The precautionary principle is a blunt instrument, a 90s throwback out of place in an era of "smart solutions" and big data.

A world of over seven billion people faces some pretty complex questions about the trade-offs involved in producing food, using resources, reducing disease and achieving the societies and environments in which we want to live. There's a collision between short-term and long-term outcomes, narrow interests and broader ones, and between problems and opportunities … the consequences of which may be unforeseeable. Fear of the unforeseeable gives the precautionary principle influence, but was there ever such a mismatch between a challenge and a solution?

However simple we might wish managing uncertainty about the future to be, it's not. The precautionary principle misleads us into thinking it is. Its advocates arm-wave about complexity and the unknown future, but they are producing a response that implies the exact opposite. In place of informed, real-world choices that include the potential implications of both doing something and not doing it, we have simplistic bans, precaution's monotonous answer to every challenge.

It is irresponsible. Firstly because it is short termist. In the absence of knowing the future risks of something, the precautionary approach inevitably draws on our present fears and prejudices. These offer a narrow window through which to view the future. When, in the 1950s, the world expected India to starve, no one knew what the impact of IR8, a new semi-dwarf rice plant introduced by Norman Borlaug and M S Swaminathan, would be. It was arguably more innovative and its impact more unknown than much of biotechnology today. It increased yields enough to save millions of lives.

When the first http communication happened in 1989, we could not have imagined Wikileaks or crowd-sourced research on Alpine climate change, so thank goodness no one mentioned pornography because the idea of a website might have been parked forever in a file marked "further research needed".

The precautionary principle is also irresponsible because its only tool is to stop a thing – a practice, substance or technology. This can lead us to think we have protected ourselves from outcomes when we haven't. The recent European ban on the pesticides known as neonicotinoids, for example, was appealing. But it has frustrated beekeeping organisations. Contrary to the "job done" jubilation that followed the ban, it will not lead to the revival of the bee population. If only the problem were that simple. Bees face very tangible pressures, including loss of habitat and parasites, and we do not know whether the pesticide that replaces neonicotinoids will be better or worse.

Above all, the precautionary principle encourages evasion of responsibility for the status quo. When people argue to block change, for fear of unknown consequences, they rarely assume responsibility for the consequences of current problems. If you want to mothball a possible solution, such as genetically modified potatoes, then you need to take ownership of the present problem, which is spraying potatoes with fungicide 20 times a year to stop them being destroyed by the fungal disease blight. We are not in some happy natural state without GM potatoes. We have to face the problem.

So the opposite of precaution is not some free-for-all. It is to develop refined and sensible decisions, with consistency and a far broader context. We can now investigate complex interactions and weigh up choices as never before. We can simulate our physical environment, atmosphere and climate with growing complexity. Genomic repositories are making it possible to examine responses in people, animals and plants to changes in conditions around them. We have become more sophisticated in modelling the interactions of human behaviour with the social and natural environment. Information too is collected and shared as never before: natural hazards, water supply, pollution, genetics, epidemics, drug side-effects, evolution in pests and bacteria … This sophistication is how we manage the future.

In that context, the precautionary principle looks like a childish desire to simplify, with tokens and talismans. It encapsulates a dogma, not just that simplistic bans are an effective way to manage change, but that scientific innovation is full of hubris and blind to its own implications.

But on its own a precautionary principle doesn't require that we know much about what we're talking about, let alone the alternatives and implications. At worst, it can play to our most knee-jerk fears, such as "Frankenfoods". Its advocates don't really have much to offer. We don't need to appoint a layer of people to say "ooh, you never know!"

In agriculture, energy and so much more we need big changes, even if some people do want to stop the world and get off. Realistically, to make these changes needs an approach to innovation that is permissive and watchful – that is, one that takes more responsibility – rather than banning and assuming you've done good, which is the real hubris here.

Tracey Brown is managing director of Sense About Science. This is part of a series on the precautionary principle. You can read Andy Stirling's piece now, and Steve Fuller and Jack Stilgoe later this week. On Friday, we'll pull out readers' comments and give the contributors a chance to respond to one another