The Titan submersible which imploded as it tried to reach the Titanic wouldn’t get certified because certification “slowed down innovation”. This is an age when innovation has become a religious mantra, a belief system, a matter of fate. Innovation culture did not simply lead the Titan to catastrophe. High-tech innovation is leading the entire human race to catastrophe.
You can’t stop AI because innovation. You can’t even slow down AI development because innovation. You can’t question VR or IoT or self-driving cars or 5G because innovation. All these laws and regulations, they get in the way of innovation. We must remove anything that gets in the way of innovation because all progress and growth comes from innovation, from inventing needs that people never even knew they had. The only way to solve climate change is innovation.
Innovation is a code word for planned obsolescence. Innovators are given rights to go through as many materials and create as much waste as they want, as long as they’re innovating. As long as they’re achieving greater efficiency, nothing else matters. Version 256A achieved a 0.000001% efficiency improvement. It’s doesn’t matter how much material was used or e-waste occurred in getting to 256A. It doesn’t matter that versions 250 and older are no longer supported. It’s all good because it’s all in the name of innovation.
And efficiency. Has a word done more damage to the environment than “efficiency”? Every time we get an improvement in energy efficiency in a technology, we get an increase in total energy use and waste creation. I’m going to let the brilliant engineer, Pietro Jarre, explain why:
“Technical engineers, they focus very much on reducing the unitary consumption, but actually the real stakeholder that matters—which is called Earth—the Earth doesn’t care about the efficiency of a single engine. The Earth cares—the Earth is impacted by the unitary efficiency multiplied by the number of tools which run. The Earth would be much less impacted if only one huge ship with a horrible two-hundred-year-old engine carried goods from China to Europe, instead of one million ships, with extreme efficiency. The point is how much we use, how many engines, how many computers and so on. The point is to reduce the consumption of materials, as well as to reduce the amount of fossil fuel we use, of energy we use. The point is not to increase the efficiency of solar panels. The point is to use less electricity. Period. To create technologies that help us to use fewer materials instead of the opposite. All the ICT industry today is developing products which increase our use of the Web. Today, the amount of bytes that we use is increasing at such a rate that we already have an impact on energy consumption. I don’t think the solution is to use renewable energy for data centers. The point is that we should not fill the data centers with all the crap that we’re filling them with. Much as with the mining industry, we are very, very, very efficient at creating huge dumps, huge landfills. It seems that humans’ first ability is to—sorry—shit in some place, and to leave the land full of garbage, waste, with data and materials and the like.”
We don’t need innovation or efficiency to solve the multiple environmental crises we face. We need wisdom and a moral code. Wisdom which asks what level of moral depravity the human race has descended to when it gives nonstop coverage to a few billionaires going missing on a trip they never should have gone on, and pays zero attention when hundreds of children and women die going on a trip to try for a better life.