This is the script of the final episode "Yesterday, Tomorrow and You" of the 10-episode documentary series "Connections" by James Burke in 1978. This episode gives a thought-provoking discussion on the profound consequences of progress which is led by advances in science and technology, and our attitudes towards it.
[gear noises] Change is nothing new in man's life. When we first appeared on the planet, the world around him changed constantly. But it was the regular, repeated change of the seasons. In himself too, he saw from generation to generation, the same familiar pattern recur; of growth, maturity and death. And then, one day, man used his hand to fashion the tool. And, from the first moment he used that tool, he changed the pattern of change. No longer regular, repeated, the new tool brought permanent change, till the new world it had created was changed again by the next innovation. And, as man's abilities grew, his world changed faster.
(cars honking) This series of programs has tried to show THAT happening through history, in eight different cases; each one, a chain of events leading to an invention in the modern world. Those eight inventions are behind me now; grouped together in a way that means a great deal to you and me; telecommunications, the computer, the jet engine, plastics, rockets, television, the atomic bomb. The eighth invention was the production line; the system that makes it possible to make millions of copies of the other seven inventions so that they surround us in the modern world, and affect almost every aspect of our daily lives. Those inventions and all the other man-made objects, with which we surround ourselves, act as i said in the first program, like a giant network, each part of which is interdependent on every other part. So that if change happens in one part, or one part fails to operate, the affect is felt throughout the network. Sometimes, the affect of that failure isn't particularly devastating. You miss the bus, you don't get to work; somehow the world manages without you. Sometimes though, how the interconnecting inventions fit together, matters a great deal. And in that case, failure can lead to catastrophic result. That's why, for example, the particular way our eight inventions fit together behind me here, matters. If one of them fails, the triggering effect of that failure could lead to a rather particular kind of chain reaction.
They're in a B-52. This bomber stands for the interdependent world we have made for ourselves, where the rate of change accelerates every second, because every one of man's inventions acts like a trigger, to cause change. This was the first great trigger of change: the plough. It appeared maybe 7.000 years ago, and when it did, it gave people the chance to grow enough grain, not just to survive, but to provide a surplus to support craftsmen. And, that triggered the beginnings of civilization. With enough food, the population expanded, every year. Small villages sprang up, and they too grew larger with the population. In the spreading fields around the villages, the technique grew of irrigating the land from the nearby river. As the grain supply increased, it had to be stored. The idea of the potter's wheel solved that problem. Who it belonged to, demanded the development of writing. And, building these irrigation ditches taught people the skills of engineering and mathematics that gave them in turn, architecture. And, the need to predict floods for irrigation brought realization that the flood was annual; that gave them a calendar their government could use to enforce law through a police force and an army, who needed weapon makers to protect the wealth of the country from invasion; A country that was now an empire, all because of the plough.
You see, the almost frightening difference between that simple trigger of change; the plough, and almost any object you care to name in the modern world. Because the world we live in is so much more complex, more interdependent, the potential for change hidden in the most humdrum piece of modern technology; the kind of stuff you can go and buy at your local hardware store, is immense. Because, the number of connections between any one of these, and the factories that make them, and through the factories, back to the technology network, is enormous. And there're thousands of bits of humdrum technology like that. In recent years, more and more people have come to realize the need to try and find a way to look ahead, to see what kind of change is coming. If only we can find a way to identify which of the triggers around us is a key trigger, and which is going to kind of stay on the shelf and do nothing. That's why this series dealt with the inventions it did; and not say, the hairpin, or the ice-cream cone, or the toilet roll, or a thousand other examples of what you might call second-level technology. Although, calling them that is a guess; who knows what somebody's doing with the toilet roll right now. But i think it was fair to have gone with the ones we did, as being the ones most likely to matter in the future. The question is, in that way are the triggers around us likely to operate, to cause things to change, for better or worse? And, is there anything we can learn from the way that happened before, so we can teach ourselves to look for and recognize the signs of change.
The trouble is, that's not easy, when you've been taught, as I was, for example, that things in the past happened in straightforward lines. I mean, take one over-simple example of what I'm talking about. The idea of putting the past into packaged units; subjects, like agriculture. The minute you look at this apparently clear-cut view of things, you see the holes. I mean, look at the tractor. Oh sure, it worked in the fields, but is it part of the history of agriculture? Or a dozen other things; the steam engine, the electric spark, petroleum development, rubber technology; it's a countrified car. And, the fertilizer that follows; it doesn't follow. That came as much as anything else from a fellow trying to make artificial diamonds. And here's another old favorite. Eureka, great inventors; you know, the lonely genius in the garret with the light bulb that goes 'ping' in his head. Well, if you've seen anything of this series, you'll know what a wrong approach to things that is. None of these guys did anything by themselves. They borrowed from other people's work. And how could you ever say, when a golden age of anything started and stop. The age of steam certainly wasn't started by James Watt, nor did the fellow whose engine he was trying to repair; Newcomen, nor did his predecessor Savery nor the fellow before him, Papin. And Papin was only doing what he was doing, because they had trouble draining the mines.
You see what I'm trying to say. This makes you think in straight lines; and if today, it doesn't happen in straight lines, I mean, think of your own experience. Why should the past have? That's part of what the series have tried to show. That the past zigzagged along just like the present does, with nobody knowing what's coming next; only we do it, more complicatedly. And it's because our lives are that much more complex than theirs were, that it's worth bothering about the past. Because, you don't know how you got somewhere, you don't know where you are. And we, are at the end of a journey; the journey from the past. But, is the past so random, so accidental, so one off, that there's no trick to be learned from it? No clue that we can use, to second-guess our own futures? Or, is there a pattern to it? Can we look into the past, and see the future? You may not care, except of course, you'll have to live with the result; it's your future. Unites, she said, Japan and China could now look to unrestrained challenges. after which point, the right of vote would be limited to those only in category A. The memory enhancement drug would be released on to the market earlier than - the embargo by Africa and the US would affect the european economy in a very - the president hailed the new cancer cure as a triumph for american medical science, which will be shared with the rest of the world.
You don't have to look very far, to see if the past can help. Try your own house, or the house next door. They're full of clues, including some of the stuff we looked at in this series. And, if you sift those clues they seem to fall into groups; numbers of events that occured because the same influence was at work, even though it was in different times and different places. Religion is often a stimulus for invention. Let me just give you one example. Here you are, a medieval monk in your dormitory, desperate for a good night's sleep so you can wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning, or some other hour that god has not forsaken, in order to say the prayer you're supposed to say at that hour, because if you don't, you'll be in trouble. And you can't go to sleep, in case you're asleep at the big moment. No wonder the monks were desperate to get out of their bind. Life is bad enough without a case of insomnia. The result of their desperation is in this room now. See it? (alarm clock ringing) Yes, the alarm clock. Religion gave us clockwork and the mania for knowing what time it is; thanks! Warfare also stimulates change. I mean, in battle you tend to try and think of new ways of not getting clobbered, don't you? And if you saw the last program, you may have noticed what the cannon did. One of the first things was to change the shape of towns, so they could use their cannon to defend themselves with crossfire along every wall. The new ramparts all around the town got surveyors a lot of business, and they developed new instruments: like this one. They were also very useful for producing something else. The kind of thing it helps you and me get where we're going on holiday: maps. Oh, and this is a really weird one. This came out of warfare too: the screwdriver. You know why? How do you think you screw a knight in armor? That's what it was developed for. So the next time your wife ask you to fix a plug, you'll know who to blame. Then, a lot of really big things happened by accident; like the invention on your front door. (doorbell ringing) See, back in 17th century Germany, a fellow called Girica was rubbing himself a ball; why not; to find out if it attracted things like a magnet does, when suddenly, out jumped a spark; accidental electricity. (bell ringing) One of the loonier inventions, which you find in most houses, happened in Scotland in the 18th century, at a place called Culross near Edinburgh, where there was this penniless Earl of Dundonald who was trying to scrape up a bit of cash, by inventing things; one of which was an idea for making the stuff they used to paint on ships bottoms, to protect them against woodworm. Dundonals was a born loser, and his idea for making the stuff was this. He cooked coal in a kettle, and condensed the fumes that comes out, coal tar. One day, he had an accident. His experiment was making inflammable vapor, and it blew up. (explosion) And, although Dundonald didn't know what his accident had produced, others did: domestic gas. I suppose, you would expect the environment to have a hand in causing things to change. Like in the 13th century when the great freeze up came along and gave everybody a very bad time, for several hundred years. So, in self-defense, they worked out a way of having many more fires in the house, and at the same time, cut down on the danger of sparks blowing everywhere, by developing something that had a nice safe draft. Worked on the same principle as this; it was called the chimney. What a change that made! And then, in 19th century Florida, the hot weather got a local doctor called John Gorrie all fussed up because he was looking for a way to keep his patients cool, because he thought malaria was caused by the heat. Well, he was wrong. But along the way, he invented air-conditioning. So, what've we got? We've got religion, war, accident, the environment.
Then, there's a classic; you know, when you decide to invent something and you keep at it until you do, because you know it's going to make you a lot of money. That's how things got put in cans. And how the domestic refrigerator happened. And, this kind of steel; and this one. Do you know Edison tried 6.000 different materials before settling on the right one, for that filament? What a bore that must have been! My favorite influence to change is the one where something is working away successfully in one field, and then switches to another, that at the time, has apparently nothing to do with it. That's how these Paisley designs happened. See how complex the design is? Back in the early 18th century in France, a bunch of weavers were looking for a way of making complicated designs more easily, and one of them had a father that made automatic organs. The organs worked in places like automatic puppet theaters, on a very simple idea. You turned a cylinder with pegs fitted to it that tripped control levers that led compressed air into one organ pipe or another. The weaver realized that the paper with the holes in it, that told the organ maker where to put the pegs, could be used as a control mechanism in the weaving business. The Jacquard loom was the result of all that, and the Paisley designs it was capable of producing. But the zaniest of all these influences for change, comes about when you've got all your inventors beavering away towards a goal that they've set themselves. When suddenly, whoops, they come up with something they didn't expect. Now, that happens again and again. Like it happened in the case of the young William Perkin, who lived in London, in the middle of the 19th century. He was trying to make quinine artificially to replace natural quinine that came from cinchona plants. Well, the muck he produced wasn't quinine, so he threw it away into some water, and discovered he'd accidentally invented the first artificial dye. It was suddenly, a colorful world. And, that's why you can paint your house any color you like, even brilliant white. So, you see how everything around you is a clue to why things ended up the way they did. Your house is full of secrets from the past, that rule your life. So, we have a number of ways in which change comes about that seems to occur regularly. The effects of war, religion, accident, the environment, deliberate search, surprise use of one thing in another field, and looking for one thing, and ending up with another. Now, these influences I'm talking about, are not just part of the dead and gone. They're still here; they still operate, like if Fleming hadn't let his stuff go moldy, we wouldn't have penicillin. Apollo went to the Moon, and we have miniature heart pacemakers and teflon frying pans. But we only know about these things because they've already happened. So, does knowing that, help? Armed with this knowledge that change comes about because of influences that may still be at work, does that mean we can say, "right, of all the potential triggers around me, I can identify that one as the biggie, that's going to be the one that matters?"
Of course, we can't. I mean, for a start, half the work is going on in the backroom of some giant research laboratory, or change is going to come about because right now, perhaps, somebody is looking at a computer printout, and on the basis on what the computer tells him, maybe planning to knock your house down or something. So, it may be that the thing, whatever it is, is just inaccessible to you. And even if it weren't, even if you fell in it, how could you say anything about how it was going to be used tomorrow, if it was on the verge of being used in a way that you couldn't possibly dream of? Suppose, for instance, you'd come across Volta's electric pistol in the 18th century, what would you have made of it? An electric spark jumps across the gap between those two wires, and causes gases inside to explode. It was supposed to tell you whether or not air was healthy. How could you ever have foreseen that it would end up as a spark plug in a car; in there with all the other unforeseeable bits. The block that began life as Newcomen's mine draining pump, or the carburetor that uses the system for atomizing fuel, that started life as a scent spray, or the gearing system that began as a waterwheel. The whole lot comes together, just like a jigsaw. and that's one of the general things that you can say about how difficult it is to second-guess trends in invention. Because with the jigsaw - if you haven't got all the bits, you don't know what the picture is.
The other general thing to be said about how change comes about through innovation, and especially about the rate at which that change occurs, is that the easier you can communicate, the faster change happens. I mean, if you look back at the past in that light, you see that there was a great surge of invention in the european middle ages, as soon as they had re-established safe communication between their cities after the so-called dark ages. There was another one in the 16th century, when these gave scientists and engineers the opportunity to share their knowledge with each other. Thanks to a german goldsmith called Johannes Gutenberg who'd invented printing, back in the 1450s. And then, when that developed out there, telecommunications; oh, hundred odd years ago, then things really started to move. It was with that second surge, in the 16th century, that we moved into the era of specialization. People writing about technical subjects in a way that only other scientists would understand. And, as their knowledge grew, so did their need for specialist words to describe that knowledge. If there's a gulf today, between the man in the street and the scientists and the technologists who changed his world everyday, that's where it comes from. It was inevitable; everyday language was inadequate. I mean, you're a doctor; how do you operate on somebody when the best description of his condition you have is, a funny feeling in the stomach. The medical profession talks mumbo jumbo, because it needs to be exact; or would you rather be dead. And that's only a very obvious example.
Trouble is, when I'm being cured of something, I don't care if I don't understand. But, what happens when I do care? When say, the people we vote for, are making decisions that affect our lives deeply. Because that is after all, when we get our say, isn't it, when we vote? But say, the issue relates to a bit of science and technology, we don't understand. Like, how safe is a reactor somebody wants to build? Or, should we make supersonic airliners? Then, in the absence of knowledge, what is it to appeal to, except our emotions. And then, the issue becomes national prestige, or good for jobs, or defense of our way of life, or something. And suddenly, you're not voting for the real issue at all. I was involved in a perfect example of that. here, at Cape Canaveral, back in the late 60s, when i was covering the Apollo missions. If there was ever a piece of technology that appealed to the emotions, it was the Saturn V lifting off on that July morning in 1969, heading for the moon; remember? I'm as emotional as anybody else. I won't forget it. (rocket blasting off) Trouble was, that thing took off as much on euphoria as on rocket fuel, because the public understood it as a great adventure. And how many great adventures are you going to pay for, when the plot's the same every time? So the taxpayer lost interest, and Apollo became this. And, before you say, "good, waste of money"; in the same period, american women spent the same amount of money on cosmetics.
It was lack of understanding, and the scientific reason behind Apollo, that killed it. That, and the desire we all seemed to have developed for novelty. That's one of the effects of living with a high rate of change like we do; that desire for novelty. But, it carries a price: more novelty, less understanding. More wrong attitudes towards things; like what happened here. We've arrived at a point where, somebody said; if you understand something today, it must be obsolete. And that puts us in various kinds of cleft stick. On the one hand, a rate of change so high, nobody can keep up with it. And on the other, industry geared to high turnover, novelty planned obsolescence, so that if you stop making the new models every year, and people hang on to the old model they've always had, what happens to the jobs of the people who used to make the new model every year? Again, on the one hand, we have a technological network that keeps us alive, but, because every part of that network is interdependent on every other part, it's vulnerable to failure by one bit. That power station relay blacked out northeastern America in 1965. On the other hand, it's only because that network exists that we can draw on power and raw materials from other places, when we need them, and keep our industries going; whatever. And yet, those industries use up precious raw materials and cause high levels of pollution; unacceptable. Those are the very problems that stimulate research into cleaner, safer, more unlimited forms of energy that will benefit everybody not just industry.
And so, production line style living grows, and with it the dissatisfaction and the alienation that many people feel, in a world that gets more instant, plastic; identical. And yet, it's only in that kind of world that many people can have things that they couldn't have if the world wasn't like that. And, if you're one of those have-nots now, that's just what you want to happen. And, who could blame you? So it looks likely that the rate of change is going to become more confusing, as the avalanche of things that make out lives more comfortable, more push-button, grows. But parallel with that increase in the things that we can see around us, goes as increase in invisible innovations; in the things where you need a high degree of specialized knowledge, just to begin to understand them. Areas like genetic engineering, radioactive fuel, new drugs, better poisons. Areas that are likely to have a more profound effect on our future than a super squeezy bottle of detergent. And it's in those area that the man in the street feels most impotent. He knows they're going on, but he doesn't know enough to get in there, and help with the decisions that they demand. So, is it a case that 'never have so many people understood so little, about so much'.
Or maybe I'm wrong; maybe when you see something like THIS: the good old corny example of the nuclear power station, and how incomprehensible it all is, you just don't care. You say, why should I have an opinion about reactor safety, when half the engineers argue with the other half about what the word 'safety' means. And anyway, they'll sort it out themselves. As long as I get electricity out of the wall when I want it, don't bother me about where it comes from. Let the eggheads handle the problems of science and technology. I've got enough on my plate between when I get up in the morning, and when I go to bed at night, without having any worry about science and technology. Well, if that turns you on; but you're in the bind, whether you like it or not. Technology is a life-support system. It puts the food on your supermarket shelves, runs the systems in your home, created jobs and gets rid of them. Cures you when you're sick, gets you to work, runs the water supplies. Sooner or later, all that high-level technology stuff filters down to everybody. And that's why, what we do with science and invention next, matters so much. And, over recent years, people are becoming increasingly concerned about that; maybe because technology is producing problems that can no longer be solved as easily, or because the technological network is now so wide that we're vulnerable to the smallest kind of failure; like a frost in Brazil. And suddenly, coffee is too expensive to drink. And things aren't as simple as they used to be. Back in the old days, when there was no third world, you wanted something, you took it; not any more. You have to earn the money to pay for it now. And, once upon a time, the future was just onwards and upwards. Now, we don't even know if we can go on expecting a rising standard of living.
And more and more, at the heart of questions and problems like that, is technology. And, what places like this will do for us. Attitudes to what we ought to be doing about science and technology, and our future, seemed to fall into about four main types. One says: what we should do is stop dead; stop the pollution, stop the destruction of the environment, and the rest. Stop constructing vast mass production units that are so big, they can't adapt to change and turn into dinosaurus, that you either have to pay through the nose for, or close, and give yourself a dose of high unemployment. What we should be doing, says this point of view, is going for alternative sources of energy, so we don't need dangerous places like these. They - the ponds that you store spent radioactive fuel in. Sources of energy like power from the sun, or the tides, or the waves. And, that we should be breaking up large-scale technology into small units; so that we can solve the problems of the cities, be leaving the cities. In other word, option one: scrape advanced technology, and then go rural. There, there'd be no gulf between the technologists and the man in the street, because they'd all be living together. And besides, the technologists would no longer be working on changing his life everyday. The difficulty with that point of view is it too late, already? Are we too hooked on technology, to let go? If you pull the plug out, will the patient die? Are there just too many people alive, for the simple life to support? So, can we afford to do without that kind of power, and everything that it implies?
Another point of view, often aimed directly at place like this, says make up your mind what you what science and technology to do for you. Permit research and development only in those areas, and dump the rest. So, if a place like this nuclear power station control room is considered to, let's say, represent a threat to all of us, close it. And apply that rule to any part of technology that is considered to be socially undesirable. Now, if you do that, you can then divert the brainpower that you've released, into attempting to solve the real problems; like starvation, or illiteracy, or disease. So, option two: select what your priorities are, and stick to them. The trouble is, it's not that simple. For a start, who decides what is socially desirable and what isn't? You? Me? And, on what basis? Gut reaction? That's all I've got to go on, if I don't understand something. Gut reaction; and it's almost always dangerously wrong. And then what do you lose when you say, stop work on this, or that? How do you know what you're denying yourself tomorrow, by what you throw away today? Look at the number of things that you've seen in this series that would never have happened if people had done that. The difficulties is, that things almost always start with some guys doing something that, at the time, looks totally useless.
Then, there's the viewpoint that says, drop all this rat race stuff; making new things everyday. Why can we make a car that will last, so that we can drive it for 20 years? We've got the capability; why don't we do it? Think of the market that would provide; I mean, in the third world alone. There'd be jobs in industry forever, making enough goods to do that. Just take somebody who has a high standard of living and do what you can to bring everybody up to his standard; everybody. Not just here in this country; everywhere. And, stop redesigning things everyday. I mean, isn't this place a good enough power station for anybody? We have more inventions now than we will ever need; why make more? That then, is option three: stop all further research and development now; and share the knowledge we already have. Well, it sounds like a good idea, doesn't it? Spread the wealth, and the knowledge, and the goods around everybody. Very laudable; who's going to pay for it? And how would you react if somebody came up to you and said, that's enough, no more. How would you persuade people who have, that they have enough? And then, they're not going to get anymore, no matter how hard they work. How long would you go on voting for somebody who came with that idea, mmm?
I suppose the - the attitude of the vast majority of people is; what's the hurry to do anything at all? Most people have a job that gives them money and time off to enjoy it; take the kids to the country, relax. What's wrong with the way things are? I mean, technology may have caused problems, but it's always solved them, hasn't it? We are healthier and better off, and better dressed and cleverer, and having more fun than anybody in history. And it's been good old inventive genius that's given us all this. So let's have more on the same. Tomorrow has always been better than today. Why should things suddenly be any different? So, the fourth and the last option: keep going just the way we always have. That's fine, if you're prepared to put up with the rate of change that will make today's break neck pace look like a snail out for a walk. And, a world even more interdependent that it is now. And, a level of specialization even more incomprehensible that it is now. And, a growing avalanche of innovations, each one competing with the other for the steadily shrinking amount of time that there will be, to make decisions about them. And, a growing number of bureaucrats, to process and handle those decisions. And, outside this maelstrom, this core of decision making; way outside, cut off, the people who don't understand what's going on. And, who wouldn't understand, even if they got in to find out.
Now, whichever of those four options you go for, you're talking about making some fairly complex technological decisions, even if the option you choose, is to switch off and go rural. And, as I hope this series has shown, what you need to know to make those decisions, is sometimes very heavy stuff. Like, understanding why it may soon be possible to power a city the size of Los Angeles with a bucket of water; thanks to fusion power. And, the nature of what you need to know, in order to understand what's going on around you, is very different from what it was. In the middle ages most of the changes were brough about by THIS: water; and the use of a wheel, up at the mill, to harness its power. Now, there was nothing very mysterious about the way the whell worked. There were thoudands of them. There one practically in every village. The main use they were put to was grinding flour for bread. And you only had to put your hand into a fast flowing river to feel the power source operating. [water mill sound] [steam engine] By the industrial revolution, you have to understand how steam power worked, and air pressure, and what mechanical engineering was all about. And the rate of change was accelerating. [train hooting] By the end of the 19th century, things were different again. Now, to undestand why change occurred, you had to understand the scientific theory; and especially the laws of physics and chemistry. I'd like to show you how, at various levels, if you don't understand how those laws operate, then what they do, is several times removed from your comprehension. Like, take this little deal here. What I'm going to do is mix that liquid with that one: clear. Let me be more exact, and see if I lose you. What's going to happen is going to happen because THAT is CuSO4, and THAT is NaOH. That's when they lost me when they explained it; how about you? Still, at least we all know, don't we, that if you pour two liquids together, they mix, don't they? Not here, they don't; one of then turn into little spheres.
Okay, you don't understand the chemical formula, and the liquids aren't behaving the way you expect them to, and it's all like one of those tricks you got out of the children's chemistry set. Except this trick is being developed here, at Harwell, by the atomic energy authority. That's why this machinery exists here; to do that party trick, to produce those little spheres. And there's no way that you or I, or anybody outside this laboratory could possibly know, what those little spheres could be used for. Some of the things I'm allowed to tell you. This will help produce more efficient nuclear fuel. These will help find oil. These will put a drug into your body, and allow it to act to the minute the following day; and these will help to find out if your blood vessels are working properly or not. Gobbledygook; still, you can at least see and touch these example of advanced 19th century colloid chemistry; that's what it's called. So you see how the factors for change have become more and more theoretical. And how, with the expense and the long lead-time involved in research and development of this kind of thing, increasingly, the only kinds of people who can afford to do it are government establishments and universities and industrial giants. And most of the time, new developments like this one have a value in the marketplace. So if you make the secret public, you lose the company or the country valuable money, and jobs. So, how can the man in the street ever get involved in making decisions about something that in one sense, it's against his own interests to know about, too soon. But, if it turns out to be something he doesn't want, at what point is it too late?
And when you get to where we're now, in the last quarter of the 20th century, how do you begin to get involved with this; the computer. There's nothing to see. Well, I suppose, in one sense there is. Here, but so, I tell you that these discs contain one hundred million characters. Where does that get you? Oh sure, at one level, we all understand computers, don't we? They send us bills and statements. And even this awe-inspiring thing, the British Airways computer; in 1978, one of the biggest and fastest in the world, will do some very endearing things for you. I mean, you can book your old granny onto any flight from anywhere to anywhere with all the trimmings, that is. That's her, and her flights and hotels. And this is her, and her personal details. Look, she speaks only italian. She is flying for the first time. She doesn't like carrots. She wants help when she gets there. She wants to sit near the toilet, and not see the film. She's got excess baggage and a lot more. And this friendly monster would do that for you, for a flight, anytime up to a year in the future, and prepare your bill within 50th of a second. Great, that's the kind of assistance computers give us that help the world go around. And you get involved; you pay. But that's not the side of the computer i'm talking about. If part one of the specialization of knowledge happened in the 15th century when Johannes Gutenberg came up with the printing press and helped scientists to talk their own kind of Gibberish to each other, on the printed page, easier that they'd ever done it before. Then, this is part two. Only this is no book that you can leaf through and get a rough idea what it's talking about. This is the future, because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it would juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. and if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future.
And that is power; commercial power, political power, power to change things. You want some of that power, easy; go get yourself a PhD. Otherwise, the way things had become, forget it. And there's no point in coming in here and saying, show me, show me; look. So what? Me too. But, never mind the machinery. What about the stuff this lock uses? The raw material that will change our futures like you would never believe; information, not the fact; it'd too late for that. What you do with the facts. Because there, you're into probability theory, choosing one of the alternate futures, and actually making it happen. And how does the man in the street get involved in that game. He doesn't, so when the next major change comes out of the computers double-checked and pre-packaged, it looks increasingly like you've only got two options open to you.
One: do nothing. Stick your thumb in your mouth and switch your mind to neutral. Two: do what people have done for centuries, when machines did things they didn't want. overreact, strikeout, sabotage the machine for good. You want that? But once you start, can you stop? Isn't our technology so interconnected that when you destroy one machine, you automatically trigger total destruction of the entire life-support system. Well, that's no better a solution than any of the others, is it?
So, in the end, have we learned anything from this look at why the world turned out the way it did, that's of any use to us in our future? Something, i think, that the key to why things change, is the key to everything. How easy is it for knowledge to spread? and that, in the past, the people who made change happen, were the people who had that knowledge, whether they were craftsmen or kings. Today, the people who make things change, the people who have that knowledge, are the scientists and the technologists, who're the true driving force of humanity. And before you say, what about the Beethovens, the Michelangelos, let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently. That at best; the products of human emotion, art, philosophy, politics, music, literature; are interpretations of the world that tell you more about the guy who's talking, than about the world he's talking about. Secondhand views of the world; made third hand by your interpretation of them. Things like that, as opposed to this. Know what it is? It's a bunch of amino acids, The stuff that goes to build up a worm, or a geranium, or you. This stuff's easier to take, isn't it? Understandable; got people in it. THIS scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion, ideology, and leaves only what is demonstratably true about the world. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches, is because thanks to science and technology, they have begun to know that they don't know so much. And that, if they're to have more say in what happens to their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge that they know exists, and that they don't possess. And by help towards that knowledge, I don't mean, give everybody a computer and say, help yourself. Where would you even start? No; I means trying to find ways to translate the knowledge, to teach us to ask the right questions.
See, we're on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before; or if that's not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don't have access to it, And, I don't think most people want that. So, what do we do about it? I don't know. But maybe a good start would be to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything, because that ability is there, as long as it's explained clearly enough. And then, go and ask for explanations. And, if you're thinking right now, Ask yourself, if there's anything in your life that you want changed. THAT's where to start.
This is the script of the final episode "Yesterday, Tomorrow and You" of the 10-episode documentary series "Connections" by James Burke in 1978. This episode gives a thought-provoking discussion on the profound consequences of progress which is led by advances in science and technology, and our attitudes towards it.
More info about the series: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections(TVseries)) / Douban / IMDb _To watch: Bilibili / Archive_ Script adapted from subtitles downloaded from opensubtitles, paragraphed and proofread by me, but may still contain errors. Word count: ~7000
[gear noises] Change is nothing new in man's life. When we first appeared on the planet, the world around him changed constantly. But it was the regular, repeated change of the seasons. In himself too, he saw from generation to generation, the same familiar pattern recur; of growth, maturity and death. And then, one day, man used his hand to fashion the tool. And, from the first moment he used that tool, he changed the pattern of change. No longer regular, repeated, the new tool brought permanent change, till the new world it had created was changed again by the next innovation. And, as man's abilities grew, his world changed faster.
(cars honking) This series of programs has tried to show THAT happening through history, in eight different cases; each one, a chain of events leading to an invention in the modern world. Those eight inventions are behind me now; grouped together in a way that means a great deal to you and me; telecommunications, the computer, the jet engine, plastics, rockets, television, the atomic bomb. The eighth invention was the production line; the system that makes it possible to make millions of copies of the other seven inventions so that they surround us in the modern world, and affect almost every aspect of our daily lives. Those inventions and all the other man-made objects, with which we surround ourselves, act as i said in the first program, like a giant network, each part of which is interdependent on every other part. So that if change happens in one part, or one part fails to operate, the affect is felt throughout the network. Sometimes, the affect of that failure isn't particularly devastating. You miss the bus, you don't get to work; somehow the world manages without you. Sometimes though, how the interconnecting inventions fit together, matters a great deal. And in that case, failure can lead to catastrophic result. That's why, for example, the particular way our eight inventions fit together behind me here, matters. If one of them fails, the triggering effect of that failure could lead to a rather particular kind of chain reaction.
They're in a B-52. This bomber stands for the interdependent world we have made for ourselves, where the rate of change accelerates every second, because every one of man's inventions acts like a trigger, to cause change. This was the first great trigger of change: the plough. It appeared maybe 7.000 years ago, and when it did, it gave people the chance to grow enough grain, not just to survive, but to provide a surplus to support craftsmen. And, that triggered the beginnings of civilization. With enough food, the population expanded, every year. Small villages sprang up, and they too grew larger with the population. In the spreading fields around the villages, the technique grew of irrigating the land from the nearby river. As the grain supply increased, it had to be stored. The idea of the potter's wheel solved that problem. Who it belonged to, demanded the development of writing. And, building these irrigation ditches taught people the skills of engineering and mathematics that gave them in turn, architecture. And, the need to predict floods for irrigation brought realization that the flood was annual; that gave them a calendar their government could use to enforce law through a police force and an army, who needed weapon makers to protect the wealth of the country from invasion; A country that was now an empire, all because of the plough.
You see, the almost frightening difference between that simple trigger of change; the plough, and almost any object you care to name in the modern world. Because the world we live in is so much more complex, more interdependent, the potential for change hidden in the most humdrum piece of modern technology; the kind of stuff you can go and buy at your local hardware store, is immense. Because, the number of connections between any one of these, and the factories that make them, and through the factories, back to the technology network, is enormous. And there're thousands of bits of humdrum technology like that. In recent years, more and more people have come to realize the need to try and find a way to look ahead, to see what kind of change is coming. If only we can find a way to identify which of the triggers around us is a key trigger, and which is going to kind of stay on the shelf and do nothing. That's why this series dealt with the inventions it did; and not say, the hairpin, or the ice-cream cone, or the toilet roll, or a thousand other examples of what you might call second-level technology. Although, calling them that is a guess; who knows what somebody's doing with the toilet roll right now. But i think it was fair to have gone with the ones we did, as being the ones most likely to matter in the future. The question is, in that way are the triggers around us likely to operate, to cause things to change, for better or worse? And, is there anything we can learn from the way that happened before, so we can teach ourselves to look for and recognize the signs of change.
The trouble is, that's not easy, when you've been taught, as I was, for example, that things in the past happened in straightforward lines. I mean, take one over-simple example of what I'm talking about. The idea of putting the past into packaged units; subjects, like agriculture. The minute you look at this apparently clear-cut view of things, you see the holes. I mean, look at the tractor. Oh sure, it worked in the fields, but is it part of the history of agriculture? Or a dozen other things; the steam engine, the electric spark, petroleum development, rubber technology; it's a countrified car. And, the fertilizer that follows; it doesn't follow. That came as much as anything else from a fellow trying to make artificial diamonds. And here's another old favorite. Eureka, great inventors; you know, the lonely genius in the garret with the light bulb that goes 'ping' in his head. Well, if you've seen anything of this series, you'll know what a wrong approach to things that is. None of these guys did anything by themselves. They borrowed from other people's work. And how could you ever say, when a golden age of anything started and stop. The age of steam certainly wasn't started by James Watt, nor did the fellow whose engine he was trying to repair; Newcomen, nor did his predecessor Savery nor the fellow before him, Papin. And Papin was only doing what he was doing, because they had trouble draining the mines. You see what I'm trying to say. This makes you think in straight lines; and if today, it doesn't happen in straight lines, I mean, think of your own experience. Why should the past have? That's part of what the series have tried to show. That the past zigzagged along just like the present does, with nobody knowing what's coming next; only we do it, more complicatedly. And it's because our lives are that much more complex than theirs were, that it's worth bothering about the past. Because, you don't know how you got somewhere, you don't know where you are. And we, are at the end of a journey; the journey from the past. But, is the past so random, so accidental, so one off, that there's no trick to be learned from it? No clue that we can use, to second-guess our own futures? Or, is there a pattern to it? Can we look into the past, and see the future? You may not care, except of course, you'll have to live with the result; it's your future. Unites, she said, Japan and China could now look to unrestrained challenges. after which point, the right of vote would be limited to those only in category A. The memory enhancement drug would be released on to the market earlier than - the embargo by Africa and the US would affect the european economy in a very - the president hailed the new cancer cure as a triumph for american medical science, which will be shared with the rest of the world.
You don't have to look very far, to see if the past can help. Try your own house, or the house next door. They're full of clues, including some of the stuff we looked at in this series. And, if you sift those clues they seem to fall into groups; numbers of events that occured because the same influence was at work, even though it was in different times and different places. Religion is often a stimulus for invention. Let me just give you one example. Here you are, a medieval monk in your dormitory, desperate for a good night's sleep so you can wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning, or some other hour that god has not forsaken, in order to say the prayer you're supposed to say at that hour, because if you don't, you'll be in trouble. And you can't go to sleep, in case you're asleep at the big moment. No wonder the monks were desperate to get out of their bind. Life is bad enough without a case of insomnia. The result of their desperation is in this room now. See it? (alarm clock ringing) Yes, the alarm clock. Religion gave us clockwork and the mania for knowing what time it is; thanks! Warfare also stimulates change. I mean, in battle you tend to try and think of new ways of not getting clobbered, don't you? And if you saw the last program, you may have noticed what the cannon did. One of the first things was to change the shape of towns, so they could use their cannon to defend themselves with crossfire along every wall. The new ramparts all around the town got surveyors a lot of business, and they developed new instruments: like this one. They were also very useful for producing something else. The kind of thing it helps you and me get where we're going on holiday: maps. Oh, and this is a really weird one. This came out of warfare too: the screwdriver. You know why? How do you think you screw a knight in armor? That's what it was developed for. So the next time your wife ask you to fix a plug, you'll know who to blame. Then, a lot of really big things happened by accident; like the invention on your front door. (doorbell ringing) See, back in 17th century Germany, a fellow called Girica was rubbing himself a ball; why not; to find out if it attracted things like a magnet does, when suddenly, out jumped a spark; accidental electricity. (bell ringing) One of the loonier inventions, which you find in most houses, happened in Scotland in the 18th century, at a place called Culross near Edinburgh, where there was this penniless Earl of Dundonald who was trying to scrape up a bit of cash, by inventing things; one of which was an idea for making the stuff they used to paint on ships bottoms, to protect them against woodworm. Dundonals was a born loser, and his idea for making the stuff was this. He cooked coal in a kettle, and condensed the fumes that comes out, coal tar. One day, he had an accident. His experiment was making inflammable vapor, and it blew up. (explosion) And, although Dundonald didn't know what his accident had produced, others did: domestic gas. I suppose, you would expect the environment to have a hand in causing things to change. Like in the 13th century when the great freeze up came along and gave everybody a very bad time, for several hundred years. So, in self-defense, they worked out a way of having many more fires in the house, and at the same time, cut down on the danger of sparks blowing everywhere, by developing something that had a nice safe draft. Worked on the same principle as this; it was called the chimney. What a change that made! And then, in 19th century Florida, the hot weather got a local doctor called John Gorrie all fussed up because he was looking for a way to keep his patients cool, because he thought malaria was caused by the heat. Well, he was wrong. But along the way, he invented air-conditioning. So, what've we got? We've got religion, war, accident, the environment.
Then, there's a classic; you know, when you decide to invent something and you keep at it until you do, because you know it's going to make you a lot of money. That's how things got put in cans. And how the domestic refrigerator happened. And, this kind of steel; and this one. Do you know Edison tried 6.000 different materials before settling on the right one, for that filament? What a bore that must have been! My favorite influence to change is the one where something is working away successfully in one field, and then switches to another, that at the time, has apparently nothing to do with it. That's how these Paisley designs happened. See how complex the design is? Back in the early 18th century in France, a bunch of weavers were looking for a way of making complicated designs more easily, and one of them had a father that made automatic organs. The organs worked in places like automatic puppet theaters, on a very simple idea. You turned a cylinder with pegs fitted to it that tripped control levers that led compressed air into one organ pipe or another. The weaver realized that the paper with the holes in it, that told the organ maker where to put the pegs, could be used as a control mechanism in the weaving business. The Jacquard loom was the result of all that, and the Paisley designs it was capable of producing. But the zaniest of all these influences for change, comes about when you've got all your inventors beavering away towards a goal that they've set themselves. When suddenly, whoops, they come up with something they didn't expect. Now, that happens again and again. Like it happened in the case of the young William Perkin, who lived in London, in the middle of the 19th century. He was trying to make quinine artificially to replace natural quinine that came from cinchona plants. Well, the muck he produced wasn't quinine, so he threw it away into some water, and discovered he'd accidentally invented the first artificial dye. It was suddenly, a colorful world. And, that's why you can paint your house any color you like, even brilliant white. So, you see how everything around you is a clue to why things ended up the way they did. Your house is full of secrets from the past, that rule your life. So, we have a number of ways in which change comes about that seems to occur regularly. The effects of war, religion, accident, the environment, deliberate search, surprise use of one thing in another field, and looking for one thing, and ending up with another. Now, these influences I'm talking about, are not just part of the dead and gone. They're still here; they still operate, like if Fleming hadn't let his stuff go moldy, we wouldn't have penicillin. Apollo went to the Moon, and we have miniature heart pacemakers and teflon frying pans. But we only know about these things because they've already happened. So, does knowing that, help? Armed with this knowledge that change comes about because of influences that may still be at work, does that mean we can say, "right, of all the potential triggers around me, I can identify that one as the biggie, that's going to be the one that matters?"
Of course, we can't. I mean, for a start, half the work is going on in the backroom of some giant research laboratory, or change is going to come about because right now, perhaps, somebody is looking at a computer printout, and on the basis on what the computer tells him, maybe planning to knock your house down or something. So, it may be that the thing, whatever it is, is just inaccessible to you. And even if it weren't, even if you fell in it, how could you say anything about how it was going to be used tomorrow, if it was on the verge of being used in a way that you couldn't possibly dream of? Suppose, for instance, you'd come across Volta's electric pistol in the 18th century, what would you have made of it? An electric spark jumps across the gap between those two wires, and causes gases inside to explode. It was supposed to tell you whether or not air was healthy. How could you ever have foreseen that it would end up as a spark plug in a car; in there with all the other unforeseeable bits. The block that began life as Newcomen's mine draining pump, or the carburetor that uses the system for atomizing fuel, that started life as a scent spray, or the gearing system that began as a waterwheel. The whole lot comes together, just like a jigsaw. and that's one of the general things that you can say about how difficult it is to second-guess trends in invention. Because with the jigsaw - if you haven't got all the bits, you don't know what the picture is.
The other general thing to be said about how change comes about through innovation, and especially about the rate at which that change occurs, is that the easier you can communicate, the faster change happens. I mean, if you look back at the past in that light, you see that there was a great surge of invention in the european middle ages, as soon as they had re-established safe communication between their cities after the so-called dark ages. There was another one in the 16th century, when these gave scientists and engineers the opportunity to share their knowledge with each other. Thanks to a german goldsmith called Johannes Gutenberg who'd invented printing, back in the 1450s. And then, when that developed out there, telecommunications; oh, hundred odd years ago, then things really started to move. It was with that second surge, in the 16th century, that we moved into the era of specialization. People writing about technical subjects in a way that only other scientists would understand. And, as their knowledge grew, so did their need for specialist words to describe that knowledge. If there's a gulf today, between the man in the street and the scientists and the technologists who changed his world everyday, that's where it comes from. It was inevitable; everyday language was inadequate. I mean, you're a doctor; how do you operate on somebody when the best description of his condition you have is, a funny feeling in the stomach. The medical profession talks mumbo jumbo, because it needs to be exact; or would you rather be dead. And that's only a very obvious example.
Trouble is, when I'm being cured of something, I don't care if I don't understand. But, what happens when I do care? When say, the people we vote for, are making decisions that affect our lives deeply. Because that is after all, when we get our say, isn't it, when we vote? But say, the issue relates to a bit of science and technology, we don't understand. Like, how safe is a reactor somebody wants to build? Or, should we make supersonic airliners? Then, in the absence of knowledge, what is it to appeal to, except our emotions. And then, the issue becomes national prestige, or good for jobs, or defense of our way of life, or something. And suddenly, you're not voting for the real issue at all. I was involved in a perfect example of that. here, at Cape Canaveral, back in the late 60s, when i was covering the Apollo missions. If there was ever a piece of technology that appealed to the emotions, it was the Saturn V lifting off on that July morning in 1969, heading for the moon; remember? I'm as emotional as anybody else. I won't forget it. (rocket blasting off) Trouble was, that thing took off as much on euphoria as on rocket fuel, because the public understood it as a great adventure. And how many great adventures are you going to pay for, when the plot's the same every time? So the taxpayer lost interest, and Apollo became this. And, before you say, "good, waste of money"; in the same period, american women spent the same amount of money on cosmetics.
It was lack of understanding, and the scientific reason behind Apollo, that killed it. That, and the desire we all seemed to have developed for novelty. That's one of the effects of living with a high rate of change like we do; that desire for novelty. But, it carries a price: more novelty, less understanding. More wrong attitudes towards things; like what happened here. We've arrived at a point where, somebody said; if you understand something today, it must be obsolete. And that puts us in various kinds of cleft stick. On the one hand, a rate of change so high, nobody can keep up with it. And on the other, industry geared to high turnover, novelty planned obsolescence, so that if you stop making the new models every year, and people hang on to the old model they've always had, what happens to the jobs of the people who used to make the new model every year? Again, on the one hand, we have a technological network that keeps us alive, but, because every part of that network is interdependent on every other part, it's vulnerable to failure by one bit. That power station relay blacked out northeastern America in 1965. On the other hand, it's only because that network exists that we can draw on power and raw materials from other places, when we need them, and keep our industries going; whatever. And yet, those industries use up precious raw materials and cause high levels of pollution; unacceptable. Those are the very problems that stimulate research into cleaner, safer, more unlimited forms of energy that will benefit everybody not just industry.
And so, production line style living grows, and with it the dissatisfaction and the alienation that many people feel, in a world that gets more instant, plastic; identical. And yet, it's only in that kind of world that many people can have things that they couldn't have if the world wasn't like that. And, if you're one of those have-nots now, that's just what you want to happen. And, who could blame you? So it looks likely that the rate of change is going to become more confusing, as the avalanche of things that make out lives more comfortable, more push-button, grows. But parallel with that increase in the things that we can see around us, goes as increase in invisible innovations; in the things where you need a high degree of specialized knowledge, just to begin to understand them. Areas like genetic engineering, radioactive fuel, new drugs, better poisons. Areas that are likely to have a more profound effect on our future than a super squeezy bottle of detergent. And it's in those area that the man in the street feels most impotent. He knows they're going on, but he doesn't know enough to get in there, and help with the decisions that they demand. So, is it a case that 'never have so many people understood so little, about so much'.
Or maybe I'm wrong; maybe when you see something like THIS: the good old corny example of the nuclear power station, and how incomprehensible it all is, you just don't care. You say, why should I have an opinion about reactor safety, when half the engineers argue with the other half about what the word 'safety' means. And anyway, they'll sort it out themselves. As long as I get electricity out of the wall when I want it, don't bother me about where it comes from. Let the eggheads handle the problems of science and technology. I've got enough on my plate between when I get up in the morning, and when I go to bed at night, without having any worry about science and technology. Well, if that turns you on; but you're in the bind, whether you like it or not. Technology is a life-support system. It puts the food on your supermarket shelves, runs the systems in your home, created jobs and gets rid of them. Cures you when you're sick, gets you to work, runs the water supplies. Sooner or later, all that high-level technology stuff filters down to everybody. And that's why, what we do with science and invention next, matters so much. And, over recent years, people are becoming increasingly concerned about that; maybe because technology is producing problems that can no longer be solved as easily, or because the technological network is now so wide that we're vulnerable to the smallest kind of failure; like a frost in Brazil. And suddenly, coffee is too expensive to drink. And things aren't as simple as they used to be. Back in the old days, when there was no third world, you wanted something, you took it; not any more. You have to earn the money to pay for it now. And, once upon a time, the future was just onwards and upwards. Now, we don't even know if we can go on expecting a rising standard of living.
And more and more, at the heart of questions and problems like that, is technology. And, what places like this will do for us. Attitudes to what we ought to be doing about science and technology, and our future, seemed to fall into about four main types. One says: what we should do is stop dead; stop the pollution, stop the destruction of the environment, and the rest. Stop constructing vast mass production units that are so big, they can't adapt to change and turn into dinosaurus, that you either have to pay through the nose for, or close, and give yourself a dose of high unemployment. What we should be doing, says this point of view, is going for alternative sources of energy, so we don't need dangerous places like these. They - the ponds that you store spent radioactive fuel in. Sources of energy like power from the sun, or the tides, or the waves. And, that we should be breaking up large-scale technology into small units; so that we can solve the problems of the cities, be leaving the cities. In other word, option one: scrape advanced technology, and then go rural. There, there'd be no gulf between the technologists and the man in the street, because they'd all be living together. And besides, the technologists would no longer be working on changing his life everyday. The difficulty with that point of view is it too late, already? Are we too hooked on technology, to let go? If you pull the plug out, will the patient die? Are there just too many people alive, for the simple life to support? So, can we afford to do without that kind of power, and everything that it implies?
Another point of view, often aimed directly at place like this, says make up your mind what you what science and technology to do for you. Permit research and development only in those areas, and dump the rest. So, if a place like this nuclear power station control room is considered to, let's say, represent a threat to all of us, close it. And apply that rule to any part of technology that is considered to be socially undesirable. Now, if you do that, you can then divert the brainpower that you've released, into attempting to solve the real problems; like starvation, or illiteracy, or disease. So, option two: select what your priorities are, and stick to them. The trouble is, it's not that simple. For a start, who decides what is socially desirable and what isn't? You? Me? And, on what basis? Gut reaction? That's all I've got to go on, if I don't understand something. Gut reaction; and it's almost always dangerously wrong. And then what do you lose when you say, stop work on this, or that? How do you know what you're denying yourself tomorrow, by what you throw away today? Look at the number of things that you've seen in this series that would never have happened if people had done that. The difficulties is, that things almost always start with some guys doing something that, at the time, looks totally useless.
Then, there's the viewpoint that says, drop all this rat race stuff; making new things everyday. Why can we make a car that will last, so that we can drive it for 20 years? We've got the capability; why don't we do it? Think of the market that would provide; I mean, in the third world alone. There'd be jobs in industry forever, making enough goods to do that. Just take somebody who has a high standard of living and do what you can to bring everybody up to his standard; everybody. Not just here in this country; everywhere. And, stop redesigning things everyday. I mean, isn't this place a good enough power station for anybody? We have more inventions now than we will ever need; why make more? That then, is option three: stop all further research and development now; and share the knowledge we already have. Well, it sounds like a good idea, doesn't it? Spread the wealth, and the knowledge, and the goods around everybody. Very laudable; who's going to pay for it? And how would you react if somebody came up to you and said, that's enough, no more. How would you persuade people who have, that they have enough? And then, they're not going to get anymore, no matter how hard they work. How long would you go on voting for somebody who came with that idea, mmm?
I suppose the - the attitude of the vast majority of people is; what's the hurry to do anything at all? Most people have a job that gives them money and time off to enjoy it; take the kids to the country, relax. What's wrong with the way things are? I mean, technology may have caused problems, but it's always solved them, hasn't it? We are healthier and better off, and better dressed and cleverer, and having more fun than anybody in history. And it's been good old inventive genius that's given us all this. So let's have more on the same. Tomorrow has always been better than today. Why should things suddenly be any different? So, the fourth and the last option: keep going just the way we always have. That's fine, if you're prepared to put up with the rate of change that will make today's break neck pace look like a snail out for a walk. And, a world even more interdependent that it is now. And, a level of specialization even more incomprehensible that it is now. And, a growing avalanche of innovations, each one competing with the other for the steadily shrinking amount of time that there will be, to make decisions about them. And, a growing number of bureaucrats, to process and handle those decisions. And, outside this maelstrom, this core of decision making; way outside, cut off, the people who don't understand what's going on. And, who wouldn't understand, even if they got in to find out.
Now, whichever of those four options you go for, you're talking about making some fairly complex technological decisions, even if the option you choose, is to switch off and go rural. And, as I hope this series has shown, what you need to know to make those decisions, is sometimes very heavy stuff. Like, understanding why it may soon be possible to power a city the size of Los Angeles with a bucket of water; thanks to fusion power. And, the nature of what you need to know, in order to understand what's going on around you, is very different from what it was. In the middle ages most of the changes were brough about by THIS: water; and the use of a wheel, up at the mill, to harness its power. Now, there was nothing very mysterious about the way the whell worked. There were thoudands of them. There one practically in every village. The main use they were put to was grinding flour for bread. And you only had to put your hand into a fast flowing river to feel the power source operating. [water mill sound] [steam engine] By the industrial revolution, you have to understand how steam power worked, and air pressure, and what mechanical engineering was all about. And the rate of change was accelerating. [train hooting] By the end of the 19th century, things were different again. Now, to undestand why change occurred, you had to understand the scientific theory; and especially the laws of physics and chemistry. I'd like to show you how, at various levels, if you don't understand how those laws operate, then what they do, is several times removed from your comprehension. Like, take this little deal here. What I'm going to do is mix that liquid with that one: clear. Let me be more exact, and see if I lose you. What's going to happen is going to happen because THAT is CuSO4, and THAT is NaOH. That's when they lost me when they explained it; how about you? Still, at least we all know, don't we, that if you pour two liquids together, they mix, don't they? Not here, they don't; one of then turn into little spheres.
Okay, you don't understand the chemical formula, and the liquids aren't behaving the way you expect them to, and it's all like one of those tricks you got out of the children's chemistry set. Except this trick is being developed here, at Harwell, by the atomic energy authority. That's why this machinery exists here; to do that party trick, to produce those little spheres. And there's no way that you or I, or anybody outside this laboratory could possibly know, what those little spheres could be used for. Some of the things I'm allowed to tell you. This will help produce more efficient nuclear fuel. These will help find oil. These will put a drug into your body, and allow it to act to the minute the following day; and these will help to find out if your blood vessels are working properly or not. Gobbledygook; still, you can at least see and touch these example of advanced 19th century colloid chemistry; that's what it's called. So you see how the factors for change have become more and more theoretical. And how, with the expense and the long lead-time involved in research and development of this kind of thing, increasingly, the only kinds of people who can afford to do it are government establishments and universities and industrial giants. And most of the time, new developments like this one have a value in the marketplace. So if you make the secret public, you lose the company or the country valuable money, and jobs. So, how can the man in the street ever get involved in making decisions about something that in one sense, it's against his own interests to know about, too soon. But, if it turns out to be something he doesn't want, at what point is it too late?
And when you get to where we're now, in the last quarter of the 20th century, how do you begin to get involved with this; the computer. There's nothing to see. Well, I suppose, in one sense there is. Here, but so, I tell you that these discs contain one hundred million characters. Where does that get you? Oh sure, at one level, we all understand computers, don't we? They send us bills and statements. And even this awe-inspiring thing, the British Airways computer; in 1978, one of the biggest and fastest in the world, will do some very endearing things for you. I mean, you can book your old granny onto any flight from anywhere to anywhere with all the trimmings, that is. That's her, and her flights and hotels. And this is her, and her personal details. Look, she speaks only italian. She is flying for the first time. She doesn't like carrots. She wants help when she gets there. She wants to sit near the toilet, and not see the film. She's got excess baggage and a lot more. And this friendly monster would do that for you, for a flight, anytime up to a year in the future, and prepare your bill within 50th of a second. Great, that's the kind of assistance computers give us that help the world go around. And you get involved; you pay. But that's not the side of the computer i'm talking about. If part one of the specialization of knowledge happened in the 15th century when Johannes Gutenberg came up with the printing press and helped scientists to talk their own kind of Gibberish to each other, on the printed page, easier that they'd ever done it before. Then, this is part two. Only this is no book that you can leaf through and get a rough idea what it's talking about. This is the future, because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it would juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. and if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future.
And that is power; commercial power, political power, power to change things. You want some of that power, easy; go get yourself a PhD. Otherwise, the way things had become, forget it. And there's no point in coming in here and saying, show me, show me; look. So what? Me too. But, never mind the machinery. What about the stuff this lock uses? The raw material that will change our futures like you would never believe; information, not the fact; it'd too late for that. What you do with the facts. Because there, you're into probability theory, choosing one of the alternate futures, and actually making it happen. And how does the man in the street get involved in that game. He doesn't, so when the next major change comes out of the computers double-checked and pre-packaged, it looks increasingly like you've only got two options open to you.
One: do nothing. Stick your thumb in your mouth and switch your mind to neutral. Two: do what people have done for centuries, when machines did things they didn't want. overreact, strikeout, sabotage the machine for good. You want that? But once you start, can you stop? Isn't our technology so interconnected that when you destroy one machine, you automatically trigger total destruction of the entire life-support system. Well, that's no better a solution than any of the others, is it?
So, in the end, have we learned anything from this look at why the world turned out the way it did, that's of any use to us in our future? Something, i think, that the key to why things change, is the key to everything. How easy is it for knowledge to spread? and that, in the past, the people who made change happen, were the people who had that knowledge, whether they were craftsmen or kings. Today, the people who make things change, the people who have that knowledge, are the scientists and the technologists, who're the true driving force of humanity. And before you say, what about the Beethovens, the Michelangelos, let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently. That at best; the products of human emotion, art, philosophy, politics, music, literature; are interpretations of the world that tell you more about the guy who's talking, than about the world he's talking about. Secondhand views of the world; made third hand by your interpretation of them. Things like that, as opposed to this. Know what it is? It's a bunch of amino acids, The stuff that goes to build up a worm, or a geranium, or you. This stuff's easier to take, isn't it? Understandable; got people in it. THIS scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion, ideology, and leaves only what is demonstratably true about the world. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches, is because thanks to science and technology, they have begun to know that they don't know so much. And that, if they're to have more say in what happens to their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge that they know exists, and that they don't possess. And by help towards that knowledge, I don't mean, give everybody a computer and say, help yourself. Where would you even start? No; I means trying to find ways to translate the knowledge, to teach us to ask the right questions.
See, we're on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before; or if that's not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don't have access to it, And, I don't think most people want that. So, what do we do about it? I don't know. But maybe a good start would be to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything, because that ability is there, as long as it's explained clearly enough. And then, go and ask for explanations. And, if you're thinking right now, Ask yourself, if there's anything in your life that you want changed. THAT's where to start.