Abstract: The debate on emerging technologies, their impact, and their role in addressing global and societal challenges is polarized between technological optimism and pessimism across disciplines. Both views present themselves as rational, non-dogmatic intellectual responses. This creates political lock-ins and contradictions in how these challenges should be addressed. In this paper, I argue that we lack a set of conceptual and normative tools that would enable a meaningful discussion of technological optimism and a comprehensive understanding of its implications. First, I propose a conceptual distinction between harmful and beneficial technological optimism. This normative building bridge eases the thick attributes that originate from the analytical-descriptive accounts of the philosophy of technology. Secondly, I argue that there is a normative connection between technological optimism and the sense of justice. Beliefs about technological progress contribute to sociotechnical imaginaries, that is, collectively held and disputed, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of the future. These visions also contain perceptions of the circumstances of justice, such as the circumstance of moderate scarcity. I argue that technological optimism affects expectations of available resources, which also emerges present-day views of, for example, how burdens and benefits in sustainability transitions should be distributed.

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Johanna Ahola-Launonen is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University Business School (Philosophy of Management) with her research project Technological expectations and justice in the bioeconomy, funded by the Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation. She defended her doctoral thesis “Hijacking responsibility – Philosophical studies on health distribution” at the University of Helsinki (Social and Moral Philosophy) in 2018. Her current research interests are a combination of philosophy of technology, science and technology studies, political philosophy, and methodologies in applied ethics.