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The Sceptical Optimist: Why technology isn't the answer to everything, by Nicholas Agar
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The rapid developments in technologies — especially computing and the advent of many 'smart' devices, as well as rapid and perpetual communication via the Internet — has led to a frequently voiced view which Nicholas Agar describes as 'radical optimism'. Radical optimists claim that accelerating technical progress will soon end poverty, disease, and ignorance, and improve our happiness and well-being. Agar disputes the claim that technological progress will
automatically produce great improvements in subjective well-being. He argues that radical optimism 'assigns to technological progress an undeserved pre-eminence among all the goals pursued by our civilization'.
Instead, Agar uses the most recent psychological studies about human perceptions of well-being to create a realistic model of the impact technology will have. Although he accepts that technological advance does produce benefits, he insists that these are significantly less than those proposed by the radical optimists, and aspects of such progress can also pose a threat to values such as social justice and our relationship with nature, while problems such as poverty cannot be understood in
technological terms. He concludes by arguing that a more realistic assessment of the benefits that technological advance can bring will allow us to better manage its risks in future.
- Sales Rank: #1333293 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-07-09
- Released on: 2015-07-09
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
eloquent and well-informed book ... a refreshing corrective to the excesses of technological optimism Network Review
About the Author
Nicholas Agar, Reader Victoria University of Wellington
Nicholas Agar is Reader in Philosophy at Victoria University. He has spent much of his academic career writing about ethical and philosophical issues that arise in connection with new technologies.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Not an attack on technological progress, but on overly ambitious ways of thinking about it
By IronGaspar
I thought this book was a hard slap against all technological optimists, but in truth is just a book against radical optimists as the author calls them. Those who think that technology by itself will be the solution to every problem and they choose to leave out other important and inherent aspects like the sociological, psychological, cultural, ethical and of course the secondary effects, the perverse incentives and the unintended consequences that the new technology will bring.
As a matter of fact I think the author is kind of a moderate optimist as he himself says:
The rapid exponential improvement of information technology is infectious. It tends to spread to wellbeing technologies. Progress in an infected well-being technology tends to accelerate
. Or
This book is no attack on technological progress. Rather, it is an attack on certain overly ambitious ways of thinking about technological progress.
.
There are several and similar quote from the author stating optimism in technology but always clarifying that we need to ponder about the costs and the price we will pay.
I think is a good book to temper our expectations and recognize that we need to ask more questions before demanding quick and short term solutions (or pleasures). To think that technology is the all for all and the only tool in our toolkit is to make the same mistake as the man with a hammer where he thinks that everything is a nail. We need to remember that some of the most beneficial breakthroughs in human history have been through social and attitude changes.
The only thing I found a little naive about the author is his belief that you can control human ingenuity and technological advance as if it were some kind of predictable and complete malleable clay. No doubt we can plan some scenarios ahead and set priorities in order to maximize and optimize our current resources, but sadly sometimes we need to "let the beast loose" if we want to discover things serendipitously that otherwise we couldn't. In other words, sometimes we need to break things and push the boundaries. Everything is a trade-off.
For me the most important points of the book are: (i)attitudinal time travel; (ii)experienced improvement Vs real improvement; (ii)progress traps; (iv) technology improvement is a conditional law.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Well-being ain't what it used to be
By David Wineberg
It’s not a straight line from tech to well-being. The Sceptical Optimist is a counterbalance to all the “radical optimists” who claim technology will make everyone rich, healthy and satisfied. It will of course do no such thing. It will instead put people out of work, make the rich richer and the poor poorer, as it always has. These philosophical arguments of Agar’s have long been validated and surpassed by history, economics and politics. The sum of our technological achievements is that while some people are temporarily better off, the Earth and most of its inhabitants are in much worse shape.
Technology often creates as many problems as it solves. While factories can turn out shiploads of processed foods to feed billions, the food is very low in nutrition and is instead formulated to encourage more eating, causing obesity, diabetes, etc. For all the technology we invent to eliminate diseases, our advances have resulted in such pollution that 75% of cancers are now environmental, not genetic. This has boosted cancer into second place (after cardiovascular) in causes of death. Improved well-being?
We have all kinds of technology working for us, but we are not particularly happier for it. Our ancestors worried about childbirth, smallpox, and polio. We don’t; we worry about autism, AIDS and Alzheimer’s. They didn’t have mobiles, the internet, and the Weather Channel. But they also didn’t have identity theft, malware, profiling, trolls, online dating, government snooping and facebook stress.
The basic premise of the book is perfectly obvious – we deal with our situation as we live it. Agar calls it “hedonic normalization”, meaning we cope with and assimilate whatever technology is current, subsume it, and look to the next development. In a way, this is the opposite of future shock. Agar says we normalize automatically, and the faster the well-being improvements come at us (eg. mobile apps by the millions), the less improvement we feel. We take it for granted; it’s the new base line.
There is a frustration and annoyance in reading The Sceptical Optimist. Agar examines technological “exponential” laws like Moore’s, that sweep us along to vast, almost incomprehensible improvements in tech performance. He compares it to the war on cancer, which is utterly and completely different, if only because of all the laws and regulations that make medical research narrow, expensive and not nearly as successful as unfettered tech advances. His philosophical underpinning is in need of no facts to operate at its own level.
At bottom The Sceptical Optimist is a book of philosophy: cold mathematical logic.
David Wineberg
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