Agar - The Sceptical Optimist: Why Technology Isnt the Answer to Everything

Now is a time of both great optimism and great pessimism about technological progress. Our technologies are becoming more powerful. The apparent acceleration of this improvement has led to forecasts of colonies on Mars and cures for cancer. But the increase in the power of our technologies seems also to be increasing the magnitude of their messes. The technological errors of past generations might bring crop failures or military defeats. The errors of our current global civilization threaten human extinction. During the Cold War we lived in fear of nuclear apocalypse. The turn of the millennium saw this fear joined in the popular imagination by climate change, a potentially catastrophic legacy of the Industrial Revolution.

This book seeks to take the long view of technological progress. My focuses are not the consequencesgood or badof particular technologies, but rather overall trends in the effects of technological innovation on human societies. The concept of subjective well-being, an increasingly important focus of work in psychology and policy studies, serves as my navigational guide. Put simply, the books central question is: How should we expect technological progress to affect human well-being? We must look past the welter of new social networking technologies, monoclonal antibody medical therapies, and self-driving automobiles to detect long-term trends in the effects of technological progress on well-being.

How do I propose to investigate the long-term effects on well-being of technological change? A long view of technological progress would seem to require comparisons of the well-being of people living at different times possessing different technologies. We lack representative samples of first-century Romans and twenty-third-century New Yorkers to quiz about their attitudes towards their ages technologies. To take the place of these missing survey data I offer a plausible evolutionary conjecture about how our well-being responds to different levels of technology. This conjecture places limits on the long-term improvements of well-being that can come from technological progress.

An awareness of trends in the effects of technological change on well-being reveals that we are subject to a technology biasa tendency to overstate the benefits brought by technological progress. The technology bias makes us reckless in the pursuit of these benefits. I will show how overcoming our technology bias permits a clear-eyed pursuit of more powerful technologies that is alert to relevant dangers.

Some thinkers I call radical optimists seek to encourage and amplify the technology bias. They find inspiration in an apparent acceleration of the pace of technological improvement. The radical optimists predict commensurate improvements of subjective well-being. For example, Matt Ridley expects an imminent rise in living standards to unimagined heights, helping even the poorest people of the world to afford to meet their desires as well as their needs. I argue that radically optimistic expectations of technological progress are mistaken.

Technological progress enhances human well-being in a paradoxical way. This paradox of technological progress concerns the translation of individual benefits from new technologies into benefits for the societies to which the individuals belong. New cancer therapies and smartphones bring significant rewards to individuals. But these benefits do not carry over, in their entirety, to the societies of which these individuals are members. Suppose that increasingly powerful technologies significantly boost the well-being of every individual exposed to them. These do not produce commensurate increases in average well-being.

There is something deeply odd about the idea that technological progress can boost the well-being of every individual in a society without much affecting the average well-being of that society. I argue that this puzzling result is produced by two phenomena.

I call the first of these phenomena hedonic normalization. This is the propensity for human beings to form goals that are appropriate to the environments they experience as they come to maturity. I offer an evolutionary rationale for hedonic normalization. The psychological and emotional mechanisms of subjective well-being are prominent features of human minds. They are likely to have evolved to respond to variation in the environments inhabited by humans. Humans can be hedonically normalized to arctic or to desert environments. So too, we can be hedonically normalized to different levels of technology. There is much about first-century Romans and twenty-third-century New Yorkers that we cannot know. But its reasonable to suppose that they are hedonically normalized to their different environments, and that differences in technology will account for much of the difference between first-century Rome and twenty-third-century New York.