The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World
By Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Canongate (distributed in India by PenguinRandomHouse), 288 pages, Rs 699

Optimism, irrational though it might be, is central to the human psyche: it seems to give us an advantage both in everyday life and in the evolutionary race.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury’s ‘The Bright Side’ makes a vital and transformative new argument: that optimism is not only the natural state of humanity, but an essential one. Without optimism we would never have survived the unpredictable - and often hostile - world we evolved into. Yet optimism is not reserved for times of extremity. Its benefits manifest throughout our everyday lives: our relationships, careers, bodies and minds. And it will play a critical role in overcoming the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Paul-Choudhury, an astrophysicist-turned-journalist and former editor-in-chief of New Scientist magazine, offers in this book practical suggestions on what it really takes to be an optimist today and, in doing so, provides a powerful manifesto for hope and a much-needed new perspective on our prospects. He shows how, by embracing action, imagination and possibility, we can find a path to the bright side, even - perhaps especially - when the future seems dark.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

THE END OF IDEAS

Given the conceptual and practical problems of economic growth, some people have started to put their faith in another force to carry the day: technology. Since its very beginnings, science fiction has written breathlessly of how technology can cure all ills. But techno-optimism became a force to be reckoned with when the internet became widespread in the late 1990s – offering seemingly miraculous new capabilities.

The internet, it was said, would revolutionise commerce, provide limitless free entertainment, generate unprecedented opportunity for creators and coders alike, educate the world, spread democracy, destroy all those old boring companies everyone hated (like the record labels) and incidentally make a few people on the Sand Hill Road absolute gobs of money. And in fact, it would do this regardless of whatever anyone had to say about it. Disruption was the order of the day: moving fast and breaking things, as Zuckerberg put it. That mutated into a belief that it was technology in itself that did these things, if only it was left unmolested by regulation, ethics or other constraints on its power.

In 1999, the inventor Ray Kurzweil published ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’, in which he elevates Moore’s Law – the observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years – into, essentially, a fundamental law of the universe which suggests that the power of technology will continue to accelerate until it ultimately surpasses and encompasses humanity, ushering in utopia. But despite its name, Moore’s Law is not any kind of law; it’s a fine example of how optimism can be self-fulfilling. People think it’s true, so they find ways to make it true; the underlying technology has changed several times since Moore coined it. It is not a law of the universe: it is, once again, simply drawing the line up and to the right.

In 2010, the former Wired editor Kevin Kelly – a self-declared optimist – wrote ‘What Technology Wants’, a description of the ‘technium’, the all-encompassing system of technology that surrounds us. This, he was keen to explain, had evolved like a biological system and would continue to do so – weirdly divorced, in his account, from the humans who actually have to invent, design and build it. And that meant it would in time deal with problems like overpopulation and resource depletion, when it got around to it, ‘just, I suppose, as biological evolution helped the dinosaurs deal with that meteorite,’ wrote the biologist Jerry Coyne in the New York Times.

And in 2023, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published a ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ in which he drew upon the idea of ‘effective accelerationism’ – a hybrid of effective altruism and accelerationism, a school of thought which derives from a small but influential cadre of esoteric thinkers based at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the late nineties. Accelerationism suggests that technology should be encouraged to develop as fast and freely as possible: take any and all brakes off innovation, it suggests, and everything else will follow: growth, prosperity, well-being and happiness. Written in snippets, like the world’s longest Twitter thread, Andreessen’s manifesto was a nakedly self-serving document, calling for freedom from regulation – and any other constraint on, say, a venture capitalist’s ability to make money – in the name of progress.

Of course, technology does fuel progress. It is the fundamental reason that our lives today are so much better, by almost any measure, than they would have been five hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago. The Great Acceleration was born of rapid improvements in technology. But pace Kurzweil, Kelly, Andreessen and a host of others, it takes humans to achieve that. As the economist Marianna Mazzucato has convincingly demonstrated, the seeds of Silicon Valley’s success were planted and cultivated decades earlier – in government-funded labs. That’s even truer when it comes to inventions that involve actual stuff, rather than information: think of Katalin Karikó and her mRNA vaccines.

The problem is that there seems to be less of that breakthrough innovation coming through the pipeline. An influential study by a team of researchers from Stanford and MIT concluded in 2020 that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find: to pick one headline statistic, it takes eighteen times as many researchers to keep Moore’s Law ticking over today as it did in the first few years after its formulation. The reasons why are unclear: it might be that all the good ideas have been taken, or it might be that scientific research has got too cumbersome and expensive. Or a combination of both: we’re seeking big wins – with grand experiments like sending people back to the Moon – while more modest projects miss out on funding and attention.

That’s spawned a new field: progress studies, founded by the economist Tyler Cowen and the billionaire entrepreneur Patrick Collison. This isn’t wholly new territory – the study of science and technology has been established for many years – but Cowen and Collison intended theirs to kickstart progress, whatever form it takes in the twenty-first century, rather than merely observe and comment on it: ‘[Progress studies] is closer to medicine than biology: the goal is to treat, not merely to understand,’ they wrote in their initial call to arms, published in The Atlantic. What they are aiming to ‘treat’ is GDP per capita – from which they believe all else will follow. Whether that’s what technology wants, or humanity needs, remains to be seen.

[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]