The 5 worst ideas of the 21st century – and how they went wrong

0:28So good, so good, so good. This week we've got a special episode of the show aimed at naming and shaming the worst ideas of the 21st century. Yeah and to be clear these are what we think of as the worst ideas in science and technology not in general and they're ideas that might have started out well but soon went sour. So candidates include social media and bitcoin. Once it loses all its purpose what's it for? Who's it really serving? It uses up as much energy as some entire countries still, just Bitcoin, not cryptocurrency in general. And alternative fuels and effective altruism. The amount of land that you need to, say, power aeroplanes on biofuels is just ridiculous.

1:09This idea that, you know, there's a sort of formula for being good is really appealing, but it's just not how the world is. We're going to hear from our reporters just how bad these ideas were and why.

1:24This is the World, the Universe and Us from New Scientist. I'm Rowan Hooper. And I'm Abbey Beal. I should also say that we've just published our list of the 21 best ideas of the 21st century so far. And generally we like to celebrate success, don't we? Yeah, we do. But for this episode we're going to focus on the clangers and we're going to start with a controversial one. Yeah, social media. Let's start with that. I mean strictly speaking it started in the 20th century because there were those old you know message boards and stuff going on then but it really got going in the early 2000s there was MySpace if anyone remembers that Facebook in 2004 and then we had YouTube Twitter and everything else came along Matt Sparks is here you're a technology reporter you've been reporting on this for years what went wrong with it well I think it's important to say social media per se is not a bad idea.

2:16I think in the early days it was useful and it was enjoyable and I think it was a force for good. What I said in the piece was that sort of unrestrained capitalism is maybe not a great idea and it's the effect of that on social media that's got us where we are today really. In what way? Well these social media companies, you're the product so it's really the longer you spend on the platform, the more money they make. And that's sort of this perverse incentive for them to keep you stuck to the apps, really. And through quite clever A-B testing, they've found out what works and what doesn't work.

2:55And it's just kind of morphed into really a machine to make advertising money rather than actually serve any practical purpose. So is it measurable? Has there been any study showing that people spend so much more time on it now than in the olden days no i don't think we've got any hard data but you know anecdotally we've all found ourselves glued to a screen and and unable to stop and yeah i think that's got worse over time and i think a growing number of people are kind of becoming aware of it and trying to put a stop to it really so you know the argument would be this is free we don't pay anything for it So we have to put up with being fed something by the algorithm and also being fed adverts, advertising.

3:40So isn't that the bargain that we sign up for? It is, yeah. You know, it's often said if you don't pay for the product, you are the product. And that's absolutely true of social media. I think what happened in the early days was, take Instagram, for example. Your feed used to be your friends, artists you liked, bands you liked to listen to. it was a curated feed of stuff that interested you and now it's just content crammed down your throat which you haven't chosen and you're right you you sort of do have to take that as as the flip side of it being free but once it loses all its purpose what's it for who's it really serving okay i'm just taking devil's advocate here so but people like scrolling through stuff and watching clips on Instagram that they're fed that the algorithm knows it's going to delight them and they like it and they can then share it and have something in common with their friends so what you know isn't that opening up a new form of entertainment and a new form of of sharing joy with with a whole network of friends yeah and perhaps more than anyone I enjoy a funny cat video but when when you've been stuck to an app for hours at a time just scrolling through the feed and and the feed is one of the more insidious tactics they they use it's very simple but the idea of the infinite scroll there's there is no end to social media you just keep going and going and going and i think if people are spending hours at a time doing this you do have to stop and think is this is this really healthy what's it what's it achieving if you were to ask someone after hours of scrolling what did you see tell me what the most interesting things are i think most people would have forgotten instantly yeah then they could have been doing something better instead absolutely yeah i guess establishing that it causes harm is the big problem and there is a so snapchat just settled a lawsuit didn't they um a woman alleged that she'd developed her mental health problems she was addicted to social media and they've settled it so and but that's just one of many lawsuits that are bubbling away at the moment yeah yeah and of course we've got this this other this other story which is bubbling along which is the the social media ban for under 16s which has been brought in in Australia and there's a lot of noise that suggests that it will be brought in here as well and that's another question really whether or not social media is particularly harmful for children and whether a simple ban like that would actually achieve anything we've just had the online safety act here which tries to effectively bans social media and online content that's harmful for children but they've been able to get around it really simply with VPNs and things.

6:24So whether a social media ban would actually do anything is questionable. And whether or not it's just a problem for children or whether it's a problem for adults and children is another question. It's a big complex mess, and there's lots of potential problems that come from social media and lots of potential solutions. Yeah, okay, we'll go on to the solutions in a sec, but just to be clear, you're saying it's the worst idea of the 21st century just based on anecdote. Yes. Okay. Yes, I am. Just to be clear. I think personally I've been on a bit of a journey with social media over the last few years.

6:57As a journalist, you know, I was glued to Twitter for years and years. And I cut that out, essentially. You know, I've ditched my Facebook account. I've deleted Instagram from my phone. And I try and use it just a bit more mindfully on the laptop. And I think it's made my life a bit better, frankly. I think it wasn't doing me any good. And cutting it out has been positive. Well, I've heard many people say the same thing, actually, to be fair. OK, so what about the solutions? As I say, there's a huge range of problems that people allege are caused by social media and a lot of different solutions.

7:33One really interesting thing that people have raised to me recently is this idea of sort of removing the profit from social media, trying to sort of break that link between pure eyeball time and profit. But one person even suggested there should be a sort of government-backed BBC-style social media platform. So nationalize the platforms. Yeah, which realistically is never going to happen, but it's an interesting idea. Another thing is stronger regulation, but technology firms are incredibly rich. They can lobby. There's also the personal solution and the legislative solution. You know, I've taken steps to kind of limit my social media use.

8:17Maybe that's something that more people should do. You're an old man and you know better. But kids maybe are not in the position to judge. And I think what's really telling this story, you often hear that the tech barons don't let their kids on social media. I don't know if that's true or not. Anecdotally, I've heard it is true. I've heard it a lot, yeah. I have friends in some of these firms and they take a similar approach. So I think there's a lot to it. Social media has done an awful lot of good. It's also maybe sucking up a lot of our time and not doing anything productive these days. So just worth another look, I think.

8:54I should say our readers agree because we had a poll at the end of our 21 Best Ideas about what the worst are and almost half of readers voted social media. Well, there you go. And Matt, of course, of all the things we mentioned of social media, there's a lot of evidence that it's influenced elections around the world, sometimes in Myanmar in terrible ways, in the US, in the UK, the Brexit vote. You know, there's another bad mark against it right there. Yeah, yeah, I think it's a double edged sword politically, really, because there's lots of instances where it's actually helped organize uprisings against repressive governments and that sort of thing.

9:32The Arab Spring. Exactly. It's been really beneficial. But as you say, it's also been used to really highly target advertising to sway elections. If you look at the Cambridge Analytica scandal here, and there's a lot of evidence that it's kind of, again, because it prioritizes really engaging content, which tends to be sort of on each end of the political spectrum, there's a lot of evidence that it sort of promotes populism and nationalist ideas. And inflammatory stuff, yeah. Exactly, yeah. Yeah. So it can be undermining to democracy or undermine repressive governments. OK, another controversial one up next.

10:10Leah Crane is here to talk about this one, Bitcoin. So, Leah, this one also seems like it should be a good idea. It's a currency that's not overseen by a government. So what's so wrong with that? Yeah, I mean, it not being overseen by a government, it not being overseen by basically anyone or being overseen by everyone, depending on how you view it, seems like in theory a good idea um in effect it turns out to basically just be a huge betting pool that's horrendous for the environment so that's not awesome but you know like all the ideas initially it seems reasonable um and the technology behind it the blockchain is you know potentially useful in a bunch of different areas can you remind us what a blockchain is Yes.

10:57I like to think of the blockchain as basically a Google Doc. It's a shared ledger that's distributed across the computers of everyone who owns blockchain. And every time you make a change, that change is recorded across all the different ledgers on all the different computers so that you can't, you know, in theory, you can't scam it, you can't hack it, because everyone has a copy. Okay, so you mentioned the environmental cost of it. And tell us about why it is just so damaging, especially now. Yeah, so the problem isn't necessarily Bitcoin itself or cryptocurrency itself. It's actually the mining.

11:40And mining a Bitcoin essentially consists of having your computer solve a cryptographic puzzle, a hard math problem. And the more Bitcoins have already been mined, the harder those puzzles get, the more computing power they take. So that's really the big problem is that at this point, it takes a colossal amount of computing power to mine a single Bitcoin. In the early days when Bitcoin was invented in 2008, anyone with a computer could mine Bitcoin. And now you need like a big room full of processors or big warehouse with a zillion graphics cards. And a warehouse full of computers that are constantly running guzzles energy in a way that was pretty much unheard of until AI came along.

12:26But it uses up as much energy as some entire countries still. just Bitcoin, not cryptocurrency in general. And in terms of if it is a good investment or not, you had some interesting comparisons with that, didn't you? Yeah, so I spoke to Alex de Vrij at the Free University of Amsterdam, who is an expert on this. And he said that basically, if you look at sort of the recent history, you're better off just buying a bunch of Pokemon cards than Bitcoin. It is just a big betting market. And one could argue that the entire stocks and options market is that. But with Bitcoin not actually being backed by anything, it is particularly volatile.

13:11And the other problem is that you can't use Bitcoin for anything. So if you've got a bunch of Bitcoin, it's hard to make a transaction. Very few places accept it. Alex told me that the average carbon footprint of a flight from London to New York is smaller than a single Bitcoin transaction. So environmentally, it would be better to just take your cash and put it in a briefcase and fly it to wherever you're sending it. So the network behind Bitcoin just can't handle that many transactions. So right now, it's just this betting market that's great if you want to do crimes in an untraceable way, but it's not useful for a whole lot more than that.

13:52Yeah. So you mentioned the dark web, basically. So you can't buy firearms and missiles with Pokemon cards, but you can with Bitcoin. The dark web, it didn't really exist before Bitcoin came along, did it? But is it inseparable? Are we stuck with the whole thing now? That's a tough question to answer. I think technically the answer is no. There are other cryptocurrencies, in particular Ethereum, which is Bitcoin's basically biggest competitor, which switched its whole architecture to be much more environmentally friendly. The other problems still remain. It's still not terribly useful, but it is much more environmentally friendly.

14:35The problem is that because of the distributed nature of cryptocurrency, you'd have to get 51 % of the people who own Bitcoin to agree on that, which, you know, seems like it should be a no brainer. You can overnight reduce our electricity consumption by a small country. Apparently, it is not a no brainer. It hasn't happened. And I think that's because, you know, it's hard to agree to change the entire architecture of a thing that in your mind is doing well and going up. Why would you change anything about it? There are ways to fix it. Whether those ways will actually happen is more of a question mark.

15:16OK, so we don't like Bitcoin. It's definitely earned its place on the list of bad things. What about the blockchain? I don't know that there have been a lot of great users found for it yet. but the blockchain is basically a Google Doc. So I think it's hard to think of a way that that could be like evil. Someone will find one. I'm sure there is one. But the blockchain on its own, I have no problem with. I think very few people have a problem with it beyond understanding it or being explained it 700 times. And it's not even cryptocurrency in general, because Ethereum has made these changes. And there are lots of other cryptocurrencies that aren't so bad for the environment.

15:59Bitcoin remains the behemoth of that world, and it remains sort of pretty awful in a lot of ways. We all have that dream trip we've been wishing we could go on. But too often, life, or usually price, gets in the way. That's why Priceline is here to help you turn your dream trip into reality. With up to 60 % off hotels and up to 50 % off flights, you can book everything you need for your next adventure. Don't just dream about that next trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com and book your next trip today.

16:37So that actually brings us on nicely to the next idea because a couple of the ideas that made it into this list were attempts to combat climate change and Michael LePage you wrote both of these for us so should we start with carbon offsets yes these sound like such a simple idea you go on a long haul flight maybe with your briefcase of cash and it releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere so you try and lessen your impact you have some trees planted that will take up the same amount of carbon dioxide is it not that simple no it's not I think the the first is if we take a step back and look at the big problem with this idea it can make people think it's okay to to do these things to fly so what we know it's always better to sort of avoid emissions rather than to try and compensate for them and have offsets whether a lot those offsets work or not and the big danger here is you you know someone may think oh i've got to fly so i'll offset and then say okay but i think then you slip very easily into well i can fly as long as they offset it and that's a whole different kettle of fish and that's what we don't want happening and then there's also there's another sort of related danger which is if you let people offset things they may put off actually doing what's necessary to cut emissions so let's say you've got a company that's got a fleet of cars or all internal combustion engines and they're producing lots of carbon dioxide now if that company says okay we've got these net zero targets who want to cut these emissions, oh, we can do it by offsetting.

18:09We don't actually have to replace a fleet of cars. Then they may just stick with that fleet of cars and they're still pumping that CO2 into the air. And those offsets might not be doing what they're supposed to be doing. What we want to happen is we want them to switch straight away to electric cars and avoid those emissions, make sure they don't happen. So that's one thing, but then that presumes that carbon offsets even work as build and they may well not work. Yes, that's the whole other big problem. And as we're getting to the nitty gritty, So the first thing is, you know, how do you know if a carbon offset has worked or not?

18:42Now, so a lot of offsets are either based, as we said, you plant trees and those are supposed to take up carbon and that's offsetting emissions somewhere else. Or a lot of them also, the idea is you protect a forest that would have been cut down. And so you're preventing those emissions. And then you sell carbon credits based on those. But obviously, there are sort of assumptions built in here. So the first assumption is if you plant trees, the assumption is those trees wouldn't be there unless you planted them. But that's not necessarily true. So, you know, if you've just got land that's been deforested and it's left, it's going to naturally reforest.

19:16And so maybe it would have reforested anyway. And you're setting carbon credits for something that would just have happened anyway. And then if you're protecting the forest, would that forest really have been cut down? Probably. Yeah. In some cases, that's true. But the point is that you can only assess any offsetting based, you know, these sort of tree based things. They can only be assessed based on what we call counterfactuals. That's the assumption you make about what would have happened if this hadn't been done. And of course, we can't answer that. You can't say what would have happened because you've done something else.

19:50And then even if you do, you know, plant a tree, it might get knocked over, it might burn down, it might die. You know, there's any number of things. And also, even if it does none of those things, it might be a very bad thing to do to plant a probably the wrong kind of tree, a commercial growing tree in the wrong environment. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, these can be monocultures rather than sort of natural mixed forest related. There's this whole idea of what's in the jargon is called additionality. So this is the idea that, OK, if you're doing something that you sell is an offset, it has to be something that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

20:26So maybe you want to build a solar farm and you say, well, I haven't got enough money, but I'll sell carbon credits. And then I have enough money to build this solar farm. And then it's an offset because it wouldn't have happened without those sort of carbon credits. But the thing is, obviously, there's a huge incentive for people to make it look as if projects wouldn't have happened without the carbon credits, because obviously they can sell carbon credits, they can make money from them. There's a lot of creative accounting that can go on. and so there's a real problem with saying would these projects really have happened without the carbon credits being sold or not it's just you know there's just very difficult to disentangle these these things and say is this a genuine project that's actually removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or it would just have been you know this the solar farm would have been built anyway and they're just sort of selling it as a carbon credit to get a bit of extra money yeah so what do you think the solution is do we have to just throw out the concept entirely So the first thing to say, I mean, there are some off-sating projects now, which I think you can say really do work.

21:27And this is, you know, Miles Allen, who sort of looked a lot into the whole concept of offsets, what he would say is if you remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and you put it in a geological storage system, then that is there permanently. It's not like a forest that can burn down or anything. It's there permanently. And so, you know, there are a few of these projects around. I visited a couple of them when I was in Iceland a few years ago. um the thing is it's really these are really expensive you know you pay way more per ton of carbon dioxide than you would for sort of forest things and stuff like that so whether it's affordable for companies to do or not that's a whole big question i mean the other reason why i'm hesitant to say all or offsetting is is bad is you know there are i mean there are some good projects and they are doing some good things like coming up from a conservation a biodiversity point of view, I hear about projects that wouldn't have happened without carbon credits.

22:22So I don't think we can say all offsetting is bad. I suspect that if you could add it all up and say has offsetting as a concept done more harm than good, I suspect it might be more harm than good. But because of all the complications we've been talking about, there's no real way to do that. But certainly there've been a lot of studies that have come out and said, well, we've analysed these offsets and like most of them have not done what they've said they would do in terms of removing CO2 from the atmosphere or preventing it going into the atmosphere. And for the impact you mentioned that has on people's behaviour that makes them feel like they can excuse just continue doing what they were doing before I think I mean to me that does earn it I think it's placed on the list.

23:03Yeah we're going to say it's worse than it is good because it's on the list.

23:11let's move on to the next of our horrors of the 21st century and this is one that really does seem seem like a good idea at the time it's the idea of effective altruism that's the idea that we should apply rationality to discover what's the most efficient and effective way of using money of using charitable donations josh howdjago has reported on this over the years actually josh haven't you? Take us through it. What is it first of all and what went wrong? You're right. I mean, I remember hearing about this idea maybe a decade ago and personally being really enamoured with it and thinking this is a really interesting and good idea, but I really have changed my mind and I'm going to try and persuade you that this, you know, deserves to go into the dustbin of history.

24:01But yeah, to come to what it is, I think you gave quite a good summary so i spoke to a philosopher called um alice crary about this idea she's written quite extensively about it and this is not a direct quote from her or anything but her rough definition she said it's the idea that we should rationalize our charitable charitable giving to do the most good possible for a given amount of time or money and you know as we've been saying like that really sounds like inarguable but I think the problem with this idea is that it's not just simple but it is it is simplistic like you cannot I think boil down ethics and morality and charitable giving to a calculation and I think the trouble is that for maybe for people like me and for some other people whisper it people maybe who are in Silicon Valley as we might come on to is that you know if you have a bit of a sort of a scientific bent you know if you've studied a lot of science and you think about sort of a proof in equations this idea that you know there's a sort of formula for being as it were good is really appealing but it's just not it's not how the world is yeah but okay but a lot of money is wasted a lot of charitable money effectively is wasted because it's done in perhaps well-meaning but very inefficient ways.

25:24So tackling malaria is a great example, isn't it? Because a lot of money might be spent on one aspect of it, whereas if you spent the money on getting insecticide-impregnated nets around to people in villages, that would be a much better use of actually cutting the spread of malaria. That's just one off the top of my head. But so there is in some cases there's a point. It's got a point, right? Yeah, I fully, fully agree with you. And one thing that sort of come out of the effective altruism movement, as you say, is that like people have started to sort of try and ask for sort of evidence of the impact of like charitable giving.

26:06So like if we give people, you know, an anti-malarial bed net, for example, like how many lives does that save per money spent or whatever? And those kinds of like questions about how effective various interventions are have done some good. I definitely think so. I mean, one of the things that's come out of that is, and maybe this shouldn't have been a surprise, but actually just giving people what's called a direct cash transfer, just giving poor people money is one of the most effective things you can do. Just trust them to spend it. So there's definitely been some good things. I definitely would admit that.

26:40I still think it's a bad idea, a really bad idea. Let me try and explain why. So the trouble is that there's a few arguments, right? But one of the things is that when people sort of take this idea and say, well, I'm going to try and rationalize the way that I give my money, and they try to use this idea called like expected utility. And when you try to do that, it can help, you know, if you apply it a little bit, it can lead to some helpful conclusions, but it can also very quickly get you into some really weird places. let me give you an example let's say for example i said to you i can give you a way if you spend let's say three pounds whatever it might be you might be able to save one life tomorrow but if you could invest that money in something else it might have a catastrophe in a thousand years that could wipe out the planet right so this is the kind of maybe you can see where i'm going this these are the kind of like a lot of what's happened with ea is that it's ended up pushing people to these like extreme things um extreme ideas so like the the idea that there could be an ai apocalypse um that could wipe out the whole of the human race or do massive damage in future a lot of like effective altruists have been attracted to those kinds of ideas and over the last decade a lot of people in silicon valley a lot of people in the world like of these like large AI companies, the CEOs of like Anthropic, for example, are sort of deeply engaged in this EA world.

28:12And do we really think, like, I think if we're sort of saying that instead of giving money to like poor people who might have a life-threatening disease or something, we're giving money to these AI companies. I think if we've ended up in that place, something has gone deeply wrong. Am I right in thinking as well that one of the sort of ways of thinking is that you can focus on a career that makes you just as much money as possible for yourself so that then you can decide how to spend it rather than a career that might do something that's actually like actively doing some good in the world and having a benefit yeah so this is a you're dead right abby and this is a sort of a similar kind of argument here so the argument is let's say you're like a bright young woman um you know really clever gonna probably do well in life and you're thinking to yourself, I want to do good in the world.

29:00Maybe I should go and work for a charity. And then the argument is, well, actually, charities are often ineffective. What you should, and it's going to be hard, what you should actually do in that position, you're a bright person, go and earn loads and loads and loads of money. Go and work for some tech company or an investment bank and then give away your money. And this is an idea that's called earning to give. There's like an organization that's got this name. And you probably don't need me to tell you what the problem with that is. And it's that, well, it doesn't often, doesn't always happen.

29:33I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying this never happens. But just look at somebody like Sam Bankman-Fried, who was, of course, the CEO of the cryptocurrency FTX, which went bankrupt in 2022. The problem with Bankman-Fried, as an example, is that he was a criminal, right? So we're not really talking about that sort of it. That was bad as a separate thing. but also like the idea that he was just kind of like accruing this massive wealth with this idea that he might give it away and he did give some of it away but then i mean i just i think it's really dangerous to go down that road i'm just going to earn loads of money and in future i'll give it away he ended up trying to um his company sorry we ended up trying to sort of claw back some of the charitable donations that he'd made because of the problems that happened so again i just think we're ending up in a very strange world if we go down this route yeah so we had Rutger Bregman on the show last week um he's a historian author and his his book Moral Ambition uh in one of the one of the chapters he talks about effective altruism makes kind of the same points you're making and I think his point is that yeah you you can't necessarily trust um rich philanthropists to to do the right thing and you need a philosophy of moral ambition and he's founded this school of moral ambition in order to uh you know keep it in check make sure you're focusing on the right in the right thing yeah i 100 agree with that and i think some of the stuff that i've been talking about you know you could make the case that like this is a good idea but it's just been like it's in the hands of people who've you know fallible people but i i sort of refute that because i I still think that like you just, you know, what about things like racial justice?

31:18What about things like, you know, relationships between like work colleagues and families and friends? Like you can't put numbers on those things. And there's one of the books that really changed my mind on this. You know, like I said, years ago, I used to be quite into this very sympathetic effect of altruism. I read this book by a journalist called Larissa McFarquhar. It was called Strangers Drowning. And it was all about these people who sort of adopted this sort of effective altruism sort of lifestyle. One of them, he was dedicated to the cause of chicken suffering. And he just sort of stopped doing the dishes and like ended up like getting divorced from or separating from his girlfriend.

31:58And I just thought like we don't want to live in that world. Like it's not to say that we shouldn't, you know, not eat meat or whatever. Like there's not saying there's no merit to that. But we can't make, as the person you mentioned was saying, we can't base our whole morality on a calculation. It's just it's not the way to do it. Yeah, I mean, I'm convinced, I think. I agree. It might be my pick of the worst idea now after listening to you, Josh. Thanks. Well, don't make your final decision. No, I'll wait. We've got one more. We've got one more. We do. We've got another bad climate solution for our last one that's made the list.