The ethical alternative is one that balances innovation and entrepreneurship with ecological and social responsibility.

You can use resources, invent stuff, and organise people to work on it, but you only get to do it if Reality-Based Accounting rates the project as a net positive for the planet, and you have to share some of the benefits.

And if you can't make it happen without being consistently cruel and exploitative to some individuals, groups, or locations, you don't get to do it again.

This is not trivial to organise. But it's far more likely to lead to an R&D explosion than the current myopic and manic-depressive comic book version of "the economy" we're all supposed to have irrational faith in.