“Innovation is the Greatest Ponzi Scheme of All Time”

This is a rough sketch of an idea given to me by Sander van der Leeuw’s talk titled “The Archaeology of Innovation” which he recently gave at the The Long Now Foundation seminar series about long-term thinking. Surely need to develop this idea further.

• Innovation is required to adapt to nature, to “control” nature and sustain growth path of society
• Innovation gives rise to unknown risks and challenges
• New challenges require further innovation

Problem: volume of challenges is increasing faster than innovation can solve them, except when we have major breakthroughs like fossil fuels, cities, microprocessors, antibiotics, the internet, the human genome.

Paths of innovation become increasingly myopic, path-dependent. The cost of backpedaling and choosing a new innovation path is perceived as far to high, though the unknown consequences may dwarf this cost. It gets more difficult to jump to better alternative paradigms. Like capitalism, innovation requires perpetual growth to maintain our society.

Innovation moves too quickly for our the nature-society interface to stabilize. Introduce a concept of a risk-barrier, similar to the sound-barrier at 768 mph. Before settled culture, humans constantly reacted to nature, facing challenges as they arose; humans acted within existing rules and either survived or didn’t. Now humans change the rules by innovating to circumvent nature in the short-run, while accumulating unresolved challenges–a risk-barrier–in the long run. Now with settled culture we have innovated to avoid constant change.

The world continues to change around us while we innovate to provide our own stasis. This effectively creates a backlog of risks and challenges that are deferred into the future with great consequences that increase in scale the longer they are avoided. Our time-frame of thinking gets shorter because risks are multiplying faster than innovation can solve them, because innovation itself adds new risks. Only major breakthroughs can make net progress in working through the backlog of challenges.