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AI & SOCIETY
Published in: AI & SOCIETY 5/2023

09-08-2021 | Curmudgeon Corner

Against spectatorial utopianism

Author: Robert Rosenberger

Published in: AI & SOCIETY | Issue 5/2023

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Excerpt

A recent trend in the rhetoric of climate deniers (i.e., those unconcerned about global warming) is the argument that while climate change may actually be happening, and while it may even be manmade, there is no need to do anything because future technological advances will surely solve the problem.1 That is, where climate denialism has traditionally disputed the fact that dangerous climate change is occurring, this new form instead merely denies that anything needs to be done about it. The character of these two lines argumentation is different: where traditional climate deniers dispute the science on climate change, the new trend instead relies on a utopian enthusiasm about the future of science and technology. However, the practical effects of these arguments are the same: they both advocate against addressing climate change today. …
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Footnotes
1
Paradigmatic examples of this form of utopian climate denialism—that at once acknowledges that climate change is occurring but at the same time denies that anything needs to be done on the expectation of future technological development—can be found in US politics, and in particular in recent Republican opposition to proposed Green New Deal legislation (e.g., Wheeling 2019).
 
2
Of course other broad and general philosophical accounts of technology could also be used as justification for spectatorial inaction, such as a dystopian view (that might see all action as hopeless anyway), or an instrumental view (that might see technology to be inherently neutral and thus above criticism). But those forms of potential spectatorial argumentation are not the focus of this commentary.
 
Literature
Haraway DJ (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. Duke University Press, LondonCrossRef
Rorty R (1998) Achieving our country: leftist thought in twentieth-century America. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Rosenberger, R. (2021) Stop saying that autonomous cars will eliminate driver distraction. In: Michelfelder D (Ed.). Test driving the future: autonomous vehicles and the ethics of technological change. Rowman Littlefield, forthcoming
Shew A (2020) Ableism, technoableism, and future AI. IEEE Technol Soc Mag 31(1):40–50CrossRef
Metadata
Title
Against spectatorial utopianism
Author
Robert Rosenberger
Publication date
09-08-2021
Publisher
Springer London
Published in
AI & SOCIETY / Issue 5/2023
Print ISSN: 0951-5666
Electronic ISSN: 1435-5655
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01254-5

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