Ingenuism and the Precautionary Principle

Ingenuism Weekly 13

“If you think of [opportunity] in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.” –Jeff Bezos

PODCAST

Silicon Valley and Risk

Robert Hendershott and I just launched a new podcast segment. Each week, we’ll discuss and analyze the latest news from Silicon Valley. In this inaugural episode, we take a bigger picture look at the Valley and the role that risk and failure play in promoting ingenuity.

Listen on iTunes or Spotify.

INSIGHT

Ingenuism and the Precautionary Principle

Robert Hendershott and Don Watkins

Source: Wikimedia Commons

How should we evaluate new technologies like artificial intelligence or genetic engineering when there is the potential for harm, but conclusive evidence about the risks and benefits is unavailable? One of the most influential approaches is known as the precautionary principle. Philosopher John Gray captured the spirit of the precautionary principle when he wrote:

A sound conservative maxim in all areas of policy . . . is that we should be very cautious of innovations, technological or otherwise, that have serious downside risks—even if the evidence suggestive of these risks is inconclusive, if the risks are small, or if their magnitudes cannot be known.

The precautionary principle puts the onus of proof on new technologies to establish their safety before innovations can be introduced on the market.

The advocates of this principle raise an important issue. Harm is by definition bad, and it is hard to argue with being careful and methodical. But the precautionary principle itself raises some obvious concerns. What constitutes “serious” downside risk? Can any technology meet the precautionary principle’s stringent demands? What about opportunity cost—the benefits we miss out on when we hold back potentially useful innovations?

Precautionary principle advocates like Gray sometimes view holding back progress as one of its benefits: economic growth, he declares, is “the most vulgar ideal ever put before suffering mankind.” Progress is “detrimental to the life of the spirit, because it encourages us to view our lives, not under the aspect of eternity, but as moments in a universal process of betterment.”

Touché. However, most of us want growth, progress, and betterment. We need a way to think about the risk/reward tradeoffs involved in new technologies that doesn’t cripple innovation. Ingenuism helps us think through these tradeoffs by looking at risk through the prism of exploration and environment—two of the driving forces of progress.

The precautionary principle shapes the environment in which innovation occurs. It elevates avoiding failure over exploration and the rapid iterative learning that follows, demanding what political scientist Aaron Wildavsky called “trail without error.” Error is a necessary component of learning: it is how technologies improve and harm is mitigated. Elevating error avoidance is the equivalent of reducing our commitment to learning.

When might prohibiting a technology to avoid potential harm make sense? The obvious case is when the risks are so great that, should something go wrong, there is no opportunity to learn from our errors and improve. A technology that poses truly existential risks cuts off learning from errors. The potential pain comes with no potential gain.

In less severe cases, when problems emerge from, say, social media or hydraulic fracturing, we can take stock of the harm created by the innovation and mitigate the harm through adaptation, resiliency, and further innovation. We can maximize the benefits while minimizing the costs over time.

An Ingenuist trusts that people will rapidly address the harm caused by new technology, increasing its net benefits over time.  Eventually the new technology has the potential to be the solution to much more serious problems. At its introduction, electrification would fail the precautionary principle. Now, almost every aspect of our life depends on electricity, fewer people than ever die from electrical accidents, and expanding our use of electric power is seen by many as vital for reducing the concentration of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere.

Even concerns for existential risk may not justify prohibitions on new technologies. The precautionary principle demands that we focus myopically on the (highly speculative) costs of action, blithely ignoring the opportunity cost of inaction. Taken to the draconian levels preferred by some advocates, the precautionary principle would entail restrictions on innovation so far-reaching that the principle itself represents an existential risk. 

One small example. Golden rice is genetically engineered to contain beta carotene, and had the potential to save millions of malnourished children from blindness and death. But we’re choosing to let them go blind and die because of GMO opponents who invoked the precautionary principle to warn that maybe there might be some major unknown downsides of golden rice.

What precautionary principle advocates refuse to tell us is how we can gather evidence about a potential harm, much less learn to mitigate it, if we are prohibited from exploring the area altogether.

A better approach is to identify cases where there is meaningful if incomplete evidence of a truly existential risk and formulate strategies for explorative learning that minimize the cost of errors. In short: continue to move forward but move forward cautiously and focus on learning quickly. 

A model here is the 1975 Asilomar Conference, where scientists voluntarily assembled to figure out how to deal potential biohazard risks of recombinant DNA technology.* Noting the potential benefits of the new technology, their summary report cautioned that “The new techniques, which permit combination of genetic information from very different organisms, place us in an area of biology with many unknowns.”

Rather than plow ahead blindly or stop investigation into the new technology, they recommended a path forward that would minimize any risks while ensuring progress:

[M]ost of the work on construction of recombinant DNA molecules should proceed provided that appropriate safeguards, principally biological and physical barriers adequate to contain the newly created organisms, are employed. Moreover, the standards of protection should be greater at the beginning and modified as improvements in the methodology occur and assessments of the risks change. Furthermore, it was agreed that there are certain experiments in which the potential risks are of such a serious nature that they ought not to be done with presently available containment facilities. In the longer term, serious problems may arise in the large scale application of this methodology in industry, medicine, and agriculture. But it was also recognized that future research and experience may show that many of the potential biohazards are less serious and/or less probable than we now suspect.

This is what it means to take risk seriously while holding firm to the need to move forward with exploration and innovation.

Ironically, the precautionary principle fails its own test. A principle that broadly stymies progress has very clear potential for harm. With its reckless disregard for the value of human progress, the precautionary principle is not the solution to risk—it is an unacceptable risk.

*Thanks to Jason Crawford for bringing this example to our attention.

QUICK TAKES

Space Jam

To make progress in space exploration, affordability is king. Elon Musk has focused on reusable rockets. Another start up is focusing on 3-D printed rockets.

Venture-backed startup Relativity Space, which aims to build the world's first fleet of 3D-printed rockets, said on Tuesday it has raised $650 million from a raft of new investors . . .

Long Beach, California-based Relativity, which has grown its headcount fourfold in little over a year, promises boosters built almost entirely by colossal 3D printers that can crank out a full-scale rocket in just 60 days. Such automation is vital to human ambitions to colonize Mars, [Relativity's CEO Tim] Ellis said.

"3D printing is the holy grail that will enable that future," Ellis told Reuters ahead of the announcement.

Sixty days. In a world where it can take six months to get your kitchen remodeled, that’s incredible.

Tech Lag

Despite the massive valuations of leading tech companies, stagnationists complain that statistics don’t reflect any noticeable increase in productivity. According to Technology Review, “Productivity growth, a key driver for higher living standards, averaged only 1.3% since 2006, less than half the rate of the previous decade.”

That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news:

But on June 3, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that US labor productivity increased by 5.4% in the first quarter of 2021. What’s better, there’s reason to believe that this is not just a blip, but rather a harbinger of better times ahead: a productivity surge that will match or surpass the boom times of the 1990s.  

The article goes on to note that there is often a lag between breakthrough technologies and productivity growth.

Our research and that of others has found that technology alone is rarely enough to create significant benefits. Instead, technology investments must be combined with even larger investments in new business processes, skills, and other types of intangible capital before breakthroughs as diverse as the steam engine or computers ultimately boost productivity. For instance, after electricity was introduced to American factories, productivity was stagnant for more than two decades. It was only after managers reinvented their production lines using distributed machinery, a technique made possible by electricity, that productivity surged.

Speculative, but still welcome news.

The connection challenge

We’ve argued that connection is foundational to progress—and we’ve celebrated the way that modern technology like Zoom enhances connection. But making connection productive requires exploration and experimentation.

For example, we’ve had rooms for as long as we’ve had buildings, but companies are still experimenting with what office designs maximize productivity. Well, we’re encountering similar challenges with remote connection.

Now that we’ve all mastered the art of the video call, out comes new research that suggests videoconferencing can actually hamper collaboration. And the best solution might be to turn the camera off.

A paper recently published in the journal PLOS One found that when two-person teams collaborated using videoconference tools, keeping the camera on tended to impede spoken communication, compared with teams who used audio only. Pairs that kept the camera on also scored lower on tests evaluating the teams’ ability to solve problems together.

I’m not prepared to fully buy in to that result. We’ll see if it replicates. But I definitely believe that finding the best way to collaborate remotely remains a work in progress. And the more we explore new ways of connecting effectively, the better we’ll get at connecting effectively.

Progress at the speed of snail

I don’t have anything to say about this story, but the headline is so good I had to share it:

Solving a Mass Extinction Survivor Mystery With Help From Snails Carrying the World’s Smallest Computer

RECOMMENDATIONS

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

How does one of the biggest companies on the globe remain fast-moving and innovative? That’s the question answered by two Amazon insiders: Colin Bryar, former chief of staff to Jeff Bezos, and Bill Carr, former vice president of Digital Media.

The foundation of Amazon’s success, they argue, is its Leadership Principles, which include “customer obsession,” “insist of the highest standards,” “hire and develop the best,” learn and be curious,” and “bias for action.” Unlike most company value statements, these principles “are the basic framework used for making decisions and taking action.”

For example, one of the unique features of Amazon is its principle of “working backwards.” Whereas typical companies approach new projects by thinking about their existing capabilities and profit opportunities, Amazon’s customer obsession leads them to start by asking: what would make the customer have a great experience?

Working Backwards is a systematic way to vet ideas and create new products. Its key tenet is to start by defining the customer experience, then iteratively work backwards from that point until the team achieves clarity of thought around what to build.

One of the most valuable chapters of the book discusses Amazon’s approach to organization. Large companies often have a difficult time innovating quickly because they spend “more time coordinating and less time building.” As a company’s structure becomes more complex, you get an increase in dependencies: “something one team needs but can’t supply  for itself. . . . [E]very dependency creates drag.”

Amazon suffered from this problem early on, and tried to solve it by doing what most companies do: promote better communication. That got them nowhere.

At last we realized that all this cross-team communication didn’t really need refinement at all—it needed elimination. Where was it written in stone that every project had to involve so many separate entities? It wasn’t just that we had had the wrong solution in mind; rather, we’d been trying to solve the wrong problem altogether. We didn’t yet have the new solution, but we finally grasped the true identity of our problem: the ever-expanding cost of coordinating among teams. This change in our thinking was of course nudged along by Jeff. In my tenure at Amazon, I heard him say many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it.

Bezos was overstating the point: Amazon’s innovations require major communication, collaboration, and connection. What he was stressing was that there needs to be as little friction as possible between a team’s ability to make decisions and implement them. This led to an unconventional approach to organization Amazon calls “single-threaded leadership.”

The first half of the book is filled with similar lessons about hiring, communicating, and measuring success. The second half the book delves into fascinating case studies: of Kindle, Amazon Prime, Prime Video, and Amazon Web Services.

But perhaps most interesting is what comes before those success stories: Amazon’s approach to failure. 

Embracing failure is key to Amazon’s success. As Bezos wrote in a shareholder letter:

I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.

Innovation, the authors elaborate, requires patience—successes require sticking with initiatives for many years until they payoff. To make that sustainable requires frugality (another of Amazon’s leadership principles). By keeping speculative investments manageable, they can run many experiments, with a lot of failures, then go all in on products that have clear potential. Absent frugality, failure wouldn’t be a path to success, but a threat to the company’s existence.

Even here, the authors warn, a process that nurtures small failures doesn’t prevent big ones. They discuss the massive flop that was the Fire phone and conclude, “the process improves your odds of success but by no means guarantees it.” They then quote Bezos: “We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs.”

Working Backwards provides rare insight into how a large company can stay nimble and creative. We see up close the real challenges companies have as they try to connect talented minds without slowing down builders—of encouraging exploration and trial-and-error learning without making costly mistakes—of building an environment that nurtures ingenuity when the CEO can only be involved in a fraction of the decisions. We see, in short, what Ingenuism looks like from the ground floor.

Until next time,

Don Watkins

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