Marc Andreessen and the e/acc crowd seem to have a blind, almost religious faith that technology will always make everything better, and that therefore (for example) rapid development of strong AI is bound to work out fine. In contrast to that, Vitalik Buterin here expresses a nuanced, cautious techno-optimism that recognizes that when technological advances make things better, it’s often because a lot of people have striven to make it work out well, not because it’s guaranteed. This is much closer to my own position. There’s no denying that technology has improved people’s lives in many important ways (see chart above). But as we see with environmental issues, that’s very much because people did a lot of careful and coordinated work to make sure that those issues got prioritized.
My own feelings about techno-optimism are warm, but nuanced. I believe in a future that is vastly brighter than the present thanks to radically transformative technology, and I believe in humans and humanity. I reject the mentality that the best we should try to do is to keep the world roughly the same as today but with less greed and more public healthcare. However, I think that not just magnitude but also direction matters. There are certain types of technology that much more reliably make the world better than other types of technology. There are certain types of technlogy that could, if developed, mitigate the negative impacts of other types of technology. The world over-indexes on some directions of tech development, and under-indexes on others. We need active human intention to choose the directions that we want, as the formula of “maximize profit” will not arrive at them automatically.