James Burke lecture "Axmakers of the Twenty-first Century" at Ball State University, 1992

I just want to get what I'm going to say tonight in proper perspective in spite of all those lovely words of the introduction so so that you get what I say into proper perspective let me quote something which some of you may already know from Mark Twain who might have been speaking about people like me when he once 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'm going to rectify the world a little bit tonight to look at the origin of a major phenomenon of our time and I think of our future increasingly so the question of why technology appears to have split the human race into 2 divided apparently between those artistic and those generally described as scientific and in the process why technology seems to have downgraded the artistic to a secondary interpretive role rather than figuring as a leading aid to generate a leading edge generator of social change and I think what I'm going to try and do is to show that this origin may lie in a single acts of Technology so let me start with the way single axis can have such big deal effects the great lexicographer and bomb fever dr. Johnson once said that the only good thing to come out of Scotland was a road south something else something else did too I suppose as one of the more ho-hum side effects of the Union of Scotland with England in 707 which was the way the Union opened the door for Scottish whiskey distillers to export their delicious amber nectar to the hard drinking English and the even more hard drinking American colonies the result of this change in their economic position apart from an economic boom that made even Glasgow livable was that the whiskey makers became seriously interested improving their efficiency so as to make much more Scotch for this much bigger market with much less raw materials so as to make much more money but one of the ways they said about trying to do this was by hiring a guy called Joe black to work out how to get more bang for their buck distillation wise now black looked at all the aspects of the whiskey distilling operation at how much wood you had to burn to get how much heat for the boilers and how much water you needed to pour onto the distilling vessels in order to condense the whiskey vapours and it was during this inebriating process that he came across the reason it took such a gigantic amount of cold water to condense steam because steam he discovered was so scalding hot because it contained what he described as hidden latent heat loads of it this discovery showed black's colleague James Watt how to make the steam engine get more bang for its buck which in turn gave you the railroads that opened the West because they gave Sam Morse a reason to snitch and rename a certain communication code from his colleague Vale for use on the Telegraph which was so essential to the efficient functioning of your railroads because they were running on single track so you had to tell another train that one was coming a telegraph that triggered almost immediately research into why it did what it did electromagnetic signal transmission which research eventually revealed the existence of subatomic particles from which it was a short step to the biggest bang for any buck all the whole thing took oh no it gets much worse I'm thinking of taking a doctorate in superficiality all the whole thing took was that minor tweak to the course of history the otherwise totally forgettable union of Scotland with England a fine example of the way and nuns at the right time will constrain the juggernaut of change to use move one way or another history I maintain is a sequence of such nudges some more equal than others for instance a minor nudge back in the same country in Edinburgh in Scotland in the 18th century that same union with England and the rising economic strength of the country had the local merchants very socially mobile upwards where they soon bumped into the old established wealth of the University and all the clubs it fostered none of which was going to accept any johnny-come-lately economic hustlers into their upper-class sanctums now looking around for a little backup these merchants found themselves a couple of Viennese quacks who were peddling a new idea that you could tell somebody's psychological makeup from the bumps on their head if you were a good lover for example you had a big bump behind your left ear don't check but these Viennese quacks did have a serious purpose which was the bump reading might give you a handle on character and that might help when it came to the new kind of social work that was beginning at the time well in the long run phrenology in the name for this pseudoscience never was much help to the Scottish trader yuppies but he did get an Italian social worker for instant interested in trying to relate criminality and physical characteristics and led directly to criminology and penology and other social programs and the bumps themselves of course got people quite interested in digging down to see what lay beneath them and that led to what we now call neurophysiology and the study of brain function or because somebody got blackballed at the club now for a major nudge according to a fairly recent theory about 3.8 billion years ago in the warm news of primeval lagoons lay tiny crystals of clay doing what crystals always do growing new layers repeating themselves exactly replicating themselves and any flaws in their structure exactly crystal life if you like repeating generation after generation exactly but some of the flaws in the crystals apparently had surfaces whose electrical properties preferentially attracted certain kinds of atoms from the surrounding gunk to come and stick to these floors and over time these huddled molecular groupings began themselves to repeat every time the crystal repeated and when some passing energy molecules happened along joined the group the molecules had become so good at repeating themselves that now energized they were able to start doing it without the aid of their crystal host so a tiny molecular event a subatomic nudge and there instead of a silicon-based life-form here tonight is you the carbon-based life form thanks to what is described by this theory as genetic take over life if you will imitating art and what I'm trying to say with all those examples there is that all the way along small events nudges if you like change the course of history and after the knavish you're a path to the future you might not have been without the nudge and not on any of the other paths that you might have taken one of the more interesting new paleo anthropological theory says that human development gets nudged in exactly the same way that the human brain originally evolved to handle a wide set of potentials environments and then according to what circumstances turned out to be narrows its options to fit so that for example there were Shakespeare Mozart Michelangelo genes in the caves since genes are immortal as long as their carrier survives and since Shakespeare and the others got born and those ancient genes had to be there all along all the time but until conditions facilitated the expression of those genes those genes remained dormant so to speak I mean who knows what gene you may have here waiting for the same kind of release if you just hold it until I finished that'd be good now you could see this kind of brain being ready for anything business that I'm talking about in much more contemporary terms in the way for example children handle handle language all children appear to be born with the ability to speak any language and you could see that in the way that the brain registers a thing called the second formant second formant is part of the energy structure of a speech sound and the energy shape of the second formant depends on the sound coming next so it kind of prepares you ahead of time so as to make comprehension less of a hassle thus for example the second formant in the energy spectrum of the sound v is different in V followed by horse from that in the followed by trombone so your brain can get ready for the clatter of hooves and not a brass band this phenomenon of course is why you are giving this speech a millisecond before I do one wonders why you came anyway apparently babies can do that with any language and then when their local world turns out to be you know Greek or Chinese or German or whatever they dump all the other abilities ability with all the others and retain it only with the one in their local world and the brain appears to do that kind of selective activity in all areas of what it does in reaction to the demands made by the environment in which it appears to happen it appears to find itself so what I'd like to start by doing is to look at history and therefore of course the future in terms of the effects of that kind of environmental constraint on us but in regard to one particular kind of environmental constraint and at what that might mean in the light of my remarks about history being a series of nudges it seems to me that you can look back at what has brought us to where we are not just in terms of natural evolutionary selection but also in terms of the technological and information environment with which we live and take that as a generator of a series of environmental nudges that move our social development at any time selectively more in one direction and another the earliest of these selective nudges was perhaps the most important since it kind of set the basic direction in which we were socially constrained to go from then on I speak of course about the effects of the emergence of the first tool the prehistoric stone axe up to that point about two and a half million years ago natural evolution seems first to have favored those earlier hominids who had characteristics adapted to contemporary environmental constraints which generated for example the need to stand upright when they came out of the forests and into the savanna and then favored those whose brains were large enough to handle the increasing demands for information processing as life in the upright environment became more complex than that of the one when you walked on all fours let me suggest then that things changed the axe happened the first major nudge from a new human generated technological environment which would act selectively just like the natural environment in that it would direct human social evolution to favor those of us who could adapt to the forms of thought that technology would bring and disfavor those of us who couldn't so following my nudge theory the appearance of the axe would figure as a first great proto nudge constraining our social development once and for all in the technological axe maker direction which is what happens consequently back in the cave now that axe makers exist those of us capable of making the tools succeed rather well those of us best capable of teaching others to make the tools turn out to be those who could transmit the knowledge most effectively so people teaching axe making and who can go on beyond gesture to develop speech do best of all and the key thing here in that theory is that speech developed to mediate and event acts making which is sequential linear and in its process then language does the same thing it analyzes the world it dissect it it breaks it down into a series of sequential eventless and in doing so moves the early human mind preferentially away from earlier perhaps more holistic forms of thought that therefore in a sense language itself acts like a technological constraint it acts like the acts it's almost as if those who developed language early on are those who already have these reductionist leanings and there now appears to be little doubt that all this went on a good deal earlier than I was taught at school for example I mean the mutation rates of a particular kind of DNA that descend through the mother suggest that everybody on the planet may well be descended from the same black African woman who lived about 200,000 years ago and who represents one of the first anatomically modern humans some other studies of the modern geographical distribution of certain the blood constituents would seem to indicate that we anatomically modern humans then come out of Africa about a hundred thousand BC and spread across the planet led by our axe makers carrying their lightweight stone tool making kits first up the Nile Valley and across the Sinai and then fanning out west to Europe and East to Asia Australia an event here and everywhere the colonizers stop and settle their acts makers produced the tools that they need to survive in those local conditions in the northern temperate zones close to the ice line really difficult conditions make most demands on and generate the most complex technological results from northern axe makers from a very early stage and they come up principally I suppose most important of all with needles so that they can make clothing from animal skins for us to survive the winters elsewhere the local axe makers produced long knives to cut a jungle bamboo harpoons and fish hooks for the people who settle along the shores or specialists spear throwers for the people who remain on the savannas but above all axe maker tools all do the same thing they enhance the carrying capacity of the planet of the environment in terms of how many humans it will feed clothes and house and this as you'll hear later will turn out to be a hot issue I talked earlier about the way environmental constraints caused us to activate only those processes in the brain relevant to contemporary circumstance does this mean what I'm saying then that the hand axe might have put many of the non tool related mental networks that we might have had available for use in different circumstances kind of onto the neurological backburner for a hundred thousand years because a history of successful proliferating human groups from that point on that first great nudge stays strictly in acts maker mode the point of this whole preamble is that I want to show that what happens from then on till now is a kind of conflict between in evolutionary systems on the one hand the limitation by acts maker selection primarily to those few who will fit the constraints of the technologically driven environment which the tool has created on the other the natural evolutionary push to survive best through species flexibility through variety and we look for a second at that survival through variety thing there seems to be a process through which those organisms organisms survive best and develop beyond what you might call the Southern California life-form you know get born lie on the beach die those organisms survive best which react to natural environmental change and the environment of course does change every day every night and day every season by turning themselves into varieties each able to live off specialist local conditions so that whatever happens at least one of the varieties will survive and through that variety at least one version of the species in that sense of course variety really is the spice of life because variety increased complexity of species organization means a more flexible response to change repertoire and flexible response is the key to handling anything that makes you throw at you however in the new techno environment that we've generated in the caves have we limited the scope of that variety because the axe has limited the number of directions in which we can then go well it's only limited in a very loose sense I suppose because the impression one gets is that the great axe make a nudge back beyond a hundred thousand years ago set up pretty much the general conditions of modern life in one fell swoop it generated a hierarchy the berry gathering that went on earlier may not have needed a leader but tools made hunting possible and the instantaneous and dangerous conditions of a group hunt not to mention the need to plan the hunt certainly do demand a leader and muscles so the result of these new qualifications as a result there are now going to be two kinds of people primary and secondary people so women are selected for the inferior stay in the cave role they have had since and the emergence of the leader concept brings follow me and do as I say which brings who is not for me is against me and all that ideological stuff about I am the only one around here who knows the truth it can't therefore have been long before they were into similar related subjects like right and wrong ethics and values the group divided between initiates admitted to the tool-making mystery ordinary slobs and women an official view of existence that is religion taboos to violate and be punished for and above all the good old we've always done it this way tradition that vitiates society from then on highly affecting and enduring constraint all of those I could as easily as the cave have been describing what goes on in General Motors because here of course we're talking about institutions institutions from the acts hierarchy on have only one purpose in life to perpetuate themselves and the truth they enshrined if what you're going to do with your tool is explode the variety of things your group can do because the group will survive better because you do then you are going to need to keep a grip on things so that variety doesn't mean anarchy institutions are just right for that and they are be the beginning of the exclusive keep up the nonlinear thinking specialization at first it's just a shaman and helpers dubbing the walls and carving extraordinary lunar hunting calendars on battens made of stone or antler around 25,000 BC says that only they know and only they can pass on to their successors with the stuff of office what the moon will look like for example the day before the right moment when the salmon will come up the rivers and be chased by the seals both of which you can eat because the dates and the relevant animals are carved on the batons of office I mentioned I've often wondered whether that ancient artifact is the beginning of the ancient folk myth we have about magic wands so anyway these reading talking axe maker people proliferate and get more varied and specialized some more shellfish gatherers by Lakeside's forest harvesters gain chasers on the savanna and the magic wand to become a complexity generator that stimulates the group to look for other uses of symbols for other things besides the moon and animals by about 10,000 BC in Iraq axe maker brains are having to react to the population surge which their enhancement of invar environmental carrying capacity has generated they come up with new ways of hacking at nature to nudge it further in their favor and the first dry farming begins which will in turn accelerate the population surge between 7000 BC and 2000 BC by something like sick time's this latest axe make a Marvel agriculture is accompanied by the next use of symbols symbol tokens for corn or livestock and that's the first writing and it all says the same thing this stuff is mine and it's another major nudge because the scribbling Mesopotamian acts make a nerd just loves lists if you look at the first Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets they are all lists so writing is a new thing to be into you're good at that you can be a scribe next best thing to being boss more esoteric magic knowledge and by the way if you're going to make lists you might as well use them to organize the farming better so hieroglyphs favored more social differentiation more specialization more technocracy so beside the scribbling nodes you develop priests King's soldiers traders irrigation engineers and then off the backs of them craftsmen living off your new food surplus Goldsmith's doctors architects builders hookers shoemakers Weaver's and so on all these people are not doing it in the desert or in some cave they're doing it where the axe makers have put them in the world's first cities as the old song had it how you're going to keep them down on the farm now that they've seen Jericho's and another irrevocable nudge and the first proper division of the community into those good at using ax Mecca products now including the new axe Mecca concept of writing sequential thoughts with sequential marks which we call literacy and those not good so now we have a technocratic elite using the artists among them as publicists and the common herd but as I said variety is good for you it makes the community more flexible in the face of change so in a limited way Egypt Mesopotamia a rapper the cities along the Ganges thrive and multiply and spread the word that there's only one new way to live downtown we with the benefit of hindsight and from the other end of centuries of ex maker propaganda on the subject refer to this as civilization however now we're set on these tracks the flavor of the month for the new mind that is running the place let's call it the ex Megamind the flavor of the month is what you can do with tools like make more tools so technological innovation is born and with it more specialization and with that the division of labor and a world where you as an individual no longer need to know all the things that you need to do for the group to survive the responsibility for your survival now being delegated to others there are wait for this things that not everybody needs to know especially the poor backward types who can't read write do math trade sail ships make maps or run the libraries where all the seaso technology is now housed but where you need a reader's card to get in and this is where the greatest of all instant institutional cons in history comes in the guys who happen to be good at this ancient ex maker speak spread the word that if the ex maker generated institutions are left alone to run things innovation will be encouraged and managed so as to make everybody's life rosy at translation institutions exist to perpetuate themselves and only if possible with a glowing approval of those outside innovation I'm saying is usually generated by institutions with the short term purpose of getting better at keeping what they've got and never intentionally in order to bring about their own demise so when the next great nudge comes and don't worry I'm not going to go through 3,500 more years at this rate what when the next great nudge occurs attainted entrenching the institutions as firmly as possible the alphabet apparently comes out of a phoenician accountant running a turquoise mining franchise for the ancient Egyptians at a place down the signee I called Sarah Patil had him round about 1700 BC and the only purpose appears to have been to make better sense out of all the hieroglyphic gobbledygook that the various communities used the better to do contracts with these people keep Egypt in the vanguard of turquoise futures and incidentally keep this Phoenicians in his job the fact that the alphabet also generates the extraordinary new capability of recording sequentially conceptual thought and allows people almost immediately to move from hieroglyphic simplicity's like dig irrigation trench to alphabetic complexities like metaphysically speaking I'm a Republican myself is no doubt the last thing our Phoenician accountant had in mind still no sooner does it do that then Internet is used to strengthen the establishment the first great early abstract questions which the alphabet permits among the early Greek philosophers our questions aimed at understanding how things work they better to use the environment - axe maker advantage like what are the stars and incidentally can we use them to navigate by and get back to port with all the goodies what is law and how can we structure it to the better to keep X makers in charge can geometry be a reliable unchanging measure of an ever-changing universe and incidentally produce the tools for distance by triangulation so that we can work out how far out the ship where the cargo is on its way in and nip down to the market and fiddle the prices accordingly this is what I meant by the first great con these are the first expressions of what those involved vociferous ly describe as free inquiry on behalf of the axe makers no like like most inquiry of its type no more free than the immortal free lunch we all know doesn't exist but free inquiry is a convenient rallying call leading the nerds to greater efforts at innovation and even tighter constraints on our general freedom of non technical mental movement and besides how can you stop them over the following centuries you're the average Demeter Casius Arthur Hildegard what do you know out of the political councils the church sign on Z Armour has forges the alchemists laboratories the printing house editing rooms the stuff starts to pour faster than you can read about it if you can read and don't forget up through the last century something like 99.999 recurring percent of humanity can't read meanwhile fame and fortune continue to be showered on those among an already tiny X maker minority who can spring the greatest surprises on the rest of us slobs because the end result of the great X maker constraint is specialization and specialized knowledge is esoteric knowledge so what else would it do but surprise and I mean surprise even to a bunch of creme de la creme like you she is a bit you have hindsight you know this is fairly recent you should know where I'm going before I get there after World War Two you're a visionary you invest heavily in refrigeration terrific how can you go wrong before you know it freezes in every home air-conditioning in every car everywhere you look one of the really fancy things that keeps your stock in this chilly business sky-high in more senses than one is the way refrigeration can be used to generate tons and tons of cryogenic fuel like liquid hydrogen for ICBMs and rockets to the moon and so on one day one of the satellites that your frozen fuel lofts into orbit happens thanks to the work of somebody in one of the thousands of other gobbledygook acts mega disciplines a million miles away from refrigeration happens to find this gigantic hole in the ozone layer chief criminal CFCs chief user of CFCs refrigeration there goes your portfolio try another one the 18th century Italian Alessandro Volta invoke invents an electric glass bombed round glass vessel filled with methane in through the cork goes a wire out through the other side goes another wire send electricity in the electricity jumps a gap between the two bits of wire boom the bomb bombed however a century later a German engineer puts that idea together with a perfume spray filled with gasoline and comes up with what we call the carburetor another one an English chemist looking for a way to make artificial quinine because our administration chaps out in the Far East are dying like flies from malaria fails comes up with some interesting sludge one thing it is not an artificial quinine trucks it down the sink becomes a millionaire overnight because he discovers that he's accidentally invented the world's first artificial aniline dye makes his money and typically British fashion by selling the idea to a German however a few years later a couple of guys looking for the cure for anthrax or indeed the source of anthrax and in 1882 one of them leaves some anthrax tissue in a culture dish overnight on a warm stove and somehow accidentally some of this dye spills into it next morning they wake up and there are the bugs they're looking for preferentially stained blue bingo bacteriology I could have gone on all night and you see what I mean about surprises given all that the technological sequentially thinking reductionist knowledge environment within which selection for survival and success takes place has now been firmly constrained to everything descended from the axe makers first product and almost always each each step each nudge each narrowing of the way has accidentally or deliberately been an expression of the conservativism of the institution's we move ineluctably along the path of knowing more and more about less and less boosted on one occasion along the way as perhaps at no other time in history by the techno speak of the sixteenth century Catholic Church right about eighteen around about fifteen hundred we're living as you sure you know in an Aristotelian universe earth at the center surrounded by glass onion skins each one carrying a planet or the Stars everything in its proper place techno proof that some of us are supposed to be inferiors ignorant slobs or whatever obedient to our natural masters okay minor problem because the universe doesn't really work like Aristotle says Easter gets out of whack and we are just not up to the astronomical math to get it right but right it has to be or we'll all end up meeting eating meat on Fridays because we think it's Tuesday urgent calendar reform is needed when Copernicus finally does come up with the math it's also with a totally different sun-centered universe well that's a blow to the institutions but nothing to the discovery at the same play at the same time of this place America didn't figure in the Bible so what the hell was it doing there in the panic to batten down the hatches or shore up the defenses or whatever there is a desperate search for some new way of generating ax Mecca knowledge that'll be so foolproof we'll risk no more surprises by we are from because I mean we the institution's so the search is on for certainty and the Elizabethan legal eagle Francis Bacon comes up with a guide to simple thinking order he says that's what we need and analysis his path his plan adopted him physically by all is to break knowledge up specialize it even further divided among even more acts maker brains shortly later in the same vein things are tightened up even more by one Rene Descartes I'll paraphrase what he did first of all he changed as I say tightened up I think what he did was to change radically the way we looked at what knowledge was supposed to be before he did his thing we kind of wandered around saying credo in telegram I believe and through my belief I come to an understanding after Descartes we'd switched at the other way around in Telugu or to kratom rough translation when I have examined the proposition for traps I'll get back to you and he said very simply look never take anybody's word for it if they tell you it certain think of it as probable if they call it probable think if this is possible and if the word is it's possible forget it at least he had reduced every problem to its smallest parts and then you'll be able to put it back together again now from from all that to major modern acts maker constraints emerge a few years afterwards the Dutch prince and military who is Morris of Nassau applies the idea of ordering analyzing and reducing to the minimum parts to the matter of loading and firing muskets this is a problem his Musketeers are taking so long to load with fire their guns that they get clobbered before they do so in producing what is now called military drill NASA Morris of NASA also generates the mega constraint that will become known as the production line which the Industrial Revolution will jump at the other effect is that Descartes and Bacon's orderly thought and methodical doubt specialization gives the axe makers the magic techno thinking rules for what we now call science which rapidly comes up with wonders like steam power and bleach and iron making which the Industrial Revolution will also jump at and with the Industrial Revolution the greatest ever acts mega triumphs here comes another bunch going at it for all they're worth screwing in the constraints even tighter the Industrial Revolution factory owners whose laudable aim is to invent the working day wages said everybody pots and pans and sewing machines and Quaker Oats the democracy of positions that made this country great and incidentally get seriously rich in the process and above all stay in business from then on as well peanuts this is the industrial revolutions consequent and evident need to direct the aim of public education down the ever narrowing path from increasingly specialist axe maker competence and this is where I suppose I'm gonna get into trouble with some of you because this 19th century is when our educational systems might have held out for a little more than vocational factory oriented curricula after all it was the so-called Age of Enlightenment at the time except fat chance how could they already constrained by a mandate to train for an X maker community to begin the process if you have a narrower selection of those with X maker abilities to invent the modern equivalent of the priesthood or the bone reading shaman known as the PhD the BSC the MA the dealer the B fill will be a dip and studies and any other gobbledygook label you choose through a system based on a medieval process for training monks which inclines by its very mandate towards highly limited selection with a primary aim of failing the majority so as to leave only as many as the system can use a reward or put to making metaphorical axes perfectly logical way for an educational system to work given its purpose I said a while back that the clearest expression of the constraint we have operated on since the acts is the conservativism expressed at every turn by the institutions established at each nudge down the x MegaPath my favorite example of how powerful and ongoing this conservative defensive negative reaction is from the history of technology starts with the so-called recovery of a European economy after so-called Dark Ages what kicks the economy into high gear sometime in the 11th century is the arrival from Arab Spain of a new kind of loom big deal it has foot pedals what that does is free the weavers hands to throw the shuttle back and forward make tons more cloth much more quickly much more cheaply the weaving corporations of northern Europe smash anyone at every one of these looms they will they can find because they say it'll put people out of work remarkably modern thinking for the 11th century however market forces obtain generation later the dust is settled the loom is in use and now the people rioting are the thread making guilds because they can't keep up they're teasing the stuff out of them out of the mass until their problem is solved for them accidentally by the arrival from China of the spinning wheel but the wheel in the Loom together and the production of cloth goes up like a rocket more riots because the cloth now for the mass market is linen made from plants which are cheap rather than wool made from sheep which are expensive so this time the rioters are in the well-established woolen industry however soon everybody is however wearing the new cheap linen and when they wear it out throwing it away so all over Europe there's this 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 have for durable paper and it's now free more riots there will an industry again parchment is sheepskin and now it's too expensive to use however here we are with enough paper to stick on the walls these scribes are overworked and in demand and pretty soon the writer's associations are on strike for higher wages because suddenly it's a seller's market the Black Death has knocked out 1/3 of the population of Europe the other 2/3 is inheriting and there is not enough writing ability for all the documentation to go round until Gutenberg solves a problem around about 1450 by automating it with the printing press riots in that oldest established institution neva taken the Pope needs a printing press like a hole in the head because it will give people what we would now call the ability to free think until it is realized that the bridging press can be used to generate millions of indulgences with for those for those of you are not Catholic and indulgences 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 put up the Vatican paint various ceilings pay Michelangelo's bill and generally get involved in certain prestige projects that make certain German clerics madder than hell at Miss cash-and-carry view of salvation one of whom nails up a few remarks and their thanks to advances in textile machinery in the 11th century and fought every step of the way by the institution's is the Reformation it's a trifle oversimplified would you get my point people cannot handle lateral thinking with ease this defensive institutionalized and institutionalized negative attitude to lateral thinking is extremely powerful as I said because once you start on the ax Mecca path there's not supposed to be any deviation and the further from the start you get the more difficult generating deviation can be so we live with institutions that pinion us firmly to that start point institutions that act like signposts telling us we're going in the right direction by obliging us to look backwards all the time for at what for good acts maker reasons we call traditions a few modern international diplomatic structures that date unchanged from the letter-writing era a working day designed to fit the availability of transportation and artificial light at a time of the steam engine a political system based on representative democracy that hasn't been dusted off since it was a solution to the problem of lousy roads in the 18th century a Protestant work ethic that allows true believers to lay up riches in heaven by laying them up on earth that dates from the days of the Mayflower the talking shop known as parliament from around 1300 and educational system as I mentioned earlier from the late Middle Ages an anglo-saxon legal system with long-forgotten reasons for 12 people jury systems and verbal proceedings because people back then couldn't read or write religious practices from the Middle Eastern deserts of 1500 BC city life from ancient Egypt a male-female relationship and altered since the caves above all a brain capable of miracles but obliged to adapt only to an Axman environment since at least 200,000 years ago I believe it was Einstein who said we're all born with magnificent brains which formal education then destroys don't get me wrong I am not denigrating all that the axe makers have given us we'd have longer healthier wealthier better informed freer to think and speak as we wish than ever before each one of us has power at our fingertips undreamt off by a Roman Emperor thanks to medicine we are literally the survivors of disease vectors that would have wiped us off the planet only a few decades ago but nonetheless we are perhaps not what we might once have been the reverse of the progress medallion is a world in which 99% of the people are illiterate and have no say in what shapes their lives even in countries with high illiteracy figures like this one and mine we are straitjacketed into a way of life but while avalanching us for the material satisfaction attempts to buy most of us off with it we've generated a monolithic paradigm by which to live the Western technological rational materialist way of life whose credo often appears to be use it or lose it in which there are a few hundred thousand with special acts making abilities that give them the opportunity to change the world for the other four point nine billion people that Tom Wolfe might once have called the great left behind in plain language the immense almost incredible changes which have been wrought over the last hundred thousand years alone have been brought about thanks to the effort of something like naught point naught naught naught naught naught naught naught naught naught 1 percent of the people who have lived during that time that's a measure of the world altering power of a few axe makers this is no conspiracy theory an espousing here I don't believe for a second there's some great millennial plot to devalue the non-sequential non rationalist non reductionist turn of mind it's just that the only mind selected to succeed in the post hand axe era is the tool user mind all other Minds need not apply and in the axe mega environment there's never been at any one time so far enough tools and systems to go around for more than a few to be involved tool-using society has almost by definition had to 2-tier axe makers and outsiders and as I've argued elsewhere the use of artifacts changes the user permanently and irreversibly and the emergence of a tool in one place will sooner or later trigger the emergence of a different tool in another place and knock on none if you like and above all axe maker products don't just come in the form of surprising you gizmos often they're entirely new ways to live for instance a society with print is a totally different place to be offering different ways to live and think than is a society without the print considered just a few of the ways in which that bit of axe maker technology generated new kinds of living printed maps updated with every voyage standardized data and make it more attractive and less dangerous to say the way looking for profitable cargoes a few Dutch lunatics who tried early on come home to profits as high as six hundred percent everybody wants a piece the demand for cash to invest in these surefire money winners is such that new ways have to be found to borrow money against your land the principal unit of wealth of the time so in England land registers are set up for the first time so mortgages can come into existence and mortgage companies some of the borrowing pays for ships more of it goes to the new insurance brokers set up in business to take the risk out of these adventures and so as to limit the risk even more and attract more backers new things called limited jocks joint stock companies are invented and there's the stock market with a whole caboodle held together by another new institution necessary to make the whole thing function called a national bank offering the supreme facilitator for change credit which then needs the entire structure of the credit agency system and all those career opportunities new are only a tiny bit of what print does to life sounds terrific except we're still only talking about a small fraction of the population because there's a number of things to be and grow does be and do grows so does the number of people so what the X maker mind has been doing for the last hundred thousand years apart from suppressing our non tool-using minds has been gradually to fill up the world with changing newer model technological furniture whose presence shapes affect our lives fills it with changing new model values new model ethics aims beliefs ways of existing on the other hand as part of the process what we call scientific knowledge the acts makers handbook knowledge itself has burgeoned the last I heard there were over 20,000 scientific and technological disciplines so there may be lots of new jobs around but the immense potential for change represented by each one of those 20,000 sets of Acts makers their immense potential for change grows on almost combinatorially as the world becomes more interactive and it does so in many cases without the active involvement of the specialists themselves what we have here in other words is what one could describe as a plague of nudges and as the fragmented and isolated change makers do their thing and as I said before go on knowing more and more about less and less the reverse is true for the non-specialists outsider greater and greater numbers of the population know less and less about more and more I have a power for example at Stanford now who got his doctorate at Oxford when I was up in milton's use of the comma some of you will have heard me say that the general reaction of the average non-involved non-specialists outsider to this high-tech high change Daily Show always reminds me of the depressive who gets a few days off from the clinic goes to the beach get himself a tan day later his a psychiatrist gets a postcard carrying a typical message from the depressive and perhaps most non axe maker Outsiders in the world today it says having a wonderful time why so has our artificial constraint of the way in which we could have developed back beyond a hundred thousand years ago by driving ourselves down the axe maker path has that limited the extents extent to which we can now ultimately survive because in doing so we might well have gone counter to the evolutionary law of success through diversity if the safest thing to be as multifarious has driving non axe maker thinking underground made the human community more vulnerable well even within the amazingly successful lifestyle the axe makers have given us in many ways we have pushed our luck whether or not you believe the greenhouse effect is already happening or will bring death and destruction to the planet since the Industrial Revolution we have at least made ourselves chemically felt in the biosphere at large what with obliterating entire ecosystems and indiscriminate use of overuse of fertilisers and pesticides we seem to be destroying species at a rate estimated to be something like six thousand a year now since we don't know how many are left we don't know whether this is Cataclysm or just Armageddon the social effects of the early years of the Industrial Revolution generated ideological differences that until recently brought the planet close to nuclear destruction and gave birth to a political system that pushed the countries run by it for seven decades close to starvation the ability of the axe makers to enhance the carrying capacity of the planet through agricultural tricks like the Green Revolution as well as the extraordinary reduction in death rate in the third world with drugs in public health has also brought us within the population support limit of the planet by 2050 at the latest it's only a short time ago that we were expending men women and materiel in a Gulf War that was fundamentally triggered by our vulnerability to the disruptive effect of an interruption in oil supplies on a high-tech economic infrastructure we built up in disregard of such an eventual possibility and as our communicative abilities grow we've become increasingly aware of that not not not not not not not 0.1% of the population who are calling the shots not in any dictatorial fashion I hasten to add but is the natural consequence of taking the axe mega root and we become increasingly aware of the inadequacy of our present institution meaningfully to inform the majority of our citizens about what those people are doing now we might be living with no more than a future rather complicated version of what we've lived with ever since a number of ordinary slobs gaped uncomprehendingly at the expec and his shamans sidekick with a magic wand except fortunately for the brain because the end product of this great millennial hand axe mental constraint may have been the emergence from the same axe makers almost in spite of themselves in the last few decades of a new kind of tool one that might change the rules move the goal posts whatever I refer of course to the latest version of the hand axe data processing systems and their symbiotic partner telecommunications I think the convergence of these two systems marks a watershed in our descent from the unli hindered mental vistas of a hundred thousand BC because these new technologies could offer us a way to turn the clock back in some very valuable ways there is no question is there but that the proliferation of knowledge through the computer will amply satisfy any demand by the law of evolution for diversity if the effective information surge are to generate new ways of living then in the coming decades where again we're going to get that in spades the question is whether or not becoming information technology will bring in effect just several orders of magnitude more of what went before that isn't even more highly informed even more powerful even more reduction as delete and an even larger even less informed rest or could it be something new I've heard it said that at one operation a second the computer can equal the tool-using mind in arithmetic at a hundred operations a second in logic at a thousand 10,000 operations a second in chess and at a million operations a second in some expert activities but to be the brains it could equal in imaginative thought it would need to operate at ten trillion operations a second and that we can expect to be within one order of magnitude of that by 2030 now I won't analyze imaginative thought because I don't know what imagination is operationally but 10 trillion operations a second is a significant amount of processing power with which to reproduce some of we get up to even if all it does is to mimic some of our simpler acts mega habits like seeking new ways to chop up the universe well that'll deal with much of what we have caught up to now discovery and innovation whichever way information technology goes most of it will probably by 2020 2030 be doing virtually all of the research and development that has so far taken human beings a hundred thousand pencil chewing years there are one or two problems I'll just touch on how do the social processes handle that kind of rate of innovation and discovery how can we accept innovation that cannot be explained by the machine that produced it because we will not live long enough to understand or even hear the whole of the explanation that's already happening in the field of quantum chromodynamics I believe where some of the newer systems can handle equations that would have taken an old mainframe a century so do we try to build into the system some kinds of values to act as some kind of basic social filter to help the machines decide what innovation to pursue and what to drop and if so how do you know you're not going to want something before it's been invented and if you let it emerge before you think about it who then has the authority to decide that it won't be made public but the more positive side of this problem may well lie in the way in which the system's could perhaps solve a problem loudly argued about over the years every time you talk about social inequity in our X maker world I mean of course the matter of sharing the wealth both intellectual and material when in the past it was suggested from time to time that we might call a halt to development in order to expend effort in getting what a few of us have to the majority who haven't the argument was always if people wouldn't give up their right to a higher standard of living however well-off they already were I think this is probably true I believe it would be less of a problem though in a world where with the aid of the new machines it might take few of a fewer of us to generate those high levels of innovation needed to ensure a rising standard of living what I'm suggesting is that the next generation of information and communication systems could offer so much spare organizational and innovative capacity as to give us what we've lacked for a hundred thousand years the opportunity to give everybody a hand ax metaphorically speaking enough organizational power and then some to run the place generate new models make advances in medicine and food production devised entirely new ways to make money and still have enough machine capability left for the single most important activity known to humankind educating the young for self fulfillment and responsibility towards the rest of their community the new information systems already suggests it may be possible to circumvent the major obstacle of the medieval education system lack of individual attention like a materials and above all the constraint of a single model X make a view of what constitutes intelligence in young people some of the experimental hypermedia programs offer very idiosyncratic ways for individuals to learn in their own way at their own pace with their own objective and still come out knowing what the community requires but having made the journey along paths of their own devising with knowledge all the more precious because it is of their own making because they have taught themselves to learn and telecommunications already makes it possible to bring this opportunity to the poorest most isolated shack of a school room in the most remote corner of a desert or inner city anywhere and if we spend half the effort and energy we spent getting conned by nikita khrushchev into thinking the moon mattered we could bring solar power and wind power to those same Shack school rooms and to the rest of their poverty-stricken countries twenty years from now I think we will I think inevitably we will see it makes good enlightened self-interest to have our innovation machines humming in the back room while most of the axe makers go out and help to educate the world if for no other reason and to make them consuming axe makers like us buying their tools from us what a market fortunately I think we get more than we bargained for if we did that I mean up to now we have lived in an almost empty world yes there are 4.9 million billion out there but when did you ever hear from them as a as the kid says when his mother when his mother tells him at the breakfast table eat your cereal millions are dying in the Sudan name one up to now the vast majority of illiterate humanity on this planet the non axe makers we left behind millenia ago has had no voice with energy independence and the data networks they will and the task of integrating ourselves into one global community will begin because Western technology has not made it a shrinking world that's only what CNN would have you believe when I lived in Italy for example in the 60s it was be wailed that television would destroy the cultural customs the very powerful long-lived productive cultural customs of the Italian regions it'd all be swamped by television Italian from Rome thirty years later with a television station in every pot those customs in their dialects and traditions are flourishing more vigorously than since the sixteenth century the global network that we are busily constructing now for the business in industrial elite and the political elites will soon become available at what we might call for want of a better phrase the grassroots level but a sudden and massive increase in the number of diverse talents and values and opinions that will be expressed on that network is going to put our acts making institutions under unprecedented stress and the UN is no exception only the politicians would pretend that it voices in any meaningful way the aspirations of the billions of individuals it claims to represent much less while we're feeling comfortable about this much less our 18th century so-called representative democracy with its built-in short-term imperative to shape public policies primarily in order to get reelected and expressing itself through a number of political options which are if you think about it ridiculously limited in the face of an increasing cultural and intellectual pluralism among the electorate and among the world at large if we won't take two flavors from baskin-robbins why should we take it from government to choices was fine back when the world was simple not now so if we are to be ready for the explosion of cultural pluralism which I believe is coming on the global network we urgently need to use the technology to prepare people for life in a participatory political arena what access to any information the individual considers necessary is both unrestricted and untested I suppose that word untested goes against all tax making practice we Western tool makers have taken a progress oriented view of history that sees events in terms of onwards and upwards thanks above all to the manufacturer always of new forms of specialization always tested always qualified so we see the advent of the coming information systems as some kind of step forward to an even more extraordinary cutting edge specialization the brilliant end product of a couple of centuries of reductionist scientific and technological endeavor but that endeavor as I said could have brought us something surprisingly different from what we might have had in mind and that's what I meant earlier about being able to turn the clock back if the network offers those four point nine billion the means to make themselves heard directly instead of being represented by authority it will give them the means to express their individuality in a way up to now denied them and nobody knows what that will mean nobody knows what the free empowered informed individual is capable of because we haven't had any anywhere so far we don't know what's out there waiting to be set loose the axe making techno environment D selected those other forms of talent thought and expression a hundred thousand years ago and left them out of positions of power in the jungles across the deserts high in the mountains and in music rooms art galleries and poetry classes maybe the coming networks will bring those people in from the cold for the first time in a thousand generations to help us towards what we might for want of a more pompous metaphor call a baskin-robbins cultural future maybe once the techno environment was established all those centuries ago we were tied in the kind of individual talents we could permit into the process by the limitations of the technology available at any time from then on and in general those tools and systems couldn't ever handle the non-sequential thought processes of what we today would call the artistic the imaginative the lateral the disorderly mind but a billion switches on a chip and supercomputing at fifty bucks we'll be able so that's what I really meant about turning the clock back I'd like to believe that we will soon be able to release the awesome power of the rest of our minds and those of the so-called primitive around the world and I also think that the argument that art only follows interprets and the science leads and shapes and changes the world maybe an argument itself the product of the acts maker technology constraint and once that constraint is lifted a different view will be feasible I happen to think that the technology to permit that will be here a lot sooner than our institutions are prepared for it what kind of world would they give us I don't know but whatever it is I think we should be thinking a great deal more in the institutions about the problem now instead of continuing to live by the old ax maker view you know the one of the fellow who falls off the top of a skyscraper as he falls past the seventeenth floor somebody called her to ask him how he's doing and he shrugs and says in a typically late 21st twentieth century way so far so good you know really cool back mr. Burke has agreed to a few questions if anyone has one what yeah Bruce says there's time some questions not not much time because I came in from England yesterday and it's 3:00 in the morning 4:00 in the morning could we do it this way if you have any question if you'd like to go just go if you have a question raise a finger I'll choose friendly looking people repeat their question rewording it to suit me and then dock it okay those are the rules no questions and terrific okay oh god question oh good thank you a difficult question we have any upcoming shows from me yes yes I'm doing a starting work on a 20 part don't hold your breath a 20 part series starts on November the 1st 10 go out at the end of next year and the second 10 go out at the end of the following year and it's about the interactive nature of knowledge what else you know I can redo one tune I can only cook one spaghetti dish and I can only do one kind of program still that's what all academics are like right there was another question yes ma'am do I think that computer Nets like internet and bitnet are moving towards what I'm talking about I don't think so no I don't think it's gonna come from well it took a risk here I don't think it's gonna come from inside the computer community I I was in a symposium forum thing in Japan recently where all the hotshots from the computer industry very interestingly had a very private meeting with all the hotshots from the entertainment industry and the telecommunications industry and I think what came out of that meeting was and it's going to come from entertainment through the phone in other words the push is going to be that the fiber-optic network will make it possible once hey listen I'm going to insult somebody - but you have to insult somebody don't you once you people do what we're all doing which is to let the fiber-optic go all the way to the front door of a house he said of having a silly nonsense about you know taking it up to the curb and then not into the house I mean then you'll be able to shunt stuff into the house home at a tremendous rate get broadcasting out of the air and send it down it and you have tons of bandwidth to use more sensibly than crowding it the stupid TV and then that means the end of the networks array but and you know no but I mean and the quality of programs that are produced when you only have a broadcast network them therefore the advertisers have to scattergun everything on there for only mass advertisers selling cans of beans pay for anything so you get cans of beans programs so I think what's gonna it's gonna come here let me run I think it's gonna come because the fiber optic network is gonna go into the home and it's going to you're going to be able to call on tons of stuff and people are going to demand I think people are going to say well I'd like I'd like this kind of I think that's where the thrust is going to come from not from inside the computer community cuz I don't think the computer community is qualified to do that I mean I didn't think they know what the market is I didn't think I know what people want in that sense I worry a little bit about that development because although on the one hand I think it's a good idea if you can if you can have this network supporting people's ability to call on data and to get it in ways that are other than you know bulletin board gobbledygook but I mean I'm thinking in terms of very extremely modern graphic techniques and so on what was missed lightly is that the way television I think inevitably will go and one way that's good because I think with the highly pinpointing techniques that advertisers will be able to use once they've got this fiber a system they will people like Mercedes will start paying for high quality programs so people who want to buy Mercedes and that means that for a few bucks you get the same thing and you get high quality programs and if only X percent by the Mercedes that makes trip car very happy so they go on funding it so in other words I think will be a Renaissance of quality programming for that reason but what bothers me slightly is the loss of the forum I mean however dreadful CBS ABC NBC BBC all these people are I think they provide however degraded however second-rate however produced by people with only one thing in mind keeping their jobs north they provide at least a commonality of experience for people to talk about I mean very few people listen to radio where I think the last vestiges of quality broadcasting still hang on grimly so I worry a little bit but a little about the loss of the public forum and I don't know what will replace it what worries me is nothing will replace it that we will have increasingly less in common and I know now and again whether you like it or not you leave the TV on while you make a cup of coffee or something and you accidentally get a bit of documentary work or you actually did Lee get a bit of political discussion out of it with with fiber optic specialists channels you won't you know if you're a begonia growing mud-wrestling freak that's all you'll see then who will become president sorry sir how are the axe makers who are in control of the delivery of the material today how are they going to be moved out I is paused the hacker theory of history and I think that ultimately the hacker went through and I suppose this might be the first opportunity there's a very optimistic way of looking at things but this might well be the first opportunity for for the ordinary non-specialists member of the public to act like a hacker above all act with a pocketbook for example um as for whether or not you mean the material that is sent the data that is produced will be hmm yes again I wonder whether the marketplace will see that away I mean it you know two minutes after you say cold fusion 7000 other people are saying garbage you know I think we have a tendency to - well it's what made America great it's called competition so I wonder whether the I can't see that you can have any other controls I mean the government can't do it you I suppose if there's any hope at all it's the market in that sense that no I don't mean the market in that sense I mean sorry I mean the intellectual market no oh sorry that's an antenna intentional good good can we get on to thicker ice please okay one more untold sir yes sir ten yeah well the projection is 10 billion by 2050 well there are several things you can do with them some of the more optimistic views are that there are nine acres per person on the planet seven of which are at the moment unusable Tundra Mountains one of which is used and the other one is spare so technically speaking from the straightforward no progress business-as-usual will go on as we are at the moment theoretically there is enough land to handle a doubling of the population that begs the issue of whether that land is destroyed by misuse or rendered useless by the kinds of governments that we see in certain parts of Africa at the moment where I believe half the problem of aid is not that the country has been destroyed but that the political system lack of it there means that running any kind of country that will produce anything to feed anybody is out the question so I think I think that the other thing I suppose is that I would look to ideally the realization that this problem is coming whether we like it or not and that the urgent necessity is to find alternate forms of energy renewable forms of energy and solar energy above all and that fiscal measures have to be taken to which were which were cut off in this country and 17 years 16 years ago you have to start encouraging people to get into the solar energy business again so I suppose the energy problem is not as not as critical as it might appear I mean you know you went to the moon in ten years you people you could do this in ten years you could do this alternate energy solution you could find it in ten years and make it feasible if you have the political will question is where you have a pretty cool but if you don't do it nobody else will do it I don't think everybody else is even Europe everybody else is falling apart III the the the the difficult thing to bring up in a mixed bag like you is the matter of birth control the ultimate problem on the planet you put your finger on I mean the greenhouse effect and everything everything else comes from the problem of population and the problem is how you handle the cultural and religious obstacles to introducing any kind of sensible birth control in many parts of the world including the United States of America remembering that you know you every baby that's born in this country uses 7 times more energy than any baby born almost anywhere else so you know it's not it's not it's not a straight equation to say well there are X many more people in India each one of them uses much less energy than any one of you do so I suppose altima it's a political decision about what you do about population control without that you know we'll be up to here so I suppose I'm saying there is no solution except that one and it seems to me and I'll really put my foot in it before I leave that everywhere in the world the problem is not not gonna be solved by science it's gonna be solved by a political will it's not going to be solved by contraception or abortion it's going to be controlled by educating women that one place in the world where there has to seems to have been massive success in bringing population rates down is in the province of Kerala in India and that was brought about by a sustained policy on the part of the local government there to radically change the social and educational position of women in the society and educated women decide whether they want 20 children or not and in general they don't you

Channel: Ball State University Libraries

Views: 30,861

Rating: 4.8793101 out of 5

Keywords: History Of Technology (Literature Subject), History Of Science (Field Of Study), James Burke (Author)

Id: gSAosNdSnNQ

Length: 70min 55sec (4255 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2015