Move Slow and Upgrade: The Power of Incremental Innovation

For far too long, tech titans peddled promises of disruptive innovation - fabricating benefits and minimizing harms. The promise of quick and easy fixes overpowered a growing chorus of critical voices, driving a sea of private and public investments into increasingly dangerous, misguided, and doomed forms of disruption, with the public paying the price. But what's the alternative? Upgrades - evidence-based, incremental change. Instead of continuing to invest in untested, high-risk innovations, constantly chasing outsized returns, upgraders seek a more proven path to proportional progress. This book dives deep into some of the most disastrous innovations of recent years - the metaverse, cryptocurrency, home surveillance, and AI, to name a few - while highlighting some of the unsung upgraders pushing real progress each day. Timely and corrective, Move Slow and Upgrade pushes us past the baseless promises of innovation, towards realistic hope.

Evan Selinger is a Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the ethical and privacy dimensions of emerging technology. Selinger's previous Cambridge University Press books included the co-authored Re-Engineering Humanity (2019) and co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy (2018). He is a contributing writer at The Boston Globe.

Albert Fox Cahn is the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project's founder and executive director. He has served as Practitioner-in-Residence at NYU Law School's Information Law Institute and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center For Human Rights Policy, Yale Law School's Information Society Project, Ashoka, and TED.