Unersättliche Neugier : Innovation in einer fragilen Zukunft

by Helga Nowotny

An influential scholar in science studies argues that innovation tames the insatiable and limitless curiosity driving science, and that society's acute ambivalence about this is an inevitable legacy of modernity. Curiosity is the main driving force behind scientific activity. Scientific curiosity, insatiable in its explorations, does not know what it will find, or where it will lead. Science needs autonomy to cultivate this kind of untrammeled curiosity; innovation, however, responds to the needs and desires of society. Innovation, argues influential European science studies scholar Helga Nowotny, tames the passion of science, harnessing it to produce “deliverables.” Science brings uncertainties; innovation successfully copes with them. Society calls for both the passion for knowledge and its taming. This ambivalence, Nowotny contends, is an inevitable result of modernity. In Insatiable Curiosity, Nowotny explores the strands of the often unexpected intertwining of science and technology and society. Uncertainty arises, she writes, from an oversupply of knowledge. The quest for innovation is society's response to the uncertainties that come with scientific and technological achievement. Our dilemma is how to balance the immense but unpredictable potential of science and technology with our acknowledgement that not everything that can be done should be done. We can escape the old polarities of utopias and dystopias, writes Nowotny, by accepting our ambivalence—as a legacy of modernism and a positive cultural resource.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Helga Nowotny is President and a founding member of the ERC, the European Research Council. She is Professor emerita of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich. In 2007 she was elected ERC Vice President and in March 2010 succeeded Fotis Kafatos as President of the ERC. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, NY. and a doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Vienna.
Her current host institution is the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). Helga Nowotny is a member of the University Council of the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and member of many other international Advisory Boards and selection committees.

Reviews

[DW · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I read this book, it was at first difficult to discuss it with friends. Too hard to pin down.

Now that I've finished it, I think I finally see why. It is very disconcerting to realize curiosity itself is something diffusely material and subjugated.

Ideas exist across many industries, discoveries, mandates--messy, borderless things, but moving in a direction that seems market driven with no new questions, no agenda beyond economic one-upmanship.

Isn't that super gross? Doesn't it feel like a betrayal of the curosity that we were taught to feel as kids? But this book made me ask: why do I have such religious feelings about curiosity itself? Where did that come from, this unquestioning belief that it creates the Good? Does it?

There is a dubious power in curiosity just asking questions but assuming the ends will justify the means no matter what. Kind of like inventing the next iPhone while the world is on fire. It seems reasonable, maybe it will improve something which in turn will lead to improvement, yadda, yadda...salvation?

In a weird sort of way, Kurzweil is kind of a Calvinist, isn't he?

Curiosity is a very powerful ideal to attack and examine. I hadn't realized how personal it would feel but in the end I don't think it is wrong to do so. Wanting to solve problems is not a bad thing and yet curiosity has a certain quintessentially amoral indifference to the mess it creates at least when it scales towards industry.

Nowotny defends the modernist need for curiosity even in 2009 as she wrote this, but it feels similar to Churchill's speech that democracy is the worst form of government but is the best so far.

So naked curiosity is dangerous, needs room to work on its own. Okay. Each experiment is more likely to fail than it is to succeed but it is the best we've got because the successes can be explosive/transformative/uncontrollable. That is ironically incurious to me, but fairly descriptive of what many futurists tout when you boil their arguments down to basic principles.

I don't intend to make fun of the author in saying this. Not at all. Nowotny is a genius and she profoundly moved me. But these questions around curiosity and their abnegation and contradiction still sit with me after finishing the book. A helpless feeling washes over me.

I don't know if I agree with everything here, but I agree with most of it. Until we understand the fences around our thinking and recognize that we also stand inside those fences, what can we possibly do? We have been obligingly creating these fences by asking questions too similar to the last ones and accepting innovations (kind of a dirty word in this book) ad nauseam for the sake of the human spirit that was born way back in the 19th century.

Much human good has come of curiosity: real suffering has stopped by virtue of so many leaps forward. I am deeply opposed to the trust deficit position of certain political ideologies that are dubious of science's value. We must ask questions and have the freedom to do so.

What I do want (and my personal understanding of what this book wants) is more curiosity about WHAT we are asking, WHAT we are defining as valuable or worthy of becoming 'an industry'.

What I want is to avoid blind application of subject domains towards agendas that the 'curious, scientific minds' seem indifferent to question. To what end? That is THE question for me after reading this book. Get me that on a mug or something.

Without the question of 'To what end', we get in trouble. Society doubles in power the amount of resources dedicated to each new technological direction if it can generate near-term profit, based on the gamble that it will yield something to save us from the price of the last innovation.

As an idea grows to become an industry, that doubling of scale also results in a halving of scope. The industry itself becomes self-propagating, like tech, energy, and other forces self-innovating in socially unhelpful direction for many years. Then the questions boil down to tautologies, replaced with the mumur of 'next', 'and then', 'next'. Where has the questioning gone in such a social space? Who is leading in these situations?

Great curiosity is a train on a hill without breaks or it is the lark ascending. We can choose, but we need to raise up our eyes and voices, notice the questions that are being silenced and ask ourselves really hard questions about what is silencing them and to what end.

[Fabio Ruggiero · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don't know if it comforts me about the future or it just make pressure and creates anxiety, but i think i'm liking it