Recently, a friend gave me a lift in his car. When we reached our destination, he opened the boot, pulled out a cord and plugged it in. I’d never actually seen anyone charge a vehicle before — only about 2 per cent of existing cars are electric — and it was a glimpse of a better future. At last, after 50 years of disappointment, innovation might again start improving our lives, chiefly through reduced emissions and better medicine. That’s partly because today’s polycrisis has sparked poly-innovation.
The golden age for life-enhancing innovation, argued the economist Robert Gordon, was the period 1920-1970. That’s when most people in developed countries acquired electric lights, telephones, fridges, clean water at home, vaccines, antibiotics and perhaps the most important invention, flush toilets. In that half-century, life expectancy in the most technologically advanced country, the US, jumped from 53 to 70.
But after 1970, even as tech became the dominant industry, it delivered much less. Look at the contributions of today’s behemoth companies: social media and a delivery company that did to high streets what the iPhone has done to attention spans. These innovations haven’t benefited humanity, but then why would we expect them to? The purpose of new tech is typically to enrich innovators or to build deadlier weapons. Any human progress is an accidental side-effect. Far from innovation combating climate change, most CO₂ emissions in history were generated after 1990. In fact, the next technological frontier for several garlanded innovators involves leaving behind our damaged planet and heading for space.