The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in science, business, economics, technological innovation, sociology, and related subjects.

Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure is by Vaclav Smil, a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst who is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

The TU Library collection includes a number of other books by Professor Smil.

The publisher’s description of Invention and Innovation states that it is

an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application trajectory, we may never get anything real to deploy. Or worse, even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention, its future may be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise, or outright harm.

Drawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge, Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation. He then looks at three different types of inventions.

Inventions that failed to dominate as promised:

• Airships
• Nuclear fission
• Supersonic flight
• Inventions that turned disastrous:
• Leaded gasoline
• DDT
• Chlorofluorocarbons
• Inventions we have long been promised (and that would be highly beneficial):
• Travel in vacuum (hyperloop)
• Nitrogen-fixing cereals
• Nuclear fusion

Finally, he offers a “wish list” of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.

Filled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches, this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuity—and how we can, and must, better align our expectations with reality.

Professor Smil notes:

I have never been a fan of science fiction. I am highly suspicious of any too-good-to-be-true claims about “epoch-making” discoveries. But I have also written extensively about the transformative impacts of inventions, from synthetic ammonia for fertiliser production and semiconductor devices in electronics to the 5-in-1 vaccine, which immunises against a range of diseases. What’s more, it seems obvious to me that we need new fundamental advances like these to cope with the multitude of economic, social and environmental challenges we currently face. I address potential advances in my new book, Invention and Innovation: A brief history of hype and failure.

Identifying the top priorities for possible breakthroughs isn’t easy, not least because there is so much room for improvement. Consider energy. Bill Gates has noted that: “Half the technology needed to get to zero emissions either doesn’t exist yet or is too expensive for much of the world to afford.” You could say the same about every scientific and technical category. Moreover, any list of the most desirable inventions is bound to be subjective. If you see mine as rather conservative, I plead guilty: there is no faster-than-light travel, no terraforming of other planets.

Instead, my top 12 innovations, which I set out here, cover a range of issues that we urgently need to address. They focus on areas that will have the biggest impact on human well-being and the environment and where there is already knowledge to build on. My wish list even includes three changes that all of us can get to work on right now (see “Bigger and better”). […]

First, every major, far-reaching advance carries its own inherent concerns, if not some frankly undesirable consequences, whether immediately appreciated or apparent only much later: Leaded gasoline, a known danger from the very start, and chlorofluorocarbons, found undesirable only decades after their commercial introduction, epitomize this spectrum of worries. Second, rushing to secure commercial primacy or deploying the most convenient but clearly not the best possible technique may not be the long-term prescription for success, a fact that was clearly demonstrated by the history of “beaching” the submarine reactor for a rapid start of commercial electricity generation.

Third, we cannot judge the ultimate acceptance, societal fit, and commercial success of a specific invention during the early stages of its development and commercial adoption, and much less so as long as it remains, even after its public launch, to a large extent in experimental or trial stages: The suddenly truncated deployments of airships and supersonic airplanes made that clear. Fourth, skepticism is appropriate whenever the problem is so extraordinarily challenging that even the combination of perseverance and plentiful financing is no guarantee of success after decades of trying: There can be no better illustration of this than the quest for controlled fusion.

But both the acknowledgments of reality and the willingness to learn, even modestly, from past failures and cautionary experience seem to find less and less acceptance in modern societies where masses of scientifically illiterate, and often surprisingly innumerate, citizens are exposed daily not just to overenthusiastically shared reports of potential breakthroughs but often to vastly exaggerated claims regarding new inventions. Worst of all, news media often serve up patently false promises as soon-to-come, fundamental, or, as the current parlance has it, “disruptive” shifts that will “transform” modern societies. Characterizing this state of affairs as living in a post-factual society is, unfortunately, not much of an exaggeration.

Breakthroughs that are not […]

By now, artificial intelligence (AI) should have taken over all medical diagnoses: After all, computers had already beaten not only the world’s best chess player but even the best Go master, so how much more difficult could it be for the likes of IBM’s Watson to do away with all radiologists? We know the answer: In January 2022 IBM announced that it was selling Watson and exiting health care. Apparently, doctors still matter! And the problems with electronic medicine affect even the simplest of tasks, the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) in place of charts written in longhand. According to a 2018 survey by Stanford Medicine researchers, 74 percent of responding physicians said that using an EHR system increased their workload and, even more important, 69 percent claimed that using an EHR system took time away from seeing patients. In addition, EHRs expose private information to hackers (the repeated attacks on hospitals demonstrate how easy is to extort payments for restarting these essential data services); poorly designed interfaces cause endless frustration; and why should every doctor and nurse be a prodigious typist? Above all, what is there to admire about the new model of care with a physician looking at a screen rather than at a patient recounting her problems?

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)