Optimisation, substitution and the silver bullet approach
Invited speaker @ New Narratives for Innovation – Inspirational workshop 1
European Commission – Joint Research Center – Brussels – Berlaymont
The definition of innovation as the engine of economic, social and environmental wealth is the last semantic step of a pervasive narrative of progress that can be traced back – along a co-evolving epistemic and normative trajectory – to the emergence of Scientific Revolution and Modern State. The unchallenged economic policy aims of growth, productivity and competitiveness are fundamental ingredients of this scenario, implying the paradox of sustaining a steady increase in our global resource consumption within a closed, finite system, with limited stocks and bio-geo-chemical resilience. The current dominant narrative of innovation claims a way out of conundrum: natural supplies might be limited but human creativity is unlimited, and so is human power to decouple growth from scarcity, improving efficiency in the use of natural resources and ultimately substituting them altogether, with substantially equivalent, technological optimized artifacts. In this framework, technoscientific innovation allows then for a “sustainable growth” through the optimization and the substitution of our means, and through the deployment of suitable silver-bullets, protecting us from the complexity of socio-ecological problems as they arise. This work proposes an epistemic and normative analysis of this narrative of innovation, in order to open a space for reflection on possible alternatives. First, by assuming, as in a thought experiment, that the promises of optimization and substitution inherent in some of technoscientific platforms are thoroughly fulfilled. Second, by considering what kind of world – and populated by whom – is actually implied in these promises.