Leads to existential threats---ecosystem collapse, democracy decline, inequality, etc.

While large part of the innovation literature is focused on the private returns from innovation, its impact often goes beyond the producer-consumer relationship, affecting the public sphere. The dichotomy between private and social benefits (costs) may prove useful not only to understand the underinvestment in R&D, but also to understand the overinvestment in specific technologies.

Some public health dangers are not known until long after the innovation’s introduction; some were known by firms, some of whom may try to mislead consumers and regulators. Sometimes, dangers are common knowledge, although harmful products continue to be used (e.g. every year people start smoking despite knowing that it is harmful). Other problems are more subtle: investment in expensive high-tech medicine has an opportunity cost that may reduce investment in upstream improvements in public health that have a bigger positive impact.

3.2. Environmental degradation

Innovations can make dramatic contributions to environmental degradation. We are currently living in a period of accelerated environmental change, the collapse of some ecosystems and regular mass extinctions, involving the melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice, thawing of permafrost, destruction of coral reefs, irreversible fragmentation of rainforests, the expansion of deserts, increasing frequencies of droughts, floods and forest fires, and the collapse of insect and vertebrate populations (Ceballos, Ehrlich, and Dirzo Citation2017; Lenton et al. Citation2019; Kunin Citation2019; Díaz et al. Citation2019). The relationship between innovation and the environment may have both a local and a global dimension, and Hansen and Nygaard (this issue) consider a ‘local issue’ within a more global perspective.

3.3. Harm to society

Innovations can also harm the fabric of society. Advances in technology can lead to the erosion of privacy alongside excessive monitoring by government and industry. Leaving decisions to a computer instead of a person does not remove human biases, as programmers can build in their own biases and create new ones. Advances in automation mean that an increasing number of complex tasks and operations are being ‘outsourced’ to computers and algorithms, which have hidden biases, and with humans losing their capabilities as well as their overview of the process (Gardner and Bryson, this issue).

Artificial intelligence algorithms are particularly problematic if they are trained on existing datasets that reflect biases in society. In doing so, they can perpetuate and amplify racism and sexism (Didier et al. Citation2015).Footnote2

Social media also affects our self-perceptions and social interactions (Baccarella et al. Citation2018). It can threaten democracy through micro-targeted fake news during elections, and provides a way for nations to interfere and disrupt other nations politics. The ‘click-bait’ driven business model favours polarising, anger-inducing content, rather than the respectful, balanced consideration required for democratic deliberation. Social media allows populist politicians to speak directly to the population and claim to speak for them. Innovation can also harm society by increasing inequality (Witt Citation1996; see also Fougère and Meriläinen, this issue).

Biggi and Giuliani (this issue) observe that much research into noxious innovation has focused on work-related consequences. On the one hand, innovation may bring higher unemployment (according to fears that robots are stealing jobs). On the other hand, innovation may lead to deterioration of working conditions (e.g. Amazon warehouse workers who wear a wristband that monitors their every move; innovation in office toilets designed to become uncomfortable after sitting there for too long (Morrison Citation2019)). The pervasiveness of computers and cloud technologies erodes the boundaries between home spaces and work spaces, thus becoming a problem for work-life balance (Gardner and Bryson, this issue).

3.4. Harm to the economy

Innovation can also harm the economy if innovation policy is imperfectly calibrated. Excessive patent protection or monopoly power from previous innovations (e.g. from first-mover advantages, secrecy, or network effects) can harm economic dynamism and consumer welfare, and boost inequality.

For example, when the private sector succeeds in excluding others from relevant parts of the knowledge pool, or makes it difficult to understand what is patentable, it may influence the rate and direction of innovative efforts. This seems to be the case with some areas of biomedical research, where fragmented and overlapped property rights have favoured less problematic research lines in terms of intellectual property, rather than more promising ones in terms of potential impact (Heller and Eisenberg Citation1998).

4. Unanswered questions

Three unanswered questions can be mentioned here. First, can government ever apply the precautionary principle (Stirling Citation2017) fast enough to protect against harmful side-effects on e.g. public health? Innovative substances and technologies are increasing artificial and complex, and their integration into society and the environment is often not well understood. Given that innovation is fundamentally uncertain and involves experimentation, there may be gaps in the regulation of moving from scientific discoveries to exploratory applications in the real world (e.g. applying exploratory new medical techniques on real-world patients in unethical ways; see Saemundsson and McKelvey, this issue).

Second, if innovation gets us into this mess, can we expect innovation to get us out of it? Innovation may give us the virus, as well as the vaccine (although many may die in between). Or does innovation only lead us into ever increasing difficulties (e.g. road traffic no longer means horse manure on our streets, but exhaust fumes instead). We agree, for example, with the need to give subsidies to renewable energy R&D to reduce the harm from fossil fuels (Acemoglu et al. Citation2012), but alternatives that are, by almost any definition, improvements upon fossil fuels, are nonetheless bringing new problems: for example, wind turbine blades are piling up in landfills (Martin Citation2020), and there are problems of solar e-waste (Hansen and Nygaard, this issue).

Third, accidents happen. What is the acceptable rate of ‘normal accidents’ such as Chernobyl? If it is above zero, innovation will be accompanied by catastrophes that are unpredictable and increasingly large (even if the setting-up of preventative procedures could sometimes help to avoid some catastrophes). If it is zero, then this ‘risk-averse’ stance could put an absolute halt on some types of innovation.