No sensible person could favor irresponsible research and innovation. So RRI—”responsible research and innovation“—may sound like an innocuous idea. As it takes hold in Europe, though, the term has clearly become a cover for what amounts to a Luddites’ veto. Now the notion is percolating among American academics. If it finds its way to the halls of state, RRI would dramatically slow technological progress and perhaps even bring it to a grinding halt.
The same crowd wants to slow or stop the innovation unfolding in other fields, including crop biotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, and human reproduction. With regard to the latter, [RRI advocate Sheila] Jasanoff and her colleagues argued in 2019 that germline editing threatens “the future of human integrity and autonomy as we have long understood these concepts.” Consequently, “public permission is a prerequisite to disrupting fundamental elements of social order.”
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Other biotechnological developments have fallen under RRI proponents’ baleful eyes as well. Writing last year in Agriculture and Human Values, a team of Norwegian RRI boosters celebrated the European Union’s decision to essentially ban an earlier generation of biotech-enhanced crops. “European legislation, based on the precautionary principle, has arguably served European communities well in restricting the use of ‘early’ GMOs of limited environmental and societal benefit,” they claimed.
Limited benefits? Really? A 2014 meta-analysis in PLoS One found that such technologies have “reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%, increased crop yields by 22%, and increased farmer profits by 68%.” The study also reported that “yield and profit gains are higher in developing countries than in developed countries.”
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RRI proponents are quite right that largely unfettered technological innovations and economic growth over the past two centuries have disrupted old social values. And certainly, they have been accompanied by downsides, such as pollution, deforestation, economic dislocation, and the discord that sometimes follows the spread of new mores.
But let’s look at what humanity has gained in that time. Absolute poverty—living on less than $1.90 per person per day—has declined from 85 percent of the world’s population in 1820 to less than 9 percent now. Total global gross domestic product (GDP) stood at about $1.2 trillion (in real dollars) in 1820, then nearly tripled to $3.4 trillion in 1900. Since then, world GDP has grown nearly 40-fold to around $134 trillion in 2021. As a result, GDP per capita increased from $2,000 per person in 1900 to nearly $15,000 per person in 2016.
