Innovationism

“In case of consumption…” (Physiology for beginners, 1908)

Power steering, introduced in 1951 was innovative and driven by the pursuit of convenience—as were TV dinners and Tang, a paradigm that continues today with various apps for binge-watching uninterrupted. If you look at the long view, what happened post-war was the seed of our current fascination with AI. You could even see the potential for bubbles and “isms” forming then and are beginning to manifest now with a 60-year lag. “Innovative” assumes that change happens quickly, but all the ingredients have to be readily available and in large quantities in order for it to scale up. The only thing preventing AI at scale are new microprocessors. Even then, what will it accomplish and what else gets broken quickly in the drive for innovation?

Innovation seems intrinsically benign, but many things can go wrong. If innovation is like an “immune system” metaphorically-speaking, we can also get the “auto-immune” side effects where innovation attacks itself. Central currencies kind of went this way.

The idea of a central currency was a huge innovation: it was generative in that possessed the capacity to make money just on itself in the form of loans with interest--what Douglas Rushkoff calls “extraction routines” in his recent book Team Human--which ensure continued growth by corporations. Those routines are the operating system that corporations (the software) run on--as well as the “appification” of them--accessible through smartphones. Rushkoff sees this kind of innovation, just for the sake of itself, ultimately destroying the marketplace predicated on the false notion that any innovation will save us from the problems of the past. In the late 19th century, cars were seen as a way to rescue us from horse-drawn carriages. Autonomous vehicles will save us from whatever problems that cars cause now. The problem is that provisional innovation, which could take generations to resolve, is pushed too quickly to market, causing all kinds of other problems at much larger scales and affect top-level systems, like the climate. If you think innovation should be throttled, just look at history. Many innovations rolled out at all the World's Fairs in the past century still haven’t materialized. But we’re going to Mars no matter what the cost. Our innovation immune system will attack our nerves and scar them. But we can always suppress it with more innovation.

“...in order to stoke and accelerate growth, new, paradigm-busting inventions like smartphones, robots, and drones must not only keep coming but keep coming faster and faster. The math doesn’t work: we are quickly approaching the moment when we will need a major, civilization-changing innovation to occur on a monthly or even weekly basis in order to support the rate of growth demanded by the underlying operating system. Such sustained exponential growth does not occur in the natural world, except maybe for cancer-and that growth ceases once the host has been consumed.” (Rushkoff, Douglas. Team Human. , 2019. Print., p. 114.)