Responsible research and innovation? From FinTech’s ‘flash crash’ at Cermak to digitech’s Willow Campus and Quayside

ABSTRACT

Contemporary innovation destroys more value than it creates by three effects. First it mimics already existing basic technologies (phone, camera, directory, games) adding little value but displacing while disrupting existing services. Second, it exploits human rights to security, privacy and truthful reportage without seriously regulated or legislated accountability. Third, social media – the main offender – takes prodigious profits at huge social cost, by facilitating the grooming of terrorists, vulnerable persons and enabling varieties of criminality; it feloniously steals private property, notably human identities for advertising revenue; and it facilitates dissemination of fake news, research and propaganda. To parody Mark Zuckerberg’s injunction to his company’s corporate mission and its achievement of ‘monopoly advantage’ the company was, until recently, officially driven to ‘move fast and break things’ (i.e. the law).

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• AI
• ‘flashcrash’
• GIS: ‘fablabs’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This is an example that a reviewer found controversial having read the Abstract of this contribution. However the motto’s removal from the Facebook website occurred on 30 April 2014 https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-announces-anonymous-login/. Another difficulty the reviewer had was with the following: ‘large enterprises have become rent seekers not innovators’. However this sentiment is the subject of the following cited and referenced books: Erixon and Weigel (2016); Lindsey and Teles (2017); Mazzucato (2018); Tepper and Hearn (2019). Another is the following: ‘contemporary innovation destroys more value than it creates’, This is amended to make it clear it is particularly true of AI and robotics but the Amazon effect is also an obvious case where the buildings, and jobs of many people were destroyed by its e-business. References like Ford and Frey & Osborne in text and citations reference this. Another is: ‘the “digital economy” is widely observed irresponsibly to exploit human rights’, This is factually true in the case of digital advertisers like Facebook and Google. Fines have been levied on their infringement of human rights by the European Courts of Justice. Finally the following is queried: ‘in the process it massively augments social costs of military action, criminality and crime detection;’ we can qualify this by inserting ‘social media’ and its abuse by providers like Facebook’s use in the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim people in Burma, Russian criminality in distorting elections, broadcasting of hate crimes etc. are all everyday features of social media as an innovation. The reviewer’s ‘virtue signalling’ warns that this contribution is not a ‘safe space’ immune from critique.