The sedless cherry problem

Is there or should there be a connecting line between technological advancement and the improvement of the human condition? Are these two parallel lines that never cross except when other parallel lines going in a different direction accidentally intersect and we get a windfall? If you are curious, join me on this mental journey. What I am sharing with you are facts that are unfolding now as I write this piece.

Somewhere in a laboratory, a geneticist is solving the cherry pit problem. The inconvenience of the seed. The social awkwardness of disposal. The moment at dinner when one does not quite know where to look. Millions of dollars (millions of euros). Years of research. The full weight of human ingenuity, bent toward the liberation of the cocktail garnish.

Concurrently, the United Nations reported that 673 million people faced hunger in 2024 — a number that, despite modest decline, remains above where the world stood before the pandemic. Not inconvenienced. Hungry. Not unsure where to place a seed. Unsure whether there would be food at all.

We should sit with that contrast until it becomes intolerable. Because the discomfort is the point.

The architecture of selective urgency

This is not a new failure. It is a structural one — and structure is harder to condemn than intention, which is precisely why it persists.

Capital flows toward return. The seedless cherry has a market. Starvation in the Sahel does not produce shareholders. Climate engineering for crop resilience in sub-Saharan Africa generates no IP portfolio. The dying do not fill a demand curve that anyone with a venture fund is currently tracking. This is not cynicism. It is the operating logic of the system we have collectively chosen and continue to maintain with our consumption, our elections, and our silence.

In the 1950s, Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution — the genuine application of agricultural science to mass hunger — saved an estimated one billion lives. The technology existed. The will was assembled. It remains one of the most significant deployments of human capability in recorded history, and it is almost never mentioned in the same breath as the innovations that win magazine covers.

We do not lack the science to feed the world. We lack the incentive architecture to make feeding the world as profitable as perfecting its fruit.

Two trains, one track

The optimist's defence is parallelism. The seedless cherry and the famine relief effort occupy different laboratories, different budgets, and different human beings. Progress is not a finite resource. Let both run. One does not cancel the other.

It is a reasonable argument and a dishonest one simultaneously. Because the resource that is finite — that is being actively rationed — is not money. It is attention. It is political will. It is the moral seriousness of institutions that have a fixed amount of urgency to distribute and are distributing it toward comfort while emergencies queue.

When CRISPR was announced, the technology press wrote breathlessly about eliminating genetic disease, extending human lifespan, and redesigning the crop yields of a warming planet. Within eighteen months, the same technology was being quietly applied to producing hornless cattle — because farmers found horns inconvenient. The drift from the momentous to the convenient is not an aberration. It is gravity.

Progress as alibi

The most dangerous use of the word progress is as a blanket absolution. To point at the seedless cherry and say: “This is civilization advancing” is to allow the trivial and the catastrophic to be filed under the same heading so that one can feel, in aggregate, that humanity is moving forward. No! Let’s not get confused here. What is actually moving forward is the preference set of those with the resources to commission research.

A civilisation is not measured by the sophistication of its conveniences. It is measured by the distance between the problems it chooses to solve and the problems it cannot afford to ignore. Right now, that distance is a mass grave. And somewhere on the other side of it, in a temperature-controlled laboratory, someone is very close to a breakthrough on the pit.

The accidental intersection between unrelated parallel lines moving in different directions may bring positive outcomes. We can do better. Improvements need to be intentional and investment needs to take a longer view than tomorrow.

Fay Niewiadomski
Leadership & Culture Transformation Expert - CEO, ICTN

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