life as a radically enhanced being but nevertheless be justified in rejecting it. Work on technological change The 2015 book The Sceptical Optimist: Why Technology Isn't the Answer to Everything was a departure from Agar's focus on the debate about human enhancement. Agar challenges the techno-optimist view that expects great things from technological progress for human flourishing. He describes a phenomenon called hedonic normalization that leads us to significantly overestimate the power of technological progress to improve our well-being. We overlook hedonic normalization when we suppose that because we would be unhappy to find ourselves permanently transported back in time to the middle ages that people living back them must have been miserable too. The same distortions apply when we imagine a future with cures for cancer and colonies on Mars. Technological progress may make us happier but not nearly so much as we imagine it. This has implications for our collective prioritization of technological progress. In a 2019 book How to be Human in the Digital Economy Agar continues his defense of human values and experiences. Agar responds to the challenge from automation and artificial intelligence to human work and agency. Agar argues for a hybrid social-digital economy. The key value of the digital economy is efficiency. The key value of the social economy is humanness. A social economy would be centered on connections between human minds. We should reject some digital automation because machines will always be poor substitutes for humans in roles that involve direct contact with other humans. A machine can count out pills and pour out coffee, but we want our nurses and baristas to have minds like ours. In a hybrid social-digital economy, people do the jobs for which feelings matter and machines take on data-intensive work. But humans will have to insist on their relevance in a digital age. Publications Books How to be Human in the Digital Economy (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA:, 2019) The Sceptical Optimist: Why technology isn't the answer to everything (OUP, Oxford, 2015) Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA:, 2013) Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA:, 2010) Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) Perfect Copy (Cambridge: Icon, 2002) Life's Intrinsic Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) Papers See also Human enhancement Liberal eugenics References External links Nicholas Agar Agar's personal webpage Review