Techno-progressivism, technoprogressivism, or tech-progressivism, is a stance of active support for technological development. Strong technoprogressive positions include support for human practices of consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification in particular. Techno-progressives believe that technological developments can be profoundly empowerment and emancipation when they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that their costs, risks and benefits are all fairly shared by the actual stakeholders to those developments.

Technoprogressivism maintains that accounts of progress should focus on both scientific/instrumental dimensions as well as ethical/political ones. For most technoprogressive perspectives, then, the growth of scientific knowledge or the accumulation of technological powers will not represent the achievement of proper progress unless and until it is accompanied by a just distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of these new knowledges and capacities. And at the same time, for most technoprogressive critics and advocates, the achievement of better democracy, greater fairness, less violence, and a wider rights culture are all desirable but inadequate in themselves to confront the quandaries of contemporary technological societies unless and until they are accompanied by progress in science and technology to support and implement these values.

There are a number of contemporary figures who advocate what might be construed as technoprogressive stances, among them Donna Haraway with her accounts of socialist-feminist cyborg theory, James Hughes with his accounts of democratic transhumanism, Jaron Lanier, Annalee Newitz, Bruce Sterling and the Viridian Greens.

Bioconservatism is the stance that contrasts with techno-progressivism.

=See also=

*Bioethics *Biopolitics *Free software *Genetic engineering *History of science and technology *Human enhancement technologies *Nanotechnology *Neuroethics *Reprogenetics *Social Software *Sustainable development *Technocriticism *Technological evolution

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