With accelerated adaption of new innovations all around us, the opportunities and challenges are enormous. We are facing technologies and innovations that can disrupt the very fabric of society, from AI and genome editing to brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and nanotechnology. All of these technologies are very powerful on their own, but when they converge and combine with new business models and values, significant disruptions on a global scale can happen.

Many companies, policymakers and journalists oscillate between hope and despair in relation to the new generation of technologies. It is easy to feel confused as different experts seem convinced that these technologies will either solve all our problems, or beget the end of our civilization.

The truth, however, is that they can be pretty much what we want them to be. They are tools, powerful tools, but still only tools.

There are unforeseen consequences and complexities that make it hard to guide technology exactly in the direction we want, but people are choosing how to implement the technologies and the frameworks that will guide innovation. The challenge is that innovation-driven development in the first decades of the 21st century will take place in a historically unique situation.

For more than 300,000 years human innovation has mainly focused on developing technology to enhance and extend our bodies to make us stronger, faster and more efficient with the help of machines and tools; the reason has been the urge to survive, to reduce material scarcity. But we needed “more”: more food, more shelter, more medicines... We created tools like GDP to measure progress based on “more”, and we became used to view growth as something generally positive.

This focus on “more” has resulted in unprecedented material wealth. Humans on average live longer, are healthier, have access to better food, medicine and shelter. We can and should celebrate this progress. Few of us would like to live in a time when we do not know if we will be have enough to eat the next day, or when a simple infection will kill you. But as with all things in nature, unlimited growth is neither possible nor desirable, in our own bodies unlimited growth is called cancer.

When it comes to everything from food to medicine, we have arrived at a point where we need to move beyond and ask deeper questions, and in no other field is this more true than innovation.

As we are closing in on, or in many cases, have already passed the point when we do not need or can have “more”, there is a need to direct our innovation skills to the structures guiding innovation. Moving forward, three 21st-century questions should guide innovation:

How can we ensure inclusion?

How can we ensure a good life for all?

How can we create an ecological civilization based on a half-earth approach?

Inclusion is one of the most discussed challenges of rapid innovation-driven development. With AI and robotics, in particular, we can create a future that will not require many humans to produce the material goods we need. In a similar way, many of the services that humans provide today, AI and connectivity will be able to do better, faster and cheaper.

The inclusion challenge is often framed around unemployment, but it is much more than this. It is a question of what role people will have in society. A universal basic income or similar measures will ensure that people do not starve to death, but they will not ensure that people have something meaningful to do. Instead of framing the question of inclusion as a question of income or right to work, we need to ask how we can guide innovation in a way where everyone has the opportunity to make an important contribution to society.

It is also important to approach inclusion as an educational and access challenge. With technologies that are not just about making us stronger and faster, but also smarter, it becomes important for everyone to be able to discuss what kind of values that these technologies are based on. Who has the right to data about us and who has the right to filter and guide what information we can access are core questions that must be discussed.

With material scarcity becoming more about redistribution and less about the need for increased productivity, we must ask what we want if it is not just “more”. Again, we must look beyond the simple approach when the focus just turns to “optimal”. It is obviously important that we eat optimally to avoid obesity and that we aim for more optimal ways of transport to avoid climate change and congestion. Still, if we look at any framework for human wellbeing from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to Max-Neef's taxonomy of fundamental human needs, it is clear that we need a conversation about the role of innovation in relation to what kind of society we want.

It is not an exaggeration to say that much of the innovation is making trivial or even meaningless contributions to society. If you open the app store on your smart phones and compare that to the most important challenges in society it is hard to see much overlap.

Many companies in their hunt for more are trying to create needs by making people insecure and satisfy this uncertainty through consumption. A lot of innovation is driven by companies that do not really provide any significant value to society, from fast fashion (providing inexpensive new apparel multiple times a year) to fast food (simple and unhealthy food eaten without any deeper satisfaction). These companies use innovation to push people down the scale of human evolution rather than up. Progress in art and science as well as in human enlightenment are substituted by triviality, increased tensions and irrationality in society.

A discussion of what companies contribute to society and how governments use technology is urgent.

Last, but no least, we must redefine our relationship with nature. Currently we are destroying the very fabric of life that we all depend on, and to a large extent we do this with innovations aimed at delivering us more of the stuff we don’t need or really want. Instead of a reactive or negative approach where we try to put a price on nature, or find limits for how much we can destroy, we should explore the opportunities for a positive vision.

The concept of half-earth could help us broaden our ethical horizon and move away from a simple anthropocentric perspective to a future where innovation is guided by structures where nature also has an intrinsic value.

The G20 Osaka Summit, where innovation is a key theme, provides a great opportunity for leading stakeholders to take the next step in innovation-driven development. It is time for the innovation agenda to move away from only making what we do today faster and cheaper, increasing productivity, and ask what the innovations actually contribute. All major companies, universities and authorities should start applying 21st-century questions for their innovation strategies where the focus shifts from quantity to quality.

Increased productivity is still needed in many areas, and many around still need more of even basic goods, but it is time for a 21st-century innovation agenda.

Dennis Pamlin is a senior adviser at Research Institutes of Sweden, a senior associate at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and a fellow at the Research Center of Journalism and Social Development at Renmin University.

The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

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