Earlier this year, I kept writing draft versions of an article denouncing something I wanted to call “the Techno-Optimist’s Fallacy.”

What is the fallacy? It starts with the accurate observation that technological progress has, on net, been an incredible source of human betterment, almost certainly the major force of human betterment over the history of our species, and then tries to infer that therefore all individual instances of technological progress are good. This is not true. Indeed, it seems so obviously untrue that I couldn’t quite convince myself that anyone could believe it, which is why I kept abandoning drafts of the article. Because while I had a sense that this was an influential cognitive error, I kept thinking that I was maybe torching a straw man. Was anyone really saying this?

Then along came Marc Andreesen, the influential venture capitalist, with an essay that is not only dedicated to advancing this fallacy, it is even literally titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”

So now I can say for sure that, yes, this is a real fallacy that people are actually engaged with.

There are people out there who are so annoyed by the Luddites and de-growthers and socialists that they have negatively polarized themselves into believing that it is never a good idea to worry that new technology is harmful or dangerous, in need of limits or control, or otherwise more worthy of condemnation than praise. Or, rather, they have polarized themselves into saying that they believe this.

It seems to me that, in practice, almost everyone in the techno-optimist camp lives in the Bay Area and is annoyed by the open air drug use in San Francisco. So I feel pretty confident that if I pushed them on it, they would acknowledge that the positive productivity shock we’ve seen in fentanyl manufacturing and distribution over the past 10 years has, in fact, been bad. And that even though pharmaceutical R&D, manufacturing, and distribution are in general great boons to humanity, there is also a strong case for limits in these spheres. Having people openly sell and use fentanyl downtown is bad. Having it be commercially available in stores nationwide and the subject of major advertising campaigns would be worse. I don’t think this is actually something I need to convince anyone of. But some techno-optimists are clearly out there making broad, sweeping claims that do not stand up to scrutiny.

The core thing that techno-optimists get right, I think, is that western societies took a bad turn in the 1970s. At just the time when the Middle Eastern oil crises and growing concern about coal-induced air pollution should have been making the value of nuclear energy clear, a huge wave of activism pushed, successfully, to make the regulatory burdens on nuclear power so large as to make it non-economical. And many of the core leaders in that anti-nuclear movement were fundamentally opposed to the idea of economic growth and human flourishing.

The two standard quotes are from Paul Ehrlich and Amory Lovins:

• Ehrlich: “In fact, giving society cheap abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

• Lovins: “If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”

These ideas helped kneecap the nuclear industry, and — crucially — they have implications for all kinds of contemporary controversies around things like renewables siting and interregional electrical transmission. But they also suggest that there was a road not traveled in