The Sceptical Optimist

Subtitled 'why technology isn't the answer to everything', this eloquent and well-informed book enables readers to get to grips with the relationship between technological progress and enhanced wellbeing. He also provides a range of explanatory terms that inform the debate, such as the central concept of radical optimism arguing that accelerating technical progress will soon end poverty, disease and ignorance as well as improving our happiness and wellbeing. It is just this view that Agar convincingly challenges to create a more realistic model of the impact of technology. Radical optimists take progress in IT as the standard when it clearly cannot be applied across the board. Indeed, wellbeing can be undermined by 'status anxiety' generated through social networks, and we should not forget record levels of mental health disturbances in advanced societies.

Agar brings psychological findings to bear on his argument such as hedonic adaptation in relation to set points (we gradually revert to our hedonic set point) and hedonic normalisation as society as a whole becomes accustomed to new forms of technical advance. The new paradox of progress is that improvements of individual wellbeing resulting from technological progress have failed to translate into equivalent improvements for society as a whole. The author highlights a key difference between technological progress and progress in, say, cancer research or even the design of muskets. The former incorporates a reflexive dimension whereby technological advances enable further advances. He also proposes technological progress experiments, argues that technological progress will not in itself and poverty and advocates choosing an appropriate tempo of technological progress in view of his contention that it makes marginal diminishing contributions to wellbeing. The book is a refreshing corrective to the excesses of technological optimism.