The Technology Treadmill

In their new book, Ingenious: The Unintended Consequences of Human Innovation, “innovate or die” could well be authors Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson’s warning that humans will thrive only “if our species can indefinitely rely on ingenuity.”

Using metaphors from biology, the authors argue that “as persistent niche modifiers [living beings who deliberately and continuously craft their own environment to be hospitable and beneficial to their lives], we have to keep inventing new technologies to cope with the consequences of our previous modifications.” They add that “[o]ur ingenuity has enabled us to populate a wide range of environments. … We have an evolved ingenuity.”

But technological innovation, the authors rightly observe, doesn’t always produce the results we are seeking. We sometimes get unintended, unwanted, and unhelpful outcomes. These misses, or “mismatches,” as they refer to them, in turn create problems so complex that when we once again use technology to intervene—again—to “fix” these problems, we generate further unwanted and often unimagined consequences. These in due course require their own technological “fixes,” ad infinitum.

In brief, humanity’s endless pursuit of progress—whether in terms of growth or profit or human advancement—puts our species on an innovation treadmill. Unable to get off the treadmill, today we are required to embrace innovation more fiercely than ever before, even as we become ever more aware of human limitations and our dependence on technology. Whether the challenge is climate change, pandemics, or the spread of an all-seeing digital panopticon, managing the innovation process and understanding how to germinate desired and beneficial outcomes from technological change are the central tasks facing world leaders.

To understand innovation, humans have turned either to deterministic theories that posit that technologies act on humans and shape their possibilities or to social explanations of technological change on the premise that how we traditionally live, or wish to live, drives the technologies we retain and develop. While these two options explain much, they can be enriched by the application of evolutionary concepts from the field of biology to the understanding of innovation, Gluckman and Hanson argue. While the organic change of evolutionary biology differs in significant ways from changes in the inorganic world of digital computing and communications, evolutionary concepts could prove valuable to understanding the effects of technology and innovation on human life.

But even this assessment is conditional. As British theorist John Ziman observed in his seminal essay “Evolutionary Models for Technological Change” (2000), metaphorical language suggests sameness; however, this metaphor is less than perfect: “[T]ransforming the notion of ‘technological evolution’ from an evocative metaphor into a well-formed model” requires either a blind creative leap or a stubborn insistence that both organic and inorganic innovation share fundamental logics despite the ample evidence that “technological systems are not like biological systems in a number of important ways.” That is to say, caution should be taken in the use of metaphor—similarity is not the equivalent to sameness.

These ideas comprise the authoritative, occasionally revelatory, and always intellectually challenging arguments at the core of Ingenious, a sprawling, protean, learned, and at times disorganized and deeply frustrating book about “the challenges our ingenuity has unintentionally created” on our individual behaviors and actions, as well as society at large. Coauthors of the books Fat Fate & Disease (2012) and Mismatch: Why Our World No Longer Fits Our Bodies (2006), Gluckman and Hanson turn their pop-science lens in Ingenious to the affects and effects of continual, rapid technological change on human biology and culture: “The focus of this book is the distinction peculiarity of humans, our ingenuity reflected in our continuous and cumulative niche modification driven by technological and social evolution.”

While not a new insight, the authors aim to unpack and explore how human ingenuity—specifically in terms of how humans have “progressively built technological enhancement upon technological enhancement in a way no other species has done”—has altered “every aspect of the human condition” with unintended and sometimes disastrous consequences. The book dives into these “enhancements,” from how genetically modified food has led to the obesity epidemic to how digital media has upended established culture and even the cognitive ability to determine truth and “separate good from bad.”

Here is where, as evolutionary biologists, Gluckman and Hanson’s argument travels into contentious—but not unfounded—territory. They argue that technology has not only changed culture and the environment, but that it has fundamentally, albeit indirectly, changed human biology.

Together, the authors have published many highly technical articles that challenge received wisdom about how evolution works. In Ingenious they apply these views to argue not only that technological change is best understood as an evolutionary process but also that traditional understandings of evolution fail to capture the role and rate of technological change in society.

Instead of working from a “modern synthesis” approach, which they describe as “claiming an extreme genetic determinism that ignores much of biological reality,” their analysis adheres more to the recently proposed “extended evolutionary synthesis.” This theory, according to leading biologist Kevin Laland, elevates “the role of constructive processes in development and evolution,” effectively placing greater power in human agency to cocreate themselves and their environments.

For Gluckman and Hanson, therefore, humans, as “niche modifiers,” make changes to themselves and to their environments “for many other reasons than just survival.” Here is where their argument transcends established definitions of evolution and aligns more with current notions of progress: “We no longer change nature simply to promote our biological fitness: we want to make it nicer to live in too. … [T]hrough our emerging technologies … we are continuously modifying our environment further.”

With this insistence in niche modification that, to Gluckman and Hanson, correlate with the persistence of human ingenuity, two questions guide their inquiry in Ingenious. The first is whether engineers and scientists can harness the biological processes of innovation in order to improve on nature, rapidly and democratically, or at least globally.

Preoccupied with the unintended consequences of human intervention in nature and the environment, Gluckman and Hanson conclude that “biological evolution does not offer a solution to our futures.” Neither do they imagine scientists and engineers directly harnessing evolutionary biology forces for the benefit of humans and the planet. Barring catastrophe, “selection pressures on modern humans are slow, subtle and indirect,” such that “the concept of survival to reproduce as a driver of biological evolution is now essentially meaningless for humans.”

While insisting we should accept “limits to our ability to change nature,” the authors declare that the many “dire consequences of our past innovations … can be solved only by looking at the long term and not by grabbing at temporary, short-term fixes.” But temporary fixes are the best humans can hope for because technological progress is constant: “The continuous ingenuity needed to generate new aspects of culture as older ones are replaced has been likened to running on a treadmill to stay in the same place.”

Staying on the treadmill is hard, because innovations inevitably carry risks and bring unintended and unwanted consequences—some harmful to humans and the environment, from human antibiotic resistance to social media’s denigration of civility and the factual truth. “Interfering with nature often has a price,” they write. Yet, while their concern is well founded, the authors add little or nothing to the current discourse other than to lend a different perspective through metaphorical language.

In the most valuable part of the book, the authors consider a complex and daunting challenge, presented in the second question that underlies the book: How do we move beyond the trap of endless rounds of innovations that imprison us on a swiftly moving treadmill—what I call “the technology treadmill?” The coauthors refer to this as the “core question” of Ingenious: “Has the pace of technological innovation become so fast that we will not be able to cope with the inevitable disadvantages it will bring?” Getting off the treadmill is so tricky that the best decision, Gluckman and Hanson suggest, might be to stay on it.

Imagining an “arms race” between unintended consequences and innovations aimed at correcting them, Gluckman and Hanson ask whether continual invention is the solution to what they call “evolutionary mismatches” between our ingenuity and our fitness. The quickening pace of innovation creates clashes between us and our environment, which make further adaptations more urgent. “What appears to be different now is that the pace of new invention may be outstripping human capacity to respond and manage the balance of cost and benefit,” they argue.

Because humans must keep pace on their technological treadmill, the problem of “adaptive lag,” or delayed adaptation, looms large. To some degree, the balance between identifying new problems and solving them can be eased by humans getting better at reducing unintended consequences of innovations by learning from insufficiencies or oversights in extant technologies. The fear is that technological change is outpacing the human capacity to successfully adapt to and modify with that change.

Of course, everyone wants to mitigate the worst consequences stemming from innovation. But, frustratingly, the authors don’t provide a clear solution. Instead, their concluding thoughts are equivocal: “The battle between humans and nature is still very much raging,” they write. “The tacit assumption is that, because these brilliant new technologies are the products of human ingenuity, humans are winning [the race]. But the more we look, the more it appears that humanity is, at the same time, losing.”

Gluckman and Hanson might be considered critical optimists when it comes to human ingenuity: “So far our technological creativity has always gotten us out of trouble. There is no reason to suppose we will not be able to do so in the future.” Their perspective suggests that humans will support continual technological progress, not only for their own survival, but for changes that make the world “nicer to live in, too.” And that is because human ingenuity is also driven by the desire for pleasure and profit.

These insights highlight an unsettling reality of innovation: We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it.