Original subtitles

I'm going to leave it at that.

It's now my great pleasure to introduce Maynard Orm, who's the president and CEO

of Oregon Public Broadcasting, who will introduce Mr. Burke.

Thank you, Terry, and welcome to this inaugural lecture series of ICEP.

I can't go on any further without just saying a great big thank you to Terry

Bristol for organizing this once again.

We're just really thrilled.

It is a special privilege for me tonight to introduce our speaker, James Burke.

Why is that so?

It is because he is one of the very few who is able to take difficult and

sometimes abstract ideas, put them into context, and translate their meaning for

mere mortals like me.

I cherish the nights when, sitting in a darkened room with the glow from the TV

set, I heard our speaker present an idea that excited me so much I couldn't stop

thinking about it and unfortunately didn't get very much sleep that night.

His tangential and integrated thinking has classified him as a, quote, one of the

most influential and intriguing minds in the Western world, end quote.

For over 30 years, this prolific man has produced, directed, written, and presented

award-winning programs for the BBC, PBS, and the Learning Channel,

to name a few.

His mind-transforming series like Connections 1, 2, and 3, After the

Warming, The Day the Universe Changed, The Real Thing, and Tomorrow's World,

to name a few, have influenced us all.

He is currently working on the Burke Knowledge Web, a large interactive website

due to debut in late 2002.

Burke holds an MA from Oxford as well as two honorary doctorates.

His talk tonight asks the question, is the internet redefining knowledge?

I'm assuming that if the answer was no, he wouldn't be giving this presentation.

Please welcome our special and celebrated guest, James Burke.

Well, that will have exhausted you.

No, I shall.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

It's jolly nice to be back in Portland.

The weather is so nice.

It hasn't rained since I got here.

As you've heard, and as you may know, I have wasted the last 35 years of my life

as a science historian and journalist doing TV programs and writing books and

magazines and stuff about technological change and its social effects.

And in order that you get into proper perspective of what I want to say tonight,

which is really about, well, a number of things, least of all what the title is,

let me remind you of what the late great Mark Twain once said when he might have

been talking about people like me when he said it.

He said, in the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place at

the right time.

It is the task of journalists and historians to rectify this error.

So I want to put in a bit of rectification.

I want to put into general historical context this evening that some of the

processes exercising people's minds these days, what the technology coming down the

pike is going to do to us, how you best prepare for it and why that has not been

easy up until now.

And I want to argue that the high rates of innovation we live with today and the

historical difficulty we've had predicting innovation accurately up until now and

finally the opportunities that the coming technologies will offer to take a

radically different approach to knowledge management all spring from the same

creative moment about 500 years ago when somebody triggered all this with a

solution to a small local contemporary problem that went on to change the world.

But let me start with predicting the future because if you get that right,

you've got it made.

The unfortunate thing about the future is, if you think about it, it hasn't happened

yet.

And never will, if you get my drift.

The great Danish quantum physicist Niels Bohr on the subject once perspicaciously

said, prediction is extremely difficult, especially about the future.

Now, I don't think that was just Danish humour.

Well, you never know.

I think, rather, he was talking about the humongous number of variables involved in

any change and those variables multiply through history.

Once upon a time, decision making was extremely simple.

You could have any colour, Model T Ford you liked, as long as it was black.

Today, by the time you get round to reading the manual, there's been an

upgrade.

If you can read the manual in the first place.

By the time the high schools are teaching what they need to teach to keep up with

innovation, their material is already out of date.

And as a consequence, the reaction of the average person in the street to the flood

of new technology that overwhelms us every day always reminds me of the story of the

depressive who gets a couple of days off from the clinic where he's being treated,

goes to the beach to get himself a tan.

The next day, his psychiatrist back in the hospital gets a postcard.

The message on the card reads, I think, very much like the average

person's reaction to the present high rates of innovation because the message on

the card from the holidaying depressive reads, having a wonderful time,

why?

Let me start with one of the reasons that happens, why it has been so difficult for

us so far to second guess change, to recognize, for example, what unlimited

bandwidth and technological convergence is going to do to almost every aspect of our

lives.

The challenge of how difficult it can be to get prediction right was once amusingly

illustrated by the great modern philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

He's the guy, you know, who ruined corporate communications because he once

said, if anything can be said at all, it can be said clearly.

Anyway, somebody once went up to Wittgenstein and said, what a bunch of

morons, we must have been back 700 years ago in the days before Copernicus told us

how the solar system worked, to have looked up in the sky and to have thought

that what we were seeing up there was the sun going round the earth.

Well, as any idiot knows, the earth goes round the sun and you don't need to be

Einstein to get that.

To which the great man is said to have replied, as philosophers will do,

yeah, yeah, he said.

But he said, I wonder what it would have looked like up there if the sun had been

going round the earth.

The point being, of course, it would have looked exactly the same.

What he was saying was that in any decision you're constrained by your

knowledge context, what you know at the time.

You're in a box.

And science and technology are no exception.

As an astronomer, if you think the universe is made of omelets, you design

instruments to find traces of intergalactic egg.

And if you don't find any, no problem, instrument failure.

And not, of course, that your view of the cosmos is wrong, because at any time the

contemporary view, the view from inside the box, the company view, is the only

right one or there would be anarchy.

We have to have a general agreement on how to think that we can all stick to at any

one time.

Conformity is a security matter.

Trouble, however, about being in this box, and you may know this already,

is that it dictates how you see the future and plan for it and act on that plan.

And the problem is, the view from inside the box is not always what turns out.

Principally, as I want to show, because the future is almost never a

simple linear extension of the present.

Now, this can become very soon very embarrassingly obvious to people like

Gutenberg who thought he'd print a few Bibles and that would be that.

Or the head of IBM 50 years ago who said, take it from me, the world will need five

computers.

Or Popular Science magazine the same year saying, take it from us, those computers

will never weigh more than one and a half tonnes.

Or my favourite prediction, Bill Gates in 1984, 640k ought to be enough for anybody.

He claims he didn't say it.

But the trouble with second guessing the future lies partly in the process of

change itself and the only thing you can say with certainty about change is that it

is uncertain because, as Niels Bohr said, of the variables involved.

Because while you're in your box planning on bringing about change with some new

idea or some new gizmo, at the same time in lots of other boxes you don't know

about, other people are doing precisely the same thing.

So even as you decide on your straight pathway to the future, somebody out there

is putting a bend in the road.

Let me illustrate how nonlinear the process of change can be with a not very

serious sequence of events from the history of technology that end in the

modern world with a modern innovation that I assure you every single person in this

room, in this theatre tonight is intimately acquainted.

So you should get there, as you were, before I do.

One dark and stormy night in 1707 off the south-western coast of England an English

admiral called Sir Cloudsley Shovel I had to change my name is bringing the Great

British Fleet home to England, decides to turn right and only one of the

44 navigators in the fleet says don't do it, so he does.

They hit the rocks, the entire British fleet sinks, all the British fleet sailors

drown, and so does Admiral Shovel.

This stimulates the British Parliament to offer a large prize for better navigation

techniques, thus prompting a clockmaker called Huntsman to go looking for better

steel for a clock spring.

Now, this is because those of you who sail will know that if you're going east-west,

the most important thing you can know is the exact time back at base.

If you know that, if you have a clock on board that tells you that, you know

precisely how much later or earlier one of the heavenly bodies came up over the

horizon, and that tells you where you are, time zone-wise, if you like, the problem

of longitude.

Now, this is a serious matter to us Brits at the time because we are sailing over

here to exploit you guys.

We saw nothing wrong with taxation without representation.

What's changed?

Now, the steel that guy Huntsman finds for his clock spring is perfect for clock

springs and, as it turns out, for cutting other metal.

So an ironmaker called Wilkinson uses it to bore out thin-walled water pipes and

then thin-walled cannon barrels, which, in spite of the fact that we are at

war with both of you at the time, he sells to you and the French.

Nothing changes.

A little bit later on, Napoleon uses these very lightweight cannon barrels to develop

something called mobile horse artillery and wins all his battles, except the last

one.

Sorry.

In 1810, Napoleon sets up a prize for encouraging French inventors and a

champagne bottle called Apier steps forward with a brilliant idea.

Put food into the champagne bottle, put the cork in and boil it up and kill

all the germs that nobody knows exist and preserve the food.

Ten years later, an English company is doing it because they bought Apier's

patent, which they only happen to see because it is quite literally on the table

next to the one they went to Paris to buy, which is a patent for a new

continuous-process paper-making technique that allows the first ever toilet roll to

be made.

You see what I mean about innovation being surprising?

How could anybody have forecast the toilet roll from the most frightening of

navigational problems?

English joke.

What is happening here is, I think, the fundamental process involved in

innovation and the main reason why so far it has been so hard to second-guess

change.

It's the way change happens when things come together in ways they haven't before

because when that juxtaposition occurs, the rules of math change and one-on-one

becomes three.

The result of the process is more than the sum of the parts and almost always

unpredictably so.

I mean, the German 19th century automotive engineer Wilhelm Maybach puts together the

perfume spray and gasoline and comes up with what we call the carburettor.

Another one.

Around about the same time, a medical researcher accidentally spilled some of

the newly invented artificial dye into a petri dish containing bacteria.

Next morning he sees that it has preferentially stained and killed only one

kind of bacteria.

Bingo.

Chemotherapy.

Now, in the face of this kind of serendipity, the only important question

that matters is why.

What is it about change that makes it so hard to manage because it is constantly so

surprising?

Good surprising if it's you doing it to your enemy on the battlefield or in the

marketplace, and bad surprising if it's hitting you.

I believe change is a surprise because of that knowledge management idea about 500

years ago that I mentioned, which brought us all here today and which also happened

because of what you might describe as a surprise.

One hell of a surprise.

And one which also brought us all here today.

But let me first very briefly go back to the beginning where knowledge management

first emerged as a concept in the caves of Paleolithic prehistory, which is where we

get our attitudes and our institutions.

Which I believe all start with the first flint axe.

If you think about it at the time, the first flint tool is the best thing to

hit human beings since eating berries and dirt.

Because it makes it possible to go out and hunt for the lunch on the hoof that is

walking past.

And whatever it was we human beings were going to be, the flint tool in one sense

freezes us at that point in our development, freezes the way we will think

and act and organise and innovate from then until about yesterday.

First of all because if you're going to hunt, you're going to need noodlers who

will go on making the flint axes and spearheads and butchering tools.

And then you need a man with a plan or you won't coordinate the hunt and lunch will

get away.

And then you need lots of people to do what the man with the plan says.

So you set up a top-down decision-making process in which, you may have heard this

before, the few get power and reward and the many are excluded from involvement and

do what they're told.

So when I say we freeze at that point in our development, it's because while I was

just describing what goes on in Paleolithic caves, I could as easily have

been describing what goes on in general motors.

The entire top-down command structure of modern society starts with the flint axe

and shapes the culture and the way we will think from then on, which is what

technology always does.

The flint axe kicks off a kind of cultural cascade effect because its first use

creates a discontinuity because it introduces the first non-cyclic,

once and for all change, which people get used to and then want more of,

which they always do, which generates public expectation of an even better tool

tomorrow, which it always does, which generates the requirement that the

noodlers will come up with the goods to satisfy those expectations, which it

always does.

And above all, keep the man with the plan in power.

Now, because of some work at a laboratory not too far from where I live in France,

we know that to create the hottest flint axe on the market about 200,000 years ago

took about 100 extremely precise blows to a piece of flint in an extremely precise

sequence, taking into consideration the exact fracturing characteristics of the

stone at each blow.

And to pass on such a skill as a noodler instructor, you had to be able to instruct

with the same linear exact precision, which is why, according to one eminent

Dutch paleontologist, language happens.

Language is advanced axe-making.

And like axe-making is linear, precise, and step-by-step.

And like the axe, language cuts reality into conceptual pieces you can reassemble

in different ways.

Some thousands of years later, when the Greeks find themselves in a

situation very like ours today, where innovative solutions will open up

global markets, they use language to cut up thought and reassemble it so as to

innovate using logic, which is the flint axe magnified a million times.

Because as you know, with logic you can solve problems by putting together two

things you know to produce a third thing you didn't know.

For example, stars give off light.

Light comes from fires.

Stars are fires.

Pretty good for people with no infrared spectrometry, right?

What turns this process into the cutting edge of modern science and technology is

that knowledge management idea I mentioned 500 years ago, triggered, as I said,

by an off-the-wall accident.

It is the rediscovery of America by Columbus on what he thought was a clear

shot for Japan.

America blows everybody away.

It's not in the two basic databases of the time, the Bible and Aristotle.

So what the hell is it doing there?

And then all those new animals and organisms start flooding across the

Atlantic and they're not on Aristotle's list either.

So what the hell are they doing there?

In the intellectual...

Oh, I forgot to say, and of course, around the same time Copernicus is saying

the Earth is not the centre of the solar system and Galileo is saying, you're

right, I can see that.

And the Dutch engineer called Simon Steven is going around muttering, which means

don't believe in miracles.

And the whole thing is summed up by the poet John Dunn, the English poet,

who says, the new philosophy calls all in doubt.

In the intellectual panic that follows, like can they trust anything they know

anymore, the answer comes from a French noodler that I blame for absolutely

everything.

His name is René Descartes.

And he comes up with a knowledge management idea that changes the world.

And he works out how to generate and handle trustworthy new data without

screwing up.

I'll paraphrase.

Apply methodical doubt, he says.

If the guy says it's definite, think of it as probable.

If he says it's probable, think of it as possible.

And if the word is it's possible, forget it.

And Descartes says, take a reductionist approach.

Reduce a problem down to its simplest component part.

You'll know how it works.

You'll see how to fix it.

Methodical doubt and reductionism turn the process of change into a noodler's

paradise.

And pretty soon the mission statement becomes, learn more and more about less

and less.

Like a pal of mine at Oxford who got his doctorate in the 17th century poet

Milton's use of the comma.

You laugh, he is now the head of a department at a major American university.

Because he did what reductionism requires you to do to be a success.

Make your specialist niche so small there's only room for you in there.

And your comma.

And then, and above all, explain yourself only in gobbledygook.

In this way you are incomprehensible and therefore irreplaceable.

This is one reason why innovation, it seems to me, is always such a surprise.

Because as reductionism is applied, the body of knowledge is driven to become

ever more specialist, ever more fragmented, ever more complex.

So even as a specialist you don't know what the guys at the next workbench are

doing, scratching their heads at something so esoteric you don't even know how to

spell it.

And then letting it loose to interact with other things that they didn't know were

happening out there and cause change that nobody expects.

Least of all, the unsuspecting slob in the street.

Small wonder then that this process generates the holiday-making depressives I

mentioned at the beginning and the nonlinear toilet-roll innovation sequences

that make planning so difficult.

So not surprisingly, most people find managing change difficult because

Descartes' reductionism has not prepared us to handle the ripples that spread out

from innovation.

Take one example.

The ripple effects are one very minor by-product of the early printing press.

In the early 17th century, 1609 I think, new printed maps updated with information

coming back from voyages make it safer to go looking for cargos out in the east of

China and Japan.

Guys coming back from there with tea and porcelain come back to Amsterdam and

profit levels of something between six and seven hundred percent.

Everybody wants in on the game.

The problem is cash.

So a new thing is invented called a land register to register title to your land so

you can borrow money against it.

So another new thing has to be invented called a mortgage company.

Most of the borrowing goes into another new thing set up to take the risk out of

shipwrecks called insurance.

Now things are safe, safer.

Another new thing is invented to get more money in called a limited joint stock

company.

So there's another new thing called the stock market.

Running with the help of another new thing necessary for the purpose invented called

a national bank.

Providing more money through yet another new thing invented for the purpose called

a credit agency.

The whole shebang running thanks to another new thing invented for the purpose

called a business contract.

Which finds its way into political arrangements in the contract between

citizen and state embodied in another new thing called the constitution of the

United States.

The ultimate ripple effect of printed maps.

Kind of.

The reason ripple effects surprise people is because if some institutional procedure

works very well, you want to set it in concrete.

So nothing can prevent it from doing its valuable work.

Which very soon becomes blocking all further change.

Because change might bring destabilization.

That's why people in any institution all the way from ancient Egypt to the latest

internet startup can very soon find themselves with one aim in life.

Perpetuating themselves and the procedure which their institution enshrines.

Whether or not those procedures have been rendered outdated by events outside the

institution.

And institutional thinking can be a very powerful tool for ignoring the obvious.

Let me give you a not very serious example of that kind of tendency from the history

of technology.

Back in Europe at the end of the so called dark ages.

Late 10th century.

The European economy kicks back into high gear.

It is generally agreed thanks to the arrival from one of the Arab countries.

Sicily or Spain of a new kind of loom.

The thing about the new loom is it has foot pedals freeze the weaver's hands to

throw the shuttle back and forward much more quickly.

So to produce much more cloth much more quickly much more cheaply.

The Dutch weaver is the best on the continent smash every one of these new

looms they can find.

On the ground that quote it will put people out of work unquote remarkably

modern thinking for the 11th century.

However a generation later when the dust is settled the loom is in use and now the

trouble is with the traditional thread makers.

They can't keep up with the old manual methods because this loom is really making

cloth.

Until the answer comes unexpectedly in the form of the spinning wheel probably from

China.

You put the wheel and the loom together and the production of cloth goes up like a

rocket.

More riots.

Because the cloth now for a mass market is linen made from plants which are cheap

rather than wool made from sheep which are now expensive.

So the rioters this time are in the well established woolen industry.

However soon everybody is wearing this linen and when they wear it out throwing

it away.

So all over 13th and 14th century 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 get and it's now free.

More riots.

Traditional wool industry again because parchment is sheep skin and now it's too

expensive to use.

However here we are with enough paper to stick on the walls.

The scribes are overworked and in demand and pretty soon the writer's guilds are

going out and shouting in the streets.

They want more wages because suddenly the pressure is on.

The black death knocks off one third of the population.

The remaining two thirds are inheriting like crazy and there is not enough writing

ability to go around for all the documentation required.

Until Gutenberg solves the problem by automating it around 1450 with the

printing press.

Riots in that most conservative wool institutions the Vatican.

The Pope needs a printing press like a hole in the head because it will encourage

what we would today call free thinking.

Until somebody in the Curia realises that you can use a printing press to print

indulgences with.

Now for those of you who are not Catholic let me explain.

An indulgence was a kind of spiritual credit note.

Pay now, sin later.

Anyway with all the demand for instant printed salvation that follows Rome makes

a million money to build the Vatican pay Michelangelo's bill and generally get

involved in certain prestige projects that make certain simple German clerics madder

than hell with this cash and carry view of salvation.

One of whom nails up a few mild remarks on the subject and there thanks to advances

in textile technology and fought every step of the way is the Protestant

Reformation.

It is a trifle over simplified but you get my drift.

What I'm saying is standard operating procedure doesn't like having to handle

ripple effects or the unexpected.

Like the woman who gets into an elevator as the doors close a man gets in she

doesn't know, the elevator begins to rise out of the corner of his mouth he says

your room or mine baby and she says if you're going to argue about it forget it.

The institutionally conservative attitude to change, to new ways of doing things is

very powerful because once you start on the institutional path there isn't

supposed to be any deviation from standard operating procedure and the further from

the start you get the more difficult it is made to deviate.

Thus socially we live with institutions and ways of thinking that link us firmly

to that start point because they haven't changed since they were set up in the past

with the technology of the past to solve the problems of the past.

So they act like signposts telling us we're going the right way by obliging us

to look backwards most of the time.

However increasingly these days standard operating procedure SOP is not necessarily

a good idea.

Tradition and practice has knocked off more institutions and organisations than

you could shake a stick at.

Don't get me wrong I am not knocking tradition.

We put a crown on it and live off the tourist revenue.

So what have we got so far?

The process of innovation makes knowledge management and prediction difficult

because of the way reductionist thinking puts us all in separate boxes and because

the process of change causes one and one to make three and because innovation is

produced by noodlers who thanks to reductionism don't know what each other is

up to.

So innovation brings unexpected change very reluctantly accepted by social and

business institutions which are often inflexible and incapable of encouraging

change.

And the problem about the social institutions it seems to me is that by

definition they can't keep up.

Innovation is driven by the relentless demands of the marketplace and that rate

of innovation as I said before accelerates through history.

In general somewhere the marketplace is innovating all the time because entities

that cannot or will not innovate get replaced by entities that can or will.

And there is no way so far that any status quo preserving backward looking social

institution could ever get too close to that kind of dynamic future oriented rate

of change.

The result may be that we are heading into the virtual world of the 21st century with

attitudes and social structures that haven't really changed since the caves and

an ability to manage unexpected technological change severely hampered by

the specialism generated by Descartes reductionism.

If this is the case should we all jump out of the window?

I think not.

For a number of reasons the most important of which is the killer app every one of us

has called The Brain which it is beginning to be realized may not do its best work in

the way that has been SOP ever since the Flint axe froze its development back in

prehistory.

What I'm referring to is the sheer scale of the processes which seem to be involved

in what we call thinking.

Recent guess every healthy brain on the planet has about 100 billion neurons each

one of which could have up to 50,000 dendrites each one of which could be in

contact with up to 50,000 other dendrites.

Somebody calculated that's about 10 trillion connections.

If you're into combinatorial mathematics that tells you that the total potential

number of ways a thought can go through the brain is larger than the number of

atoms in the known universe and every one of you has one.

If you're looking for massively parallel processing it's between your ears.

So maybe there are one or two things it can do as well as go down the ever more

narrow reductionist path.

Maybe Einstein was right when he said we are all born with magnificent brains which

formal education then slowly destroys.

I think what he was really talking about was a strange way that innovative thought

is very often not linear, very often doesn't happen according to the step by

step procedure.

I mean Einstein himself said he dreamt up relativity because he had a dream of

riding on a beam of light.

Very often the most innovative solutions seem to come when the brain is kind of

freed from the nuts and bolts, defocused, not concentrating on a problem.

So the last thing much creative thinking appears to be is step by step.

Which explains of course why you are successfully achieving solving the

enormously complex problem of understanding me.

I am not referring to my accent because you are the ones with the accent.

I'm talking about this speak listen event.

If you think about it, if what you were doing was hearing each sound I said,

going into some kind of lexicon in your head, running through from top to bottom

each time to identify that sound, bringing it out and matching it with the

memory of the sound you heard, saying yep that's it, sticking that on the

end of the sound stream that went before and saying to yourself that makes sense

and then coming out and listening for the next sound I was making, then if all you

were accessing in there was a lexicon the size of the average high school graduate's

vocabulary, wait for this, 12,500 words, the English language has 414,812 words,

something's wrong somewhere.

However if what you were accessing was the average high school graduate's vocabulary

of 12,500 words at one millisecond per act of neural retrieval it would be taking you

12.5 seconds to understand each word I'm saying and you're not doing that are you?

Good.

So what are you doing?

You are running multiple simultaneous scenarios ahead of me using the grammar

and the syntax and the content and so on of my speech so far to power up all the

probable alternatives and in all ways I will end the word phrase, sentence,

paragraph and as I come on through powering down the ones you got wrong and

powering up the next set of probable alternates and powering them down and so

on and doing that as long as I utter sounds.

What that means of course is that you are all giving this speech before I am.

And any other speech I might have given.

One wonders why you came.

But that ability to put things together and run scenarios and stay ahead of the

game which is what survival is all about what the brain is best at, that seems to

be, you'll be happy to know, why brains appear to like jokes.

The punch line brings together two concepts in a way that's new to you and

since that's what the connective structure of the brain appears to be for,

you laugh in pleasure at having your connections enriched.

Let me try it on you.

Every brain in this theatre has the concept bird and the concept fruit in it

and like everything in the brain it's connected in some way.

Your connection may be bird tree fruit, bird colour fruit, bird season fruit,

bird eat fruit.

See if I can put a new connection in there and if I do you will laugh in pleasure at

connectivity enhancement.

Bird fruit.

A drunk goes up to his host at a party and says with that terrible seriousness of

totally plastered adults and very serious small children excuse me and the host

turns around and there is the drunk, plastered, I mean glassy eyed out of it

and the host think there's something wrong and says yes what's the problem,

what's the problem and the drunk says can you answer a question and the host says

sure fire away and speaking very carefully the drunk says do lemons whistle and the

host says no lemons do not whistle why do you ask and the drunk staggers back and

smacks his forehead in chagrin and says oh my god in that case I have squeezed your

canary into my gin and tonic.

Enjoy it there are no more jokes.

You see how innovative thinking may act in some ways just like a good joke but I make

a serious point the brain appears to be naturally configured for change to work in

the one plus one equals three mode to have new ideas because its job is to put

together information in new ways and innovate as that great American Claude

Shannon the inventor of information theory once said information causes change if it

doesn't it's not information example no information you are sitting in a seat

information the person next to you has a communicable disease nobody moving okay so

what I'm saying is that every brain then is a natural innovator capable a million

times over of managing change so one of the ways to think innovatively to manage

creatively to second guess the future if you had the technology back up might be to

use your brain in the way it appears to have been designed to be used before the

flint axe froze it if that's the case why have we not done so because of what I said

about technology back up up to yesterday there was never enough technology

available to involve more than a very few people in the innovative process and whose

prime job was to keep the political social or commercial power structure in power and

the community safe well supplied and stable the argument I am making is that

because the technology of the time shapes the culture of the time up to now without

the means to offer open access and the tools to go with it we've been obliged to

live to a certain extent with what I would call a culture of scarcity in which 99% of

the human race remained illiterate and excluded and in which it was taken for

granted therefore that only a very few people would have their say or do their

thing and therefore of course that such talents were exceedingly rare in the human

race the result of that limitation of access on the tools of innovation and

self-expression then generated what we call standards the self-expression by a

very small number of people with access that set the benchmark that the rest of us

would aim for if we ever got the chance and in a culture of scarcity we stuck to

those benchmarks for centuries I mean our educational systems at least where I come

from have not essentially changed since they were set up in the middle ages to

train priests many of our legal systems certainly where I come from still use

processes basically unaltered since the 13th century and as good reductionist

followers of Descartes we still admire people who have a mind like a knife but

consider the possibility that this apparent aristocracy of rare talent the

people who set those standards those benchmarks and the product of their brains

I mean the output of people like Michelangelo Einstein Confucius Newton

Galileo Jefferson were no more than what you get when only 1% of you gets to do

anything we don't know how many other kinds of genius there were out there at

the time up to the 20th century because they were out of the loop illiterate

unconnected and in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king what I'm

suggesting by that is that the innovative process itself may also have been so far

denied the benefit of the kind of ideas that might have come from non reductionist

approaches like at the very simplest level what you might get if you relax the

division of labor rule and encourage cross discipline between disciplines between

professions or accepted input from from non reductionist abilities like the very

shadowy area the penumbra around everybody's core competence that we call

experience valuable but informal talent the trouble with this unquantifiable but

maverick resource was that in the old world there was no way even if you had the

bandwidth to let it loose to nail it down to a formal procedure so that you could

harness it encourage it to conform and be productive when somebody's penumbra

somebody shadowy area of expertise crossed over somebody else's and that happens all

the time you couldn't do that in a division of labor world shaped by Adam

Smith but could it be that what's happening here at the start of the 21st

century is that in kicking off the scientific revolution Descartes first

great knowledge management tool triggered a chain of events that has finally given

us the second great knowledge management tool the kind of information technology

that may enable us to change the way we solve our problems radically alter the

knowledge management infrastructure and above all enfranchise some of that talent

out there for the first time if that's the case what kind of effect will that have on

the general culture well for a start the potential demand for the technology is

gigantic if the price is right and at a recent conference I attended run by the

real gurus in the trade the general belief was that within 15 years or so the most

expensive thing in a computer will be the plastic housing as for where the demand

for the technology is well I know there are 6.1 billion people on the planet but

when did you last hear from the other 5.4 like the kid retorts when his mother says

eat your cereals thousands are starving out there name one thanks to technology

shortfall we in the industrializing nations have lived on a kind of silent

planet those people out there in the third world the inner city ghettos outside the

universities never had the means to express themselves and their wish list

because as I said they were out of the loop but soon they won't be and I think

the word we're going to hear more than any other is more it's happened before if you

look at history you see that even in the technologically advanced communities there

are periods following times like today when you get major advances in the ability

to generate store and disseminate information when massive information surge

was triggered followed by high innovation rates and then major social change and

also there seems to be a kind of shake out period that follows innovation surge a

kind of period of transitional confusion while people get used to what the new

technology will allow them to do and then settle down to as it were codify what it

should do and accept the new shape that it gives society and this happens as I said

in the past it's not easy I mean after the printing press came along and you no

longer needed a good memory and years of living to know anything within a

generation or two of Gutenberg young people who could read and learn took over

and old people lost their authority and never got it back here in the United

States today at a society wide level the present version of that period of

transitional confusion is being called dumbing down I'd like to argue that we are

not dumbing down most of our community is being for the first time informationally

enfranchised and we are going through a long and massive learning curve as a

result and anyway dumbing down happens frequently in history too back in the 16th

century it was said about the printing press this gizmo, well they didn't say

gizmo this gizmo will make reading the infatuation of people who have no business

reading a rumpf in the 18th century Mozart got kicked down the stairs because they

thought a lot of people thought what he was doing was junk the school I went to 50

years ago that school Latin stopped being mandatory and it was said that our brains

would turn to porridge I don't think it has this may be why our generation is

finding it so difficult to predict change, first of all because there are more of us

interested in and involved with the process than ever before but the process

is now moving much faster than the old modern social systems can handle and

second of all because the so called information revolution we are supposed to

be going through hasn't even got into first gear yet if you look at it from

inside the box from the old model point of view things look pretty scary I mean

sometime in the next 15 years they are talking about semi-intelligent neural nets

multimedia up the yin yang massively parallel computing, operating systems

using DNA or light or quantum or all of the above super computing systems capable

of recreating a virtual human being down to cellular level and above all write your

own ticket software for virtually every activity that used to require a human PhD

and all this that will allow the individual, if they wish, to do everything

from bridge building to non-invasive surgery to balancing the books to painting

better than Michelangelo or playing better than Agassi the coming technologies what

I'm saying offer the possibility of enfranchising the individual's brain way

beyond the access we even boast about today.

The hot topic in the business community now is the way the culture is beginning to

demand customisation of product like never before as people wake up to what the

technology will do for them in ways they never thought about but the logical

outcome of that is an intriguing thought the consumer as designer the consumer

whose electronic agent becomes involved in the process of customising.

Perhaps goods and services entities like supermarkets or universities will end up

as virtual warehouses where the tools and materials are available for the consumer's

electronic agent to come and put together a customised package of what it is the

agent's owner wants if so then what the new softwares may ultimately mean is to

some extent the end of the intermediary for centuries in a culture of scarcity

there was so little access and tools around that if you wanted something done

you had to go to the guy who had the tools and ask him to make for you a horse shoe

or a sword or a house or an education today thanks to the reductionist hangover

and the fact that we're only at the start of this information revolution we still

operate like that through intermediaries take representative democracy if you think

about it a perfect 18th century solution to an 18th century problem lousy dangerous

roads and no telecommunications so what you do is you find a couple of fools with

time to spare and a horse and you send them up to the capital to represent the

local hayseeds now the roads are much too dangerous for them to come back the next

day and say have you changed your political minds so return journeys not too

frequent but regular return journeys are arranged after a number of decades these

horse-owning fools become known as politicians and their return journeys

elections 300 years later we have perfect roads and telecommunications coming out of

your ears and the same lumbering 18th century system and as for political choice

would we ever accept only two flavors from Baskin Robbins

representative democracy and any other form of intermediary infrastructure and

that pretty much relates to every social and business institution will not survive

in a world where individualism will have real meaning for the first time in history

centralized authorities over simple right or wrong ideologies charismatic leaders

with silver tongues and well hidden track records won't survive when it's easy for

your electronic agent to take a very close look persuasion is a lot harder when the

audience is well informed as I know to my cost and it's going to become even harder

you give people an inch they take a mile and the only systems we've had in

operation up to now in our culture of scarcity have offered less than an inch

people's electronic agents are going to want more than that they're going to want

in on the game all the way in and that will cause the biggest social changes in

history and if history is anything to go by it isn't going to be easy first because

the institutions are not going to want to give up power willingly or in a hurry and

second because of that transitional phase I mentioned before the fact that through

history the technology always moved a bit faster than the social processes could

keep up many institutions are handling this problem today in what you might

describe a skyscraper mode you know the story of the man who falls off the top of

the skyscraper as he falls past the 77th floor somebody calls out to ask him how

he's doing he shrugs and replies now falling past the 54th floor so far so good

surprising how many institutions are ignoring the upcoming sidewalk the other

way to handle it of course is with an attempt to catch up with innovation by

matching the brain and the technology a bit better because now the technology is

beginning to mimic the capabilities of the brain it's becoming semi-intelligent

holistic distributed low power high storage cheap the catch up approach I'm

talking about involves the other key effect of the new technologies that I

haven't mentioned yet it's the way the new technologies can bring any kind of

education to people anywhere from a Dallas high rise to a mud hut outside Bangalore I

won't go on about distant learning because I'm sure you know all about that but maybe

we need to introduce some new educational modes the product in a sense of what the

new technologies allow us to do to lay alongside our reduction systems to support

them in a different way you see the reason I say that is because most of the

environmental and cultural problems that we face in the world today are the product

of what reductionism and technology shortfall have done over the centuries

solved a million problems one at a time by taking them apart that's given us the

highest standard of living in history and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest

greenhouse effect acid rain the ozone hole depletion of oil and fish stocks a world

shaped and motivated by the effects of past colonialism and all the short term

view effect that result from not seeing the holistic forest for the reductionist

trees inevitable historically we didn't have the technology to think any other way

but soon in terms of what people do with their lives as I said the technology will

be doing most of the old reductionist things that used to take human beings a

pencil chewing lifetime and it seems to me the worst way to prepare for what comes

after that is to go on limiting education to the kind that used to train medieval

priests in which you were judged intelligent or stupid because you passed

or failed a set of tests of literacy and numeracy designed to exclude all but the

very few and that very few as in western very few any minute now technology is

going to make the whole shebang I've been talking about a really global matter not

the irrelevant small scale matter of how much of the global market your company

will get or how you sell your stuff in a hundred different cultures but the

humongous possibility that the global community won't necessarily lie down and

do it the western way the vast illiterate majority out there are still a

kaleidoscope of diversity with their roots firmly in their own cultures and

information technology is going to enhance that diversity empower it, support it

foster it, make it viable however small the group in ways we never could before

when the best we could do was pretty crude stuff colonise a country, make them speak

British and wear wigs in their law courts except you guys for some strange reason

you wouldn't have won if it hadn't been for French money you know that don't you?

anyway I think diversity is a really good thing because if you think about it that's

how nature has solved the problem of change since the very beginning I don't

know if you've ever noticed but in the way organic life seems to evolve to become

more and more ordered in the way for example you are born as a blob and you end

life as a very sophisticated adult and not very often the other way around in the way

this happens life seems to treat the second law of thermodynamics you know the

one that says everything left alone falls apart, decays things left alone,

hot things left alone go cold, cups of coffee intimate friends should you

be here life seems to treat this fundamental law of thermodynamics much the

same way as my Italian friends treat government regulations

I love Italy, it's not a country it is a disease for which happily there is no cure

but anyway what I'm talking about this attitude towards thermodynamics is

manifested in the way that the very successful life forms the ones that

develop beyond what you might describe as the primeval Southern California life form

get born, lie on the beach die seem to succeed in direct relation to their own

ability to appear to at least temporarily dodge the implications of thermodynamics

and handle environmental change by changing themselves becoming more complex

as a species by developing varieties of themselves each one each one adapted to

many different location specific kinds of forms of energy so that no matter how bad

the bad weather gets and no matter how long it lasts one of the varieties will

survive and through that the species in other words the more complex the species

is the better its response to change repertoire is likely to be and the better

its chances diversity being basically good for survival it seems to me that the

diversity I'm talking about in the social sense in the near future won't work the

old way there's just no time we can in the time available give everybody a PhD and

anyway it's too late for that I think what we need as I said are some new additional

educational modes that are more inclusive and less exclusive because we have to get

the knowledge out there fast and it's got to be knowledge with a new shape first of

all because the technology is going to make it possible to express your talents

perhaps especially in the virtual reality world in ways that aren't just words and

numbers and anyway in the chaotic and innovative environment of tomorrow if we

try to organise ourselves by the old representative division of labour top down

way there'll be anarchy because that old culture of scarcity way only maintain

stability through the application of what we call mushroom management keep them in

the dark and feed them a lot of manure

it's too late for that people everywhere already know just enough to know that

there's one hell of a lot that they should know now some of us are working on ways of

making that knowledge more available in what you might describe if you wanted to

use fancy words as post reductionist forms that kind of match the kind of thinking

and what you can do with the new technology ways that don't necessarily cut

and slice the material into isolated specialist segments I'd like to show you a

couple of seconds you better answer that I'd like to show you a couple of seconds

of what I'm doing I'm working on a thing which you could crudely call a sort of

small knowledge web in which all the elements of various kinds of data from

widely differing fields humanities arts and sciences as it were are all connected

all in some way to all a little bit like the brain works so whatever subject area

or target data you choose to go to to get to it you travel along a path to the data

that reveals several things about your target it's wider context the way it is

not necessarily the product of a linear sequence of events the ripple effects it

could cause the advantage of such an approach I suppose I would argue is that

entering the web is easy it's not frightening it doesn't require special

qualifications but any gateway will do so you come at the material in a way that

suits your particular background if you want to get at it through ice cream start

with ice cream if you want to go at it through high energy physics go at it

through high energy physics I'll just show you this for a couple of seconds I have to

tell you that what I'm going to show you is not the software I will be using

finally because I'm not anywhere near finished this web consists of 2,200 people

linked 17,000 ways and I've done about 1,600 but I have a skeleton structure of

the web I can show you and maybe just give a vague feel for how you'll be able to

journey through it the final software will give it an appearance and a mode of

function after we have gone out in gigantic number of focus groups to talk to

teachers about if they had a tool like this how they would expect it to work for

them and for the kids in the school so this is not that this is just a skeleton

on which to hang some of the early work this is what you might describe as the

kind of standard knowledge we've been using up until now and the thing about it

is that if you know this guy Ferdinand de Lesseps then you know about either

engineering or canal building or 19th century French engineering and canal

building because this guy Ferdinand de Lesseps built the Suez Canal okay now if

you're the kind of person who knows about Ferdinand de Lesseps the chances are

you're not the kind of person who knows about this one that is a woman called

Jenny Lind she was known as the Swedish nightingale in the middle of the 19th

century and she people claim that she possibly had the greatest voice of all

time if you know all about her the chances are you don't know anything about this guy

Saint Simon 19th century French thinker invented a new kind of Christianity for

businessmen strange man shot himself in the head six times and missed

if you know about him the chances are you don't know much about this one Alston one

of the great early American romantic painters what I'm saying is that what we

tend to do in the old way is to silo put knowledge into silos so that you know

about one lot but you tend not to know about another now the name of my game of

course as you'd expect is to show ways in which these people are actually linked so

let's take a look at this particular bunch I won't go right through it because you'll

get bored you're probably bored already that's tough luck okay take Mr Brewster

Brewster is a 19th century early 19th century crystallographer he invented the

kaleidoscope as a matter of interest but his work was very valuable when it came to

Marie Curie trying to measure the charge above the pitch blend that she was working

on before she discovered radioactivity her father-in-law was a follower of that

nutcase I told you about who shot himself in the head Monsieur Saint-Simon and one

of his followers also was this guy who built the Suez Canal for which Verdi was

invited to write the opening music a little number called Aida he wrote this

some time after he wrote an absolutely dreadful little number called Imaz Nadieri

so that this lady could sing the lead role Jenny Lind made a bomb we say it in

English you say that a million she made millions of dollars because P.T.

Barnum remember him P.T.

Barnum three ring circus person invited her to come to America on a tour that he

would organize well she made so much money she got married and retired and I'll

finish in a second Barnum who kicked off the great you know the greatest show on

earth three ring circus blah blah blah turned down one day a fail safe high wire

act which was a gyroscopically controlled wheelbarrow designed by Elmas Berry who of

course invented the gyroscope now if you take a second look at these people yes

they're linked and they're linked of course in more ways than one oh god I hate

doing this hang on a minute here we go yes now you see for example I'll be quick

Brewster came up also with Pisa Electricity Marie Curie's lover Langevin

invented the sonar down here Jenny Lind do you see this guy Hans Christian Anderson

when he wasn't writing children's stories he was writing pornographic letters to

Miss Lind

okay she ignored them now what you get when you take that process to its absurd

conclusion which is what I've done is this this this is not the real software but

it'll give you a smell now I'm sorry the guy's way back there you can't read the

little words and there's nothing I can do about that I'm really sorry but here for

example we're looking at Lister see this this guy Lister L-I-S-T-E-R and here are

Lister's immediate important contacts the people he worked with the people he

influenced and so on one of whom was let's say I don't know Pasteur here is Pasteur

and he has Pasteur's local contacts and people one of whom was a man called Koch

the man who discovered the tubercle bacillus Koch was knew a lot of people one

of whom was a man called Liebich and Liebich was a real mover and shaker you

can tell look at the number of people he knew and worked with and every time we're

looking at that of course all these little yellow people are the people that they

knew and this is one page out of 2,200 so you see what I'm hoping is that it will

probably exhaust a teacher's desire to it'll probably give a teacher enough so

that she won't he won't exhaust that web in a whole year I mean to say of course

that each one of those nodes obviously comes with a potted biography and you know

pictures and graphics and if relevant paintings, music recordings and so on and

so forth the thing about this business of making the material more accessible is

really you're talking about transferring power and knowledge out to the individual

much more than ever before as a virtual unlimited bandwidth really kind of

fragments information media into a thousand sources that really leads to a

few final questions when almost every aspect of life goes virtual what will

happen to the nation state when frontiers of local laws and customs no longer have

any meaning if I can buy my goods anywhere on the planet who taxes the purchase who

makes the goods who has the jobs in which case what happens to my national

commercial structures my national employment strategies my national ability

to provide social services my nation when I can educate myself in any classroom on

earth through distant learning exposed to influences and information from a thousand

different sources what happens to my local cultural values when online electronic

agents working 24 hours a day to represent me go out onto the web and bring back what

my profile tells the agent I want will I ever get anything other than

self-gratification will I ever emerge from starring in my own utterly personal

virtual reality paradise and if all I hear is the news I want to hear what does that

do to my political and social opinions and in any case how do you run a country when

every individual's electronic agent is inputting every individual's political

opinion on every issue in every section of the country every second of the day a

night 186,000 times a second what happens to the old pre-internet structures like

the European Union or United States when the internet removes the limitations of

time and space from international commercial and political relations and on

the international level whose law operates in cyberspace moving from a culture of

scarcity to a culture of abundance isn't going to be easy to leave behind the

comfort of believing that only specialists are valuable or of living by standards

established for you by somebody else my guess is the first effect of that open

access that period of transition I mentioned will show itself in some ways

that are turbulent and perhaps negative at the artistic level during this transition

will it be a world of home videos and illiterate scribblings and in science how

will the average person even with access to global databases make a meaningful

contribution to whether or not to spend billions of dollars in one aspect or other

of invertebrate paleozoology in other words will open access and the closing of

the gulf between the ordinary person and the world of information also bring with

it at least temporarily a welter of mediocrity instability, mindlessness and

self-gratification the like of which has never been seen before yes this side of

the educational revolution which it will also bring meanwhile maybe we could try a

few moves relax the division of labour rule become more flexible realise that

already an institution that is utterly satisfied with what it's doing is probably

dead and doesn't know it see that if as an institution or an individual you stand

still for too long now just as in the jungle sooner or later something will eat

you recognise that in the virtual mobile individualistic demanding marketplace of

tomorrow there will be so many alternatives washing around in that sea of

information that the newly enfranchised individual will be just like Admiral

Shovel in desperate need of a lighthouse in desperate need of an education tailored

to give the specific tools for their specific problems now our brains,

quintessential examples of innovative convergence at work have always been able

to handle these issues and now thanks to our technology perhaps so will our social

and cultural institutions if we don't use the technology to open a crack in that box

that Descartes put us into we will not be ready for the upheaval as we shift from a

culture of information scarcity to the free for all that will be the first free

for all in history the situation we face reminds me very much of things something

that happened to me when I was covering the Apollo missions the space missions for

the BBC 100 years ago in the stone age I used to find myself with my colleagues in

Moscow from time to time and in a dark bar somewhere a long way from the commissars

one of the locals would sidle up to us and engage us in conversation and sooner or

later they asked the same question they said how do you guys in the western

capitalist world survive all that dangerous confusion and anarchy and we

said what dangerous confusion and anarchy and they used a word that encapsulates

everything that challenges us in future they said choice I am an optimist in this

matter because pessimists jump out of the window and are no longer concerned and I

am an optimist because years ago during that part of my career I came across

something about you guys that made me feel extremely optimistic about the future

because if you sneeze we catch a cold I was covering Apollo and the mandate from

the BBC is tell the great British public why the Americans keep doing the same

thing go to the moon, bounce around, come back go to the moon, bounce around,

come back what they really meant was what's different between one mission and

another and please they said go and spend as many months as you like in Houston and

other Cape, find out well it was wonderful it was the most exciting five years of my

television career and I got to meet a lot of wonderful people they were really

special people those guys anyway I got hate mail for one aspect of my work I

think I did fairly well because I am here but there was one thing I got hate mail

from and all the mail said you know you paid lots of money to stand on that

television up there on the television screen and explain this stuff to us what

are they looking at?

I didn't explain because I couldn't explain on the lunar surface sometimes

they referred to what is called a cuff checklist and a cuff checklist was a kind

of aid memoir now this is not because astronauts are stupid because you know

they are not it's because on the surface of the moon you have that much oxygen and

you have to do that much work you don't have that much oxygen so you get the work

right or you blow it so on special occasions when really complex matters were

concerned there would be a cuff checklist that they could refer to now I never

explained this because I couldn't I'll just invent what it was suppose you are on

the surface of the moon first time in human history 240,000 miles from the

nearest work bench you take a piece of white hot technology some poor slob of a

science engineer has spent his or her adult life you lay it reverently in the

lunar dust and you press its little button and it doesn't work as Carl would have

said billions of people are watching you you have got to fix it now so you refer to

your cuff checklist and these cuff checklists never got explained by any of

us I'll have to pretend it would say something like if the LR cubed fails

option 1 press the out mode squelch PCM to 2 and disengage XYZ if option 1 fails

option 2 if option 2 fails option 3 squared and there would be something like

half a dozen instructions designed to stave off the possibility of a very

embarrassing technological gaff on the surface of another planet for the first

time in human history right at the end of each of these came a phrase that made me

an instant optimist about you and your relationship with your technology very

healthy relationship because the phrase at the end of each one of these little sheets

of instructions could never have been written by a British space agency or a

French space agency or a Chinese space agency or anybody else because at the end

of each one of these things it said if all technological repair options to this point

have failed kick with lunar boot

well we started a bit late and I over ran I can't see you can we have the lights up

I'm informed that we have a few minutes for questions those of you who teach will

recognise this technique you put up a hand or you go to the microphone and I choose

the people who look least dangerous re-voice the question in my favour and

duck it your teachers recognise that don't you so I can't see anything is there any

more light available out there she whizzes Bonneville is up the road isn't it oh

there you are now you can either put up a hand and shout or you can find a

microphone I can't tell you where they are there's one up here there's one up where

the voice of god oh hello okay you got there first make it easy is terrorism one

of these social upheavals that you think are going to happen now is terrorism one

of the social upheavals you mean part of the transitional confusion I don't think

it's been generated by advances in technology kiddo I think it's been

generated by something it went way before any advances in technology so no I do not

think it's part of the transitional confusion generated by the use of

technology no more than that I can't say without ruffling feathers next question

sir yes can you comment on any of the current collaborative projects going on on

the internet such as wikipedia which is a encyclopedia project is done by the great

masses attempting to build a encyclopedia from scratch or other similar types of

projects I think I saw that they put an ad didn't they you want to build an

encyclopedia come to with us and we'll do it together yes yes it could be the

greatest potential for obfuscation ever since Noah Webster reinvented the english

language ha ha H O N O U R we say you have put your finger of course as you know very

well and everyone else on the key problem of the internet how do you know you can

trust it I'm sure you do too I'm whizzing along and I think I need a quick fact

instead of going to the British library I save some time by going in the net the

stuff that I know is inaccurate is legion legion I don't know how you deal with that

well I do know but nobody's invented it yet there's a lovely woman up at MIT

called Patti Maas who is not only a genius but also beautiful and she's working on

these electronic agents and the kind of thing she's talking about is being able to

have an agent that can tell margarine from butter do you say that here?

no perhaps you don't in other words the electronic agent can work fast enough to

track down the sources of what's there and say no this is crap and not bring it to

you but short of that I think we're in for a period of transitional confusion in

spades yes but it happens all the time look at the junk that was printed not long

after Gutenberg we had to winnow our way through that stuff I will manage filtering

is part of the great oh gosh yes madam yes that's you yes oh my god I can't it's a

man sorry thanks a lot buddy I can't see okay okay in some of your other works you

made statements about some of your other works you made statements about main

philosophers coming around and really influencing people like corrupted

Darwinism and stuff but I want to know what you think about the main distribution

of information shifting from governments distributing information to corporations

distributing information to how you think that's going to affect us I don't agree

with you that the main source of information comes from either governments

or corporations the main source of information comes from libraries I mean

that's a plain fact you mean propaganda or selective elements of information but by

no means the main source of information I mean the information in your Library of

Congress is a little bit larger than what Mr Bush says sorry

or any other member of any government anywhere on the planet it's just that he's

more amusing

so I can't really I don't know well I mean I'm not sure I don't care actually I don't

think I think one of the aspects of the internet and the general growing rising

standards of education in general is that people are fooled a lot less than they

used to be even in my lifetime people are a lot a lot less easily fooled people are

waking up to realizing that you know what we've called transparent democracy for

five six hundred years has been anything but and the sooner we recognize that the

better you know we now accept that in a world of rail politic your government has

been assassinating people for a hundred years so has ours it happens and one day

it won't but it's far better that we know about it and then try to bring about a

world where it doesn't happen then believe that so what I'm saying to you is I think

the end of the 19th century it mattered a great deal what the government told you

but I think less and less so now but then that's because I'm Pollyanna-ish I suppose

yes sir I'm only joking I can let you get away with it I'm kidding I'm kidding I

guess my question was do you give a lot of stock into the ideas like I guess what

Topper called future shock do you think that people will ultimately be able to

adjust to it because of what's occurred historically or do you think that there's

some kind of limit that people will eventually approach because of so much

information I guess will there ever be an information overload in the effects of all

this psychologically on the individual and society no ok

I don't think that we have come remotely close to tapping what's between your ears

not remotely close and the matter of information overload is simple ignore it I

mean ignore it I mean find ways to we've filtered throughout our existence whether

it's whether it's what the shaman tells you and you know you ignore all other

bones except these or feathers or whether it's whether it's a librarian saying don't

waste your time on that muck over there if you want the horse's mouth it's over here

I mean there are ways that we but I don't think I wouldn't believe there's any

danger of the human being being overloaded because you can ignore things I do all the

time sir oh wait excuse me sorry sorry the gods I'll come back to you yes sir pardon

me if I've misunderstood but it seemed like you were saying that with the spread

of knowledge through the internet that it will increase diversity and it appears to

me that that if we all have access to the same knowledge will eventually all become

more and more alike such that eventually in the future hundred couple of hundred

years if we survive the current crisis that the only the real difference we're

going to need to find is you know another species from outer space or something yes

I understand that point of view and forgive me saying so it's old fashioned

what I'm talking about when I talk about diversity is the ability of each

individual to express themselves that's never happened there are 6.1 billion

people out there if they all express themselves it's going to be pretty

difficult to make them conform number one number two

I forgot what I was going to say damn it was a brilliant thought

I lived in Bologna I told you that I thought Italy was like dying and going to

heaven I lived for a number of years in Bologna back in the early 60s teaching and

Bologna you may not know this some of you may do know it Bologna's language is a

form of dialect of Italian that is almost incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't

live in Bologna I'll give you a tiny example of it one phrase in Italian when

you say see you tomorrow you say ci vediamo domani now I'll say that again and

then I'll repeat it in Bolognese ci vediamo domani assabdankmang when

television came along in the early 60s the people in Bologna were really upset they

said our culture will be destroyed we'll be talking like bloody Romans well today

there is a there are two Bolognese dialect television stations and the culture is

stronger than it ever was before so I think what we're going to do is as I said

in the middle of my words that the technology is going to empower that

diversity because it's going to make it easier for it to express itself and the

only way that cultures die out which they did when the Bible was not printed in

their language in the 16th century is because there's an incredibly limited

amount of the ability to express yourself thank you hi I'm from we are actually

teaching a course called cyber millenium cyber what?

millenium yeah so what you have said it's very very pertinent but I'm actually was

actually thinking about the same question and let me repeat it a little bit on the

question of whether the information technology will enhance cultural and

linguistic diversity and where I know I'm very happy that you think that it will but

some of us are still having the nagging suspicion because it's probably not so

much the idea of information technology but there is another trickster involved

that's the capital the commodification of cultures and languages and knowledge

systems that are again when you look into it you'd rather go to the pharmaceutical

company or it will go to the cultural entertainment industry so virtually I'm

talking more about the indigenous people and peasants and all those people out

there that what would we how would they really keep their processes of cultural

production I think I'm really troubled by that fact because once it begins to become

modified then they might be seeing their own dance actually through a video rather

than through their own ritual performance of daily life you're not talking about the

internet I think you're talking about what happens with normal human interaction one

group next to another have influences on each other one individual has an influence

on the other I still don't think that homogenizes us all far from it it may be

that the production of the interaction is yet another addition to the cultural

diversity mix I would hope so and I'm afraid on that note I'm beginning signal

to stop so thank you very much indeed for coming and good night

well if you have no questions I'll sit down oh damn yes sir easy question good

I'll duck it

what newspapers or magazines do I read to get current input on current events well

of course the Times of London are rump actually it's a question of what you can

get really I suppose yes in England I read the Times because it's the best newspaper

in England but perhaps the world I would read the New York Times if I could get it

but it isn't that easy in the sticks where I live outside London magazines The

Economist because I'm basically a fascist

I used to read Scientific American but since I stopped writing for it I don't

read it anymore actually the magazine was bought by people somebody came up to me

tonight and said what happened to you and Phil Morrison eminent physicist and

general good guy and because we wrote you know he wrote the column before and after

mine sometimes before sometimes after and they were bought by new people and

everyone was fired including us and now the magazine looks different I'm biased I

think it's not very good thank you thank you horrible so those are the magazines I

used to read what else history today is pretty good if you like the recent stuff

it spends a lot of time on the Nazi period but doesn't everyone these days it seems

to be the cheapest thing to teach children because it has movies attached so those

are the magazines and things I read I tend not to read magazines I tend to go and sit

in the British Library and read books because it's nice and fun and they pay me

to do it you know somebody it's better than real work no more questions thank you

oh damn yes sir is it correct to say that one of your thesis is

is my thesis that everyone will finally have access to everything ah if that is

the case here comes his question most people I know don't

most people he says you don't mind if I repeat this because people can't hear he's

saying that most people come home from work too tired to go to the internet

it's much easier to turn on the tube you mean the august body for which I do my

work I hope that is no longer true because I think television is dead and doesn't

know it I think saving your presence sir my god I apologize in general centralized

sources of information I think are dead and don't know it it's just a matter of

time until they've gone we're there on the vine I think the great thing about the

internet is that it will cause that to happen and actually if you look at history

that's exactly what happens throughout history there's a constant diffusion

outwards of information and sources of information constant diffusion outwards of

means of what Tom Kuhn described as the hacker winning through so that's my answer

to your question yes I can't answer questions from you you're my hero I'm too

scared to speak

oh yes for frippery it's okay and that's all it's okay for I think with limited

exception from time to time of PBS I think most of it's gone down the tubes I think

if it has any sense I think it will migrate across to the screen of my laptop

there are a couple of people I know in the business who have moved out of television

and who got to know those funny software people and who are writing programs that

will put a background against you that will be indistinguishable from the real

thing only an engineer will know that you did this not walking on a beach in Tahiti

but walking up and down your living room in Portland, Oregon and only an engineer

will know because these things, and that's going to be wonderful because

it's going to make it cheaper to make exciting looking television programs and

you know, go around the world like I used to for real, but never leave your living

room in Portland and what we'll see will be the products of your fertile

imagination unconstrained by this filthy business called Budgets there aren't any

more anywhere are there any more?

where I come from there aren't any more yes ma'am

you'd like me to talk a bit more about what I think education should be today

have you ever asked anybody that question before?

and if you have, have they ever answered it?

this is not fair

the only reason I went on and on about reductionism as I did a bit tonight was

because while it's fine and dandy, and while I would never let a dentist into

my mouth without a degree in dentistry or I would never cross a bridge if it weren't

built by an engineer who knew how to build bridges reductionism has its place and up

until now in history it has had a very important place in providing us with the

goods and services that give us the highest standard of living in the world

and in history but I think as I said tonight I think education has to start

concerning itself with all these other people out there we've lived a really

comfortable luxurious little life in the west us first then you second and I think

recent events have shown that that causes more problems than it solves I think we

have to urgently begin to try and get the material out to the rest of the world and

I don't mean propaganda, I mean raw data and let them make of it what they will and

I think the way in which we do that the vehicle, the educative vehicle for doing

that cannot be the reductionist method it's too slow it's too complex and it

functions for the kind of society in which we live and not they we have to find ways

I think as I said in my talk tonight of transmitting the data to them in different

forms that make it easier that make it not easier in the sense that they are stupid

but that I mean if all of you go to Italy I presume that most people in this country

do not in this room do not speak fluent Italian if you go to Italy you will be

regarded as stupid because you don't speak the language very well I mean I don't know

if you've come across people foreigners who come here and say I would like very

much and you think this guy is really dumb you know he has seven PhDs in quantum

physics but simply because he doesn't speak your language means that he can't

explain himself well and you judge him so I think the people out there are not

stupid we have to find ways of getting the knowledge out to the rest of the world so

that oh boy I stick my foot in it here so that they no longer live in the stone age

but in something slightly different

yes yes oh yes yes you're absolutely right sir I was really only talking about the

fact that television doesn't have any money anymore well hang on you've got to

deal with that first I mean either television doesn't have any money anymore

and we can no longer make these intellectually challenging programs

because we can't travel around the world or we find alternate ways of making the

programs so that they look just as good as they ever did and people have

intellectually challenging programming to watch that's a specifically western issue

that I'm addressing the issue of what we Brits and you Americans watch on your tube

as to whether or not people in the rest of the world living in their unpleasant

circumstances in squatter camps or whatever it is, dying of starvation and

having no electricity and no water and no hygiene and nothing else whether they know

they're living in the stone age it's neither here nor there, they are I mean in

our terms this is not politically correct but if you can give people drugs that will

save them from dying why not do so if it comes, happens to come from a I suppose

it's correct I suppose it's historically correct to say that it just so happens

that gosh I don't even know if I want to say this because it's going to sound wrong

it wouldn't sound wrong in England because we're not religious

the consciousness of stewardship inherent in Christianity that says the planet

belongs to you and you must do what you can to make it better is what has driven

western what we call progress it seems to me, that in the middle ages people were

told the planet belongs to you, it is your stewardship, you're in charge

of it and you must make it better when you die it should be a better place than when

you left so therefore go out and change it so in a sense western the Judeo-Christian

ethic allows you to change the environment for the better other entities in other

countries don't have this particular dynamic view of the interaction between

the human being and the environment that's not our fault it's an accident of history

but it does end up with me having

ampicillin when I have respiratory disease which I can take and it stops me from

dying that's marginally better than the other throwing the bones into the air to

see whether or not I'll live so I make no apology for saying that accidentally we

have a society that is capable of doing wonderful things to keep people alive and

make them better informed and in that sense I use the word stone age I see

little value every understanding of the universe has its own relative values I

can't say that anybody's view of God is any better than mine since I have no view

so it sort of doesn't matter it's an irrelevant discussion to me but that I can

keep a child alive or let it die is a major difference between my society and

theirs I make no apology for thinking that mine is better if I can keep that child

alive that's all I have to say about that Sir

there are at least two things to be said about this one, most linguists would agree

that English is an extremely efficient tool it is the kind of I think synthetic

structure that is better than non-synthetic structures which are most

other languages on the planet however the other thing to be said about it is ask any

Frenchman if he agrees with you and he'll say you're talking garbage as somebody

once said in a joke, if English was good enough for Jesus Christ it's good enough

for us and as far as the French are concerned God invented French so I think

your question in a sense in the nicest possible sense of the word is irrelevant

there are certain structures I suppose within what one describes as I suppose the

way the English language functions the way the English language works, I'm not sure

that it's any better than anything else, languages describe reality as we see it we

see it I suppose most of the 414,812 words in the English language were there before

the scientific revolution no, 99.9 recurring of them were there before the

scientific revolution so that doesn't really prove much that ours was better

than theirs or anybody else's sir

oh dear I'll stop after this because I think I should would I comment on the

state of affairs after September the 11th gee whiz this is very very difficult as a

foreigner Europeans don't see it the same way you do and I'll ruffle feathers and

you've been so kind to look after me and you've been such good hosts that I feel

like a churl saying these things yes the rest of the world is has for many many

decades been appalled at your profligacy not not just the prof your profligacy

doesn't cause people to be poor and die of starvation and disease and malnutrition in

various parts of the world of course it doesn't that doesn't stop them thinking it

does you know as long as I can remember I never forget the first time I met

Americans when I was a young man at Oxford and my first impression was that they

threw things away and you're going to laugh at this but back in the early 60s we

didn't have you know when you pick up a glass with a napkin, a paper napkin we

didn't have paper napkins, nobody had them except you and I remember thinking good

grief you know we were given a drink at somebody's house an American household in

England and we were given these glasses with these paper things so we said what's

this for everybody was holding them because you didn't want the condensation

to make your hand cold or wet and we thought good god how effete how wonderful

you know and then people get another drink and throw it away now I now know that this

is a silly thing to think but back then I didn't, I thought this was extraordinary

multiply that a million times and you get close to the kind of you in some squatter

camp in the middle east about you and your culture and the luxury life you live and

the apparent lack of concern about the rest of the world and sometimes it's not

just apparent I was in Lincolnville Nebraska ten years ago and I met a very

nice woman the British film crew visiting, the mayor gave a party it was really kind

of all the people in the town to give us a party and a woman came up and said where

do you come from and I said London and she said which state is that and I said it's

not a state, it's in England and she said uh huh, which state is that and I think

that kind of is an absurd example of what the rest of the world sees you're very

rich and you're very you don't have to give a rat ass about the rest of us why

should you and in a way, if you closed your borders and said get on with it you

people, we don't care we'd kind of understand it because we're like that but

you are this incredible dichotomy, you are very rich very powerful and you

make all these caring noises and we don't know what to make of that because we

wouldn't I mean the British didn't do that they enslaved everyone and made them wear

wigs in their courts as I said so you're a very confusing bunch of people,

especially when you then say well we'll solve this problem with tomahawks that

really really confuses us so I think that so many people died on September the 11th,

I really hardly want to talk about it but if I have to, I have to say that in

Britain we have IRA bombs every two or three weeks and you know 5,000 people have

been killed in the last 30 years in my country, and you learn to live with it and

that's the way life is and maybe what happened was a wake up call in the sense

that for the first time you were experiencing what the rest of the world

has been too poor and too vulnerable to avoid and the rest of us have lived with

it it's a terrible thing to say and I apologize for it but I believe it to be

true if it means that we all start to think more about why these things occur

and go to the root causes which are almost always corruption and poverty those things

can be cured very easily you can poison the wells you can poison the wells out

there easily by giving them what they haven't got which is food and electricity

and above all information I was saying on that radio program a smoker in a few years

time cell phones will be so cheap you could parachute them into the rest of the

world and that will do it the minute those people I was in the eastern block before

the wall went down in eastern Germany the first time people started to be able to

see western German television, same language and the effect was

electrified and they never looked back that's all