Why innovation will fail to save the world

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

Let me start with a friendly note. This article is not an anti-innovation cynical piece, it just highlights some of the less talked about negative effects technology had on our society. It also tries to establish that innovations when directed with the sole motive of influence/profit maximization tend to hurt the masses in a long term. And that inventions by many great scientists and thinkers have worked in ways which was beyond their own imagination, some times for good and sometimes for bad.

This post has been divided in 3 parts to cover the broader explanation of why innovation is only a part of solution and not the solution itself and why the myth that it is the ultimate savior can in fact be devastating.

All great inventions are like fire. You can use them to cook food and you can use them to burn yourself.

Lets think about the greatest scientist of all times, Einstein. To his genius, we owe the photoelectric cell and nuclear power stations which light up our offices, homes and streets. And for the same genius, we had to pay by burning hundreds of thousands of people in two of the busiest cities of Japan in the blink of an eye.

The agricultural revolution was deemed to be the greatest turning point in the history of mankind. It brought us the modern day fertilizers, pesticides, a deluge of knowledge and advanced farming practices to maximize crop yield. Today the same phenomena is working to serve toxic food on the plates of millions of lower middle class people in developing nations.

The information age companies which promised to connect us better and keep us informed are making the already very powerful and shrewd government agencies even more powerful giving them access to personal information leaving us even more vulnerable.

If you think about it, it will be hard to come up with even one fundamental invention which has not been put to destructive use. Technology only upholds its master’s “intent”. If the intent is short sighted or corrupt, results can be catastrophic. And any community or country which lays endless stress on innovation & consumption without caring enough about aligning the intent of its leaders towards a bigger goal is digging up its own grave.

Any monetized innovation will make the rich richer and poor poorer

Lets illustrate with an example.

Internet has been around for atleast 20 years. Today, out of 6 billion people on earth, 1 billion have access to internet. Considering the fact that internet is actually a big knowledge machine, you can safely say that one billion educated(and financially well doing) people have been using Internet to sharpen their intellect, share creative ideas and become even smarter. If knowledge is power, over 20 years it has ended up vesting a lot of power in our hands and since everything is relative, left others for worse.

This may sound cynical but lets take up a case. I have a college classmate who hails from a small village from West Bengal. Our college is one of the best known engineering colleges in country. And as expected after +2, one needs to appear for an entrance test for getting admission. After we got our entrance test results, it was time to choose the college. For me it was a straight choice, no doubts. This guy though was having a hard time choosing between a local second tier engineering college where he wanted to go with his friends and the one which was “far away”. Luckily his parents decided to consult his uncle living in Bombay who was well informed and instantly instructed his parents, “Stop thinking about it and send Anant to BITS”. This one choice has changed the course of his life. He still talks about how some very talented guys from his village with good entrance scores had made the choice of sticking back to local college.

Above example does not relate to “Internet” in particular. It is meant to illustrate how critical can the access to right information be and in a world of limited opportunities, how technology can skew the equation in favor of those who can afford it thus creating a bigger gap. You can extend this theory to innovations in healthcare, defense etc.

If you want to think of a counter example, think of polio drops. That “intentionally not patented” formula has made its way to the farthest corners of the world and polio could be eradicated soon.

Human memory is short and history repeats itself.

Here is the story of Easter Island.

When Europeans arrived on this tiny scrap of land in the middle of Pacific,1300 miles from anywhere, in 1722, it was clear that a few degraded cannibals who lived there were descendants of a great civilization who had built the famous extraordinary, eighty ton stone statues that look out to a sea from the cliffs. What had happened? In a nutshell, the islanders had committed ecological suicide. They chopped down all their trees to act as rollers and levers for their statues, thereby deforesting their island to the extent that soil erosion killed off agriculture; over forty kinds of sea bird could no longer nest there and so became extinct; palm trees no longer grew;canoes could not be built for fishing and there could be no firewood.

Does this all sound familiar? For eighty ton statues, read Global Economy; for 10,000 people with axes, read 6 billion with bulldozers, for remote habitable island, read Planet Earth, alone in the galaxy …...

“I am sorry to say that there is too much point to wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours” — John F. Kennedy

We have been taught to think of progress as numbers and indices which reflect how our economy is doing. Number and graphs plotted to decipher production, consumption, demand & supply. But since what we call “markets” are actually composed of 1% of world’s population which holds most of the disposable wealth, these equations provide a very limited picture. In today’s context, production and consumption are not a good measure of progress, neither are the innovations which can disrupt the “markets” to form huge corporations. What may really matter are the innovations which disrupt us, “The People”, which bridge the gap between two far apart sections of society and allow majority of the world’s population to access basic amenities like healthcare, sanitation & nutritious food, and when they are fed & healthy, give them education and fair opportunities to grow. Honestly, such innovations may not be “profitable” but they can definitely save the world.

Do hit the recommend button if you liked the article! If you have any comments, hover over the greyed-out comment icon to the right of any part you want to comment about. If you want to give direct critique, use Twitter.