The innovation series: Part 2— Measuring the potential of technology — which tech is most imp

A simple tool to assess tech’s potential impact

This cable is the second of three. Dive into the others at:

The innovation series: Preamble — Ru-Wa-Aki’s mission

The innovation series: Part 1 — Understanding humans & the role of technology

The innovation series: Part 3 Understanding the flip — when brilliant tools sabotage species

A theoretical underpinning of measuring impact

Given how technology’s raison d’etre seems to be about de-risking, creating abundance or helping us momentarily escape our realities, it seems only natural that those attributes be used to judge the potential of a particular technology.

Specifically, we measure how helpful the said innovation is in derisking (survival), enhancing (thrival) the boundaries with which humans define themselves. In addition, we also look at whether the innovation is helpful in helping us momentarily “forget” about surviving & thriving.

Recall that while each human may define different boundaries for themselves, one common fact is that each has its source in three worlds that humans inhabit — (1) Physically-aligned world, (2) Emotionally-aligned world, (3) Intellectually-aligned world. A boundary could have its source in a complicated mish-mash of all three worlds, or be more geared towards a particular world.

Unfortunately, humans don’t usually carry out systemic studies to understand the impact of ideas. It has not been necessary as the pace of progress was slow enough to try out most ideas and see what succeeds and what fails.

However, as the pace of innovation accelerates & technology gets better at solving problems, there may be a need to flag ideas with very high potential (as these are also ones that could back-fire on humans).

In order to do so, the MIFI method may be employed. Standing for Measuring Impact of Ideas, it serves as a crude way to compare potential of ideas.

The MIFI system assigns a specific score to each new innovation along the lines of its ability to derisk, enhance or ‘escape’ the three sources of boundaries (physical world, emotional world, intellectual world).

The scores are then summed up to give an idea of the potential scale of impact of innovation.

While not very thorough, it does provide an easy way to test the total impact of different innovations. Take a minute to look at how the scoring works, along with a first pass at an assortment of technologies that have come and gone on Planet Earth

Points system

0 — N/A : idea is not applicable in solving for this category

1 — Low suspected impact (questionable statistically significant presence)

3 — Statistically significant impact (but scale of impact is small)

5 — Presence of statistically significant & large scale impact

Example scores (score your own invention in the comment section and I’ll include it here)

The scores don’t claim to be perfect, but to a certain extent they do predict the scale of impact that these technologies have had on human civilization. A next iteration could assign different weights to each of the categories mentioned above — which is likely to be more accurate.

Furthermore, here are some observations (in no particular order)

· Each innovation mentioned about has changed the way the world works from Velcro to Agriculture. The difference in scores reflects the difference in absolute scale of impact from pre-invention to post- invention.

· Innovations that score a 5 (full marks) in any sub-category, indicates that it solves an existential problem really well. In fact, so well that there is high chance of people becoming addicted & dependent on it.

· This isn’t always bad — human dependence on agriculture helped us achieve a great many things.

However, the higher the score, the higher the potential for misuse of the technology. And the MIFI framework help isolate specific innovations that have the potential to really change things (for better or for worse).

However, simply flagging these innovations won’t do much. To ban all high-scoring innovations would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Ideally humans would need to specifically understand how each technology could be misused and end up hurting instead of benefitting.

But before doing that, they’d need to better understand how technologies can create breakpoint. Perhaps a theoretical underpinning that helps understand what actually happens when progress goes wrong.

This is the focus of the next part.