Technology is the study of means, as John Stuart Mill put it. (Mill contrasts this with science, the study of causes.) A technology is a verb, a process to obtain a result. We often see the manifestations (tools, mechanisms, products), but those merely support and guide the process.

- Any intervention has both intended and unintended effects.

- Effects may be manifest or latent, similar to Robert K. Merton's notion of manifest and latent functions.

- Effects, whether manifest or latent, may be short-term or long-term.

- The overall process may be readily communicated (learned, sold, advocated, adopted), or difficult.

- Implementations and interactions may be simple or complex.

Optimists deal with the intended, manifest, short-term, and readily grasped.

Pessimists deal with the unintended, latent, long-term, and that grasped only with difficulty.

It's far more often the pessimist who then is addressing the unknown and remote-to-comprehension rather than the optimist, contrary to Crawford & Patrick's (data-free) assertions.

In discussing latent and manifest functions, Merton makes the observation that:

Discovery of latent functions represents significant increments in sociological knowledge .... It is precisely the latent functions of a practice or belief which are not common knowledge, for these are unintended and generally unrecognized social and psychological consequences.

Robert K. Merton, "Manifest and Latent Functions", in Wesley Longhofer, Daniel Winchester (eds) Social Theory Re-Wired, Routledge (2016).

https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-theory-re-wired-new-co...

In multi-bet gambles, the Optimist is wagering on a possible benefit, whilst the Pessimist is wagering to minimise losses. As others have noted, the Optimist occasionally wins, at least in the short term, but often loses. Suvivorship bias / Texas sharpshooter fallacy leaves us looking at the lucky Optimists. We rarely see manifest signs of highly-appropriate pessimism.

Crawford's other arguments lean heavily on rhetoric, shibboleths, fallacies, and incomplete assessments. Whilst Haber-Bosch lifted the near-time constraint of overextracting a renewable biological resource (bird guano), it did so by tapping into an even less renewable resource (natural gas --- see the case of one early "unlimited" discovery playing out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom), and has only further increased human populations running up against energy, fertiliser, and agricultural productivity crises. And the practice itself has resulted in second- and higher-order effects of excessive nitrogen in the form of blooms, dead zones within littoral regions, and more. Sinks soak only so much.

Rock-oil kerosene is no more renewable than natural gas, and reserves which in the 1860s were reported to suffice for a thousand years, or a million, are proving to have a total lifespan measured on the order of a few centuries. Mining is an inherently nonsustainable resource so long as extraction rates exceed those of natural formation.

Human agency and innovation can only at best attain physical and technological efficiency limits. The cannot create new pools of low entropy. They may in the short term be successful in tapping into previously unutilised ones.