Nicholas Agar

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.

One negative with technology is that it 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… (meer)