Abstract
This Article examines an underappreciated bias that has long pervaded U.S. legal culture: an exceedingly enthusiastic view of technology and technological progress. It adopts the term “techno-optimism” to describe an asymmetrically positive view of innovation that extols its benefits, minimizes its harms, and elides much of its complexity. The recent rise of more skeptical attitudes toward technology only casts into sharper relief the techno-optimism that has subtly dominated policy debates for decades. As a case study of techno-optimism, this Article scrutinizes patent law, particularly its constitutionally defined objective of promoting technological progress. In so doing, it offers the first extended scholarly assessment of attitudes toward technology in the patent system. By examining legislative histories of major patent acts, executive pronouncements, and judicial opinions, it reveals that patent policymakers exhibit roundly positive views of innovation. On the rare occasion when they identify harms from technological progress, they defer, minimize, or otherwise compartmentalize their concerns.
This Article then challenges such techno-optimism by exploring several underappreciated harms of technological progress. This critique is most centrally aimed at the patent system, and it will highlight ways in which patents exacerbate several costs related to technological progress. However, this critique has broader salience for numerous legal and policy initiatives aimed at promoting technological advancement. First, extending previous work, this Article explores how innovations (including patented inventions) from opioids to social media to pesticides can harm individuals, society, and the environment. Second, it explores how the zealous pursuit of technological progress contributes to inequality in access to innovations and wealth distribution throughout society. Third, it argues that rampant innovation often leads to substantial waste, overinvestment, and misallocation of social resources away from other worthy ends. The Article concludes with calls for a cultural shift among policymakers from techno-optimism to techno-realism. Additionally, it presents several high-level prescriptions to mitigate the harms of innovation, enhance the distributive effects of rapid technological progress, and integrate innovation policy within a broader social policy framework.
Recommended Citation
Peter Lee,
Techno-Optimism in Innovation Law and Policy,
75
Emory L. J.
819
(2026).
Available at:
https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/elj/vol75/iss4/1