Responsible innovation and irresponsible stagnation

This long blogpost is based on a lecture I gave at UCL a couple of weeks ago, for which you can download the overheads here. It’s a bit of a rough cut but I wanted to write it down while it was fresh in my mind.

People talk about innovation now in two, contradictory, ways. The prevailing view is that innovation is accelerating. In everyday life, the speed with which our electronic gadgets become outdated seems to provide supporting evidence for this view, which, taken to the extreme, leads to the view of Kurzweil and his followers that we are approaching a technological singularity. Rapid technological change always brings losers as well as unanticipated and unwelcome consequences. The question then is whether it is possible to innovate in a way that minimises these downsides, in a way that’s responsible. But there’s another narrative about innovation that’s growing in traction, prompted by the dismally poor economic growth performance of the developed economies since the 2008 financial crisis. In this view – perhaps most cogently expressed by economic Tyler Cowen – slow economic growth is reflecting a slow-down in technological innovation – a Great Stagnation. A slow-down in the rate of technological change may reassure conservatives worried about the downsides of rapid innovation. But we need technological innovation to help us overcome our many problems, many of them caused in the first place by the unforeseen consequences of earlier waves of innovation. So our failure to innovate may itself be irresponsible.

What irresponsible innovation looks like

What could we mean by irresponsible innovation? We all have our abiding cultural image of a mad scientist in a dungeon laboratory recklessly pursuing some demonic experiment with a world-consuming outcome. In nanotechnology, the idea of grey goo undoubtedly plays into this archetype. What if a scientist were to succeed in making self-replicating nanobots, which on escaping the confines of the laboratory proceeded to consume the entire substance of the earth’s biosphere as they reproduced, ending human and all other life on earth for ever? I think we can all agree that this outcome would be not wholly desirable, and that its perpetrators might fairly be accused of irresponsibility. But we should also ask ourselves how likely such a scenario is. I think it is very unlikely in the coming decades, which leaves for me questions about whose purposes are served by this kind of existential risk discourse.

We should worry about the more immediate implications of genetic modification and synthetic biology, for example in their potential to make existing pathogens more dangerous, to recreate historical pathogenic strains, or even to create entirely new ones. Continue reading “Responsible innovation and irresponsible stagnation”

Lecture on responsible innovation and the irresponsibility of not innovating

Last night I gave a lecture at UCL to launch their new centre for Responsible Research and Innovation. My title was “Can innovation ever be responsible? Is it ever irresponsible not to innovate?”, and in it I attempted to put the current vogue within science policy for the idea of Responsible Research and Innovation within a broader context. If I get a moment I’ll write up the lecture as a (long) blogpost but in the meantime, here is a PDF of my slides.