Innovation in the Dark

What Motivates Innovators

Saturday, March 14, 2026

Innovation is often described in positive terms: as improvements to standards of living in myriad ways. In this imagining, innovation includes smartphones, high-speed passenger rail travel, and countertop air fryers, for instance. Creative inventors devise these things—mysteriously, shrouded in some fog of smarts and inquisitiveness—for us to want to experience and enjoy in our everyday lives.

But the human mind wants to know: Is the bright side all there is to it?

Clearly not!

For a few short years at the end of the Cold War, we modern westerners, as a collective society, could dream we’d arrived in a world generally at peace, with ever expanding international networks of trade and material wealth. The world would now be one of representative, democratic governance and free trade: sort of an ever-expanding, sprawling department store of choice, offering us doodads and articles of fashion we’d never even imagined we’d need or want. Inventors, whether working solo or for some faceless corporation, would sell all this to us, motivated by profits and greed. They would innovate production so as to lower costs, giving them the opportunity to become filthy rich monopolists in their niche markets.

The promised peace dividend fizzled. A new century dawned and new wars accompanied it. The ones who were vanquished disagreed with our imagined empire of freedom and ever fancier consumption goods. They remembered that innovation was also a means for acquiring and solidifying dominance over others, and the humiliation of defeat felt a lot like being involuntarily dominated.

The motives of profit and greed were useful, they could see. But the spirit of innovation could also be coerced. You could threaten people with death and dismemberment, forcing them to innovate or suffer the consequences.

So far this century we have learned, as an example, that inventors in Ukraine and Russia keep coming up with new ways to gain battlefield advantages, devising new ways to kill each other before themselves being killed. They have each innovated the use of “unmanned aerial vehicles” in an escalating drone war. Each offensive innovation has created the dire incentive to innovate ways to defeat it.

This is the other, less cheerful, way of innovation throughout human history. People have been compelled to innovate as societies and nations—usually governments—to ensure the freedom to choose one’s own destiny, the freedom from having others dominate you.

Viewed this way, a lot of technological innovation over the millennia has involved refining weapons of war. Innovations in making flint spear points for hunting animal prey also work against human quarry, after all. Better bludgeons, longer-range arrows and other projectiles, defensive fortifications: What serves for offense and defense against other wild species also serves as defense against rival clans and societies. Many innovations for fighting wars spawn technologies used for civilian purposes, sure. But those are of little use to you if you’re dead.

What we think of as the big innovations from the past century were as much about winning international rivalries. Railways facilitated moving men and arms to the front, but also for delivering the material goods of commerce. The space race, with all its spillovers for civilian society, was at its root as much about dropping bombs on distant lands and gaining tactical advantages. Much like early human air flight, satellites in orbit could gather intelligence about what the enemy was doing by flying overhead and taking pictures with ever more innovative cameras.

Even if the innovations aren’t for dominating other humans—even if they aren’t coerced at the barrel of a gun, so to speak—don’t they end up disappointing us in other ways? With every silver lining there’s a lot of cloud. New technologies increase the production of stuff—stuff that pollutes the soil, water, and air in one way or another.

There are the innovative new technologies all around us. They appear fabulous at first, but then we later come to believe they were a big mistake all along, each heralding new catastrophes one after another. Asbestos is in everything because it was once an innovative fire retardant: You’d have been crazy not to want asbestos in all your household materials.

Today, smartphones cause dumbed-down kids; agri-chemicals lead to chronic disease from adulterated food; cheaper travel by way of abundant energy lead to more fossil fuel use and projected planetary overheating and death by slow roast. Plastics have been revolutionary in improving human life in so many ways. And now we find their unwanted byproduct microplastics are in our own organs down to the cellular level.

The promise of artificial intelligence and robotics, as we all know, comes with fears of having our minds and bodies wither and rot, of becoming dominated not by enemies abroad, but by enslavement to our own all-too-smart inventions.

As research tells us, the approximate ratio of negative perception to happier reality is four to one. Our minds are attuned to the bad news, and we overestimate the power of bad by about four times, stated very roughly. Let’s call it a socio-psychological rule of thumb. While the negativity bias is something we are aware of, it eludes and defies accurate measurement. The four-to-one ratio is a best guess, but it isn’t a particularly good one at that.

This is, of course, another way of saying that things aren’t ever quite as bad as they may appear to us. Good news doesn’t threaten us and worry us, so we dismiss it. The good news may even at times give us the heebie-jeebies: the sneaking feeling that we’re overlooking some mortal danger creeping up on us while we’re drunk on self-satisfaction. We should be preparing just in case: We should thus continue to innovate the weapons of war as a way of warding off violent rivals, of letting them know their plans to conquer us aren’t worth it.

The incentive to innovate comes from threat as well as promise. Others threaten to take away your autonomy, your property, and your life; you’ll need to come up ways to prevent that. Or else you are motivated by the profit motive: the promise of greater riches from creating goods and services that others are willing to pay you for—which sounds a lot like the roots of greed.

Which should it be? Incentivizing innovation by greed is much more appealing than having one’s autonomy and very survival threatened. Given the choice, we should heed the profit motive as much as possible. Greed is better than the alternative. Yet innovation under threat will continue to be a necessity for the foreseeable future, too.