By Peter Bloom, Professor of Management, University of Essex. Originally published at The Conversation.
Technological innovation in the last couple of decades has brought fame and huge wealth to the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Often feted as geniuses, they are the faces behind the gadgets and media that so many of us depend upon.
Sometimes they are controversial. Sometimes the level of their influence is criticised.
But they also benefit from a common mythology which elevates their status. That myth is the belief that executive “visionaries” leading vast corporations are the engines which power essential breakthroughs too ambitious or futuristic for sluggish public institutions.
For there are many who consider the private sector to be far better equipped than the public sector to solve major challenges. We see such ideology embodied in ventures like OpenAI. This successful company was founded on the premise that while artificial intelligence is too consequential to be left to corporations alone, the public sector is simply incapable of keeping up.
The approach is linked to a political philosophy which champions the idea of pioneering entrepreneurs as figureheads who advance civilisation through sheer individual brilliance and determination.
In reality, however, most modern technological building blocks – like car batteries, space rockets, the internet, smart phones, and GPS – emerged from publicly funded research. They were not the inspired work of corporate masters of the universe.
And my work suggests a further disconnect: that the profit motive seen across Silicon Valley (and beyond) frequently impedes innovation rather than improving it.
For example, attempts to profit from the COVID vaccine had a detrimental impact on global access to the medicine. Or consider how recent ventures into space tourism seem to prioritise experiences for extremely wealthy people over less lucrative but more scientifically valuable missions.
More broadly, the thirst for profit means intellectual property restrictions tend to restrict collaboration between (and even within) companies. There is also evidence that short-term shareholder demands distort real innovation in favour of financial reward.
Allowing executives focused on profits to set technological agendas can incur public costs too. It’s expensive dealing with the hazardous low-earth orbit debris caused by space tourism, or the complex regulatory negotiations involved in protecting human rights around AI.
So there is a clear tension between the demands of profit and long-term technological progress. And this partly explains why major historical innovations emerged from public sector institutions which are relatively insulated from short-term financial pressures. Market forces alone rarely achieve transformative breakthroughs like space programs or the creation of the internet.
Excessive corporate dominance has other dimming effects. Research scientists seem to dedicate valuable time towards chasing funding influenced by business interests. They are also increasingly incentivised to go into the profitable private sector.
Here those scientists’ and engineers’ talents may be directed at helping advertisers to better keep hold of our attention. Or they may be tasked with finding ways for corporations to make more money from our personal data.
Projects which might address climate change, public health or global inequality are less likely to be the focus.
Likewise, research suggests that university laboratories are moving towards a “science for profit” model through industry partnerships.
Digital Destiny
But true scientific innovation needs institutions and people guided by principles that go beyond financial incentives. And fortunately, there are places which support them.
“Open knowledge institutions” and platform cooperatives are focused on innovation for the collective good rather than individual glory. Governments could do much more to support and invest in these kinds of organisations.
If they do, the coming decades could see the development of healthier innovation ecosystems which go beyond corporations and their executive rule. They would create an environment of cooperation rather than competition, for genuine social benefit.
There will still be a place for the quirky “genius” of Musk and Zuckerberg and their fellow Silicon Valley billionaires. But relying on their bloated corporations to design and dominate technological innovation is a mistake.
For real discovery and progress cannot rely on the minds and motives of a few famous men. It involves investing in institutions which are rooted in democracy and sustainability – not just because it is more ethical, but because in the the long term, it will be much more effective.
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It seems to me that the main talents people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs have is first an ability to recognize whether a prospective employee (with real scientific training) actually has the ability to solve the problems at hand, and, second, they can ask the right questions when a project is bogging down.
The assumption has long been that there are such people with real scientific training, and creative talent enough to solve the technical problems, but I doubt it now. This became apparent to me when scientists began to care too much about patents, like when Joe Kennedy noticed that shoeshine boys were giving stock tips. And far too much effort goes to computer coding, which is more like playing chess than engineering.
What Westinghouse or Edison did with folks like Tesla, was LOTS different than what they did TO employees & contractors who’d actually made crazy, slapped-together prototypes function? As autonomous train control, CAD/ CAM or holographic XRays didn’t quite function; lawyers & PR folks replaced engineers & QA/ QC?
Not only do Uber, Amazon, Tesla etc. not innovate at all, they are also dependent on legal arbitrage as well as non-enforcement of laws. Would they have to treat their workforce like human beings and their suppliers with financial respect as well as delivering value to their customers they would be out of business within days.
Indeed. Amazon really pulled the ultimate bait and switch. I remember the news reports in Seattle when they first started out. They were a mail order book company with a no nonsense CEO in Bezos, whose desk was supposedly an old door propped up on cinder blocks. They also treated their employees well. I had friends who worked in the early warehouses who got paid very well and had decent benefits. I remember warehouse people being offered stock options early on. Not sure what the vesting period was, but if it was short enough, those people stood to make some real money as the stock price went up rapidly. And they just sold books – easy to ship and you pretty much knew what you were getting. The only real “innovation” here was ordering from the internet instead of mailing or calling in the order.
Fast forward a generation, and the products available are legion but what you receive is of dubious provenance and quality, the workforce gets crap pay and pees in bottles, while the CEO is out to conquer outer space using the money he made through tax avoidance.
Superbly summarized and said. Especially the second paragraph. Thank you. The NC commentariat is etc.
I just finished watching the latest video discussion on Carl Zha’s YT channel, talking about the recent Chinese tech companies’ rapid advances in chip and AI technologies arising from US sanctions, designed to constrain Chinese technological innovation and development.But had the opposite effect, as it forced different Chinese companies to work together and come up with a domestic solution. .
Necessity is the “mother of invention”.
The money they saved by not importing off-the-shelf chips etc, was funnelled into R&D, as joint ventures, and setting up their own hi-tech manufacturing hubs,.or near-shoring with other Asian countries like Vietnam and Thailand.
It also helps having the State provide free healthcare and education , which provides a larger pool of talent to draw on.
Carl Zha is a great resource:
https://www.youtube.com/user/CarlZha
I watched the clip. Biden’s stuttering (eye roll) was “my/his father” with an immediate correction. Watch the CNN video. (at 13.55 minutes on) These guys tweaked the video to only “my father”. I’m not a Biden fan or supporter, but I hate this stuff, even if it’s considered irony, funny or whatever you wish to call it. I call it deception. (I agree with one thing. This is the supposed leader of the “free world”?)
https://www.c-span.org/video/?532379-1/white-house-hanukkah-reception
China does not provide free health care. Those seeking health care often must pay up front before a doctor will see them. All in all, China’s health care system is pretty shoddy. More and more, China is following the neoliberal economic model.
Yeah, I was wondering why Rain Lewis wrote that. As for education being free, higher education includes quite a few universities that charge tuition.
Not entirely clear to me, as an uninformed outsider, in what sense the PRC can be called socialist. The Frenchman in China Twitterer Arnaud something (forget his last name) who gets shared here a lot mocked the idea that China is not socialist but just made a vague explanation that any government that tries to advance the interests of its people is socialist…which is…not a traditional definition of socialism.
Was just thinking of the explosion of new technology through places like Xerox PARC. Here is a a list of stuff that came out of the 70s-
Email (1971), the floppy disk (1972), cell phones (1973), VCR (1972), digital cameras (1975), the Microcomputer (1975), the Apple Computer (1976), GPS (1978) and the portable music player (1979)
https://www.tti.com/content/ttiinc/en/resources/blog/10-best-electronic-inventions-from-the-70.html
My point here is that as a thought experiment, imagine if the present Silicon Valley culture that we have today was in full effect from the 60s. How much of that sample of technology would still have been developed? I really find it hard to think off many technological advances the past decade or two that was not really a case of refining earlier technology.
Billionaires are wealth seekers, not contributors to human progress.
And many of the billionaire tech CEOs didn’t invent a damn thing – they bought or stole the IP.
This article might have included a mention of Apple’s Tim Cooke who seems to be more interested in making money than he is in making good computers. I have notice a decline in quality over the past five years.
Good point. The two best computers ( and the fastest) are two 12 year old Apple laptops I have, one loaded with Ubuntu and the other with Fedora. Reliable and rugged, both have been in daily use for years
The post talks about mythology but in reality it was created and propagated through incredibly effective PR: social media and old media, news media (NYT particularly) and entertainment media like The Simpsons and the (absolute garbage) new streaming Star Trek, which claimed that in the 23rd century, Elon Musk would be mentioned in the same breath with Newton and Einstein.
There needs to be a naming and shaming of all the media figures who were on the take for Musk.
People tried to take down Musk by shorting Tesla’s stock. That didn’t work out very well. Musk has succeeded in slaying every dragon that has come after him. There is really no limit to what he can do these days. Perhaps one day Musk will be added to Mount Rushmore.
“That myth is the belief that executive “visionaries” leading vast corporations are the engines which power essential breakthroughs too ambitious or futuristic for sluggish public institutions.”
Mark Blyth has been shooting down this myth for years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyPuJtfYGd8
(4 min)
“Mark Blyth has been shooting down this myth for years.” But people want to believe in heroes and miracle workers, and of course it’s part of the national ideology. Hence the mantra, oft repeated, about Steve Jobs’s “Reality distortion field” — a mixture of aggression, charisma, and sometimes a certain instinct for designing products and sales strategies that were unusually successful in their time and place regardless of the quality of the technology they purveyed. I’ve worked for people like that, and it is really amazing to watch it function, especially when it fails in spite of its aura. A long time ago, the ACM studied the fate of several large commercial computer projects, and discovered that more than half failed to produce anything useful. The losers are forgotten, and the winners are celebrated when most of what they had was luck, or maybe a talent for ruthless and deceptive business practices.
Hero worship enslaves us and will keep us enslaved for a long time.