What is techno-optimism?
A working definition from MIT Sloan
techno-optimism (noun)
The notion that technological change will automatically lead to better outcomes for society, especially for workers via the labor market.
Amid anxiety about artificial intelligence, automation, and job loss, some people point to history and say that technological change will eventually benefit everyone, despite some bumps along the way.
MIT economists and Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue that this techno-optimism overlooks the role that economic and political decisions play alongside technological development.
“Our understanding of the relevant economic theory and history has led us to believe [techno-optimism] isn’t right,” Acemoglu told MIT Sloan Management Review in 2023. “Throughout history, deliberate decisions have had a bearing on who gained and lost from a particular technology, whether it brought anything approaching shared prosperity, or even whether it helped or destroyed democracy.”
In their 2023 book, “Power and Progress: Our 1,000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity,” the pair examine the Industrial Revolution as an example of technological change that began with bad outcomes — child laborers pushing coal carts, for example. This was because the revolution was driven by an entrepreneurial class focused on productivity and allowed to operate nearly unchecked in 19th-century Britain, where democracy was conditional and unions were illegal.
Gains for workers came eventually but required “a complete change in the institutional fabric of British society,” Johnson said.
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