James Burke ( Connections ) Interview 5-17-20 with Patrick Rodgers (Quarantine Interview Series)

good afternoon everybody I am very pleased to be doing a live interview an exclusive live interview with James Burke if you were old enough to see men walk on the moon and you lived in England James Burke was the anchorman who told you what you were seeing he is the presenter and writer of a number of popular series including connections the original there's connections too there was connections 3 and also the day the universe changed I own all the DVDs that you can find most of these programs on dailymotion and YouTube he's also the author of a dozen books and if I kept reading his bio we'd run out of time in fairly short order so we're gonna talk about a number of topics today and naturally kovat is going to be among them the information that we have about pivoted seems to change almost daily but less the viewers think it unreasonable for me to ask James to make predictions about a pandemic that's evolving rapidly I want them to understand the gift that he has for anticipating the future based on an incredibly detailed knowledge of history so to drive that point home I'm going to show a brief clip from the original connections show and it has nothing to do with pandemics but it demonstrates the ability of our guest to analyze patterns and foresee future developments now I want you to bear in mind that this clip aired over 40 years ago in 1978 so let's take a look this shape is the shape of our future because the only way the money can move around fast enough to keep up with trade is electronically from bank to bank through computers or in the case of you and me through this the credit card this is you coded into that magnetic tape see in there is the world's newest virtue credit worthiness are you a good risk or not and what people need to know about you before you can become a coded signal on that stripe makes this much more than a substitute for money it's a judgment on you and that's why here where they make credit cards the security is so tight because you steal one truckload of credit cards and you've practically got the key to Oh every bank in the country the question is is any security tight enough as the data on you and your credit flows from bank to shop to employer to police to tax inspector what happens to privacy and if you don't want to credit how do you live in a world where they don't take cash what will happen when being in debt all the time is the normal way to live so I want to bring James out on camera now and address that clip hi James hi thank you for joining us from Europe where I know it's a much later on in the day about that clip these were incredibly prescient points that you raised before the existence of PayPal or venmo identity theft debit cards or cashless shops all of which are explicitly predicted or hinted at very strongly and what you said over 40 years ago so I want the viewers to take note that my questions asking you to predict things are not unfair given your track record but now that we've got that out of the way let's just get started let's talk about the Black Death one of the fascinating things you talked about in your programs and I'd like you to briefly recap is how the plague affected the value of Labor and also how it created a demand for what Americans would call notaries or registrar's well I guess the most important thing to say about the Black Death was that it it hit a society that had been structured in that way for several hundred years everything that we were it was a time with no telecommunications with very little communication systems of any kind well over 95% of the population would have been illiterate people really went further than eight or nine miles their home because you had to be back at night before dark because there was no light so the country really operated on our system social system that had been in in a moveable existence for hundreds of years and that really boiled down to land work there was no apart from apart from artisans like iron workers Smithy's of people who would paint your house craftsmen if you like nineteen here the population lived on the land work the land it was an agricultural society not an industrial society and what retired what happened with at the time situation was that you work as a what kind of a serf you belong to the aristocrats who owned the land and in whose house little house somewhere on the land you live your alert a bit and that was your lot for your entire life the plague decimated the population I think that I guess I guess for England I learned that for Europe I was twenty five million people Wow so the population went down by between 1.2 1.2 and 2/3 an incredible shock to the system because an agricultural society lives on the effort of its laborers and now there weren't any so the first thing it happened was that the laborers were so rare that the relationship between them and the aristocrats changed radically and it stopped being one of permanent servitude and started being cash it started being wages or rental and the worth of every labor of course was immensely more now because there were fewer of them I mean the production of food agricultural use the land dropped like a stone so the aristocrats who owned the land were instantly poorer and now they also had laborers who could kind of say this is my wage and this is what I want you don't want me I'll go to somebody else never before possible so the whole of society radically changed and because of the new interaction new contractual relationships if you right between our Socratic laborer the importance of contractual relationship became and that's where this business of the notaries suddenly becoming acutely important everybody had to have some kind of deal or the man would walk off the land and go and watch somebody else so none of this at least for 100 years pushed very hard toward technological alternatives because that depended on many other factors which weren't present at the time like steam power for example um so the best the best you could do really was to try and persuade as many laborers as you could to accept the way that you could give them and help them go on working around the same old way gradually things began to change because gradually technological novelties began to arrive and help society adapt in many ways in the population but that's in a nutshell and you also needed notary and the inheritance paperwork because so many people were leaving inheritances well the problem in throughout history is what we see who gets what when people die I mean you know marriage in the 3rd millennium BC in Mesopotamia is it's instituted to make sure that land remains in the same hands that same people same family so a woman brings her diary into a family and it remains there in order to help pay for the continued and ownership of the land by that family men go out but they get women and come back with them as wives so they always remained with the family so institutions are set up to make sure that happens and the contractual obligations were terribly important at the time so as far as labor and the importance of people who are working the land we've we've already seen a repeat of this right now in America where the government has classified seasonal or migrant farm workers as essential because if the crops aren't harvested in time they will wither on the vine they'll rot and there'll be a disruption in the supply of the food chain on the flip side of that we also now know that many people could actually work from home who previously had been working out of the home so I wonder if you foresee a more permanent shift to stay at home labor and I wonder if you see an increase in the value of labour for jobs that can't be done from home and are considered essential I think this covin experience will turn out to have been an accelerator in the sense that it will move us faster towards what I think we were going for anyway and especially through this new relationship we have in our work situation where many people have now for the first time ever in their lives set at home and done the job they used to do by getting on a train and going to their office and working with 27 other people coming back home at 5 o'clock and I don't think we'll go back I mean there are too many savings to be made if you have that kind of system people live in their own houses you don't have to rent big office space you don't have to have canteens lots and lots of stuff and save and yet do you get the work done just as well because it's done as it is in the office in a strange way electronically in motor tape most people sit at a computer these days and I mean you know technically speaking there is no reason for them at after sit anywhere except in front of a computer that could be at home so I think we'll we'll never look back in the sense that we will move towards I mean people that you and me people in the Communications business have been doing this for some time I mean I I live on my computer I don't go to an office anywhere my office is my computer and I think this is the new way then we'll still be need for people to do jobs not sitting on computers doing things like construction like public public transportation um I'm not sure that that were also the value of the people doing that work from what it is now I think there may be more people out there looking for that kind of work because not everybody does work on a computer a lot of people don't question is you know if they're if the if the if the people who own the companies want to cut back it's going to be possible to cut back on some of those people who come in if only to service the people who sit at the computers like canteens and cleaning and various other things like that so we I think we may have a temporary period where we see problems concerning how many jobs are available for what we might have called ones unqualified people but that's coming anyway that's coming anyway that's coming with the advance of you know artificial intelligence and robotics which are going to do away with the need for human beings to do certain kinds of jobs completely and then the long term I think we have to look at what work is and why we do it and what we get from it and whether or not ultimately and there's been a couple of experiments I think in the states in small areas whether or not we should look towards the possibility of universal basic income that you get a basic income whether you work or not and that int that basic income is slightly like a pension may be better because it gives you enough to live on for you and your family but you don't necessarily have to have a job you might have to qualify by proving that you lost a job to a machine and then there was no other way you could have done what you do but I think that's telling too you I wanted to talk to you about the terrifying outbreak of cholera in London in 1854 obviously neither of us is anti science but the medical establishment really they were completely wrong in every way about the cholera epidemic and ultimately it was novel thinking and very meticulously gathered data that solved the mystery and arguably was the genesis of Epidemiology can you tell us what happened there in a nutshell yeah and I'm not sure what happened was it as gistic became important for the first time and here's why Korah turns up in 118 the first time in 1830 something but it really hits big in sort of 1850 in London the biggest city by far in the world at the time and it hits and nobody knows what it is you know at the time medical opinion is that all disease is caused by bad smells or bad air malaria French opera which taught that because Marla Aria means bad air malaria so the traditional way of dealing with most diseases is to let somebody lose a lot of blood I'm one of two other crazy things that doesn't work and and people are dying like flies and that's something that nobody is capable of no medical science at the time can't handle at all and what happens is that there's a there are bunch of physical friendly societies and these are kind of trade unions before trade unions and their job is to take it small amount of money a few pennies from poor the workers and then if they're not well if they have a child who zeros on paid for their care will pay for the time away from work when they're not earning friendly societies they were called and these people are obviously keen to know how bad things are going to get to know whether or not they charging enough premium to then provide the money that everybody needs and so they're interested in finding out more about why people are dying where there and one of them is a fellow who trained in France in a mansion in France called far and he become ranged in medical statistics and at the time around about 1850 the first really detailed statistics start appearing about deaths you know I forget that it caught actuarial tables who dies where and why and of what and this allows him to do an analysis of who dies where and he discovers that many more people have died near water than further away from it so he does a kind of map of London and he looks at the number of deaths and where they died and sure enough the big number of death happens closer to the river and then they begin to say well what's in the river and then they look and then they say what's in the river it's where all the sewage is dumped because there is no sewage system and gradually and it becomes clear that what's happening is cholera is carried in contaminated water that is drunk by people because that's where they got their water from the Thames so once they started building sewage alternatives lecturers it stopped and that's really what what it boil down to gathering the data about how far about the Thames you stop getting cholera so it was really statistics that solved that issue where people were getting their water from it wasn't wasn't there a case where there was a two streets and one Street was getting all its water from a certain company and the other Street was getting so you had this side-by-side comparison where you can look at on Street and say you're all getting cholera and you all get your water from you know X Y Z water company your side of the street in close proximity they have less or no cholera but they're getting their water from someone who's drawing it from a pure source than not the town yes yes and then this was finally proved by John Snow there was a cholera epidemic particularly bad around the place called Broad Street where there was a pump and he said if we're right this pumps doing it and so they stopped the pump working and the cholera went away and they said hang on this is a pump pumping water up from artesian well how could it get there they dug down and discovered that the cart easier well is being retaliated by seepage of sewage into it so that just confirmed everything there you go one of the one of us sort of amusing and fascinating things for me as a non British person is the the British government's response to that cholera outbreak and the role that they played in creating this modern British cultural identity this this the stiff upper lip and fair play and jolly good show and all of this was I don't I really don't want to use the word propaganda because that's a loaded word but all of this was kind of a government campaign it wasn't something that sort of bubbled up organically can you talk about that just briefly oh my god no reason about it I mean it's Victorian values Victorian writers that have to do with how the upper classmen and and it took it took its most obvious form in the creation of what we call public schools would you call private schools some of the great British public schools the fun of that as time a because they took children away from the cities on into school out in the countryside so they were less likely to bump into cholera and disease and then it taught them according to principles of new a new kind of American religion called muscular Christianity as part of what was also known as the Great Awakening which was a kind of revival of religious belief in Victorian England and this included you know obviously going to church a lot at the schools and every Church had its own chapel and the before it got the kids out in the open air where they thought disease wouldn't get them and to do that they introduced for the first time ever the fact that sports would be part of the curriculum and it would happen every day every week whatever you decided and of course those two sports winter rugby and summer cricket so everybody became rugby or cricket players and then that whole institutionalized business of fair play and and if you lose be a good loser shake hands it's called stiff upper-lip blood wrap this was really I'm not sure it filtered down too much to the lower classes but it was worth the government wanted and it wasn't be propaganda course yeah I just I always hesitate to use that word just because it you know so for some people it can be can be a loaded term but you know I'm certainly not gonna argue that point with you it's yeah but good propaganda for a good cause you know we have a lot of places have quarantined for kovat and in those places we've seen pretty much across the board improvements in the quality of air and water because pollutions been reduced since everybody's staying at home and factories aren't operating and so forth so now that we've had this breath of fresh air even if we've had it from sticking our heads out the window and inhaling that's where quarantines do you anticipate a renewed appetite for green initiatives or is that something that's just gonna get lost in the noise of economic recovery no no I don't think it'll go away I mean it was we were moving in that direction very strongly anyway as the public the whole will become more and more aware of the value of what's going on in laboratories throughout the world looking at what new technology they do and you know we are already beginning to buy lots of electric cars and there isn't in the laboratories already working well there are one or two things that make it easier to move towards a common neutral world rather than what has been discussed over the last eight ten or fifteen years which is you know shutting down shutting down plants and creates uhm cutting back heavily on the old kind of massive industries nanotechnology offers a possibility to continue to be a just really active while not necessarily pumping more stuff into the atmosphere two or three little examples there is already in the laboratories the means to spray solar cells onto an object in such a way that it will make its own power from any form of radiation whether it's solar or nighttime so you spray your car you don't need batteries it will run on on on on light chef solar energy there is already a bit of ography and ability to stick one end of a straw into the dirtiest water you can come across and suck clean water out the other end that's going to be extraordinary for the third world third world there are membranes it can be put over smokestacks that take everything out except clean air so there are I think the public is becoming more and more aware that these opportunities exist and that we should and that they won't call they won't demand a radical rethink of our industrial situation and therefore I think they'll get more support so another instance in which Co vid is kind of an accelerating event yes yes mm-hmm so there have been a lot of people saying that life is never going to return to the way it was and that we'll be living with a a new normal do you think that's true in the long term and if so what are some of the changes that you anticipate I don't think that there'll be any be major changes immediately I think however we have become fairly accustomed first of all because of the ability to stay at home and work on a computer I think we've become fairly ready to accept the fact that we don't necessarily have to work from 9:00 till 5:00 every day and go to an office or a city in the same city centre and do that I think that will reflect itself in the way people behave and the kind of lives we lead when as I say millions of people don't have to flown into the city everything's run over you I think that would be a permanent chip I think it I think we will take a while to get over this business of distancing but I think we'll get back to cuddling family so let me let's say a year or two I think I think I think the green cuddle I mean you know right up next against people and I think that won't last very long I think we will go back to being crowded if we want to because it's fun being crowded cinemas festivals that kind of stuff people like that but I think there will be an undergoing another an underpinning awareness which we had lost oddly enough of the potential that a pandemic can turn up at any time because the fact if you know the history you know we have lived with epidemics of some kind almost every year for the last five or six hundred years they may not never they have been very bad in where you live but somewhere people were dying at a very high rate and we have earlier on of course we didn't know about that because the press didn't tell us was press didn't exist on media telecommunications and so on but in the last hundred years or so I think we have tended to slightly ignore that the rest of the world very often is suffering from epidemics great honor in the third world so I think in wareness of that might make us a little more prepared for what to do next time around let's hope it's taught the government at least how to do that it certainly would be nice to see the government learning some lessons from what's happening abroad particularly in the US which does not have a great track record for paying attention to the rest of the world so I'm gonna move myself on to the screen to give you a moment to fiddle with your computer because I understand you you have a little presentation for my next question I've asked you a number of times to make predictions and part of what makes these these shows that you've done 40 years ago so much fun to watch even today is the you really did a great job of anticipating changes and I mean obviously I enjoy all the little historical facts and the fun stories too but how is it done again can you explain the art of prediction to us well there are two things to be said there are two hundred things to be said but let me say a couple then the brain is it exists primarily to predict because staying alive means making the right decision turning left hiding behind a bush running away marrying the right person there are many many ways in fact I can't think of a single way in which every second of your life you're making the your brain is making a prediction and allowing me to make a decision about what to do next you know back the right horse but whatever um the great thing about that is because the way the brain is structured which is off the top of my head something like ninety billion brain cells each one carrying up to twenty five thousand links with another brain cell so the number of ways in which a signal can go through that is certainly bigger than the atoms in the known universe so it's a big thing and everybody's got one and a nice example of the way the brain acts in this predictive way is for example the way you are understanding me now I mean if you think about the speak listen event going on between me and you there is no time is there for you to go into your head find the word I just said in your lexicon your dictionary in your head and see that it makes sense and come back and listen for the next one because if that's what you were doing if you were all he were doing was accessing in there a lexicon the size of the average sixteen-year-olds vocabulary which these days is reckoned to be about twenty thousand words sounds a lot there are four hundred and fourteen million thousand words in the English language so you're looking in there through a lexicon of 20,000 words and one millisecond per active viewer retrieval would be taking pretty seconds to understand each word what I'm saying and you're not doing that I trust no what you seem to be doing is using the new rules that you know about language grammar and syntax what words can follow each other and what words can't plus the look of my face the muscles on my face my tone of voice and the way you think I'm going in the subject I'm discussing anyway and everything else it allows you to run a number of scenarios ahead of me part of setting up the word the next word that I might say and then when I say it dumping the ones that were wrong and setting up the next set of scenarios and going on doing that as long as I go on doing this blah blah blah and what's that mean of course interesting Lee is that you are giving this interview my part of it before I am and you're saying what you know what I'm saying before I say it under anything else I might have said so in a sense when when does why you bothered to watch but there we are I use this principle to develop over the last few years I think I'm called the king with the knowledge web and I hope you can see it on the screen now can you give me a moment and we'll get that up and running and here it is here's the K web okay good now this K web I as I said been working on it for some years as you can see there are a number of names on the screen linked with each other and over to one side there's the name and the biographical details and so on of the man I'm looking at at the moment who's Mozart and you see if I can do this more of his biographical details you know anyway that I have about 2800 people from history all of them linked in with each other according to who was important in their life whether in their work or their own personal life who they influenced or influenced by them and so on and so forth so the people who matter so here for example you have Mozart and I just want to show you how one can go through a series of steps that bring us to the modern world through the ways in which people interacting in the past and one of the reasons that kind of interaction is interesting is that change usually happens because people and people come together in new ways they kind of cause 101 to make three and the outcome is quite often more than the sum of the parts so quite often it's a surprise and what I'm trying to do with this knowledge room is to give people the chance to take the many thousands of journeys they can through this to two thousand eight hundred people make twenty thousand ways by seeing how it happened in the past so let's make help or take Mozart wrote on stone the idea of The Marriage of Figaro from a French playwright called beaumarchais a beaumarchais also helped to launder the money across the Atlantic to help new Americans since they were so called war of independence fully appreciated for that reason he was a big pile of Thomas Jefferson Jefferson liberal liberal thinker interview sorry influenced by the thinking of an Italian philosopher called Bavaria thing about my career is he wrote his first book about phenology why he put people in prison he said and if a person kills and we execute them why do we kill in order to kill the killer and he was influenced in turn by a couple of people in Vienna for college full-time who invented what his court had been reading and this became wildly popular in the 19th century because he could read the bumps on a person's head theoretically it said you could tell the size of the organs under the skull these organs were criminality you know gentleness a nativity you know wherever whatever character you want and if there was a bump that was a extra well-developed thing so if you find a very big bump of criminality you'd know the guy was a criminal and you could maybe do something to change this person's character which interested social reformers like a German called fun who was so keen on the whole thing that he got very excited was put in jail or they tried to put him in jail for non-violent action the public action and he went up before a judge to be judged a man called ETA Hoffmann who in his spare time wrote creepy stories about the deck their greatest reach in the middle of night and these stories profoundly influenced Edgar Allen Poe who wrote his own creepy stories and one of those stories was taken as a as a theme by recommend and often one of his I think concertos operas and rough matter of was at a party in Long Island Monday and he met another young Russian in America working on something and so impressed Rachmaninoff he gave the guy five thousand bucks which in 90 prints use a lot of money which allowed Sikorsky to develop the helicopter what up so moves up to the helicopter intend unusual and unexpected jumps I finished my business that's amazing good evening so what I'm trying to show that is is how above all change comes along quite often in the least expected ways whatever example I enjoy if I could just to take your second to tell you this one I mean in 1705 unit came the political union of Scotland with England and the big deal was what this allowed was the Scottish whiskey makers to get access to the thirsty America market and so they got very excited about trying to get more bang for their buck and more profit from the American market so they went to a fella called black who taught physics at Emory University it's cotton and said how can we find a way to use less fuel but to boil out the same amount of mash to make the same amount of steam to then distill and do wonderful whiskey and save money on the fuel so he did a lot of work into all that stuff and he came up with knowing quiet steam is as hot as it is he caught it latent heat and this was what allowed black to tell the university repairman how to repair his bit of technology and make it work better the repairman was called James what the technology company became a steam engine and hence bingo thanks to whiskey you get the Industrial Revolution I think probably thanks to whiskey we've gotten many things over the years I have to deviate just for a second because I I do see a comment from somebody that's asking if you're york' web is accessible to the public is that just a private tool that you use or is that something that's online for other people to use as well yes it's not not online yet because I haven't finished it it's almost finished but there are versions of it available if you go to www.ketv.com there's a bunch of people here as a california running that for me and they're delighted if you get in touch with them all right I've just no I should say one last thing my main aim when it's finished and that should be in the next year or so is to make it available of course free because I'd love to have it been used in schools and maybe first universities to teach people to think laterally so if it's not it won't cost excellent excellent I'm sure people are looking forward to that and I know I'll enjoy playing around with it as well I wanted to talk about a theme that's really common through a lot of your shows which is about the rate of change and the rate of change in technology is greater now than any other time in human history how do we ensure that our ethics and our legal system and our other aspects of our society keep up with this pace of technological change that's a very difficult question because the trouble with technology and the speed with which it brings change is that change challenges the institutional nature of our society and our institutions I think about politics finance education medicine the major institutions in our society come from a history of a point event at some time in the past when they were created in order to deal with a particular kind of problem so our institution to our product of the past dealing with the issues of the past according to the values of the past for example a wild generalization but I believe it parliamentary democracy is the answer to bad roads and no telecommunications you find a way somebody for somebody to represent a number of you and then he or she take the long and difficult journey to the Capitol and then stay there and represent your point of view as well as they can until it's time to come back again and say did you notice what I got for you and will you vote for me again now that that's variously back as far as it could be I suppose in 13th century a Britain but that institution solved problems that we no longer need to solve and that's why I'm going to be rude now that's why our country Britain is run by a bunch of people in a large wooden your own shouting at each other now when you have computers like like Frontera one of the new ones capable of doing a quintillion operations a second to dealing with every decision you've ever made in your life in one second with the ability to access pretty much any knowledge you need instantly there are other ways to run society than with 17th century parliamentary kumar's and this is true I think of increasingly most of our institutions it goes back to what we were saying earlier about the fact that doing things using human beings is going to be too slow I mean if you think go out on a limb here if you think about this curve in issues and you look at the news reports about everybody working very very hard indeed all over the world to try and find a vaccine what you see is what you would have seen 100 years ago - people just bring liquids into little glass tubes and then looking at them through microscopes and blah blah there is one as far as I know maybe more there's one program that's throwing the problem into a very very big computer and saying look at the molecular structure of this thing and see the kinds of things that we ought to be doing to try and stop it working and I don't know whether that computer will come up with the answer or not but you see what I'm saying that that that we will increasingly society have to accept the fact that we don't do things with human beings we do things with computers and at best what we do is make a decision about what we want the computer to do know that is a political decision and how we do that means the subject that can go on for hours about but it doesn't necessarily mean sitting in a big wooden room yelling at each other government by computer government by direct democracy okay interesting well it'll take me into a couple of areas I'm happy to talk about if you like big data and predictive analytics let's save the big data for a different question but predictive analytics by all means go ahead well two things sometime I think in the early 18th century the marvelous French physicist called in a class and he said you want me to predict everything no problem tell me everything and of course nobody ever could with mega computers growing faster and bigger by the hour we are now almost ended in the situation of where we can pretty much collect all the data that remotely relates to a situational and trucking the algorithms and see what patterns there are in the data and what those patterns tell us I'm not really understood this property but I'll have a go at it back in 1950 something statistician came up from stuff called called decision trees and he said making a decision about whether or not people will behave in a certain way is like a tree with a branch on it which has twigs on it which have leaves on it which has a leaf on it and as you go down towards that leaf you you refine the number of people involved we've been through the previous stages to get to that and then you look at what they're doing and that'll tell you where most of these people are going to go in terms of what their behavior will be in other words it's kind of behavioral prediction if you are capable of using predictive analytics to throw the algorithm into a sea of data about people you will be able to find out how they really want to do what they really want to do and to do that there's a lot of shouting going on at the moment with tracing and tracking and all that about losing privacy as if we hadn't already lost it I mean at least for 15 years we've really capable of following much code data exhaust and that's what happens every time you buy something use your credit card buy a ticket see a doctor the buy pair of shoes travel somewhere I mean everything we do including of course everything we do on a computer every time you click the information is available to say what it clicked now as a very crudest level this is why some companies can say to you when you're buying something from them online you might also want to look at this not because they're guessing but because they followed what you've done so far and they know that 99% your going to look for that and this can translate very easily into what we might do in order to run our society without men in a room shouting at each other because this is the way that you find out what people want I mean what the way people live tells you what they want that when people spend their money what they do how they enjoy themselves these all add up to what people want life to be like and what you do in predictive analytics is put all that together and discover what everybody wants and then look at a way in which you can run society providing as much as possible what everybody wants this is supposed to be what politicians do but they don't and it's one prime reason why they don't in Britain there are 160 million people to suggest that 60 million people's desires wishes of life but life can be dealt with adequately through three alternatives labor conservative and Lib Dem is crazy I mean you know 50 60 million people have many many more requirements that can be met by three ways of doing it maybe three any ways of doing it maybe even 30 million ways but not three that's what I mean about replacing the men in the box with each other in a sense you almost know how people are going to vote before they vote with the predictive analytics if it's good enough you don't ask them to vote because there's nothing to vote for or do you say all you say is nothing I mean you say we think if you say anything you say we've arranged for life to be like this for you is that right and now I come back saying you bet because if predicting Emily takes you're close to being really producing what the person being I'm still in like how society functions physically out in the world that's that's what the computer gets on with to arrange you know like if nobody wants to go on a bus ever again then you've dumped the buses and one of the things you do out there is to say okay no more buses everybody's got me so you know it's good to be we're not even going to be asked because we haven't been asked well know we'd be telling in the ways that we spend and move and love and behave and go the data exhaust is us telling what we want well I know one of the things you're very keen on is nanotechnology I saw a speech you gave on YouTube in which you envisioned a machine that could replicate essentially anything including itself and in the US we already have the government cracking down on 3d printers that are capable of making guns and gun parts and thinking about the world economic system if you could just make an unlimited supply of gold that would certainly have a big impact on that and if you no longer need to buy consumer goods what happens to the companies that make those consumer goods so in all of that my real question is would the people in power ever allow such a machine to even exist that's a nice nineteenth-century question people in power are dealt with by hacker the hacker always wins so I don't think there's any question that the people in power being able to prevent nanotechnology occur let me say a little bit about nanotechnology in response to what you were saying about the things that would do I mean another technology basically and then of fabricator is what I was really talking about and this is a machine that takes it an atom and put it together with another atom to make a molecule so you take for example two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen you get h2o which is water and you can do that with everything except one a team well pretty much and the key thing about this is that another fabricator will get those atoms from essentially 90 something 98% of what none of fabrication needs to make these things from essentially Earth sorry dirt air and water and then what you need is it shall have Micro Micro Micro Micro factory to push these things together to get the the atoms together into a little clump and then to make the molecules get together in clumps to make stuff and then put the stuff together to make things so that's that's a nano fabricator and it's coming because two years ago at University of Manchester the first piece of equipment that would move those little atoms together to make a molecule was developed and it's working and they're moving ahead my guess is I'd say 40 years it'll probably be 50 or 50 but it's in that ballpark and when you have a nano fabricator you are entirely autonomous you know it'll make anything as you said anything you want food clothing building heat power telecommunication equipment you name it it'll make it all you have to do is to give it the lead I think where the molecular structure to aim for Chilean which means of course you can live any real I can live on a mountain you can live in Antarctica no pollution of course no because the pollution goes back in the Machine and it's sweeter know anything really ever you've got everything you absolutely unique at that time we presume you know we'll be able to travel early human beings holographically if you want you can have their own granny to dinner and she consider cross the table for me unless you try actually ending hunger and put your arm right through but she's there and anybody else she wanted you can turn your house or whatever it is into the Globe Theatre and watch Shakespeare plays with holographic actors during it give me a thing you can do anything in life you can be in touch as we've learned in this recent coverage situation you can be in very close touch with people electronically quite easy what happens when we don't need any money when we don't need any companies you see the thing about who gets laid off when when company that makes something nobody wants anymore I'd anyway there's no money they don't get laid off they themselves have nano fabricators so they don't need a job the interesting thing is what will happen when we all live like that when the remove value systems worth anything I mean you know you want gold make gold you want the middle either make it perfect copy of the Mona Lisa you want to be rich beyond your dreams what would you like have it for nothing question is what are we going to do with our brains and I suppose an optimist would say and I say this because the pessimists jump out of a window and I'm no longer involved after mr. play it's a wonderful opportunity for people to be creative in a way people have never been able to before so the Dukan sit there and think of something absolutely wonderful and have your nano fabricator make it and then show it to people and if they want it send them a copy so you know the optimist says this could be the River Renaissance like never seen before so I'm I'm for it not against it because as I say pessimist is jump out the window and are no longer at all yeah I'd say I'm for it too I would certainly like the ability to have anything I want at my fingertips so I want to go back to two connections and you know the other shows that you've done one of the things that I really love about the shows is that you talk about people and the discoveries they made and these people didn't have university credentials and in many cases they didn't even have a background in the thing that they discovered or invented some of those discoveries were ridiculed or suppressed by mainstream science in particular I'm thinking of the continental drift theory which was invented by a meteorologist if I remember correctly so nothing everybody mocked him for thirty years and then finally they came around and said hey said you know looks like you were right about that whole continental drift thing and it seems to me as a layman in today's world science has become even more orthodox and there's even less room for novel thinking or dissenting theories and it seems like fewer discoveries are coming from Noodlers as you've affectionately called them on the show is my take on that right or have we just kind of run out of things that people can discover unless they have a laboratory and funding grants and things of that nature well people do you see people do I mean I think with what is happening in computers it is becoming increasingly likely than it is another very long time I don't know how many years 13 20 50 people will have the capability of using computers in a way they just about do some of us now but most not yet saying to the computer like saying you know Siri invent me something oh no I think it would be a very good idea to produce a thing that does this and I don't know how to do it but I know what I wanted to do so here's a detailed list of the outcome of one you do not go and do it and whoever she is there yo somebody goes off to make a commercial computer uses all the knowledge of the planet comes back it says is this what you want to do say well I'd like to change this than that nut so you can I think be creative I think in the old world of people doing things you were right in saying that science has become extraordinarily precise and specialized niche oriented where you know to be a great success be the only person in your field who knows what to do well that is good a very rapid to be superseded by what computers to do so I think the potential for innovative thinking will be enhanced enormously because I keep going back does not don't keep going back to but I want to go back to this fact but we all have a brain with more connections at it than there are atoms in the known universe and it's got to do something I mean the reason people aren't brilliant is not that they're not brilliant it's just our educational systems naturally enough have been capable of teaching branch to do zillions that what the branch to do because that's that that's something we could teach people with the technology we've had up until now you know take the right box know that two and two equals four speak a foreign language these are all wonderful up to the 19th century wonderful and very more choices but not much longer so the Noodlers will be noodling with Siri or whoever the next digital assistant is I think that I keep on going back to it I go back to it again yeah if you name these people in a room for long enough for the big piece of paper and nothing to do but doodle and say think up something if you encourage them in the right way they'll do it they do it I mean I think everybody has the same sized brain as Einstein it's the educational system that cannot deal with that it will it will because very shortly very shortly we're going to start having avatars instead of real human beings we're on your screen and who are so realistic you have no idea they're not human beings I mean I might be one right now the difference between me and an avatar is inside the avatar is all the knowledge on the planet inside me there's only my knowledge and that means that the Avatar can teach each kid it is syncretic Li the exactly the way that kid would best be taught so the kid wouldn't sit in this classroom thinking I'm stupid because I don't I don't click with this way of learning it the kid would be doing it the way the kid wants to and I think that's going to cause the biggest revolution in history when it happens and it's going to happen in the next 15 to 20 years Wow so I mean my eyes in the education you've talked a lot about how people who have invented things have actually borrowed pieces of other inventions or they've just outright stolen ideas you talked about how Charles Darwin may have stolen the idea of survival of the fittest from somebody who wasn't a scientist he was a layman and Thomas Edison famously took credit for a lot of work that was just done by people who were toiling in his lab so when we have a science text and it presents as the Eureka moment of one individual rather than sort of describing this collaborative process of borrowing bits or stealing bits from other people it are the textbooks doing us a disservice by presenting invention and science in that fashion that you rika fashion you betcha I mean let me do a couple of three Eureka's I mean as you should Edison I mean without an unknown German called Springer who eventually a vacuum pump to get the air on a light bulb it wouldn't work Morse didn't invent the Morse code the little guy doing his wiring it was called failed at that the Wright brothers got all their Aeronautics from a French expect call dr. shadow invisible oh no Gutenberg probably got ahold of a bit of Korean block printing to show him how to do it the Polaroid camera came from not Edwin land but a little guy called William Byrd Harry path who discovered a kind of crystal by putting together because he was a chemist iodine with dog-ear and work that one out so there are all kinds of strange less important people back there who did what but above all what I would say is when you teach history as a series of acts by great people special different people what you're doing is telling your children that you're teaching that you may not be one of them the chances are you're not because there are very few of them and many many many of you and that's the greatest disservice we can give any child and give any brain agreed agreed speaking of borrowing ideas and borrowing things Martin Luther famously wrote hymns that were set to the tunes of popular drinking songs because he reckoned everybody already knew the music and Americans I think would be shocked to learn that the music for the American national anthem is actually a British drinking song can you briefly can you briefly recap that story for us and then tell us did nobody at the time figure this out or did it just not bother them that tell us the story yeah well well the basic piece of music was originally written for a gentleman was drinking at singing Club in London called the anacreontic society now in a Korean tech society was a society dedicated to the memory of a Greek writer and Bob beaver called I'm a crayon and the song is called an a crayon in heaven that's to say he's up there watching us doing all the singing for him I was hurt enveloped by a fellow with a surprising English name of Smith now the point of all is drinking singing was because that's what you did in 1766 in downtown London and it was all very you know good fights where Glee club's first began the song the music and the words were actually published in 1788 and he ten years later I think one of the son as a declaration Robert treat Paine used the music to write words call for song called Adams and Liberty nobody's ever heard of it and then in 1812 of course Francis Scott Key wrote a song called the defense of Fort McHenry and set it to an a crayon in heaven and only a bit later people started to use words from the song and called the song a star-spangled banner so a lot of people knew but in fact the star-spangled banner set around being sung here in their liver America for long time wasn't adopted as the national anthem until 1931 so by that time people people were singing but they were singing at the way they sing they used to sing folk songs or voidable songs it was just a song everybody saying the fact it was written by a brick door Smith and we written by another court pain I mean it sort of didn't matter why should all right the next question is is really it's kind of complicated and I'm gonna so I'm going to speak slowly so that everybody has time to sort of absorb it you know people that have seen your shows I think will will pick up on it fairly quickly but for those few who haven't this is a little bit of a mind bender so something that you've demonstrated on your shows is that even something that we regard as sort of the gold standard of irrefutable proof our sensory input the things that we can see with our own two eyes that all of that is subjective and something as pure as what we see our minds can only interpret by using the facts as we understand them and if we see something with our eyes that doesn't fit our understanding of the world what our mind does is creates an new interpretation of what we see to match our facts it actually changes what we're seeing rather than updating our facts to match what it is that we actually see and in learning that from your show one of the questions that I've always had is that mental process of not updating your facts but rather changing the interpretation of what you're seeing is that sort of mental process purely confined to sensory input or does it also prevent us from accepting concepts or data that are in conflict with our understanding of the facts yes they've been officially let me press star by saying your your eyes don't see things they see signals and brain says what the signals are the the prime thing to say about what we see in whether it's pure or not and whether it's related to what we think things are in terms of concepts as well as anything else can be clearly illustrated with the fact that every morning you wake up and I wake up and we all wake up and we watch the Sun come up it doesn't never has never will I mean it doesn't come up we go round now I've known that since I was a tiny kid and so have you that we are on a spinning globe and we spin ourselves in to a point where we can start to see the Sun that still doesn't alter the fact that my brain says that's the Sun coming up so that doesn't become anywhere but it was what was happening perfectly good sense too doesn't it and it was what rule the universe before Copernicus I mean before Copernicus the earth was the center of the universe and everything went around it and then along comes the premise and risk she knows well by saying hey wait a minute that's not true you know there's a thing called the solar system and we are just one planet image the is no longer you know the center of God's attention which is what the church said it was and that's why he got into such deep doo-doo until you know galileo comes along and looks up at Jupiter and says I can see moon is going around Jupiter which proves that there are many places where things go around and we're just one of them so this kind of rules in where we move representative democracy you know the way we used to see things have been done still rules us language for example me yeah a concept of love means something entirely different same word same language to Chaucer Jane Austen and Hollywood I mean and that happens in almost where they're almost every word in the vocabulary that's true before before Charles the first godliness with divine and they chopped his head off and set up the Commonwealth and we no longer regarded Kings as divine but as constitutional monarchs so you know things innovation causes things to change and we then adapt to fit sometimes not well and sometimes we hang on to what used to be thought to be true until we are obliged by force to actually I'd like again parliamentary democracy no we we are now spending half the time telling ourselves how wonderful parliamentary democracy is which seems to me is an indication to me but it's time to rethink it might be it definitely might be I have a couple of questions left we're a little over time can we keep you or do you have another obligation okay well I'll try I'll try yes yes well if we can keep you for a little bit I'll ask you just a few more questions you spoke about astronomy which is one of many fields there's so much of our course science is based on what Islamic scholars discovered or on what they rediscovered from antiquity that had been previously lost and a lot of that scholarship took place in medieval Spain specifically and I'll Andaluz where Muslims Christians and Jews lived and studied together I actually vacationed there and I was struck by the the pride that Spanish people feel even today for the reconquest which brought an ends to Moorish rule in the late 15th century what happened to all of that scholarship and coexistence in Spain once the church was back in charge yeah well a couple of things about what you've said 90% of what the Muslim was brought was actually ancient Greek knowledge because a bunch of people who were slightly off the wall in terms of belief become historians questions and they were chucked out of Constantinople because of their beliefs and they went to a place called Judah shapour in the middle of the mountains in Iran but it's not round and nearby Baghdad the the the guy in charge got some terrible stomach bug and his doctor couldn't fix it and somebody says there's some people up in the mountains who seem to know quite a lot so they went up and said can you fix him and he they came down and said yeah this is what you need to take anyway they did he said what can I do for you and they said nothing he said what can I look at your library and they said sure so he then set up a translation outfit and took almost everything out of a library and translated to Arabic and when everybody went west and then following a couple of 300 years they took this knowledge with them and included ended up in in and Athiya and above all in Cordova and as you say they're a complete sir check them out and that was the end of them what happened to the knowledge will will be Catholic Church had always you know kept pretty tight control on what you couldn't talk about but not much happening because you see by the time American keister happened in the fifteenth century the the system set up in the northern Spain during the Moorish occupation there was a system set up to start thinking about how to turn all this Moorish knowledge into an origin latin that we would understand and institutions were formed in order to create that body of knowledge out of arabic knowledge and these these institutions became known as universities so by the time of the Reconquista there was there were many universities all over europe already 150 years in and doing very nicely thank you yes of course there was trouble from time to time from the church I mean at 12:15 the Catholic Church shut down the University of Paris for quite a while because it was talking stuff that the church didn't agree with but gradually as I said earlier in our conversation hacker windows so gradually the ways were found around for example when Copernicus published is in a dissent all we have to do is to say and what you're talking about up there in the sky is a kind of mathematical fiction it's not real and that led him off the log and then were ways of doing that all the time so the church kind of got people got around the problem village church until it stopped being a problem Renaissance from then on so we did okay thanks to those institutions set up to translate all that stuff called universities from which we have all benefit that story about the Khalif al-mansour in baghdad that's probably one of my favorite stories from connections and I've told it to many people it's really quite a brilliant story I recall in your show you talked about how after the reconquest the the Spanish only allowed Jews to be moneylenders and so people borrowed money from Jews because that was the only profession that they were allowed into and if you didn't feel like paying back the loan all you had to do was say I saw that Jewish guy eating meat on Friday and they would burn him at the stake and your debt would go up in smoke along with the Jewish person who loaned you the money that didn't just happen in Europe so certainly you know difficult times I think for for Muslims and Jews once the church was was back in control yes it must be said that the Muslim ethos in Muslim Spain was fantastic I mean they as you said yourself they worked happily with Christians and Jews at all times not quite for your muscle a bit almost yeah and so it's a people always sort of seem to have their mind blown when I explained to them how many words just scientific words algebra I mean that's Arabic so I I have to tell you something silly nothing doing this conversation we have a marvelous stand-up comedian in Britain and he said the other day why should I learn algebra I have no intention of going there nice very nice you know I've praised your success rate so much during this interview and so I feel comfortable asking about one of your predictions that maybe didn't quite hit the mark yet you talked about this concept of a virtual assistant that could basically stand in place of a person reminding them of birthdays suggesting gifts for the person whose birthday it was paying bills talking to somebody else's virtual assistant and saying you know hey my guy can't make this meeting when's the next time your guy can make the meeting and working it working it out amongst themselves the virtual assistants and then coming back to you and saying hey you're 5 p.m. on Wednesday has been moved to a 3 p.m. on Friday and I I don't I don't know that I don't think we've seen that yet one of the things that you pointed out when you made that prediction is that we would really have to sacrifice a lot of privacy in order for that to come to pass so right now there's this current of distrust for Big Data do you feel like that current of distrust means we'll never have this virtual assistant or have we already given up so much privacy that the virtual assistant may well appear in in the nearest future the problem is we use this with privacy or privacy in terms more more a more fitted to the late 19th century than now I mean first of all as I said earlier many aspects of what we used to call privacy like where I spend my money what I like to buy where I go with my holidays where I go with my girlfriend what I do when I see the doctor are those things that's already known because of that data exhausts that we leave behind that I said earlier which is usable in terms of predictive analytics to see where we're going next so in that sense of the word we've lost what used to be called privacy of privacy already and it doesn't matter the thing I mean the silliest example of privacy I think and I think it very well represents the sole affection for you people have at one point in the austro-hungarian Empire I think in the 19th century yes 19th century it was announced that people going to have numbers on their houses and people screamed and yelled and went out on the streets and shattering privacy privacy you know if you put a number in my house everybody will know where I live and the government said would you like your mail delivered or not and they said ok so hey you know we choose aspects of privacy that matter to us and sometimes other silly ways but the prime thing to say about these personal assistance hey I think we will have them we didn't within 15 years was that when my personal assistant talked to your personal assistant about what it is we're doing together and arranging our Diaries or whatever some of the time they won't be talking about me and you they'll be talking about my computer at home and your computer and the work that we are doing together which will actually be being done by our computers according to the way we'd like and these conversations were going on between the assistants and them on the computers I don't see why not with absolutely total security I mean you know one of the one of the things we all know is it going to go on being a growth industry is cybersecurity because out there there's always a hacker so I'm not too worried about that situation I have some fan questions to ask you because as you've probably guessed by now I'm a huge fan of the connections and the date of the universe changed and your your other shows so in those shows you you wrote a snowmobile you stood on top of a Concorde jet you you have to decide of meet with a longsword you just did a lot of crazy stuff and I've always been curious if there was something that you wanted to do where the producers or the finance years of the network stepped in and said James no you can't do that it's it's just too dangerous well first of all I've always produced my own stuff so that was every producer to refer to in my case it was mostly the BBC who would sometimes if they ever did say something like why are you choosing to do that but they never did I mean you know everything about the bieber's they left you to do what you wanted to do anything failed you'd never work again so yeah they had their own their own ways of controlling you they didn't mutter a little bit when I said that we are the crew wanting to go up and what's called the vomit comment which is the airplane that nASA uses to train astronauts to spend time in zero-gravity and what it does is it flies along and then it dives and at the bottom of the curve it curves back up again and then it climbs again and as it climbs and goes over the top up equals down in terms of force and there is no gravity on the plane and you float for about 40 seconds and their problem was the insurers said is this plane qualified to commercial airline levels of safety and the BBC said we thought that we think it might not be so I had to write a piece of paper that said and I waved my wrench and then we went and went and did it and we stayed up there for hours having this wonderful experience I should add at the end of it all at the base of the stage we came off and a local reporter came up with it what was it like and I said it was the second most exciting thing I've ever done and she went on to the next question what's the first most exciting thing you've ever done sorry mind your own business point well-taken sir well I only have one more question so these days fans of older TV series you know they've had some luck they can't always get networks to produce a new season of their favorite show but sometimes they wind up with a two-hour special or a movie or something like that have you have you given any thought to doing a connections special no I'm doing a new connection series will come out in January 2022 this is me with my mind being blown I am terribly excited about that so Wow so connections for then right it'll be cold connections 21 connections 21 okay and will we be seeing this in America oh yes yes yes it's wonderful wonderful well that's fantastic news you've thrown me off my game that's how excited I am so I'm gonna ask you one more question but before I do I'm gonna ask your indulgence for 60 seconds I've seen probably by a conservative estimate about a thousand hours of your programs which I didn't tell you before the interview cuz I was worried you would think I'm a crazy stalker so a lot of well you're almost done you're almost out of the woods I've noticed some patterns and just some things that seem to crop up often in your shows and as a fan in a good-natured spirit I've invented a James Burke drinking game and if you'll indulge me for 60 seconds I just like to play the video of the James Burke drinking game so let me just add my screen here and we'll do the the James Burke drinking game so this is something you know people might enjoy during the pandemic I'll say it's something that should be done in in moderation and with friends and anyway here it is rule number one when James Burke is shown using a tool you take a drink rule number two when James Burke is shown operating his own vehicle you take a drink rule number three when Jamesburg uses the Braves power of some screw of some screw you take a drink rule number four when James Burke asks a question and then answers it himself you still take a drink right right rule number five when James Burke is somewhere obviously dangerous you take a queasy sip but you still take a drink rule number six when James Burke drinks everybody yells drink and the last person to yell drink has to take a drink so there we are thank you for indulging me in my silliness my lawyer your barrister I assume you mean well the last thing I want to ask you is just that tell us what you're working on right now you mentioned connections 21 do you have any other projects that you'd like to tell us about or things you're working on the book which one which the series would be based I always do that write the book first and I'm doing stuff for BBC radio because the nice thing about that is you can do down the line and I can do it from here in France and I do it good very good well I'm sure everybody is excited and looking forward to your your new projects I want to thank you so much for your time today this has been absolutely fantastic for me and for the viewers I'll ask you to just stay in the studio as I end the broadcast which at the moment when it's done but viewers you have a lot to look forward to now and certainly hope you all enjoyed this interview as much as I enjoyed giving it so good afternoon or if you're watching from James Burke's area good evening and I'll end the broadcast and then we'll we'll chat just for a moment so goodbye folks

Channel: dncngferrt

Views: 3,198

Rating: 4.9344263 out of 5

Keywords: James Burke, BBC, Connections, The Day The Universe Changed, Science History, Patrick Rodgers, Interview

Id: mUb6Sv-rUv0

Length: 83min 16sec (4996 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020