I'm gonna leave it at that it's now my great pleasure to introduce Maynard norm who's the president and CEO of working Public Broadcasting who will introduce [Applause] [Music] Thank You Terry and welcome to this inaugural lecture series of AI SEP I go on any further without just saying a great big thank you to Terry Bristol for organizing this once again we're just really thrilled it is a special privilege for me tonight to introduce our speaker James Burke why is that so it is because he is one of the very few who was able to take difficult and sometimes abstract ideas put them into context and translate their meaning for mere mortals like me I cherish the nights when sitting in a darkened room with the glow from the TV set I heard our speaker present an idea that excited me so much I couldn't stop thinking about it and unfortunately didn't get very much sleep that night his tangential and integrated thinking has classified him as a quote one of the most influential and intriguing minds in the Western world and quote for over 30 years this prolific man has produced directed written and presented award-winning programs for the BBC PBS and The Learning Channel to name a few his mind transforming series like connections 1 2 & 3 after the warming the day the universe changed the real thing and tomorrow's world to name a few have influenced us all he is currently working on the Burke knowledge web a large interactive website due to debut in late 2002 Burke holds an MA from Oxford as well as two honorary doctorates his talk tonight asks the question is the Internet redefining knowledge I'm assuming that if the answer was no he wouldn't be giving this presentation please welcome our special and celebrated guests James Burke [Applause] well that will have exhausted you know I shall good evening ladies and gentlemen it's jolly nice to be back in Portland the weather is so nice hasn't rained since I got here as you've heard and as you may know I have wasted the last 35 years of my life as a science historian and journalist doing TV programs and writing books and magazines and stuff about technological change in its social effects and in order that you get into proper perspective what I want to say tonight which is really about well a number of things least of all what what the title is then we remind you of what the late great Mark Twain once said when he was talking about might have been talking about people like me when he said it he said in the real world the right thing never happens in the right place at the right time it is the task of journalists and historians to rectify this error so I want to put in put in a bit of rectification I want to put in your general historical context this evening the some of the processes exercising people's mind these days what the technology coming down the pike is going to do to us how you best prepare for it and why that has not been easy up until now and I want to argue that the high rates of innovation we live with today and the historical difficulty we've had predicting innovation accurately up until now and finally the opportunities opportunities that the coming technologies will offer to take a radically different approach to knowledge management all spring from the same creative moment about 500 years ago when somebody triggered triggered all this with a solution to a small local contemporary problem that went on to change the world but let me start with predicting the future because if you get that right you've got it made the unfortunate thing about the future is if you think about it it hasn't happened yet and never will if you get my drift the great Danish quantum physicist Niels Bohr on the subject once perspicacious Lee said prediction is extremely difficult especially about the future now I don't think that was just Danish humor well you never know I think rather he was talking about the humongous number of variables involved in any change and those variables multiply through history once upon a time decision-making was extremely simple you could have any color Model T Ford you liked as long as it was black today by the time you get around to reading the manual there's been an upgrade if you can read the manual in the first place by the time the high schools are teaching what they need to teach to keep up with innovation their material is already out of date and as a consequence the reaction of the average person in the street to the flood of new technology that overwhelms us every day always reminds me of the story of the depressive who gets a couple of days off from the clinic where he's being treated goes to the beach to get himself a tan the next day his psychiatrist back in the hospital gets a postcard the message on the card reads I think very much like the average person's reaction to the present high rate of innovation because the message on the card from the holiday depressive reads having a wonderful time why let me start with one of the reasons that happens why it has been so difficult for us so far to second-guess change to recognize for example what unlimited bandwidth and technological convergence is going to do to almost every aspect of our lives the challenge of how difficult it can be to get prediction right was once amusingly illustrated by the great modern philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein he's the guy you know who ruined corporate communications because he once said if anything can be said at all it can be said clearly anyway somebody once went up to Vidkun stein and said what a bunch of morons we must have been back 700 years ago in the days before Copernicus told us how the solar system worked to have looked up in the sky and to have thought in what we were seeing up there was the Sun going round the earth well as any idiot knows the earth goes on the Sun and you don't need to be Einstein to get that to which the great man is said to have replied as philosophers will do yeah yeah he said but he said I wonder what it would have looked like up there if the Sun had been going round the earth the point being of course it would have looked exactly the same what he was saying was that in any decision you're constrained by your knowledge context what you know at the time you're in a box and science and technology are no exception as an astronomer if you think the universe is made of omelets you design instruments to find traces of intergalactic egg and if you don't find any no problem instrument failure and not of course that your view of the cosmos is wrong because at any time the contemporary view the view from inside the box the company view is the only right one or there would be anarchy we have to have a general agreement on how to think that we can all stick to at any one time conformity is a security matter trouble however about being in this box and you may know this already is that it dictates how you see the future and plan for it and act on that plan and the problem is the view from inside the box is not always what turns out principally as I want to show because the future is almost never a simple simple linear extension of the present now this can become very soon very embarrassingly obvious to people like Gutenberg who thought he'd print a few Bibles and that would be that or the head of IBM 50 years ago who said take it from me the world will need five computers or popular science magazine the same year saying saying take it from us those computers will never weigh more than one and a half tonnes or my favorite prediction Bill Gates in 1984 640 K ought to be enough for any Pocky he claims he didn't say it but the trouble with second-guessing the future lies partly in the process of change itself and the only thing you can say with certainty about change is that it is uncertain because as Niels Bohr said of the variables involved because while you're in your box planning on bringing about change with some new idea or some new gizmo at the same time in lots of other boxes you don't know about other people are doing precisely the same thing so even as you decide on your straight pathway to the future somebody out there is putting a bend in the road let me illustrate how nonlinear the process of change can be with a not very serious sequence of events from the history of technology that ends in the modern world with an innovation a modern innovation that I assure you every single person in this room in this theater tonight is intimately acquainted so you should get there as it were before I do one dark and stormy night in 1707 off the southwestern coast of England an English Admiral called sir clouds Li shovel had a change my name is bringing the great British fleet home to England decides to turn right and only one of the 44 navigators in the fleet says don't do it so he does they hit the rocks the entire British fleet sinks all the British fleet sailors drown and so does Admiral shovel this stimulates the British Parliament to offer a large prize for better navigation techniques thus prompting a clockmaker called Huntsman to go looking for better steel for a clock spring this is because those of you who sail will know that if you're going east west the most important thing you can know is the exact time back at base if you know that if your clock onboard that tells you that you know precisely how much later or earlier one of the heavenly bodies came up over the horizon and that tells you where you are timezone wise if you like the problem of longitude now this is a serious matter to us Brits at the time because we are sailing over here to exploit you guys we saw nothing wrong with taxation without representation what's changed now now the steel that guy Huntsman finds for his flock spring is perfect four o'clock Springs and as it turns out for cutting other metal so and the iron maker called wilkinson uses it to bore out thin walled water pipes and then thin walled cannon barrels which in spite of the fact that we are at war with both of you at the time he sells to you and the French nothing changes I'll admit later on and Napoleon uses these very lightweight cannon bells to develop something called mobile horse artillery and wins all his battles except the last one sorry in 1810 Napoleon sets up a prize for encouraging French inventors and a champagne bottle are called appear steps formed with a brilliant idea put food into the champagne bottle put the cork in and boil it up and kill all the germs that nobody knows exist and preserve the food ten years later an english company is doing it because they bought a pairs patent which they only happen to see because it is quite literally on the table next to the one they went to paris to buy which is a patent for a new continuous process paper making technique that allows the first ever toilet roll to be made you see what I mean about innovation being surprising how could anybody have forecast the toilet roll from the most frightening of navigational problems English joke what is happening here is I think the fundamental process involved in innovation and the main reason why so far it has been so hard to second-guess change it's the way change happens when things come together in ways they haven't before because when that juxtaposition occurs the rules of math change and one on one becomes three the result of the process is more than the sum of the parts and almost always unpredictably so I mean the German 19th century automotive engineer Wilhelm may Barr puts together the perfume spray and gasoline and comes up with what we call the carburetor another one around about the same time a medical researcher accidentally spilled some of the newly invented artificial dye into a petri dish containing bacteria next morning he sees that it has eventually stained and killed only one kind of bacteria bingo chemotherapy now in the face of this kind of serendipity the only important question that matters is why what is it about change that makes it so hard to manage because it is constantly so surprising good surprising if it's you doing it to your enemy on the battlefield or in the marketplace and bad surprising if it's hitting you I believe change is a surprise because of that knowledge management idea but 500 years ago that I mentioned which brought us all here today and which also happened because of what you might describe as a surprise one hell of a surprise and one which also brought us all here today but let me first very briefly go back to the beginning where knowledge management first emerged as a concept in the caves of Paleolithic prehistory which is where we get our attitudes and our institutions which I believe all start with the first flint axe if you think about it at the time the first flint tool is the best thing to hit human beings since eating berries and dirt because it makes it possible to go out and hunt for the lunch on the hoof that is walking past and whatever it was we human beings were going to be the flint tool in one sense freezes us at that point in our development freezes the way we'll think and act and organize and innovate from then until about yesterday first of all because if you're going to hunt you're going to need new dealers who will go on making the flint axes and spear heads and butchering tools and then you need a man with a plan or you won't coordinate the hunt and lunch will get away and then we need lots of people to do with the man with the plan says so you set up a top-down decision-making process in which you may have heard this before the few get power and reward and the many are excluded from involvement and do what they are told so when I say we freeze at that point in our development it's because while I was just describing what goes on in Paleolithic caves I could as easily have been describing what goes on in General Motors the entire top-down command structure of modern society starts with the Flint axe and shapes the future sorry and shapes the culture and the way we will think from then on which is what technology always does the flintoff kicks off the freight ax kicks off a kind of cultural cascade effect because its first use creates a discontinuity because it introduces the first noncyclic once and for all change which people get used to and then want more of which they always do which generates public expectation of an even better tool tomorrow which it always does which generates the requirement that the Noodlers will come up with the goods to satisfy those expectations which it always does and above all keep the man with a plan in power now because of some work at a laboratory in not too far from where I live in France we know that to create the hottest Flint axe on the market about 200,000 years ago took about 100 extremely precise blows to a piece of Flint in an extremely precise sequence taking into consideration the exact fracturing characteristics of the stone at each blow and to pass on such a skill as a noodler instructor you had to be able to instruct with the same linear exact precision which is why according to one eminent Dutch paleontologist language happens language is advanced axe making and like axe making is linear precise and step-by-step and like the axe language cuts reality into conceptual pieces you can reassemble in different ways some thousands of years later when the Greeks find themselves in a situation very like ours today where innovative solutions will open up global markets they use language to cut up thought and reassemble it so as to innovate using logic which is the Flint axe magnified a million times because as you know with logic you can solve problems by putting together two things you know to produce a third thing you didn't know for example stars that give off light light comes from fires stars or fires pretty good for people with no infrared spectrometry right what turns this process into the cutting edge of modern science and technology is that knowledge idea I mentioned 500 years ago triggered as I said by an off-the-wall accident it is the rediscovery of America by Columbus on what he thought was a clear shot for Japan America blows everybody away it's not in the two basic databases of the time the Bible and Aristotle so what the hell is it doing there and then all those new animals and organisms stuff stop flooding across the Atlantic and they're not on Aristotle's lists either so what the hell are they doing they're in the intellectual oh I forgot to say and of course around the same time Copernicus is saying the earth is not the center of the solar system and Galileo is saying you're right I can see that and a Dutch engineer called Simon Stevin is going around muttering wonders in wonder which means don't take don't believe in miracles and the whole thing is summed up by the poet John Donne the English poet who says the new philosophy calls all in doubt in the intellectual panic that follows like can they trust anything they know anymore the answer comes from a French noodler that I have blamed for absolutely everything his name is Rene Descartes and he comes up with a knowledge management idea that changes the world he works out at generate and handle trustworthy new data without screwing up I'll paraphrase apply methodical doubt he says if the guy says it's definite think of it as probable if he says it's probable think of it as possible and if the word is it's possible forget it and Descartes says take a reductionist approach reduce a problem down to its simplest component parts you'll know how it works you'll see how to fix it methodical doubt and reductionism turn the process of change into a Noodlers paradise and pretty soon the mission statement becomes learn more and more about less and less like a pal of mine at Oxford who got his doctorate in the 17th century poet milton's use of the comma you laugh he is now the head of an department of a major American University because he did what reductionism requires you to do to be a success make your specialist niche so small there's only room for you in there and your comma and then and above all explain yourself only in gobbledygook in this way you are incomprehensible and therefore irreplaceable this is one reason why innovation it seems to me is always such a surprise because as reductionism is applied the body of knowledge is driven to become ever more specialist ever more fragmented ever more complex so even as a specialist you don't know what the guys at the next workbench are doing scratching their heads at something so esoteric you don't even know how to spell it and then letting it loose apt to interact with other things that they didn't know we're happening out there and cause change that nobody expects least of all the unsuspecting slob in the street small wonder then that this process generates the holidaymaking depressives I mentioned at the beginning and the nonlinear toilet roll innovation sequences make planning so difficult so not surprisingly most people find managing change difficult because des cartes reductionism has not prepared us to handle the ripples that spread out from innovation take one example the ripple effects are one very minor byproduct of the early printing press in the early 17th century 1600 and 9 I think new printed Maps updated with information coming back from voyages make it safer to go looking for cargos out in the East to China and Japan guys coming back from there with tea and porcelain come back to Amsterdam and profit levels of something between six and seven hundred percent everybody wants in on the game the problem is cash so a new thing is invented called a land register to register title to your land so you can borrow money against it so another new thing has to be invented called a mortgage company most of the borrowing goes into another new thing set up to take the risk out of shipwrecks called insurance now things are safe safer another new thing is invented to get more money in called a limited joint stock company so there's another new thing called the stock market running with the help of another new thing mr. service the purpose invented called a national bank providing more money through yet another new thing invented for the purpose called a credit agency the whole shebang running thanks to another new thing invented for the purpose called a business contract which finds its way into political Arrangements in the contract between citizen and state embodied in another new thing called the Constitution of the United States the ultimate ripple effect of printed Maps kind of the reason ripple effects surprise people is because if some institutional procedure works very well you want to set it in concrete so nothing can prevent it from doing its valuable work which very soon becomes blocking all further change because change might bring destabilization that's why people in any institution all the way from ancient Egypt to the latest internet startup can very soon find themselves with one aim in life perpetuating themselves and the procedure which their institution enshrines whether or not those procedures have been rendered outdated by events outside the institution and institutional thinking will be a very powerful tool for ignoring the obvious let me give you a not very serious example of that kind of tendency from the history of technology back in Europe at the end of the so-called Dark Ages in late 10th century the European economy kicks back into high gear it is generally agreed thanks to the arrival from one of the Arab countries Sicily or Spain of a new kind of loom the thing about the new loom is it has foot pedals freeze the weavers hands to throw the shuttle back and forward much more quickly so to produce much more cloth much more quickly much more cheaply the Dutch Weaver is the best on the continent smash every one of these new looms they can find on the ground that quote it will put people out of work and quite remarkably modern thinking for the 11th century however a generation later when the dust is settled the loom is in use and now the trouble is with the traditional thread makers they can't keep up with the old manual methods because this loom is really making cloth until the answer comes unexpectedly in the form of the spinning wheel probably from China you put the wheel in the loom together and the production of cloth goes up like a rocket more riots because the cloth now for a mass market is linen made from plants which are cheap rather than wool made from sheep which are now expensive so the rioters this time are in the webOS tablet well established woolen industry however soon everybody is wearing this home this linen and when they wear it out throwing it away so all over 13th and 14th century Europe this is gigantic and growing pile of linen rag so the price of paper drops like a stone linen rag is the best raw material you can get and it's now free more riots traditional wool industry again because parchment is sheepskin and now it's too expensive to use however here we are with enough paper to stick on the walls the scribes are overworked and in demand and pretty soon the writer's guilds are going out and shouting in the streets they want more wages because suddenly the pressure is on the Black Death knocks off 1% of 1/3 of the population the remaining 2/3 are inheriting like crazy and there is enough enough of writing ability to go around for all the documentation required until Gutenberg solves a problem by automating it around 1450 with the printing press riots in that most conservative all institutions the Vatican Pope needs a printing press like a hole in the head because it will encourage what we would today call free thinking until somebody in the Curia realizes that you can use a printing press to print indulgences with now for those of you who are not Catholic let me explain an indulgence was a kind of spiritual credit note pay now sin later anyway with all the demand for instant printed salvation that follows Rome makes a million money to build the Vatican pay Michelangelo's bill and generally get involved in certain prestige projects that make certain simple German clerics madder than hell this cash-and-carry view of salvation one of who nailed up a few mild remarks on the subject and their thanks to advances in textile technology and fought every step of the way is the Protestant Reformation it is a trifle oversimplified but you get my drift that what I'm saying is standard operating procedure doesn't like having to handle ripple effects or the unexpected like the woman who gets into an elevator as the doors close a man gets in she doesn't know the elevator begins to rise out of the corner of his mouth he says your room or mine baby and she says if you're going to argue about it forget it the institutionally conservative attitude to change to new ways of doing things is very powerful because once you start on the institutional path there isn't supposed to be any deviation from standard operating procedure and the further from the start you get the more difficult it is made to deviate thus socially we live with institutions and ways of thinking that link us firmly to that start point because they haven't changed since they were set up in the past with the technology of the past to solve the problems of the past so they act like signposts telling us we're going the right way by obliging us to look backwards most of the time however increasingly these days standard operating procedure SOP is not necessarily a good idea tradition and practice has knocked off more institutions and organizations than you could shake a stick at don't get me wrong I am NOT knocking tradition we put a crown on it and live off the tourist revenue so what we got so far the process of innovation makes knowledge management and pretend prediction difficult because of the way reductionist thinking puts us all in separate boxes and because the process of change causes one and one to make three and because innovation is produced by Noodlers who thanks to reductionism don't know what each other is up to so innovation brings unexpected change very reluctantly accepted by social and business institutions which are often inflexible and incapable of encouraging change and the problem but the social institutions it seems to me is it by definition they can't keep up innovation is driven by the relentless demands of the marketplace and that rate of innovation as I said before accelerates through history in general somewhere the marketplace is innovating all the time because entities that cannot or will not innovate get replaced by entities that can or will and there is no way so far that any status quo preserving backward-looking social institution could ever get to close to that kind of dynamic future oriented rate of change the result may be that we are heading into the virtual world of the 21st century with attitudes and social structures that haven't really changed since the caves and an ability to manage unexpected technological change severely hampered by the specialism generated by de cartes reductionism if this is the case should we all jump out of the window I think not for a number of reasons the most important of which is the killer app every one of us has has called the brain which it is beginning to be realized may not do its best work in the way that has been SOP ever since the Flint axe froze its development back in prehistory what I'm referring to is the sheer scale of the processes which seem to be involved in what we call thinking recent guests every healthy brain on the planet has about a hundred billion neurons each one of which could have up to 50,000 dendrites each one of which could be in contact with up to 50,000 other dendrites somebody calculated that's about 10 trillion connections if you're into combinatorial mathematics that tells you that the total potential number of ways a thought could go through the brain is larger than the number of atoms in the known universe and every one of you has one if you're looking for massively parallel processing it's between your ears so maybe there are one or two things that can do as well as go down the ever more narrow reductionist path maybe Einstein was right when he said we are all born with magnificent brains which formal education then slowly destroys I think I think what he was really talking about was a strange way that innovative thought is very often not linear very often doesn't happen according to the step to step by step procedure I mean Einstein himself said he dreamt up relativity because he had a dream of riding on a beam of light very often the most innovative solution seemed to come when the brain is kind of freed from the nuts and bones defocused not concentrating on a problem so the last thing much creative thinking appears to be is step by step which explains of course why you are successfully achieving solving the enormous lee complex problem of understanding me I'm not referring to my accent because you are the ones with the accent I'm talking about this speak listen event if you think about it if what you were doing was hearing each sound I said going into some kind of lexicon in your head running through from top to bottom each time to identify that sound bring it out and matching it with a memory of a sound you heard saying yep that's it sticking that on the end of the sound stream that went before and said - you're saying to yourself that makes sense and then coming out and listening for the next sound I was making then if all you were accessing in there was a lexicon the size of the average high school graduates vocabulary wait for this 12,500 words the English language has four hundred and fourteen thousand eight hundred and twelve words something's wrong somewhere however if what you were accessing was the average high school graduates for Kabri four thousand words at one millisecond per act of neural retrieval it would be taking you 12 and a half seconds to understand each word I'm saying and you're not doing that are you good so what are you doing you are running multiple simultaneous scenarios ahead of me using the grammar and the syntax and the content and so on of my speech so far to power up all the probable ways I will end the word phrase sentence paragraph and as I come on through powering down the ones you got wrong and powering up the next set of probable alternates and powering them down and so on and doing that as long as I are sounds what that means of course is that you are all giving this speech before I am and any other speech I might have given one wonders why you came but but that ability to put things together and run scenarios and stay ahead of the game which is what survival is all about with the brains best at that seems to be you're happy you'll be able to know why brains appear to like jokes the punchline brings together two concepts in a way that's new to you and since that's what the connective structure of the brain appears to be for you laughing pleasure at having your connections enriched let me try it on you every brain in this theater has the concept bird and the concept fruit in it and like everything in the brain it's connected in some way your connection may be bird tree fruit bird color fruit bird season fruit bird eat fruit see if I can put a new connection in there and if I do you will laugh in pleasure at connectivity enhancement bird fruit a drunk goes up to his host at a party and says with that terrible seriousness of totally plastered adults and very serious small children excuse me and the host turns around and there is the drunk plastered I mean glassy-eyed out of it and the hosts think is something wrong and says yes what's the problem what's problem and the drunk says can you answer a question and the host says sure fire away and speaking very carefully that drunken tears do lemons crystal and the host says no lemons do not whistle why do you ask and the drunk staggers about him smacks his forehead and chagrin and says oh my god in that case I have squeezed your canary and imagine and tonic enjoy it there are no more jokes you see how innovative thinking may act in some ways just like a good joke but I make a serious point the brain appears to be naturally configured for change to work in the 1 plus 1 equals 3 mode to have new ideas because its job is to put together information in new ways and innovate as that great American Claude Shannon the inventor of information theory once said information causes change if it doesn't it's not information example no information you are sitting in a seat information the person next to you has a communicable disease no me nobody moving ok so what I'm saying is that every brain then is a natural innovator capable million times over of managing change so one of the ways to think innovatively to manage creatively to second-guess the future if you had the technology back up might be to use your brain in the way it appears to have been designed to be used before the Flint axe froze it if that's the case why have we not done so because of what I said about technology back up up to yesterday there was never enough technology available to involve more than a very few people in the innovative process and whose prime job was to keep the political social or commercial power structure in power and the community safe well supplied and stable the argument I'm making is it because the technology of the time shapes the culture of the time up to now without the means to offer open access and the tools to go with it we've been obliged to live to a certain extent with what I would call a culture of scarcity in which 99% of the human race remained illiterate and excluded and in which it was taken for granted therefore that only a very few people would have their say or do their thing and therefore of course that such talents were exceedingly rare in the human race the result of that limitation of access on the tools of innovation and self-expression then generated what we call standards the self-expression by a very small number of people with access that set the benchmark that the rest of us would aim for if we of the chance and in a culture of scarcity we stuck to those benchmarks for centuries I mean our educational systems at least where I come from have not essentially changed since they were set up in the Middle Ages to Train priests many of our legal systems certainly where I come from still use processes basically unaltered since the 13th century and as good reductionist followers of Descartes we still admire people who have a mind like a knife but consider the possibility that this apparent aristocracy of rare talented people who set those standards those benchmarks and the product of their brains I mean the output of people like Michelangelo Einstein Confucius Newton Galileo Jefferson were no more than what you get when only 1% of you gets to do anything we don't know how many other kinds of genius that were out there at the time up to the 20th century because they were out of the loop illiterate unconnected and in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king what I'm suggesting by that is that the innovative process itself may also have been so far denied the benefit of the kind of ideas that might have come from non reductionist approaches like at the very simplest level what you might get if you relaxed the division of labor rule and encourage cross discipline between disciplines between professions or accepted input from from non reductionist abilities like this the very shadowy area that penumbra around everybody's core competence that we call experience valuable but informal talent the trouble with this unquantifiable but maverick resource was that in the old world there was no way even if you had the bandwidth to let it loose to nail it down to a formal procedure so you could harness it encourage it to conform and be productive when somebody's penumbra somebody's shadowy area of expertise crossed over somebody else's and that happens all the time you couldn't do that in a division of labor world shaped by Adam Smith but could it be that what's happening here at the start of the 21st century is that in kicking off the Scientific Revolution first great knowledge management tool triggered a chain of events that has finally given us a second great knowledge management tool the kind of information technology that may enable us to change the way we solve our problems radically alter the knowledge management infrastructure and above all in franchise some of that talent out there for the first time if that's the case what kind of effect will that have on the general culture well for a start the potential demand for the technology is gigantic if the price is right and at a recent conference I attended run by the real gurus in the trade the general belief was that within 15 years or so that the most expensive thing in a computer will be the plastic housing as for where the demand for the technology is well I know there are six point 1 billion people on the planet but when did you last hear from the other 5.4 like the kid retorts when his mother says eat your cereals thousands of starving out there named one thanks to technology shortfall we in the industrializing nations have lived on a kind of silent planet those people out there in the third world the inner-city ghettos outside the universities had never had the means to express themselves and their wish list because as I said they were out of the loop but soon they weren't to be and I think the word we're going to hear more than any other is more it's happened before if you look at history you see that even in the technologically advanced communities there are periods following times like today when you get major advances in the ability to generate store and disseminate information when massive information surge was triggered followed by high innovation rates and then major social change and also there seems to be a kind of shakeout period that follows innovation surge a kind of period of transitional confusion while people get used to what the new technology will allow them to do and then settle down to as it will codify what it should do and accept the new shape that it gives Society and this happens as I said in the past it's not easy I mean after the printing press came along and you no longer needed a good and years of living to know anything within a generation or two of Gutenberg young people who could read and learn took over and old people lost their authority and never got it back here in the United States today at a society-wide level the present version of that period of transitional confusion is being called dumbing down I'd like to argue that we are not dumbing down most of our community is being for the first time informational informational Ian's franchised and we are going through a long and massive learning curve as a result and anyway dumbing down happens frequently in history - back in the 16th century it was said about the printing press this gizmo within say gizmo this gizmo will make reading the infatuation of people who have no business reading a rump in the 18th century mozart got kicked down the stairs because they thought what a lot of people thought what he was doing was junk the school I went to 50 years ago that school at that school Latin stopped being mandatory and it was said that our brains would turn to porridge I don't think it has this may be why our generation is finding it so difficult to predict change first of all there because there are more of us interested in and involved with the process than ever before but the process is now moving much faster than the old model social systems can handle and second of all because the so-called information revolution we are supposed to be going through hasn't even got into first gear yet if you look at it from inside the box from the old model point of view things look pretty scary I mean sometime in the next 15 years they're talking about in semi-intelligent neural nets multi-media up the ying-yang massively parallel computing operating systems using DNA or light or quantum or all of the above super computing systems capable of recreating a virtual human being down to cellular level and above all write your own ticket software for virtually every activity that used to require a human PhD and all this that will allow the individual if they wish to do everything from bridge building two non-invasive surgery to balancing the books to painting better than Michelangelo or playing better than Agassi the coming technologies what I'm saying offer the possibility of in franchising individuals brain way beyond the access we even boast about today the hot topic in the business community now is the way the culture is beginning to demand customization of product like never before as people wake up to what the technology will do for them in ways they never thought about but the logical outcome of that is an intriguing thought the consumer as designer the consumer whose electronic agent becomes involved in the process of customizing perhaps goods and services entities like supermarkets or universities will end up as virtual warehouses where the tools and materials are available for the consumers electronic agent to come and put together a customized package of what it is the agents owner wants if so then what the new software's may ultimately mean is to some extent the end of the intermediary for centuries in a culture of scarcity there was so little access and tools around that if you wanted something done you had to go to the guy who had the tools and ask him to make for you a horseshoe or a sword or a house or an education today thanks to the reductionist hangover and the factory at the start of this information revolution we still operate like that through intermediaries take representative democracy if you think about it a perfect eighteenth-century solution to an 18th century problem Laozi dangerous roads and no telecommunications so what you do is you find a couple of fools with time to spare and a horse and you send them up to the capital to represent the local hayseeds now the roads are much too dangerous for the come back the next day and say if you changed your political minds so return journey is not too frequent but regular return journeys are arranged after a number of decades these horse owning fools become known as politicians and their return journeys elections 300 years later we have perfect roads and telecommunications coming out of your ears on the same lumbering eighteenth-century system and as for political choice would we ever accept only two flavors from baskin-robbins represented democracy and any other form of intermediary infrastructure and that pretty much relates to every social and business institution will not survive in a world where individualism will have real meaning for the first time in history centralized authorities over simple right or wrong ideologies charismatic leaders with silver tongues and well-hidden track records won't survive when it's easy for your electronic agent to take a very close look persuasion is a lot harder when the audience is well-informed as I know to my cost and it's going to become even harder you give people an inch they take a mile and the only systems we've had in operation up to now in our culture of scarcity have offered less than an inch people's electronic agents are going to want more than that they're going to want in on the game all the way in and that will cause the biggest social changes in history and if history is anything to go by it isn't going to be easy first because the institutions are not going to want to give up power willingly or in a hurry and second because of that transitional phase I mentioned before the factor through history that technology always moved a bit faster than the social processes could keep up many institutions are handling this problem today in what you might describe a skyscraper mode you know the story the man who falls off a couple of skyscrapers he falls past the 77th floor somebody calls out to ask him how he's doing he shrugs and replies now falling fast the 50-foot floor so far so good surprising how many institutions are ignoring the upcoming sidewalk the other way to handle it of course is with an attempt to catch up with innovation by matching the brain and the technology a bit better because now the technology is beginning to mimic the capabilities of the brain it's becoming semi-intelligent holistic distributed low-power high storage cheap the catch-up approach I'm talking about involves the other key effect of the new technologies that I have in mentioned yet it's the way the new technologies can bring any kind of education to people anywhere from a Dallas high-rise to a mud hut outside Bangalore I won't go on about distant learning because I'm sure you know all about that but maybe we need to introduce some new educational modes the products in a sense of what the new technologies allow us to do to lay alongside our reductionist systems to to support them in a different way you see the reason I say that is because most of the environmental and cultural problems that we face in the world today are the product of what reductionism and technology shortfall have done over the centuries solved a million problems one at a time by taking them apart that's given us the highest standard of living in history and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest greenhouse effect acid rain the ozone hole depletion of oil and fish stocks a world shaped and motivated by the effects of past colonialism and all the short term view effects that result from not seeing the holistic forest for the reductionist to trees inevitable historically we didn't have the technology to think any other way but soon in terms of what people do with their lives as I said that technology will be doing most of the old reductionist things that used to take human beings a pencil chewing life time and it seems to me the worst way to prepare for what comes after that is to go on limiting education to the kind that used to Train medieval priests in which you were judged intelligent or stupid because you passed or failed at the set of tests of literacy and numeracy designed to exclude all but the very few and that's very few as in Western very few any minute now technology is going to make the whole shebang I've been talking about a really global matter not the irrelevant small scale matter of how much of the global market your company will get or how you sell your stuff and a hundred different cultures but the humongous possibility that the global community won't necessarily lie down and do it the Western Way the vast illiterate majority out there are still a kaleidoscope of diversity with their roots firmly in their own and information technology is going to enhance that diversity and power it supportive foster it make it viable however small the group in ways we never could before when the best we could do is pretty crude stuff colonize a country make them speak British and wear wigs in their law courts accept you guys some strange reason you wouldn't have won if it hadn't been for French money you know that don't you anyway I think diversity is a really good thing because if you think about it that's how nature has solved the problem of change since the very beginning I mean I don't know if you've ever noticed but in the way organic life seems to evolve to become more and more ordered in the way for example you are born as a blob and you end life as a very sophisticated adult and not very often the other way around in the way this happens life seems to treat the second law of thermodynamics you know the one that says everything I left alone falls apart decays and things left alone hot things left alone go cold of cups of coffee intimate friends should you be here life seems to treat this fundamental or thermodynamics much the same way as my Italian friends treat government regulations I love Italy it's not a country it is a disease for which happily there is no cure but anyway what I'm talking about this attitude towards thermodynamics is manifested in the way that the very successful life forms the ones that developed beyond what you might describe as the primeval Southern California life-form get born lie on the beach die seem to succeed in direct relation to their own ability to appear to at least temporarily dodge the implications of thermodynamics and handle environmental change by changing themselves becoming more complex as a species by developing varieties of themselves each one each one adapted to many different location specific kinds of forms of energy so that no matter how bad the bad weather gets and no matter how long it lasts one of the varieties will survive and through that the species in other words the more complex the species is the better its response to change repertoire is likely to be and the better its chances diversity being basically good for survival it seems to me that the diversity I'm talking about in the social sense in the near future won't work the old way there's just no time we can in the time available give everybody a PhD and anyway it's too late for that I think what we need as I said are some new additional no educational mode that are more inclusive and less exclusive because we have to get the knowledge out there fast and it's got to be knowledge with a new shape first of all because the technology is going to make it possible to express your talents perhaps especially in the virtual reality world in ways that aren't just words and numbers and anyway in the chaotic and innovatory environment tomorrow if we try to organize as ourselves by the old representative division of labour top-down way there'll be anarchy because that old culture of scarcity way only maintains stability through the application of what we call mushroom management keep him in the dark and feed him a lot of manure it's too late for that people everywhere already know just enough to know that there's one hell of a lot that they should know now some of us are working on ways of making that knowledge more available in what you might describe if you wanted to use fancy words as opposed to reductionist forms and kind of match the kind of thinking and what you can do with the new technology ways that don't necessarily cut and slice the material into isolated specialist segments I'd like to show you a couple of seconds better answer that I'd like to show you a couple of seconds are above what I'm doing I'm working on a thing which you could crudely call it a sort of small knowledge web in which all the elements of various kinds of data from widely differing fields humanities Arts and Sciences as it were are all connected all in some way to all a little bit like the brain works so whatever subject area or target data you choose to go to to get to it you travel along a path to the data that reveals several things about your target it's wider context the way it is not necessarily the product of a linear sequence of events the ripple effects it could cause the advantage of such an approach I suppose I would argue is that entering the web is easy it's not frightening it doesn't require special qualifications any gateway will do so you come at the material in a way that suits your particular background if you want to get at it through ice cream start with ice cream if you want to go at it through high energy physics go at it through high energy physics I'll just show you this for a couple of seconds I have to have to tell you what I'm going to show you is not the software i will be using finally because i'm not anywhere near finished and this web consists of 2,200 people linked 17,000 ways and I've done about 1,600 but I have a skeleton structure of the web I can show you and maybe you give you just give a vague feel for how you'll be able to journey through it the final software will give it an appearance and a mode of function after we have gone out in gigantic number of focus groups to talk to teachers about if they had a tool like this how they would expect it to work for them and for the kids in the school so this is not that this is just a skeleton on which to hang some of the early work this is what you might describe as the kind of standard knowledge we've been using up until now and the thing about it is that if you if you know this guy Ferdinand de Lesseps then you know about either engineering or canal building or a 19th century French engineering and canal building because this guy Ferdinand de Lesseps built the Suez Canal okay now if you're the kind of person who knows about Fred and de Lesseps the chances are you're not the kind of person who knows about this one that is a woman called Jenny Lind she was known as the Swedish nightingale in the middle of the nineteenth century and she people claimed that she possibly had the greatest voice of all time if you know all about her the chances are you don't know anything about this guy Sasi Moll 19th century French thinker invented a new kind of Christianity for businessmen strange man shot himself in the head six times and missed if you know about him the chances are you don't know much about this one Alston one of the great early American romantic painters what I'm saying is that what we tend to do in the old way is to silo put knowledge into silos so that you know about one lock but you tend not to know about another now the name of my game of course as you'd expect is to show ways in which these people are actually linked so let's take a look at this particular bunch I won't go right through it because you'll get bored you probably bored already that's tough luck okay take mr. Brewster Brewster is a 19th century early 19th century crystallographer he invented the Kaleidoscope as a matter of interest but his work was very valuable when it came to Mary curry trying to measure the charge above the pitchblende that she was working on before she discovered radioactivity her father-in-law was a follower of that nutcase I told you about who shot himself in the head mischiefs Anne Seymour and one of his followers also was this guy de Lesseps who built the Suez Canal for which Verdi was invited to write the opening music a little number called aji de he wrote this some time after he wrote an absolutely dreadful little number called him as nadir e so that this lady could sing the lead role Jenny Lind made a bomb we say it in English you say that a million she made millions of dollars because PT Barnum remember him PT Barnum the 3-ring circus person invited her to come to America on a tour that he would organize well she made so much money she got married and retired and I'll finish in a second Barnum who kicked off the great fruit you know British owner three-ring circus blah blah blah turned down one day a fail-safe high wire act which was a gyroscopic to control wheelbarrow designed by Elmer Sperry of course invented the gyroscope now if you take a second look at these people yes they linked and they're linked of course in more ways than one oh god I hate doing this hang on a minute here we go yes now you see for example I will I'll be quick Bruce Brewster came up that also with peace of electricity Marie Curie's Marie Curie's lover lingerie invented the sonar down here the Jenny Lind I see the sky Hans Christian Anderson when he wasn't writing children's stories he was writing pornographic letters to miss Lind okay she ignored them now what you get when you take that process - it's absurd conclusion which is what I've done is this this this is not the real software but it'll give you a smell now I'm sorry the guys way back there you can't read the little words and as nothing I can do about that I'm really sorry but here for example we're looking at Lister see this this guy Lister IST ER and here are Lister's immediate and important contacts the people he worked with the people he influenced and so on one of whom was let's say I don't know pastor here is pastor and here's pastors local contacts and people one of whom was a man called cough the man who discovered the tubercle bacillus was knew a lot of people one of whom was a man called Leiby and Libra it was a real mover and shaker you can tell there was a number of people and the number of people he knew and worked with and every time we're looking at that of course all these little yellow people are the people that they knew and this is one pay page out of 2200 so you see what I'm hoping is that it will probably exhaust a teacher's desire - it'll probably give a teacher enough that so that she won't he won't exhaust that web in a whole year I mean to say of course that each one of those nodes obviously comes with a potted biography and you know pictures and graphics and if relevant - paintings or music recordings and so on and so forth the thing about this business of making the material more accessible is you really you're talking about transferring power and knowledge out to the individual much more than ever before as a virtual unlimited bandwidth really kind of fragments information media into a thousand sources that really leads to a few final questions when almost every aspect of life goes virtual what will happen to the nation state when frontiers of local laws and customers no longer have any meaning if I can buy my goods anywhere on the planet who taxes the purchase who makes the goods who has the jobs in which case what happens to my national commercial structures by national employment strategies my national ability to provide social services my nation when I can educate myself in any classroom on earth through distant learning exposed to influences and information from a thousand different sources what happens to my local cultural values when online electronic agents working 24 hours a day to represent me go out onto the web and bring back what my profile tells the agent I want would I ever get anything other than self gratification will I ever emerge from starring in my own utterly personal virtual reality paradise and if all I hear is the news I want to hear what does that do to my political and social opinions and in any case how do you run a country when every individuals electronic agent is inputting every individuals political opinion on every issue in every section of the country every second of the day and night 186,000 times a second what happens to the old pre-internet structures like the European Union or the United States when the internet removes the limitations of time and space from international commercial and political relations and on the international level whose law operates in cyberspace moving from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance isn't going to be easy to leave behind the comfort of believing that only specialists are valuable or of living by standards established for you by somebody else my guess is the first effects of that open access that period of transition I mentioned will show itself in some ways that are turbulent and perhaps negative at the artistic level during this transition will it be a world of home videos and illiterate scribblings and in science how will the average person even with access to global databases make a meaningful contribution to whether or not to spend the billions of dollars in one aspect or other of invertebrate paleontology in other words will open access and the closing of the gulf between the ordinary person and the world of information also bring with it at least temporarily a welter of mediocrity instability mindlessness and self gratification the like of which has never been seen before yes this side of the educational revolution which it will also bring meanwhile maybe we could try a few moves relax the division of labor rule become more flexible realize that already an institution that is utterly satisfied with what it's doing is probably dead and doesn't know it see that if as an institution or an entity or an individual you stand still for too long now just as in the jungle sooner or later something will eat you recognize that in the virtual mobile individualistic demanding marketplace of tomorrow there'll be so many alternatives of washing around in that sea of information that the newly enfranchised individual will be just black admiral shovel in desperate need of a lighthouse in desperate need of an education tailored to give the specific tools for their specific problems now our brains quintessential examples of innovative convergence of work have always been able to handle these issues and now thanks to our technology perhaps so will our social and cultural institutions if we don't use the technology to open a crack in that box that they got put us into we will not be ready for the upheaval as we shift from a culture of information scarcity to the free-for-all that will be the first free-for-all in history the situation we face reminds me very much the things something had happened to me when I was covering the Apollo missions of space missions for the BBC one hundred years ago in the Stone Age I used to find myself with and my colleagues in Moscow from time to time and in a dark bar somewhere a long way from from the commissar one of the locals would sidle up to us and engage us in conversation and sooner or later they asked the same question they said how do you guys in the Western capitalist world survive all that dangerous confusion and anarchy and we said what dangerous confusion and anarchy and they used a word that encapsulates everything that challenges us in future they said choice I am an optimist in this matter because pessimists jump out of the window and are no longer concerned and I'm an optimist because years ago during that part of my career I came across something about you guys that made me feel extremely optimistic about the future because if you sneeze we catch a cold I was covering Apollo and the mandate from the BBC is tell the great British public why the Americans keep doing the same thing go to the moon bounce around come back go to the moon bounce around come back what they really meant was what's different between one mission and another and please they said go instance spend as many months as you like in Houston another Cape find out well it was wonderful I was a most exciting five years of my television career and I got to meet a lot of wonderful people they were really special people those guys anyway I got hate mail for one aspect of my work I think I did fairly well because I'm here but but there was one thing I got hate mail from and all the mail said you know you're paid lots of money to stand on that television up there on the television screen and explain that stuff to us what are they looking at I didn't explain because I couldn't explain on the saloon or surface sometimes they you referred to what is called a cuff checklist and the cuff checklist was a kind of aid memoir now this is not because astronauts are stupid because you know they are not it's because on the surface of the Moon you have that much oxygen and you have to do that much work you don't have that much oxygen so you get the work right or you blow it so on special occasions when really complex methods were concerned there would be a cuff checklist that they could refer to now I never explained this because I couldn't I'll give you I'll just invent what it was suppose you're on the surface of the Moon first time in human history 240,000 miles from the nearest workbench you take a piece of white-hot technology some poor slob of a science or engineer has spent his or her adult life you layered reverently in the lunar dust and you press it a little button and it doesn't work as Carl would have said billions of people are watching you you have got to fix it now so you refer to your cuff checklist and these cuff that checklists never got explained by any of us I'll have to pretend it would say something like if the L R cubed fails option one press the out loud squelch PCM to two and disengaged X Y then if option one fails option two little over five if option two fails option three below R squared and there would be something like half a dozen instructions designed to stave off the possibility of a very embarrassing technological gaffe on the surface of another planet for the first time in human history right at the end of each of these came a phrase that made me an instant optimist about you and your relationship with your technology very healthy relationship because the phrase at the end of each one of these little sheets of them of instructions could never have been written by a British Space Agency or a French Space Agency or a Chinese base or anybody else because at the end of each one of these things it said if all technological repair options to this point have failed kick with lunar boot [Music] well we started a bit late and I over ran I can't see you can we have the lights up I'm informed that we have a few minutes for questions those of you who teach will recognize this technique and put up a hand or you go to the microphone and I choose that people who look the least dangerous reavoice the question in my favor and Duquette you teachers recognize that don't you so I can't see anything is there any more light available out there she Wiz Bonneville is up the road oh there you are okay no you could only put up a hand and shout or you can find a microphone I can't tell you where they are cuz I don't know there's one up here there's one up where the voice is called oh hello okay you got there first make it easy is terrorism one of these social upheavals that you think are going to happen now is terrorism one of the sale of people you mean part of the transitional confusion yes I don't think it's been generated by advances in technology kiddo I think it's been a generated by something that went way before any advances in technology so no I do not think it's part of the transitional confusion generated by the use of technology no more than that I can't say without ruffling feathers next question sir yes can you comment on any of the current collaborative projects going on on the internet such as Wikipedia which is a encyclopedia project is done by the great mass is attempting to a build a encyclopedia from scratch or other similar types of projects and how do they I think I saw that you mean they put an ad didn't they said you want to build it could be to come to with us and we'll do it together yes yes yes yeah the greatest it could be the greatest potential for obfuscation ever since Noah Webster reinvented the English language are our HOA know you are we say you have put your finger of course as you know very well and everyone else on the key problem of the internet how do you know you can trust it I mean I'm sure you do too I'm you know whizzing along and I think I need a quick fact I instead of you know going to the British Library I save some time by going in the net the stuff that I know is inaccurate is legion Legion I don't know how you deal with that what I do know but I mean nobody's invented it yet there's a lovely woman up at MIT called Patti Mouse who is not only a genius but also beautiful and she's working on these electronic agents and the kind of thing she's talking about is being able to have an agent that can tell margarine from butter do you say that here no perhaps you don't and in other words the electronic agent that can can work fast enough to track down the sources of what's there and say no this is crap and not bring it to you but short of that I think we're in for a period of tradition transitional confusion in spades yes but it happens all the time if you look at the junk that was printed not long after Gutenberg you know we had to win our way through that stuff what will be I will manage we filtering is part of the great oh gosh yes madam yes that's you yes yeah I showed you see oh yes oh my god I can't it's a man sorry Mike I thought buddy I can't see okay okay it's every other works you made statements about some of your other works you've made statements about main philosophers coming around and really influencing people like corrupted Darwinism and stuff but I want to know what you think about the main distribution of information shifting from governments distributing information to corporations distributing information that how do you think that's going to affect us I don't agree with you that the main source of information comes from either governments or corporations the main source of information comes from libraries I mean I have to get to play in fact you mean propaganda or selective elements of information but by no means the main source of information I mean the information in your Library of Congress a little bit larger than what mr. Bush says [Applause] or or any other member of any government anywhere on the planet just that he's more amusing so I can't really I don't know that it well I mean I'm not sure I don't care actually I don't think I don't think I think one of the effects of the Internet and the general growing rising standards of education in general is that people are fooled a lot less than they used to be even in my lifetime people are lot a lot less easily fooled people are waking up to realizing but you know what we've called transparent democracy for five six hundred years has been anything but and the sooner we recognize that the better you know we now accept that in a world of realpolitik your government has been assassinating people for 100 years so is ours it happens one day it won't but it's far better that we know about it and then try to bring about a world where it doesn't happen then believe so what I'm saying to you is I think at the end of the 19th century it mattered a great deal what the government told you but I think less and less so now but then that's because I'm pollyannaish I suppose yes sir oh no no joke if I can let you get away from doing I'm kidding okay all right I guess my question was do you give a lot of stock into the ideas like I guess what top are called future shock do you think that people will ultimately be able to adjust to it because of what's occurred historically or do you think that there's some kind of limit that people will eventually approach because of so much information I guess will there be ever be an information overload in the affects of all this psychologically on the individual and society I I don't think that we have room for remotely close to tapping what's between your ears not remotely close and the matter of information overload is simple ignore it I mean ignore it I mean find ways to we've filtered or we filtered throughout our existence whether it's whether it's what the shaman tells you and you know you ignore all other bones except these or feathers right or whether it's whether it's a librarian saying don't waste your time on that muck over there if you want the horse's mouth it's over here I mean there are ways that we but I don't think it I wouldn't believe there's any danger of the human being being overloaded because you can ignore things I do all the time hi oh wait sorry excuse me uh sorry sorry the gods [Laughter] yes pardon me if I've misunderstood but it seemed like you were saying that with the spread of knowledge through the internet that it will increase diversity and it appears to me that that if we all have access to the same knowledge will eventually all become more and more alike such that eventually in the future hundred couple hundred years if we survive the crisis I think that the only the real difference we're gonna need to find is you know another species in from outer space or something yes I understand that point of view I mean feel forgive me saying so it's old-fashioned what I'm talking about when I talk about diversity is the ability of each individual to express themselves that's never happened there are six point 1 billion people out there if they all express themselves it's going to be pretty difficult to make them conform number one number two um I forgot what I was gonna say damn it was a brilliant thought I lived in Bologna I told you that I thought Italy was like dying and going to heaven I lived for a number of years in Bologna back in the early 60s teaching and Bologna for you may not know this some of you may do do know it but Anya's language is a form of dialect of Italian that is almost incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't live in Bologna I'll give you a tiny example of it one phrase in Italian when you say see you tomorrow you say Shiva the M of the mani now I'll say that again and then I'll repeat it in Polynesia gvim of the mani as a blank manga when television came along in the early sixties the people in bologna were really upset they said our culture will be destroyed we will be talking about bloody Romans well today there is a there are two bolognese dialect television stations and the culture is stronger than it ever was before so I think what we're going to do is as I said in the middle of my words that the technology is going to empower that diversity because it's going to make it easy for it to express itself and the only the only way that cultures die out which they did when the Bible was not printed in their language in the sixteenth century is because there's an incredibly limited amount of the ability to express yourself thank you we are actually teaching a course on called cyborg millennium so what cyber what millennium oh yeah so what you have said it's very very pertinent but actually what's actually thinking about the same question and let me repeat a little bit on the question of whether the information technology will enhance cultural and linguistic diversity and where I know I'm very happy that you think that it will but some of us are still having the nagging suspicion because it's probably not so much the idea of information technology but there is another trickster involved that's the capital the commodification of cultures and languages and knowledge systems that are again when you look into it and you'd rather go to the pharmaceutical company or it will go to the entertainment industry so virtually I'm talking more about the indigenous people and peasants and all those people out there that what would we how would they really be keep their processes of cultural production I think I'm really troubled by that fact because once it begins to become modified then they might be seeing their one dance actually through a video rather than through their one ritual performance and daily life you know you're not talking about the internet I think you're talking about what happens with normal human interaction motor size one group next to another have have influences on each other one individual has an influence on the other I still don't think that homogenizes us all far from it it may be that the production of the interaction is yet another addition to the cultural diversity mix I would hope so and I'm afraid on that note I'm beginning signal to stop so thank you very much indeed for coming [Applause] you well if you have no questions I'll sit down oh damn yes sir easy question good I'll duck it what newspapers or magazines ready to get current input on current events well of course the Times of London are running actually it's a question of what you can get really um I suppose yes in England I read the times because it's the best newspaper in England perhaps the world I would read the New York Times if I could get it but it isn't that easy in the sticks right live outside London magazine The Economist because I'm basically a fascist I used to read Scientific American but since I stopped writing for it I don't read it anymore actually the magazine was bought by people somebody came up to me tonight and said what happened to you and Phil Morrison eminent physicist and in general good guy and out because we wrote you know he wrote the column before and after mine sometimes before something about it and they they were bought by new people and everyone was fired including us and now the magazine looks different I'm biased I think it's not very good thank you thank you thank you horrible so those are the magazine's I used to meet um what else history today is pretty good if you like the recent stuff it spends a lot of time on the Nazi period but doesn't everyone these days it seems to be the cheapest thing to teach children because it has movies attached so so those are the magazines two things I read yes I tend not to read in magazines I tend to go and sit in the British Library and read books because it's nice and fun and and they pay me to do something it's better than real work no more questions thank dad yes sir it's my thesis that everyone will finally have access to everything ah if that is the case here comes this question most people he says you don't mind if I repeat this because people don't hear me saying that most people come home from work too tired to go to the Internet it's much easier to turn on the tube you mean the August body for which I do my work I hope that is no longer true because I think television is dead and doesn't know it I think saving your presence oh my god I apologize in general centralized sources of information I think I didn't don't know it and it'll just a matter of time until they've gone with it on the vine I think the great thing about the Internet is it will cause that to happen and actually if you look at history that's exactly what happens throughout history there's a constant diffusion outwards of information and source of information constant diffusion operative of means of what Tom Kuhn described is the hacker winning through so that's my answer my answer to your question yes I can't answer questions from you you're my hero aren't you I'm too scared to speak oh yes yes yes for frippery it's okay and that's all it's okay for I think I think the ins with with it with limited exception from time to time of PBS I think most of its gone down the tubes I think I think if it has any sensible migrated across to to the screen of my laptop I I there are a couple of people I know in the business who have moved out of television and I've gone on got to know those you know funny software people and who are writing programs it will put a background against you that will be under indistinguishable from the real thing only an engineer will know that you did this not walking on a beach in Tahiti but walking up and down your living room important and only an engineer will know because these things and that's going to be wonderful because it's going to make it cheaper to make exciting looking television programs and you know go around the world like I used to for real but never leave your your living room in Portland and what we'll see will be the products of your fertile imagination unconstrained by this filthy business called budgets there aren't anymore anyway are there anymore no well where I come from there are team yes ma'am oops sorry you've let me talk a bit more about what I think education should be today have you ever asked anybody that question before and if you have have they ever answered it this is not fair the only thing the only reason I went on and on about reductionism as I did a bit tonight was because while he's fine and dandy and while I would never let a dentist into my mouth without a degree in dentistry or I would never cross the bridge if it was build by an engineer who knew how to build bridges reductionism has its place and up until now in history it has had a very important place in providing us with the goods and services that give us the highest standard living in the world and in history but I think as I said tonight I think education has to start concerning itself with all these other people out there I mean we've lived a really comfortable luxurious little life in the West us first then you second and I think a recent events have shown that that causes more problems than it solves I think we have to urgently begin to try and get the material out to the rest of the world and I don't mean propaganda I mean raw data and then let them make a bit what they will and I think the way in which we do let the vehicle the educated vehicle for doing that cannot be the reductionist it's too slow it's too complex and it functions for the kind of society in which we live and not today we have to find ways I think as I said in my talk tonight of transmitting the data to them in different forms that make it easier that make it not not easier in the sense of they're stupid but that I mean if all of you go to Italy I'd presume that most people in this country do not in this room do not speak fluent Italian and when you if you go to Italy you'll be God you you will be regarded as stupid because you don't speak the language very well I mean I don't know if we've come across people foreigners who come here and say I would like a very much and you think this guy is really dumb you know he has seven PhDs in the quantum physics but simply because he doesn't speak your language means that he can't explain himself well and you've judged him so I think the people out there are not stupid we have to find ways of getting the knowledge out to the rest of the world so that oh boy I stick my foot in my foot in it here so they no longer live in Stone Age but in something slightly different oh yes yes you're absolutely right sir I was really only talking about the fact that television does how many money anymore well well hang on you've got to deal with that first I mean either television doesn't have any money anymore and we can no longer make these intellectually challenging programs because we can't travel around the world all we find alternate ways of making the program certainly look just as good as they ever did and people have intellectually challenging programming to watch that's a specifically Western issue that I'm I'm addressing the issue of what you've read Brits a new Americans watch on your tube as to whether or not people in the rest of the world living in their unpleasant circumstances in squatter camps or whatever it is dying of starvation and having no e15 no water no hygiene anything else whether they know they're living in the Stone Age it's not a you know there they are I mean in our terms if you this is not politically correct but if you can give people drugs that will save them from dying why not do so if it comes happens to come from a I suppose it's correct I suppose it historically correct to say that it just so happens that gosh I don't even know if I want to say this because it's gonna sound wrong it wouldn't sound wrong in England because we're not religious the consciousness of stewardship inherent in Christianity that says the planet belongs to you and you must do what you can to make it better has is what has driven Western what we call progress it seems to me that in the Middle Ages people were told the planet belongs to you it is you it is your stewardship you're in charge of it and you must make it better than when you died it should be a better place than when you left and you said therefore go out and change it so in a sense Western the Christian the judeo-christian ethic allows you to change the environment for the better other other entities in other countries don't have this particular dynamic view of the interaction between the human being in the environment that's not how fault it's an accident of history it but it does end up with me having ampicillin when I have respiratory disease which I can take and it stops me from dying that's a marginally better than the other throwing a bones into the air to see whether or not I'll live so I make no apology for saying that accidentally we have a society that is capable of doing wonderful things to keep people alive and make them better informed and in that sense I use the words donation I I see little value in enough little value I mean every understanding of the universe has its own relative values I can't say that anybody's view of God is any better than mine since I have no view so it sort of doesn't matter it's an irrelevant discussion to me but that I can keep a child alive or let it die is a major difference between my society and theirs and I I can I make no apology for thinking that mine is better if I can keep that child alive that's so there's at least two things to be said about this one most linguists would agree that English is an extremely efficient tool it is the kind of I think a synthetic structure that is better than non synthetic structures which are most other languages on the planet however the other thing to be said about it is ask any Frenchman if he agrees with you and he'll say you're talking garbage you know as somebody once said in a joke I think this was good enough for Jesus Christ it's good enough for us and as far as the French are concerned God invented French so I think your question in a sense in the nicest possible is that there is irrelevant there are certain structures I suppose within what one describes as I suppose the the the way the English language functions the way the English language I'm not sure that it's any better than anything else languages describe reality as we see it we see it I suppose most of the four hundred fourteen thousand eight hundred twelve words the English language were there before the Scientific Revolution No 99.9 recurring of them were there before the Scientific Revolution so that doesn't really prove much that ours was better than theirs or anybody else's sir oh dear I'll stop after this because I think I should without comment on the state of affairs after September the 11th achieve with this is very very difficult as a foreigner I mean Europeans don't see it the same way you do and I'll ruffle feathers and you've been so kind to look after me and you've been such good hosts that I feel like a churl of saying these things yes the rest of the world is has for many many decades been appalled at your profligacy not the kind of not just the prophet your prophet cuz he doesn't cause people to be poor and die of starvation and disease and malnutrition in various parts of the world of course it doesn't that doesn't stop them thinking it does you know as long as I can remember I never forget the first time I met Americans when I was a young man at Oxford and my first impression was that they threw things away and you're gonna laugh at this but back in the early 60s we didn't have you know way when you pick up a glass with a napkin a paper napkin we didn't have paper napkins nobody has them except you and I remember thinking good grief you know we were given a drink at somebody's house an American household in England and we were given these glasses with his paper things so we said what's his for everybody was holding him because you didn't want the condensation to make your hand cold or wet and we thought good god how he feet how wonderful you know and then and then people get another drink and throw it away now I now know that this is a silly thing to think but back then I didn't I thought this was extraordinary multiply that a million times and you get close to the kind of view in some squatter camp in the Middle East about you and your culture and the luxury life you live and the apparent lack of concern about the rest of the world and sometimes it's not just a parent I was in Lincolnville Nebraska ten years ago and I met a very nice woman the British film crew visiting the mayor gave a party it was really kind of all the people in the town to give his party and a woman came up and said where do you come from and I said London and she said which state is that and I said it's not a stated to England and she said uh-huh which state is that and I think that kind of is absurd example of what the rest of the world sees you're very rich and you're very you don't have to give a rat's ass about the rest of us why should you and in a way if you closed your borders and said get on with it you people we don't care we kind of understand it because we're like that but you are this incredible dichotomy you are very rich very powerful and you make all these caring noises you know and we don't know what to make of that because we wouldn't you know I mean the British didn't do that they enslaved everyone and made them wear wigs in their court so you're a very confusing bunch of people especially when you then say well we'll solve this problem with tomahawks that really really confuses us so III think that so many people died on September the 11th I mean how do you want to talk about it but if I have to I have to say that in Britain we have IRA bombs every two or three weeks and you know five thousand people have been killed in the last thirty years and on my country and do you learn to live with it and that's the way life is and maybe what happened was a wake up call in the sense that for the first time you were experiencing what the rest of the world has been too poor and too vulnerable to avoid you know the rest of us have lived with it it's a terrible thing to say and I apologize for it but I believe it to be true if it means that we all start to think more about why these things occur and go to the root causes which are almost always corruption and poverty those things can be cured very easily you can poison the wells you can poison the worlds out there easily by giving them what they haven't got which is food and and electricity and above all information I was saying on that radio program a smoker but in a few years time cell phones will be so cheap you could parachute them into the rest of the world and that'll do it the minute those people I was I was in the Eastern Bloc before the wall went down in eastern Germany the first time people started to be able to see Western German television same language and they never looked back that's all
I haven't heard this yet, but I already know it's going to be amazing. So, I'll go ahead and highly recommend it. James Burke is the greatest science history communicator who ever lived.