luddites should not be confused with the historical Luddites, the 19th Century stockingers – workers running stocking frame mechanical knitting machines – who engaged in riot and sabotage of automated textile machinery to protest employers’ use of such machines to drive down wages. It was the capitalist socio-economic relations surrounding this technology that the Luddites were protesting, not technology itself. If anything, today’s neo-Luddites should learn from their namesakes and focus less on the machines and more on who owns them.)
All of this creeping anti-modernism threatens not merely human development and the expanding freedom that flows from it, but also undermines our ability to adequately respond to a range of existential threats, from climate change to pandemics. We are caught between the capitalist techno-hucksterism of Musk and the Malthusian technophobia of Greenpeace and friends.
Thankfully, there is – to coin a phrase – a third way.
In place of technophobia, the left’s traditional arguments around the “market alignment problem” still offer a better path toward enhancing human liberation. In place of both market fundamentalist neoliberalism and green-inflected neo-Luddism, the left should be talking once again about conscious design of the economy – and thence which technologies we want to develop and accelerate – through industrial policy, public ownership and other forms of democratic economic planning.
As of 2024, we are roughly at the halfway point between the first climate treaty, 1997’s Kyoto Protocol, and the 2050 deadline for net-zero decarbonization of the economy. Yet due to policymakers’ overdependence on market-based mechanisms such as carbon-pricing (and the developing world’s understandable demand for fossil-fueled development), the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption has barely moved, dropping from 86% to 82%. But industrial policy domestically – building on Bidenomics’ version of the Green New Deal, the Inflation Reduction Act – and a properly egalitarian approach to climate finance and economic development internationally, can turn all this around.
Our suite of antibiotics is rapidly failing and so in the absence of new discovery and development of new ones, as well as new diagnostic techniques and vaccines, clinicians warn that we are nearing a collapse of the foundation of antimicrobial protection upon which almost all of modern medicine depends. But decommodification of pharmaceutical production and, again, internationalism could solve the problem entirely.
Similarly, pandemic monitoring and early warning systems require robust public-sector funding, restructuring of intellectual property rights, and even global democracy. All of this is optimized by a more muscular social democracy.
There are so many areas where the left should have so much more to say about technology and progress
Biodiversity loss threatens to undermine ecosystem services that we depend upon, but precision agriculture, new genetic techniques and “lab meat” can radically reduce humanity’s land-footprint, so long as there is strong state intervention to de-risk these new technologies.
In order to overcome less well known but still profound risks from space debris and near-Earth asteroids, we need not cynicism about space, but a revival of space as primarily a public-sector enterprise and the sort of internationalism and global democracy that the left favours.
But a left approach to technology is not just about avoiding harm, but about grand ambition. Getting to Mars and beyond, spreading life throughout the cosmos, is a gargantuan multi-generational endeavour, of the level of audacity that Danton commanded. Markets will never get us there if it isn’t profitable enough – and it is unlikely to be so.
Artificial intelligence has already solved the hard problem of protein-folding, and soon it could radically enhance medical diagnosis, accelerate materials discovery, and reduce mineral exploration costs, and maybe even predict earthquakes, but much of this will require humans working alongside AI rather than AI replacing humans – meaning an increased cost over either humans or computers alone, which will thus tend to be far less attractive to capital. And so AI thus far appears to be primarily directed at much more profitable but far less freedom-enhancing endeavours such as enterprise software, theft from artists and musicians, and ever more panoptical state surveillance.
To steal a phrase from artificial intelligence discourse, the market has an “alignment problem”. It is an algorithm independent of human control. And so it could be said that the techno-libertarians want to liberate themselves from all things that unconsciously dominate humanity – except for markets.
There are so many areas where the left should have so much more to say about technology and progress, whether the challenges we face are existential threats or how to achieve the most soaring of ambitions.
Neither Silicon Valley tech hucksters nor eco-austerity technophobes are up to the task.
