Unintended Consequences of Innovation!

What can primate research tell us about human behaviour? After all, we’re basically smart monkeys who have lost our tails. Although maybe we’re not as smart as we’d like to think.

Between 1952 and 1953, a team of scientists observed a closed group of Japanese macaque monkeys on the island of Kojima. While studying the group, the team would drop sweet potatoes and wheat on the beach and observe the troop’s behaviour. One young female monkey, Imo, started washing her sweet potatoes in the water.

Her changed behaviour led to several feeding behaviour changes in the troop over the next few years. The scientists observed that the young first teach their contemporaries and immediate family, who all benefit from the new behaviour and teach it to their contemporaries. If the parents or their contemporaries are too old, they don’t adopt the behaviour. But once the initial group have children, a change occurs in the dynamic of teaching previous and current generations. The behaviour is no longer taught but passively observed and mimicked so that it becomes common practice throughout the troop.

This is how an innovator can produce widespread change at scale. The new idea is taught to family-like homogenous groups, who teach it to their contemporaries. A tipping point is reached when the new idea is observed and copied by other groups who incorporate it into standard operating practice.

But the innovator continues to innovate. The scientists observed that the young monkey, Imo, who started potato washing also learned how to sift wheat grains out of the sand by throwing handfuls of sand and wheat into the water, then catching the wheat that floated to the top. This invention was also copied using the same teaching and learning process until there were too many monkeys on the island with too little wheat apportioned.

At this point, the scientists observed competition became too fierce, and the stronger monkeys would steal the collected wheat from the weaker ones, so they stopped the learned behaviour in self-preservation.

What’s the moral of the story? Innovation can lead to unintended consequences. What looks like a wonderful invention on its own (harvesting more wheat from sand) can tip the balance of an ecological system into a vicious attractor (getting beaten up by stronger monkeys).

In the same way, the invention of nuclear power was initially intended to make cheap energy available for humanity, until it destabilised geo-politics into the haves and have-nots, which tipped the ecological system into an arms race with potentially devastating consequences.

The establishment of social media platforms looked like a wonderful invention to democratise speech and connect people, until it caused an amplification of personal grievances which tipped the ecological system into a vicious attractor of conspiracies and aggression.

How can you ever hope to offset the dark side of innovation? By considering the wider ecological consequences from a perspective of wise thinking and wise choices, even when faced with doubt, dilemma, or disruption.

What do you think? When have you observed a dark side to innovation?

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