If tech progress might be bad, what should we tell people about it?

Related: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hoz/do_earths_with_slower_economic_growth_have_a/

A link to Paul Christiano's excellent 'On Progress and Prosperity' shouldn't be left out in this discussion:

http://effective-altruism.com/ea/9f/on_progress_and_prosperity/

Even if growth were bad or neutral, there would have to be specific activities that were bad, and other activities that remained good. So how does this differ from just telling folks to look for ways that their society might hurt itself, or ways that they might be contributing to this antisocial behavior? There is a lot of disagreement about which behaviors, exactly, are antisocial.

I do worry that given enough time, industrialized countries will, um, self-destruct by using nuclear weapons. But in that case the remedy would probably not be giving up industrialization. That seems like too high a cost.

It's also possible that growth may not be that important because growth is becoming much harder or impossible. But is it?

One point you make is that during the last 200 years growth has helped. Without strong evidence against it, it seems hard to make any assumption but that trends continue. So I think growth is good; growing societies will either be looked to and emulated by other groups that want the same rewards, or else powerful growing societies will just conquer other weaker ones. Either way, growth seems like the winning strategy.

Almost all of our written output takes as a strong assumption that economic growth and technological advancement are good things.

For what it's worth, I think this conclusion is extremely non-obvious and I'm somewhat disheartened when I see people taking it for granted. Most people are prone to optimism bias.

Why are we so cautious about raising these issues?

There may be a sampling bias here. People at Stanford EA talk about these issues, and I read about them online all the time. I haven't interacted much with CEA/Oxford people but my impression is you guys are a lot less willing to acknowledge that anything might be harmful, and less willing to discuss weird ideas.

Nice post. Can I suggest you're missing the most obvious one from your test?

How about "making people happier"?

which you could rephrase as

"reducing suffering/connecting people/empowering people to life the lives they want."

I'm one of those (controversial?) people who thinks most economic and technological development is morally neutral and does surprisingly little to make people's lives better, largely because people adapt to it and doesn't make a difference over the long run. I'm actually planning to make this argument in a longer post soon as I also think it's something of a neglected issue.

If it's not a force for good, and if you believe investment banking and similar roles damage the economy, that makes earning to give via them look more attractive.

Perhaps this can be an area of work for the Good Technology Project?

Other modelling suggests the overall effect is very unclear

Can I ask what modelling/whose?

Some are also good reasons to think that economic growth is indeed more likely to be good than bad.

True, although only the last two even seem valid to me.