Techno-optimism is a cloak for selfishness

I was chatting yesterday about techno-optimism. My position was that techno-optimism is foolish enthusiasm.
I found the article below this morning, showing that I'm not the only one who thinks so.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/why-growth-cant-be-green/
 We might have seen good technological progress in the recent past, but that's more likely to have been 'low-hanging fruit' than a sign of endless progress to come.
'Study after study shows the same thing... that there are physical limits to how efficiently we can use resources. Sure, we might be able to produce cars and iPhones and skyscrapers more efficiently, but we can’t produce them out of thin air. We might shift the economy to services such as education and yoga, but even universities and workout studios require material inputs.
Once we reach the limits of efficiency, pursuing any degree of economic growth drives resource use back up.'

We've all studied calculus at school, right? That's explained to us as taking a very small slice of a graph and showing that for very small slices of the graph that line can be modelled as a straight line. The gradient appears to be steady for small bits of the graph. This is true even for exponential changes.
So it might be that progress gets exponentially more difficult, but we've only had professional scientific research institutions for such a short period of time that it looks like we're making steady progress. Or it might even look like progress is accelerating, because we funded research more than we did at first.
But now that we fund it less, in an age of austerity and lack of respect for science or investment in the future, and it's getting harder to make progress, we can rationally expect progress in many fields to become dramatically slower.

I know the example of medical research best.  When we first started discovering how the human body worked, the advances came fast, and they were important. We discovered that a whole category of compounds could kill bacteria; we discovered that cortisol, just one drug, could massively affect the body, reducing inflammation and helping recovery in over-inflamed conditions such as allergies and auto-immune disorders. But we know those drugs now. There's a book's worth of detail to cover, but pharmaceutical companies are creating slight variations on existing drugs in the hope that the new molecular structure will have slightly improved properties... and in the cynical ploy of patenting something new and marketing it as the best option even though the out-of-patent drugs are as good, or negligibly worse.
Medical progress simply will not be as fast again... or as fast with the same level of investigation. We are now in the realm of needing to personalize treatments, of understanding the phenomenally complex systems that biology creates, and working out how to achieve the effects we want without terrible side effects in some part of the web of interlinked processes. We need therapies, targetting multiple systems in real time and with feedback on progress, possibly targetted to specific areas rather than taken as a pill that lets the drug go wherever the body can take it. We need to excise bad DNA and replace it with functional DNA. These are not one-off drugs. These are complex treatments based on even more complex understanding. It won't be simple.

Sure, techno-optimists usually talk about computing and consumer goods and extrapolate to climate change and other areas. Maybe it's because the physics of computing is simple... or that physics, as a discipline is simple and clean compared to biology. Yes, we have made faster and faster computer chips. But we already know the theoretical maximum for silicon-based computing speeds. We know there is a limit. We know that scientists are working hard to find alternatives.
That doesn't mean that geo-engineering our climate will be easy. That's a strange leap of faith. It's like saying that because a toddler has already learned to walk, which is four or five times as fast as crawling, and is on its way to running, which is four or five times as fast, it will be travelling at 100 mph by the time it's 10 years old, crossing continents in a day as a teenager and visiting the moon for the weekend in middle age.
We can just about imagine that happening. The toddler could learn to fly an aeroplane very young and cross continents, and we, as a species, might establish a lunar base within its lifetime, where tourists can go.
But those achievements are not as simple, or as guaranteed, as the progress we have already seen. They are vastly more complex. And if we carry on with this simple extrapolation, we can expect our toddler to travel to Mars in a month within its lifetime. These seems less likely, and is certainly not a reasonable conclusion based solely on its progress in learning to walk and run.

There's another problem with techno-optimism. It's the cop-out option: it's driven more by the desire not to have to do anything, or worry, rather than a rational assessment of probability. But even if these things were probable, that doesn't mean that we should rely on them. Many optimists point to economic growth: growth has happened in the modern world, so we should rely on it, and take out debt, and promise pensions, based on the understanding that future generations will magic away it all with their enormous wealth. And yet relying on consistent growth for our models is what caused the financial crash: the Black-Scholes model was a good model, but only if used sensibly, with good data. People used only data as far back as the previous crash.
We have already seen twenty years of static wages; young people are now likely to be poorer than their parents. We have cut back on investment in infrastructure and research to fund pensions and tax cuts, and we expect growth will simply happen, because it always has. Because life will find a way.
Life does indeed find a way, but we might not like it. Like the humans on Easter Island, or the woolly mammoths, or the dinosaurs, we could be racing to a future in which the path 'life' chooses for us is not to have life; to be replaced by something that can survive in the mess we leave behind.

Maybe that's ethically acceptable. Maybe we do have no obligation to preserve anything for the future, or improve the future. But if that's what we think, we shouldn't pretend we're doing the future a favour. We shouldn't claim that pushing debt and problems to others because we hope they'll be better able to deal with them is anything other than selfish, lazy and self-interested. Even if it is efficient, a virtuous person would take the problems of the moment on and never dump them on someone else.