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The speed of change is numbing

When I was 11 or 12 and living in Toronto I acquired a tiny crystal radio set which could keep me entertained for hours, mostly under the covers at night long after I was supposed to be asleep.

When I was 11 or 12 and living in Toronto I acquired a tiny crystal radio set which could keep me entertained for hours, mostly under the covers at night long after I was supposed to be asleep. I used to get AM radio signals from all over the place but for some reason Fort Wayne, IN comes to mind. It was my first brush with technology that wasn’t a bike or a clarinet.

Fifty years later I am still amazed that it is normal to drive along a highway and get beautiful FM stereo music out of the air as if the choir was in the back seat. I am not an early adopter. I am a techno peasant.

I never trusted microwave ovens and wasn’t surprised when we learned they pretty much destroy food when the objective is just to cook it. There is no rhyme or reason to innovation although it is generally scientifically acquired. Innovation marches on at lightning speed driven by curiosity, greed and need and pseudo need. To me, innovation is out of control like a speeding car with the accelerator jammed to the floor with a cement block and no driver in sight.

How else to explain genetically modified food bred to resist weeds and healthy human digestion at the same time, or a medical drug culture that presents innovative solutions that bring side effects more harmful than the swamp you started out to drain in the first place. The thing is not the innovation itself but our inability to manage it for positive outcomes.

Some technologies are so horrific (nuclear bombs) we actually try to control their use. To be honest, watching the American primaries, I’m not sure if Iran scares me any more than the Republican party. That said, you get no points for sanity if you are just trying to hoard a horrific technology for yourself rather than outlawing it altogether.

I’m not above greed although I like to tie my investments to community building of one kind or another.

I’m heavily invested in small, fast-moving digitally innovative companies. From teaching music digitally to semantic search on the web, from aggregating content, to collaborative design powered on the Internet, I see how fast things can change. recently, a company I invested in a year and a half ago was about to go broke with its chosen innovation except for a new product it had been playing with on the side.

The same week we were gasping for air with the old product, the new innovation was funded by top venture capital from around North America, giving the company a valuation in the millions overnight.

I’ve never seen such a positive reversal of fortune.

Most of my publishing companies will be unrecognizable in five years. They will be doing different things in different ways. Technology will transform how we report, interact and influence. We will, of course, adapt. It is part of our DNA.

I’ve always been intrigued with Google’s tag line “do no harm.” This is a fairly noble commitment, no doubt easier to proclaim when you are small and not one of the largest companies in the world sucking up enough energy to run a small country and changing forever the notion of personal privacy, not to mention amending the business model for newspapers, an art form I find myself quite attached to. “Do no harm” can be a fairly subjective phrase, but at least someone thinks it’s a good idea.

The problem with all of this innovation is that most of it is done to make money and making money is tied mostly to convenience or making war. After a while, we find ourselves believing it is normal to fly drones over other peoples' countries 20,000 miles away to assassinate people that annoy us with such technological efficiency that is frightening. What is worse is that we turn murder into the equivalent of a video game, and of course to support this disconnected madness we create video games that glorify murder and claim this has no impact on our kids who are addicted to them.

We need to have rules about innovation. Do no harm is a good start.

The problem is to whom do we turn to enforce some semblance of sanity?