I don’t think a left version of techno-optimism makes any sense because the problems don’t have to do with things people can’t do, they have to do with things they shouldn’t do. Right now the biggest obstacle to abundance is that everything we accomplish keeps being stolen and turned against the rest of us.
I mean, the most obvious place where technology might help is clean energy – and yet even there the biggest limit to progress is that oil companies keep sabotaging it. We could use better ways to treat diseases, but Covid wasn’t so deadly because people couldn’t figure out how to stop it, it was because businesses complained and the right refused. I don’t even know where to begin with Khan’s example of AI. Talking about technology buries that it’s all social problems.