Innovation is harmful to health, and the economy.

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…

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).

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).