The sceptical optimist : why technology isn't the answer to everything / / Nicholas Agar

• Autore: Agar Nicholas
• Pubblicazione: New York, New York : , : Oxford University Press, , 2015; ©2015
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (222 p.)
• Disciplina: 303.483
• Soggetto topico: Technology - Psychological aspects; Technology - Social aspects; Technology - Philosophy
• Note generali: Includes index.
• Nota di contenuto: ""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?""; ""Mooreâ€?s Law, Kryderâ€?s Law, and exponential technological improvement"" ; ""Two questions about exponential technological progress""""Exponential technological improvement as a conditional law""; ""What went wrong with cancer?""; ""Kurzweilâ€?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 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 WONâ€?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""
• Sommario/riassunto: 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
• Titolo autorizzato: The sceptical optimist
• ISBN: 0-19-102662-X
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910815205203321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II