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Record Nr. |
UNINA9910797274803321 |
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Autore |
Agar Nicholas |
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Titolo |
The sceptical optimist : why technology isn't the answer to everything / / Nicholas Agar |
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Pubbl/distr/stampa |
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New York, New York : , : Oxford University Press, , 2015 |
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©2015 |
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ISBN |
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Descrizione fisica |
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1 online resource (222 p.) |
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Disciplina |
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Soggetti |
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Technology - Psychological aspects |
Technology - Social aspects |
Technology - Philosophy |
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Lingua di pubblicazione |
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Formato |
Materiale a stampa |
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Livello bibliografico |
Monografia |
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Note generali |
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Nota di contenuto |
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""COVER""; ""THE SCEPTICAL OPTIMIST: WHY TECHNOLOGY ISN'T THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING""; ""COPYRIGHT""; ""DEDICATION""; ""ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS""; ""CONTENTS""; ""LIST OF FIGURES""; ""INTRODUCTION""; ""An outline of the book""; ""1: RADICAL OPTIMISM AND THE TECHNOLOGY BIAS""; ""Does technological progress increase subjective well-being?""; ""Radically optimistic forecasts""; ""How should we prioritize technological progress?""; ""Concluding comments""; ""2: IS THERE A LAW OF TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS?""; ""Moore�s Law, Kryder�s Law, and exponential technological improvement"" |
""Two questions about exponential technological progress""""Exponential technological improvement as a conditional law""; ""What went wrong with cancer?""; ""Kurzweil�s evolutionary explanation of exponential technological progress""; ""The difference between reflexive and passive improvement""; ""Exponential technological improvement is infectious""; ""Concluding comments""; ""3: DOES TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS MAKE US HAPPIER?""; ""The traditional paradox of progress""; ""How we hedonically adapt to new well-being technologies""; ""Complete or incomplete hedonic adaptation?"" |
""Concluding comments""""4: THE NEW PARADOX OF PROGRESS""; ""Gibbon versus Ridley on historical happiness""; ""The perils of attitudinal time travel""; ""Hedonic normalization""; ""How to make |
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comparisons that best reveal the effects of technological progress""; ""Complete or incomplete hedonic normalization""; ""Why hedonic normalization is probably incomplete""; ""The new paradox of technological progress""; ""Concluding comments""; ""5: WE NEED TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS EXPERIMENTS""; ""Technological progress traps""; ""Two ideals of technological progress""; ""The fear of falling behind"" |
""How is progress dangerous?""""Rehabilitating the idea of technology experiments""; ""Jared Diamond on the natural experiments of traditional societies""; ""Creating and nurturing variation in technological progress""; ""A nuclear power progress experiment""; ""Why should the winners share with the losers?""; ""A progress experiment on genetically modified crops""; ""The future of technological progress""; ""Concluding comments""; ""6: WHY TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS WON�T END POVERTY""; ""Poverty and well-being""; ""Ordinary and emergency circumstances of poverty"" |
""Radically optimistic solutions to poverty""""Were there poor people in the Pleistocene?""; ""How poverty affects life satisfaction""; ""Misunderstanding the happiness of the Sun King""; ""Evidence from status competitions for the relevance of social context""; ""Economic and technological trickledown""; ""Concluding comments""; ""7: CHOOSING A TEMPO OF TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS""; ""Comparing different tempos of progress""; ""Technological progress makes diminishing marginal contributions to well-being""; ""Mobile phones and cancer therapies"" |
""The importance of subjectively positive technological progress"" |
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Sommario/riassunto |
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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 willautomatically produce great improvements in subjective well-being. He argues that radical optimism 'assigns to technological progress an |
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