Transformative technologies (TTs) refer to technological advances with a high likelihood of significantly altering society. Specifically, among TTs, there are significant trade-offs between
- progress: advancing technological capabilities
- participation: enabling public input and self-determination
- safety: avoiding disproportionate risks
This reliably leads to a set of three failure modes.
- Capitalist Acceleration: sacrificing safety for progress while maintaining basic participation.
- Participation comes in the form of consumer choice and investor agency
- The downsides include proliferating risk and lack of public oversight (minimal regulation, auditing, or provision of public goods)
- Authoritarian Technocracy: sacrificing participation for safety while maintaining basic progress.
- Built on the belief that ensuring safety requires entrusting only a few entities (individuals, companies, nation-states) with the ability to develop advanced technologies
- The downsides include the risks of illegitimacy, the well-documented failures (see: Seeing like a State) of central planning (e.g. the economic calculation problem and the challenges of gathering representative information for centralized decision-making), and the basic injustice of autocracy
- Shared Stagnation: sacrificing progress for participation while maintaining basic safety.
- Combines anti-technology inclinations with concerns about worsening global conditions (such as climate change, inequality, bias and discrimination) due to current trajectories of progress (see: degrowth)
- The downsides include a lack of investment in necessary economic or technological development, and undervaluing the need for large-scale coordination, e.g. via international bodies or large-scale production.