Innovation

We humans have came a long way from the beginning from stone age, to modern era and one can’t deny the fact that during this time, we humans have evolved a lot and for everything we now enjoy, we can thank innovation. I always believe mind is the greatest tool that humans have in there arsenal. And thanks to that great tool we have innovations, discoveries and all the other good stuff.

We have came from some mere creatures living in some kinda cave to flying in the sky. All that was due to thousands of innovations over the years. Well all is great and good, but I also believe that everything has both good as well as bad sides to it. In this article, I wanna look at the dark face of innovation.

So what could possibly be wrong with innovation, one may ask. To get to its dark face, we need to change our context. When we think about innovation we look at either ourselves or a group of humans and how its beneficial for them, instead of looking at a group of humans, we need to look at the whole mankind as one and also the future offspring to come. Only then we can look at the dark face.

One more thing I wanna clarify here, is I don’t wanna consider certain innovations in this, only the ones which solves the problem that we humans have created in the first place, for an example like the recent Covid-19 vaccines, obviously it’s great and thanks to the frontline health workers and thousands of researchers we finally have the cure, but if we look back it’s the problem only we humans created. So I don’t think its beneficial for us, because we created the mess and now we are cleaning it up.

Now let’s look at some innovation which were actually beneficial for human race. The best one comes to my mind is wheel, wheels are one of the greatest innovations, humans ever created. So what could possibly go wrong with this, at first nothing. Now let’s take that and move a bit forward in time to look at its dark face. If I tell you in a nutshell, wheels gave rise to hunger for power, to capitalism, to slavery and tons of other stuff. Now the question you may be having is, what in the world how?

Let’s see if I can explain this properly. For this to understand we need to take two different situations first before the wheel era and second after the wheel era. Before the invention of wheels, every human had a limit on how much productive he/she can be, whether it was food gathering, farming, or any other similar stuff. After the invention of wheel, we removed that limit and now one can be very much productive without any restrictions. He/she can grow more, have more, carry more in less time and effort, which brings me to my next point i.e. we humans have a very bad appetite, we are never full. Now if you connect the dots and think it you can get why I said it gave rise to more hunger for power, and if you move more further and add trades and money into the equation we have capitalism, and lastly if you increase that variable of hunger for power, we get wars, slavery and all other similar stuff.

Obviously there is also great side to it, but I don’t wanna focus on that part because we already know all the good stuff about it, like it also gave rise to civilization which then in turn created more problems.

But now the question may arise, did we just fucked ourselves or should we or should we not have done all that stuff? I think innovation is great and I personally love innovation, but I also think there should be some kinda governing body or some kinda limit on this. Because anything whether it’s good or bad in excess is bad for mankind.

You can take this to other innovations too like the invention of computer, the invention of tools and my personal favorite the invention of AI. And as I am writing this I can think of thousands many other dark effects of it. For the sake of my laziness I would just add one more to it, as a mental exercise for you to figure out i.e. wealth disparity.