On managing the future – but first the history lesson (yawn)

This may take a while to explain, so bear with me. About a year or so ago now I had a yarn (or rather I exchanged emails with) IBM’s then chief technologist Irving Wladawsky-Berger. The subject was our collective responsibility to manage the future as well as the present. (I work for IBM too, by the way, but not at Irving’s altitude, if you know what I mean. And these are of course my views, not necessarily IBM’s.) Now this exchange was along the lines of my previous post, but rather than just asking ‘how did we get here?’ I instead asked ‘what happens if we just innovate and release, ever quicker, and repeat ad infinitum?’. It was in part a technological conversation, where as a technologist Irving was keen to expand upon the benefits to humanity of – you guessed it – technology.

And of course I agree. Technological innovation is not just a special gift of humanity but a vital tool by which we meet the challenges and threats to our lives, such as to our food and water supplies and to our general comfort, security and wellbeing. To meet these challenges swiftly may very well be critical to resolving the issues we face and surviving as individuals (or even as a species). So we don’t want to hold things up unnecessarily. On that count both Irving and myself would probably agree (and I’ll stop speaking for him now – you can find Irving’s insightful blog here).
My real bone of contention is that whilst we are very creative animals, we don’t necessarily respect or adequately consider the consequences of what we do. We may well ask ‘is anyone going to buy this?’ and I bet we’ll ask the ever-popular ‘will we capture the lion’s share of the market and make a killing?’, too. We will probably also ask ‘is it legal?’ and ‘can we patent it?’, but we won’t necessarily ask ‘will this product lead to consequences we don’t understand, or can’t control?’. I don’t blame anyone for answering along the lines that we have to trust the social and legal system to monitor and adapt to these downstream effects, for that is the system we have. When releasing a new product we are asked simply to meet the legislated requirements of any particular market and we tend (as humans do) take advantage of any loopholes. Some companies may take a more ethical or wider social view than others but in principle we innovate within set guidelines and then release. The community itself has evolved social, legal and economic systems that are meant to self-adjust to our innovations. Typically this means that if something goes awry down the line it’s spotted by someone, somewhere, at some time. It’s a downstream effect, and it may be cumulative, and – crucially – may not necessarily be direct. It will almost certainly be reflected in changed human behaviour, and maybe acknowledged also as a ‘hurt’ to an individual. 

If the changed behaviour is small or painless enough we’ll just forget about it and go on with our lives. But if we are hurt in some way by the innovation we’ll notice it. If we can identify the source of the pain then we’ll mount a legal case or perhaps lobby for a new law. Subsequently it may enter the wider public debate and sometimes – eventually, in the fullness of time – it may become a new law, guideline or requirement. If the originator was identified then they may be compelled to modify the product or service. Now that’s a great, self-correcting system, surely. After all, that’s what we have been trusting, revising and relying upon for the last 2,000 years at least, so why not just continue as before?

I’m sure you can see already that this largely reactive system (there are exceptions of course, but it’s generally reacting to a ‘hurt’) isn’t going to respond well to lots of small, relatively painless and increasingly speedy innovations. In the time elapsed between innovation and resolution of any hurt (be it physical, emotional or financial pain) there’s an indeterminate number of people out there with a problem of some sort. Or maybe a set of changed behaviours that will not hurt right now but will cause discomfort to future generations. And let’s not forget that this is arguably the greatest period of human change and innovation, ever. I say that with some trepidation, but I’m thinking we have over 6 billion people on the planet now, and even if they aren’t all innovating like crazy, by sheer weight of numbers a heck of a lot of them surely are. And they are increasingly connected in ways that we hadn’t even thought of just 20 years ago. So my contention is that, sure, we have ethics and laws and regulations and governing bodies in place to provide the checks and balances – but what if we just overload those institutions by sheer volume of seemingly innocent yet cumulative change?

Perhaps we already have.