What do the governor of St Helena, an English carpenter and artificial fish fillets have in common?

Directed technological innovation

When the governor of St. Helena wrote his annual report in 1891, he was concerned: ‘The condition of the island was such as to excite grave anxiety,’ William Grey-Wilson explained. ‘Work was almost unobtainable; with the shipping nothing was doing; the potato crop was indifferent; and starvation faced many.’ He continued: ‘1891 has probably been the most gloomy and dispiriting during the century, and its financial and social aspects are alike so very depressing in every way that I hasten to conclude my review of it.’

The reason was simple: St Helena’s main source of income had dried up. The more than 1400 ships that still visited the island in the middle of the century had dwindled to a paltry 86 by 1891. The island’s income, mostly due to port charges, had decreased by 70% between 1866 and 1891.

Why were fewer and fewer ships stopping by St Helena? The answer can be found in a competition the British government launched almost 150 years earlier. The aim was to find a solution to an age-old problem: seafarers need both longitude and latitude to determine their position on the open sea, and while it is relatively easy to determine latitude by observing the sun or stars, until that point, it had been impossible to make an accurate measurement of longitude. That’s why ship captains typically wanted to stay close to the coast and often missed their destinations altogether, thus running aground.

The competition’s prize was £20 000 for the first person who could find a solution to the longitude problem, more than R60 million today. For the English carpenter John Harrison, this was an opportunity: if he could find a way to design a watch that could measure the exact time at a known location (like Greenwich), then seafarers could compare their local time at sea (measured by the sun) with the watch's time to determine their distance from Greenwich. All that was needed was a very accurate watch that could withstand rough sea conditions.

Harrison spent the next few decades perfecting his marine timekeeper. His early models, known as H1, H2, and H3, were large and complex but showed promise. It was not until he developed his fourth model, however, that he made a breakthrough. The H4 was a smaller, watch-sized device that could accurately keep time at sea.

In 1761, Harrison's H4 was tested on a journey to Jamaica by his son. It performed remarkably well. Despite this success, the judges were sceptical and subjected Harrison to years of additional testing and bureaucratic obstacles. Eventually, in 1773, after other successful sea trials and after much persuasion from influential supporters, the judges awarded Harrison a significant portion of the Longitude Prize.

Harrison's chronometer, as it would become known, would revolutionise navigation and, as a consequence, the growth of coastal cities, changing the distribution of people across the planet. Ships could now travel faster and more directly to their destinations, without stopping at refreshment stations like St Helena. The invention would also save countless lives at sea over the next century. One incident, in particular, would demonstrate its value: on May 30, 1815, the Arniston, a ship from the British East India Company, ran aground at Waenhuiskrans, close to Cape Agulhas, resulting in the deaths of 372 sailors. To save money, the ship did not have a chronometer on board and had to rely on older, less reliable navigation aids. The captain thought Agulhas was Cape Point, then turned north, with deadly consequences. The incident would ensure that all ships would be equipped with a chronometer in the future.

More direct shipping routes had major implications for coastal populations. A new paper by the economists Martina Miotto and Luigi Pascali shows that the chronometer causally raised the growth rate of coastal cities. ‘We find that a one percent reduction in the time of a return trip from Europe enabled by the chronometer is associated with an increase in urban population above 3 percent in 1850’. This result only holds for coastal cities but not for inland cities. The ‘invention of the chronometer had large but geographically uneven effects on navigation, and through this channel, led to massive shifts in global population and the distribution of cities’, they conclude.

The chronometer is an example of directed technological innovation. ‘Technologies do not exist independent of an underlying vision,’ write Daren Acemoglu and Simon Johnson in a new book, Power and Progress. (Acemoglu and Johnson are well-known economists, among other things, co-authors of the previous runaway success Why Nations Fail.) Vision, they explain, determines the direction of innovation:

‘We look for ways of solving problems facing us. We imagine what kind of tools might help us. Of the multiple paths open to us, we focus on a handful. We then attempt alternative approaches, experimenting and innovating based on that understanding. In this process, there will be setbacks, costs, and almost surely unintended consequences, including potential suffering for some people.  But what determines which technology vision prevails? Even though the choices are about how best to use our collective knowledge, the decision factors are not just technical or what makes sense in a pure engineering sense. Choice in this context is fundamentally about power – the power to persuade others – because different choices benefit different people.’

Acemoglu and Johnson's thesis is challenging: Yes, the world is a much better place today because of technology, but not all technological innovation are necessarily good for everyone. They discuss several historical innovations – the Panama Canal, medieval mills, computers – and show that not everyone benefited from these innovations. More importantly: some of these innovations could have been more inclusive – it could have benefited more people – but they were precisely developed to exclude some. The result was unequal outcomes, Acemoglu and Johnson argue, because the winners of technology had all the political and social power, and they could therefore steer technological innovation in a direction that was to their advantage. This further strengthened their power.

Power and Progress offers many history lessons, but with a clear warning for today: ‘What if its main impact will not be to increase productivity but to redistribute power and prosperity away from ordinary people towards those controlling data and making key corporate decisions? … The evidence is mounting that all these concerns are valid.’

For them, the solution is found in democratic institutions. Democratic governments and civic organisations, in addition to for-profit companies, have an important role. At the ballot box, the average citizen must be able to stand up to the political elite, and the ordinary worker (through, for example, trade unions) to the economic elite. But that’s easier said than done. Given the whirlwind speed of contemporary innovation, I fear, it will be extremely difficult for political and civic groups to coordinate resistance against certain innovations.

One solution is to take the initiative and steer innovation in a certain direction rather than simply responding to for-profit companies. Competitions can help. Just as the British government spurred the development of the chronometer in 1714, so governments (and even civil society, like donors) can encourage certain types of technological innovation by offering prizes for technology that achieves certain objectives.

Of course, there are already such initiatives. The XPrize Foundation offers competitions with clear, objective and measurable targets. One of the prizes, for example, offers $11 million for new technology that can quickly extinguish wildfires. Another is a $15 million prize that encourages innovators to develop chicken breast or fish fillet alternatives. There are many others.

But even these examples seem to benefit rich rather than poor countries. In South Africa, one would think the government or private donors could launch several competitions to develop technology that helps the poorest: solar panels for shacks; a nutritious but affordable breakfast bar that can be served to children at schools; a water purification implement that schools and clinics can use; an app that connects public transport. One could even think of better systems for driver's licenses or property registrations, but that may be too much to ask... The point is: Technological innovation need not always be profit-driven.

If the political and economic elite solely directs technology, however, it could mean that the poor are disadvantaged. Almost every governor sent to St. Helena tried to find a solution to the problem of declining ship transport. But all attempts – from coffee plantations to the abolition of harbour tariffs – failed. The sweeping technological changes of the nineteenth century were simply too strong: first the chronometer, then the steamship, and then, by 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal. Despite the benefits these innovations held for the rich and poor worldwide, there were also ordinary people, including the residents of St. Helena, who suffered as a result. For many of these people, the only alternative was to move away, disempowered and displaced, to South Africa or elsewhere.

And that is what we are confronted with today: Despite the tremendous opportunities that new technologies like AI hold, it is inevitable that there will also be losers. How to protect these technological losers or, where it is impossible, how to compensate them, will be one of the next decade's greatest political, economic, and social challenges.

An edited version of this post appeared (in Afrikaans) in Rapport on 11 June 2023. All images were created using Midjourney v5.1. I thank Tom Janisch, a student in my graduate class, for the quotes by St Helena’s governors. Tom is the grandson of a former governor.