One mistake we continue to make, time and time again, is confusing innovation with progress. It’s true that in many cases, innovation is progress. We see the results of this every day, in the development of vaccines, antibiotics, and even indoor plumbing. The results of innovation have improved people’s lives across the globe, allowing them to live longer, healthier lives. These are examples of progress fueled by innovation, but this is hardly always the case. It’s a mistake to assume that innovation and progress are the same, despite people using the terms interchangeably. Thinking this way is a trap that lulls us into complacency.
Confusing Innovation With Progress
When people use the term “innovation,” they often mean technological innovation. People imagine everything from hoverboards to intergalactic space travel. It’s these larger-than-life imaginings implanted in our brains that companies exploit to sell products as progress. Apparently, the road to utopia is paved with forced obsolescence and mandatory upgrades. However, nowhere in the definition of technological innovation is there a qualifier that it must be beneficial to humans.
Innovation is about making money, after all, companies are in business to make money. This isn’t some terrible, disgusting secret. And no, we shouldn’t burn it all down because companies are trying to turn a profit. This is how the world works. However, we need to recognize this fact because it figures into our calculus of progress. Because when innovation makes life better for us, the making life better part is a byproduct of the innovation activity. There are certainly exceptions and exceptional people like Jonas Salk, but this is hardly the norm.
Progress, on the other hand, is advancement toward the betterment of humanity. Or, at least, that is what the definition should be. Granted, these are subjective measures, which make them difficult to pin down, but progress is typically something we know when we see, for example, reducing poverty or medical advancements that reduce disease. Basically, anything that makes human lives better as a whole, preferably ones that lead to human flourishing, although this is rarely the case.
The fact that progress is subjective is what many technologists don’t like. There’s no number to optimize. Of course, since it’s subjective, people’s perspectives on progress vary. This is what gets exploited to sell nonsense as progress. When innovation is packaged as progress by default, then there’s something to optimize.
Let’s take the example of brain-computer interfaces, a space that is certainly going to heat up. Here’s Elon Musk claiming that Neuralink will allow us to become one with AI.
This is certainly innovation, but is it progress? In some cases, the claim could be made that it is progress. This would be true if it corrected some impairment or disability. But otherwise, let’s think about the scenario. Imagine a world where you never know whether a thought or memory you have is truly yours. A world that signals the end of private thoughts and the beginning of a whole new world of manipulation and unintended consequences. Maybe it’s just me, but this doesn’t sound like progress. I’ve pointed out these risks in my public presentations on emerging technology, as well as my addressing Kurzweil’s nonsense.
The lines can certainly get blurry. Self-driving cars seem like progress until they take away the self-driving features and instead charge you a monthly fee to access them. Apparently, a monthly subscription fee is how we get to Mars. I’m not claiming technology should be free. I just don’t think monetization should be a rug pull.
Apparently, this is how we get to Mars, through a monthly subscription fee.
Detractors often bring their own set of problems. No innovation that leads to true progress benefits everyone on the planet equally and simultaneously. The idea that it can and should is delusional, and insisting on this as the criterion is disingenuous and won’t lead to any progress. It’s the mark of a performance by someone living in an alternate reality.
Much of what we’ve seen over the past couple of years is innovation for its own sake, with associated negative consequences.
Why Does This Distinction Matter?
Many would have us believe that this is a distinction without a difference, and that I’m being provocative, but the reality is, these are two separate terms with two separate definitions. Progress is a general term that all humans can understand, whereas innovation is a specialized term used by technologists. The blurring of the lines between the two makes innovation in whatever form easier to digest. Quite often, innovation is immediately labeled and packaged as progress to exploit this condition.
This packaging and blurring of the lines between progress and innovation have been with us for quite some time. In Aldous Huxley’s post-apocalyptic novel from 1948 titled Ape and Essence, the Arch-Vicar of the satanic church describes progress and nationalism as the two great ideas that Belial put into human heads. In this scene, innovation has clearly been labeled as progress.
Progress—the theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in one field without paying in another; the theory that you alone understand the meaning of history; the theory that you know what’s going to happen fifty years from now; the theory that, in the teeth of all experience, you can force all the consequences of your present actions; the theory that Utopia lies just ahead and that since ideal ends justify ideal means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave, and murder all those who, in your opinion (which is, by definition, infallible), obstruct the onward march to the earthly paradise. -Aldous Huxley (Ape and Essence)
There’s no doubt that Huxley isn’t describing progress as human flourishing; he’s describing technological innovation packaged as “progress.” This is no doubt because the term “innovation” was not a common one flaunted in the faces of the general public the way it is today. This matters for all the reasons Huxley points out in this very line, and it applies just as well to technologists today as it did back in 1948. We are seeing the conditions Huxley noted in this passage today.
Technology Is Never Neutral
People love to claim that technology is neutral, but this demonstrates a stunning lack of awareness of reality. Technology is never neutral. The mere presence of the technology changes people and their environments. This has been known for over half a century. Here’s Marshall McLuhan writing about it in the 1960s.
Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. -Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media)
To quote another sage on the same topic, back in the 1980s:
Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral. -Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves To Death)
Technology, by some measure, always changes the environment in which it’s found. Take social media, for instance. Social media changes the communications landscape, forcing even people who opt out to reckon with the possibility of being left out of activities when a group decides to organize on a social media platform.
There’s not much we as individuals can do about this, other than be aware of the phenomenon so we can implement mitigations. If we recognize that technologies are not neutral, we must acknowledge trade-offs, even if trade-offs don’t appear in the short term. Once again, we can look to social media. Early in social media’s life, there didn’t seem to be any real trade-offs. This perspective seems quaint today.
This is the point of this post: we never get something for nothing. The bill comes due at some point. When innovation, regardless of impact, is automatically packaged as progress, it becomes a vehicle to shove it down our throats, to make us get in line, to label us Luddites, to strip us of our humanity, and disregard our concerns.
For example, I’m still struggling to understand how destroying art and artists and dehumanizing everyone on the planet is somehow a prerequisite to getting a cure for cancer. If you don’t let us loot the intellectual and creative property of everyone on the planet, then you won’t get a cure for cancer or eternal life. Seems Huxley was right.
Conclusion
We should want and insist upon innovation that’s actually progress, with progress defined as the betterment of humans. So many these days are bedazzled by technology because it is neat or cool and never ask any larger questions about what problems it actually solves and what the tradeoffs are.
The next few years will require vigilance because much of the innovation packaged as progress comes at the cost of stripping us of our humanity and agency, further pushing us toward becoming machines. We need to become much better at envisioning trade-offs and not blindly take every new application or technology for only its surface-level functionality. The real dangers lurk behind the curtain and are rarely exposed until it’s too late. Awareness of potential trade-offs allows us to keep our guard up, choose our technology use cases wisely, and defend our humanity to the best of our ability. In the current environment, it’s up to us to defend ourselves.