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- The Dark Side of Innovation
Ozempic. Oat milk. Plant-based meat.
It’s easy to be captivated by these brilliant innovations.
And even easier to overlook their hidden complexities.
Why?
The Coastline Paradox – a continuous reminder to embrace a more nuanced view of progress.
Let’s dive in.
***
Say you hire three people to measure the coastline of an island.
A few weeks later, they return with wildly different answers. One sees it as 10 miles, another as 20 and a third as 30.
Who’s right?
Well, herein lies the paradox – they all are. Depending on how closely you measure it.
The coastline isn’t a simple shape like a square. It’s a fractal – a complex, infinitely detailed shape that’s impossible to measure precisely.
Creating a map? That becomes a challenge of deciding how much detail to include in the limited space.
The coastline map might get close to accuracy, but it will never fully represent it. There’s an infinite amount of subtle detail that the map will have to leave out.
Perfectly fine for navigating, yes. But if you had to try to rebuild the coastline based on it – good luck.
***
Contrast that with a blueprint. Unlike a map, a blueprint starts in someone’s head and is planned out precisely.
It serves as a complete guide to creating something.
Think of chairs or cars – products that may vary slightly, but functionally turn out the same every single time.
Other technologies, however, like medicines or farming methods, come from nature and when we venture into this domain, the complexity multiplies.
Recreating these methods is much like making a map. Even if the map is close, it can’t capture all the tiny details.
Things might not always turn out exactly right.
Let’s look at a few examples.
***
As our understanding of the brain deepened in the early 1900’s, a neurologist named Egas Moniz proposed a bad idea: treating the brain like a machine.
His theory suggested that mental illnesses were caused by faulty pathways in the brain and if we could fix how they were wired, all problems would vanish.
Moniz’s solution was revolutionary – identify the miswired areas in the brain, the supposed source of mental illness, and then cut those connections.
The marketing pitch was quite persuasive:
Your brain is miswired, but we’ve cracked the code and can fix it!
Enter the lobotomy – a procedure that involved drilling holes in skulls to sever connections in the prefrontal cortex.
The logic behind it made sense. Moniz believed he had an accurate map of the brain, allowing him to make precise changes without consequence.
However, it mirrors an error we’ve seen time and time again – a failure to anticipate a complex system’s spillover effects.
Lobotomies yielded promising results for some, but many patients experienced troubling side effects from apathy to disengagement and concentration issues. Some even died from the procedure.
Moniz thought he had a blueprint of the brain, but he really just had a map.
He had no idea how many parts of the coastline were missing.
After once being touted as a “miracle cure” and mainstream in medical circles, the procedure’s dangers and side effects eventually revealed themselves several years later.
The procedure is now banned in several countries and is no longer performed in the United States.
Today, mental health problems are often treated with lifelong prescriptions to certain medications. While our current brain map is more accurate, the spillover effects have continued.
Yes, these medications are incredibly effective for some, but others have shown concerning side effects from indifference to mood swings to weight changes and a decreased sex drive.
So, the question remains: how accurate is our map? Will our attempt to blueprint the brain result in another failed effort?
***
The Crisco saga followed a similar storyline.
Proctor & Gamble had a thriving candle-making business in the 1800’s, but the spread of electricity dimmed the demand.
In search of a lifeline, they pivoted away from using cottonseed oil for candles.
Enter hydrogenation, a process that turns liquid oils into solid form, giving cottonseed oil a lard-like consistency – the predominant cooking fat at the time.
Proctor & Gamble began using this process with cottonseed oil and branded it as a cooking product – Crisco.
The result was remarkable. Crisco stayed solid at room temperature and had an extended shelf life compared to lard.
Cheaper, easier to produce and positioned as vegetable-based, it was a marketing home run – a vegetable oil that makes our food taste just as delicious and creamy as animal lard.
There was just one problem, as you may already be aware.
It turned out the hydrogenated cottonseed oil was predominantly composed of Trans Fats – a type of fat so toxic to our health it was eventually outlawed.
Now, there are several reasons to why this happened – greedy business motives, dishonest marketing and poor regulation of new food groups.
Yet, similar to our earlier example, the misunderstanding of the map and blueprint distinction shouldn’t be ignored.
After the ban, several companies started making trans-fat-free cooking oils like Canola and Soybean. However, like Crisco, these too relied on industrial processing, involving huge numbers of seeds, solvents and chemicals to produce something similar to natural oils.
Is it possible in the next 10, 20 or 50 years we discover that these attempts to make a blueprint of something from nature failed just as Crisco did?
I wouldn’t rule it out.
You can never fully anticipate what the side effects will be when you tweak something in a highly complex system.
***
By now, you’re probably catching on to the recurring theme of the issue:
We see a natural process in the world and want to make sense of it. We study it closely and attempt to make a map of it.
We see flaws in the process as it exists today and create a solution based on our map.
The solution seems like a slam dunk. It appears to address all the issues of the original system with no side effects.
The side effects are outside of the map. Problems arise and we realize our initial map wasn’t as accurate as we thought.
We iterate, hoping for a more accurate map this time.
***
Let’s be clear – I’m all for technology, science and innovation.
These are problems worth solving for, absolutely. Many innovations are legitimate improvements, no question.
All I’m saying is that we should tackle these issues with a dose of humility and an awareness of the inherent risks.
Sometimes, the risk is worth it. Other times, it’s best to use caution instead.
Take a look at Ozempic. There will certainly be side effects we have yet to uncover. Oatly and Impossible? They almost certainly contain ingredients we don’t fully understand yet.
These products aren’t following a blueprint – they’re navigating a map. One that’s evolved over billions of years and filled with areas we’re still trying to wrap our heads around.
Consequences await in the areas we haven’t yet discovered.
Explore at your own risk.
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