Flip the Narrative: What Stifles Innovation?
Greed and social disregard stifle innovation
Dear AI ethics enthusiasts,
If you’ve been following any tech ethics debate, you have surely encountered this narrative:
Regulation stifles innovation
This narrative is especially relevant now, with the rise of Trump’s administration, which highlighted those concerns that regulation comes at too high of a cost to progress.
But think of it more carefully. What really stifles innovation? Consider:
Greed stifles innovation
Social disregard stifles innovation
Here’s the rationale: Invention is born from constraints. The question is only which constraints are taken seriously. Regulation becomes a barrier when the social constraints are ignored instead of being used as a catalyst, which can be caused by greed and disregard for social consequences.
Below I use the invention of the power loom during the Industrial Revolution to illustrate this point. My foundation is Brian Merchant’s excellent Blood in the Machine, especially chapter 1.
To be clear, I don’t buy into the implicit assumption that innovation is more important than other values, like improving the human condition. But I’m putting this aside for the sake of argument.
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The invention of the loom
Richard Arkwright’s water frame, patented in the UK in 1769, was a machine that spun cotton into yarn using water power. When Edmund Cartwright and his friends visited Arkwright’s water frame factory, their response was a mixture of marvel and concern.
They realized that if the water frame were widely adopted, it would flood the British market with yarn. There would be so much yarn that the British weavers wouldn’t be able to handle it all, and most of the yarn would need to be exported. But then, weavers in other countries could weave it more cheaply, which would harm England’s trade.
The solution to this problem was clear to Cartwright: Build a machine to automate weaving, too. He also wanted to get rich and invent cool stuff, of course, but Merchant quotes him as saying that automating weaving is “the only remedy for such an evil,” referring to the risk to the British economy (page 31). And so, the power loom was invented and patented in 1785.
Notice what happened here: a social concern catalyzed innovation.
Regulation
Cartwright’s loom worked so well that he tried to commercialize it. But Queen Elizabeth stopped him because she was concerned about mass labor displacement. As a result, Cartwright did not commercialize his loom. He died broke. His loom would succeed later on, too late for him to benefit from.
Enthusiasts of the “regulation stifles innovation” narrative might say:
“See, regulation inhibited the power loom.”
But let’s look at it one layer deeper. Cartwright already took a social concern seriously when he invented the power loom. What would have happened if he also took the Queen’s social concern seriously? Which inventions could it have catalyzed?
So, what inhibited the invention of the power loom? I would say it is not the regulation itself. It’s the disregard for what stands behind it:
Social disregard stifles innovation.
Worker rebellions
Back when Cartwright was developing the power loom, workers were less than cooperative. Weavers refused to help him. He could have greatly benefited from their help, as he lacked any background in this craft, and user feedback is crucial for any innovation. Moreover, in 1792, weavers destroyed the first 24 power looms Cartwright managed to sell.
Historians say the causes for such worker rebellions were the extremely poor working conditions and concerns about labor displacement, which were ignored. It’s not innovation itself that they opposed (as some Luddite critics think).
So, what stifled innovation here? I would say:
Social disregard stifled innovation. Geed stifled innovation.
How much better could Cartwright’s power loom have been if he had more user feedback? How much faster could it have been invented if Cartwright used social responsibility to catalyze his innovation? Or if he only paid his workers more and treated them better?
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Read Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine. It’s excellent. This post draws from chapter 1.