Storytellers: How the Residues of Innovation Could Guide our Decisions

An innovation is truly groundbreaking when it has the power to reshape society, for better or worse. Take plastic: once celebrated for its versatility, researchers recognised as early as the 1970s that microplastic particles were accumulating in the oceans. For decades, this was largely ignored given the attractiveness of an expanding plastic industry. Only when the potential risk to environmental and human health became evident did the issue gain broader attention. But even today, we continue to rely heavily on plastics, and a rapid phasing out of non-essential plastics seems unrealistic. Nor do we have the means to remove microplastics from our environment.

“A good science fiction story should have been able to not predict the automobile but its future: the traffic jam,” comments Ulrike Felt, Professor of Science and Technology Studies and member of the Environment and Climate Research Hub (ECH) of the University of Vienna. She argues for a change of perspective in science as well as politics: Instead of focusing on an innovation itself, we should take a closer look at the traces it leaves behind, or what she calls innovation residues.

Ideally, innovations would be monitored and followed from their emergence into their expansion phase both by scientists and decision makers. “In our project, we want to find out at what point in the life of an innovation contemporary societies start to actively deal with innovation residues, who takes responsibility and what infrastructures exist to manage and care for them,” explains Felt. She is focusing on three innovations: plastics, nuclear energy, and digitalisation – looking at present challenges as well as into the future.

Like plastic, nuclear power was introduced with high expectations as a form of energy that was “too cheap to meter.” However, with nuclear energy, the waste problem was known from the start, always with the promise that “we will find a technological solution when the time comes,” Felt recites. “But no one considered carefully enough how to decommission nuclear power plants after 30 or 40 years of operation. Now we are faced with a first generation of plants that were built without sufficiently considering the complexity of dismantling them.”

The former physicist remembers the discussion about nuclear power at the beginning of her own studies: “At the time, there was a public debate in Austria about the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant, which was eventually built but never activated. It was fascinating for me to see how the debate developed into pro and contra camps, even within our physics departments.”

Innovations and the question of how to deal with their residues are pushing the limits of our imagination. For high-level radioactive waste, systems need to be in place for periods of more than 100,000 years. And even the storage of intermediate and low-level waste needs about 300 years of environmental monitoring. “We are not particularly good at thinking in these time scales. What will society look like 300 years from now? We have no idea,” Felt points out. “Our visions of the future are deeply shaped by the present. We imagine people going for picnics, building a playground for children or building motorways at the site where this nuclear waste is buried. But maybe none of that will apply anymore in such a distant future.”

For Felt, this is not an argument against innovation per se, but a much-needed call to reflect on how we evaluate innovation, weighing benefits against long-term consequences in terms of intergenerational justice. Following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Felt visited Japan with a delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “It was startling to witness the short-term solutions that were deployed to ‘clean up’ residential zones, agricultural lands, and public spaces to deal with the residues left behind in Fukushima – even though we’ve made commitments that will affect future generations for centuries,” she recalls of her impression of the nuclear accident site.

Looking at the ongoing technological transformation, Felt sees the massive digital transformations, and in particular artificial intelligence (AI), as the next major innovation that is already leaving behind residues. Digitalisation consumes huge amounts of energy, water and rare earth materials to produce data, keep it constantly available and feed them into all kinds of AI applications. Felt calls this phenomenon ‘data producing waste’. In addition, there is ‘data as waste’, unknown amounts of unused, outdated or irrelevant data that is kept alive.

To this end, Felt’s ERC project also focuses on the situation in Ireland, a spot-on example for a country relying heavily on the data industry. “Ireland is now facing the problem that 20% of its electricity is used for data centres. And nuclear power suddenly is also envisaged as a potential solution even though legally banned in Ireland,” she notes. If this is realised, nuclear waste would be a residue produced in the name of digital innovation. With the rise of AI, this will become even more problematic.

“AI works like an extractive industry, but instead of mining natural resources, it extracts information from data,” says Felt. “Currently, we are eager to establish AI in all areas. But we should also ask: where do we really need AI, and how do we balance our energy and resource consumption with the advances it has to offer?”

“Nuclear energy and plastics both emerged in the 1950s, and in theory society could have learned from them,” says Felt, “but we’re still waiting for solutions to the waste problems they have created.” This, she insists, is something we can no longer afford in an innovation-driven society. Her vision for a new kind of technology assessment is a more realistic, long-term approach to innovation. One that involves researchers engaging with other disciplines, learning their language and developing a deeper understanding of their perspectives – which is the main idea behind the Environment and Climate Research Hub of the University of Vienna.

“Today it is impossible to be something like a universal scientist. But if we understand what the main question of another research field is, it is a big step and a possibility to enter into a dialogue about major societal challenges,” says Felt about the research hub and how it can promote environment and climate-related research.

When it comes to innovation, instead of being blinded by the initial excitement, scientists could learn together from the stories that the residues of innovation have to tell.