Innovation forms an inherent part of life and human history, we can’t stop it!
Driving progress
Today science and technology are widely seen as the drivers of progress that will allow humanity to flourish. These ideas are embedded in much of our thinking and behaviour regarding new technology. New is better than old – we’ve all watched the queues for the latest iPhone, every time hailed as ‘the best iPhone we’ve produced’.
It’s not surprising therefore that there’s an assumption that AI technology is good, that it will make our lives easier and more comfortable, and that it will enable humanity to flourish. Businesses strive for greater efficiencies, and we become people driven by what’s convenient, without ever asking what we’re losing and what this technology is doing to us.
Shaping society
If the experience of modern society shows us anything, how- ever, it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning.
Serving humanity
We don’t want to stop innovation but innovation should serve us rather than the other way around. Technology expands the possibilities available to us and in so doing immediately offers us choices – choices that humans are sometimes bad at making. We could choose to do the right thing but often we don’t.
It is for this reason that governments sometimes have to regulate to protect their citizens from the harmful effects of products and services that companies or even individuals produce. Regulation of drugs and addictive substances are a good example of where regulation is needed to temper innovation and to require rigorous testing to pick up side effects and harms.
References
L. Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 7.