“No one who has ever done anything really great or successful has ever done it simply because he was attracted by what we call a ‘reward’ or by fear of what we call a ‘punishment’.... Every victory and every advance in human progress comes from an inner compulsion.” –Maria Montessori, The Discovery of the Child
INSIGHT
The Downside of Connection
Robert Hendershott and Don Watkins
Our increasingly connected world has spawned the greatest episode of wealth creation in the history of humanity (although it pales compared to what could come). But this does not mean that connection brings unmitigated benefits.
Connection enabled the recent Colonial Pipeline hack that interrupted 45% of the East Coast’s fuel supply (and more in the Southeast). Connection accelerated the COVID-19 pandemic. Bad ideas disseminate as quickly as good ideas. Sometimes ingenuity is applied to nefarious purpose, and connection can magnify the bad outcomes.
But ingenuity and connection’s benefits far outweigh their costs and often contribute to mitigating the costs. Ingenuity is applied to network security as well as network attacks. PC viruses have gone from a common problem to virtually nonexistent (unless you click on that email link!). Connection helped create the pandemic, but it also allowed for rapid vaccine development and promulgation.
The recognition that connection has real downsides, but that these negatives are overwhelmed by the benefits, is reflected in Ingenuism’s core value of trust.
In the Ingenuism framework, we trust that people will use their ingenuity for good. Our default is optimism about new technologies and ways of doing things—not fear that they will be misused or abused. Our default is respecting the freedom to innovate unless there are strong reasons to think a particular innovation poses a major threat to people’s safety—not treating all innovations as guilty until proven innocent.
This isn’t blind trust, because we don’t believe that people will always use their ingenuity for good. It’s authentic trust: we acknowledge the possibility of mistakes and betrayals but have confidence that when people don’t use their ingenuity for good, we and others will figure out solutions.
In the same way that a breach of authentic trust does not trigger general mistrust, a misuse of connection does not imply connection needs to be reined in. This can be tempting because the costs of connection make headlines, and the expense of minimizing those costs feels like unnecessary waste. All of the ingenuity applied to protecting networks from hackers would, in an ideal world with no malicious hackers, be applied to creating value rather than preventing damage. But the fact that the benefits of connection are less apparent does not make them less real. On the contrary, they are enormous, and progress requires being careful that our efforts to protect our golden eggs don’t lead us to inadvertently kill the geese that lay them.
QUICK TAKES
We’re going to have organs coming out of our ears
One of the healthcare holy grails is the ability to grow organs. But that turns out to be really hard.
Thousands of people die every year in the United States waiting for an organ transplant, Hyun noted. So, in recent years, some researchers in the U.S. and beyond have been injecting human stem cells into sheep and pig embryos to see if they might eventually grow human organs in such animals for transplantation.
But so far, that approach hasn't worked.
Now scientists are working on a new approach: injecting human cells into monkey embryos.
After one day, the researchers reported, they were able to detect human cells growing in 132 of the embryos and were able study the embryos for up to 19 days. That enabled the scientists to learn more about how animal cells and human cells communicate, an important step toward eventually helping researchers find new ways to grow organs for transplantation in other animals.
No, they’re not creating monkey men. “We are trying to understand how cells from different organisms communicate with one another,” one of the scientists notes.
We’re probably a long way away from organs-on-demand. But we’re making real progress.
Patents end pandemics
In the rush to vaccinate the world against COVID-19 as quickly as possible, scientists and drug companies have done more than we had the right to expect. As economist Alex Tabarrok eloquently puts it:
Like the Apollo program and Dunkirk, the creation of the mRNA vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna should be lauded with Nobel prizes and major movies. Churchill called the rescue at Dunkirk a “miracle of deliverance,” well the miracle of Moderna will rescue many more. Not only was a vaccine designed in under a year, an entirely new production process was set up to produce billions of doses to rescue the world. The creation of the mRNA vaccines was a triumph of science, logistics, and management and it was done at a speed that I had thought possible only for past generations.
As thanks, the Biden administration wants to…waive their vaccine patents.
Every injustice is short-sighted, but this one is particularly galling. As many commentators have pointed out, patents are in no way the thing limiting vaccine production. Investor Peter Kolchinsky notes on Twitter:
Some think patents stand in way of making more vaccines. They don’t. Skill & money do. Just as most of us couldn’t replicate Mona Lisa (no IP there), few can make advanced vaccines. Vaccine companies have already partnered w/ all skilled producers they could find to make doses.
The reason they have already liberally partnered is b/c incentives were there to do so & competition among companies spurred them to get to market first. All those big contracts offered enough reward that innovators shared their knowledge & reward w/ manufacturing partners. . . .
So competition among vaccine innovators required collaboration to expand production and rewards were high enough to hire all capable people in the world to work on this. The market worked. But there are only so many vaccine experts. So it’s not patents holding back production.
As Yaron points out in a discussion with Adam Mossoff, a leading expert in intellectual property rights, patents are crucial for human progress. If we rob drug companies of their COVID-19 patents, we may not get a “miracle of deliverance” next time around.
Did they try sending Bruce Willis?
There’s a long-standing debate between environmentalists who say that human progress is unsustainable and economists who say that our power to innovate means we can keep advancing indefinitely. I side with the economists and used to quip that the environmentalists wanted sustainable poverty and I wanted sustainable prosperity.
But a few years back an economist friend of mine noted that actually poverty wasn’t sustainable since it left us vulnerable in the face of Armageddon-level catastrophes like a giant meteor strike. And, it turns out, that’s a problem we still haven’t solved.
Recently a group of scientists went through an exercise to see if they could stop an asteroid 35 million miles away from hitting the Earth. Verdict? Not good. They “determined that none of Earth's existing technologies could stop the asteroid from striking given the six-month time frame of the simulation. In this alternate reality, the asteroid crashed into eastern Europe.”
More progress, please!
SPAC…the final frontier
The SPAC craze is becoming deeply intertwined with the space craze:
SPACs—public investment vehicles that raise funds to acquire a private company—have become a shortcut to listing for glamorous ventures with few revenues but bold forecasts. Electric vehicles have been a popular theme, but the industry arguably most revolutionized by the financing fad is space.
Before 2019, investors had no clear way to embrace their cosmic dreams. Space businesses were either part of big conglomerates such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin or, more recently, private firms owned by billionaires, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. Crucially, insiders had no easy way of getting out, making space startups even riskier.
All of this changed when former Facebook executive turned SPAC investor Chamath Palihapitiya acquired Virgin Galactic, a brainchild of British billionaire Richard Branson. Amateur traders quickly embraced a company that aims to charge $250,000 for a few minutes of weightlessness in the lower thermosphere.
I’m looking forward to the day when we all can visit space and complain about how slow our WI-FI connection is.
In the meantime, The Atlantic observes that today’s science fiction increasingly “treats travel beyond Earth not as an opportunity for human improvement, but instead as an extension of human deficiency.”
Science fiction has inspired some of our best scientists and entrepreneurs. One of the few things that would make me pessimistic about the future is if our artists fully abandoned optimism.
Where can I recharge my water bottle?
What could be better than a water bottle? A water bottle that got you to drink more water.
To keep up with the hydration craze, carafe companies have released new, high-tech versions [of water bottles] that promise to increase your H2O intake through virtual nudges and tops reminiscent of trendy fidget toys. “We’re so busy with our day-to-day lives that automatic reminders can be a welcome encouragement,” said nutritionist Rachel Paul.
I’m sure I would buy this. And I’m sure I would fill it with Red Bull.
RECOMMENDATIONS
I was really tempted to recommend the movie Armageddon as a remedy for the science fiction pessimism I noted above. But I figure everyone has seen that and, let’s face it, the only thing we remember is Ben Affleck bouncing animal crackers on Liv Tyler’s tummy while Liv’s dad sings a love song.
Probably not what’s going to inspire the next Jeff Bezos.
But what is unquestionably inspiring is the outstanding 1998 miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, which brings to life the story of the Apollo program. If you haven’t seen it, don’t miss it. If you haven’t seen it in a while, revisit it. If documentaries are more your thing, then check out Apollo 11. And if you have kids, encourage them to watch, too.
Until next time,
Don Watkins
P.S. Want to support our efforts? Forward this email to a friend and encourage them to sign up at ingenuism.com.
Thanks for the great article.
Did anyone reading this know that Ayn Rand was at the launch of the Apollo 11? She recounts the experience in her publication "The Objectivist", in September, 1969. It was later published in "The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (1989)". I highly recommend it. You can find it at the Ayn Rand Institute, here:
https://courses.aynrand.org/works/apollo-11/
Thanks, again, for the great article. I'm really enjoying it. Keep up the good work!
"Our increasingly connected world has spawned the greatest episode of wealth creation in the history of humanity"
"Connection accelerated the COVID-19 pandemic."
"Connection enabled the recent Colonial Pipeline hack that interrupted 45% of the East Coast’s fuel supply" yet apparently "PC viruses have gone from a common problem to virtually nonexistent".
But what IS "connection"? You haven't defined your terms. Based on the very vague and wishy-washy essay, connection seems to mean ANY human interaction. Or did you have something more specific in mind? I can't tell. If the thesis is "human interaction can lead to good or bad outcomes", I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone on earth who disagrees.
An essay worth reading would explore what is meant by "connection". What is the nature of the concept? Why are some kinds of connection good and some kinds bad and what principles can help us tell the difference? Blind assertions and rationalistic thinking won't cut it.