Technological Innovation and Economic Transformation

Much as we appreciate the bounties technological innovation has brought us, we seek not to succumb to technological enthusiasm. We seek to assess technological innovation pragmatically. Technology is neither good nor bad; neither helpful nor harmful. Technology is nuanced, and each technological innovation comes with its costs and benefits. The innovator’s utopian vision of the future, in which the innovation would receive universal accolades, rarely occurs. It is, however, this vision, frequently a single-minded vision, that urges the innovator forward, and we respect that. All innovation brings about disequilibrium of the status quo. In sum, innovation disrupts. Innovators see problems where others may not, and their innovations are intended solutions to these problems. Since the introduction of an innovation would disrupt the way we make sense of the world, it would induce any of us to adjust our relationship with the world. Often such adjustment takes time. Some of us may resist an innovation. Some of us may reject it, use it inefficiently, or differently than expected or proposed. Some of us will modify tinker with, disassemble, or reassemble the innovator’s technology.¹ Once a technology is released into the markets, the innovator, like any other creator, loses control over the creation. This loss of control implies that it is necessary to think not just about the unintended consequences of technological innovation, but also about the complex factors that influence innovation before, during, and after its conception.

The illustrations of chapter 1 are ironic because their underlying infrastructures persist even as their justifying conditions seem to have eroded over time. Investment in infrastructure may enable innovation in a context at a given time and place, and yet the establishment of infrastructure also institutionalizes behavior that resists innovation, preserving an erstwhile newly achieved status quo. We note that the consumption activities associated with the daily commute to work or the walk in the park have become far removed from the experiences of our forebears for whom the infrastructures were initially conceived. So to assess the prospects for innovation in the presence of these infrastructures, we present in this chapter a simple framework for identifying five categories of influences that contribute to producing context that is relevant for understanding how a technology may be used, commercialized, or abused (not necessarily in that order). The framework, called the Star in the Pentagon (SIP),¹ is reasonably flexible in that it would enable a systematic analysis of historical fact or fiction, and it would inspire the conjuring of possible futures. We present and explain the framework as it might be applied to begin interpreting the illustrations of chapter 1.

The situation that ET faces at the George Washington Bridge (GWB) tollbooth has its origins in pre-1908 United States. So, to consider the chain of interactions among the influences described by the Star in the Pentagon (SIP), we begin by positing a change in science and technology, △T, as the initiation. The technological innovation of the personal motor vehicle dates from Cugnot’s fardier à vapeur (steam-powered wagon) in 1769.¹ As we noted earlier, in 1886 Karl Benz was the first automotive innovator to incorporate an internal combustion engine, powered by gasoline, into the personal motor vehicle. As legend has it, it was Frau Benz who effectively demonstrated the utility of using her husband’s invention for long-distance transportation by taking her sons on a drive from Mannheim to Pforzheim. From 1886 to 1908, though, the automotive industry was a cottage industry, wherein most of the manufacture and assembly took place in France and most of the consumption took place in Great Britain.² The novel consumption activity that the automobile, as a technological innovation, enabled was defined as “motoring,” which, prior to 1908, was primarily a leisure-oriented activity.³

In March 2015, representatives of the EU-3+3¹ were locked in prolonged negotiations with the foreign minister of Iran about Iran’s nuclear program. The question on the table was how to present a set of incentives and disincentives, acceptable to both Iran and the nuclear powers, such that Iran would, for a period of time, abandon its efforts to develop the nuclear capability for weapons production and delivery and focus exclusively on the application of nuclear energy to non-weapons uses, such as for generating electricity.