He started his talk with a quote from Mark Twain: "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 situation." This is what Burke has spent the last thirty years doing, taking events which have some remote connection ("sorry") and joining them together to tell a story about technology and its effects.
But Burke has recently come to some realization that the future is in the internet and even though the future is difficult to predict "mainly because it hasn't happened yet" he took a stab at it. Niels Bohr said that "prediction is extremely difficult. . .especially about the future" and Burke added that all we have to make predictions with at any given time is what we know. When the radio was invented, it was thought it would be used only for ship to shore communication and one former head of IBM at one time felt that the United States would need "around five computers."
Using the premise that we are currently under-using data and communications media, including the one between our ears, he started with some warm up exercises. Submarine, sandwich, lunchbox, kitchen, mother, love, tennis, elbow, grease, Rome, trident, submarine, sandwich. . .another new connection ("sorry") has been made.
In fact, Burke pointed out, if you had to interpret every syllable that you hear, it would take up to twelve and a half seconds to interpret a single word "and you aren't doing that, are you?" Instead, the brain races ahead of the speech and runs scenarios ahead of the speaker, giving possible twists and turns to what is being said. In effect, the listener gives the speech (and many possible variations of it) before the speaker does. "The brain makes the internet look like a walk around the block" even if no one knows what memory is.
Jokes are interesting to the human brain because they make new connections ("sorry") between old ideas. The new connection is greater than the sum of its parts, one plus one equals three. Illustrating this, he dared us to see if we could come up with a link between "bird" and "fruit" like the following one. "A man walks into a bar and approaches the bartender. 'Excuse me' he says, trying carefully to enunciate his words through the large number of drinks he has consumed. 'Yes, sir' the bartender replies. 'Do lemons whistle?' the man asks. 'No, I believe they do not' the bartender replies, curiously. 'Then I believe I just squeezed your canary into my gin and tonic.'"
Information, on the one hand, has the ability, indeed the qualification, that it causes change. If you are told that the person next to you has a communicable disease, your opinion of them is changed a bit. Language, on the other hand, is just linear garbage and is a good example of the under-use of information. Language is axemaking, long ago when it was necessary to relate all of the steps involved in making an ax, language had to be developed. Those who could make axes could go out and hunt and provide food and therefore, they were valued members of the community.
Because women were not axemakers, they were relegated to the same role as the "non-techies" which was a secondary class. From the beginning, knowledge has been the privilege of the few. Language spread and was put to other uses, like philosophy and by 1619 Descartes was refining philosophy and telling everyone to doubt everything.
Knowledge is still the privilege of the few and by now, in order to be the cream of the crop, one needs a doctorate, which proves that you know as much as possible about as little as possible. Burke claimed he has a friend who got his doctorate in "Milton's use of the comma" but corrected this because it was actually "Milton's use of punctuation."
In these days, when by the time you've read the manual, the new model is already on the shelves, it is difficult to keep up with all the new technology. Life appears to be going against the second law of thermodynamics, which states that everything goes from hot to cold, including cups of coffee and intimate friends. Life appears to regard this rule the way "Italians regard government regulations." Indeed our species does so well because we can adapt to the environment. The more complex the species, the better the chance that at least some part of it will survive some catastrophe.
Major improvements in media transfer result in information surges, new data can be brought together and innovations occur. People like to organize things, maps made it easier for Europeans to go out and look for cargo. These trips could bring in 600% profits, but required investments, so a land register was developed to give property a value. This brought about the mortgage company, which brought about the insurance industry to protect the investments. A limited joint stock company allowed people to invest in these new businesses, a national bank had to be invented, which brought about the credit agency, then the invention of the business contract and finally, the Constitution of the United States.
This is the generally accepted view of progress, linear and straight forward. Institutions are often set up to keep progress from getting out of hand and to protect their own vested interests in keeping things the way that they are. Conformity keeps the lid on things, the rules may change but institutions are very good at fighting change. They are interested in keeping themselves in business and this is one reason that the representative democracy has not been dusted off since the 18th century, the government has a definite reason to not rock the boat. Einstein said that science can often "say more about scientists than about science itself."
The current educational system is based on memorization with the promise that it is preparing students for life-long jobs. This often results in mass-produced lives and the daily rates of change, generated by more scientists and technologists alive today than ever in history, that has made us into the wealthiest, healthiest people ever. But too often our mood is like the depressive on vacation who writes home saying "I'm having a wonderful time. . .why?"
All of this brilliant industrialization has lead to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, reduction of forests and the destruction of 6000 species of plants and animals which "we cannot tell if it is catastrophic or Armageddon", by the year 2050, the world population will reach its maximum and if you consider making less than $500 a year to be absolutely poverty stricken, there are 750,000,000 absolutely poverty stricken people in the world today. So much for progress, it is doubtful that there is a technological fix for all of this.
We must go back to the time before the ax, before constraints were put on the brain. In the near future, people will probably change their careers every ten years or so and even today the office environment is changing. Telecommuting has eliminated suits and commutes and e-mail allows problems to be solved quickly, eliminating the chain of command and replacing it with direct contact with the person best able to help.
There is the small matter of the Third World, some 4.9 billion people out of the 5.5 billion in the world will soon want to be (finally) heard. The old attitudes like "the thing I like about the Third World is that we have the gattling gun and they don't" and Victor Hugo's "An African city in flames is the first step towards civilization" won't work anymore.
Neither will the old nine to five shift, where you define your life by what it is that you "do" for a living. The old use it or lose it attitude won't work anymore as the majority are brought back into the system. Everyone, it seems, has a brain the size of Einstein's. We need to start the process of teaching web learning, where problems are worked through by using imagination rather than memory. The new skills will be following pathways of information, accessing and retrieving data and weaving through problems. Each culture will be able to build its own webs and the "fuzzy minds" who are no good with linear thinking will be integrated into the culture of knowledge.
Problems will be solved in a virtual environment, where the consequences can be viewed and decisions made. "The language of specialism excludes people from the loop. . .how long will the unrepresentative democracy last?" The political arena may change, direct representation may be the wave of the future, but will it bring with it mediocrity, the death penalty, Not In My Backyard attitudes and a general dumbing down of everything. Will we all suffer along with home videos, untrained artists producing junk and uneducated scientists? Will it bring mindlessness and self-gratification? In Burke's opinion, "Yes!"
There has always been a dumbing down, when the printing press was invented, the literate population feared that the ignorant masses would have access to books, thus dumbing down literature. The haves always want the have-nots to stay where they are, or as Burke stated: "I don't like rap because I'm stuffy and British." Today's tasteless junk is tomorrow's old master. There are always new kinds of vulgar talent, like Mozart or the Beatles, which eventually become accepted.
Burke stated that he would put his money on the changes caused by giving people freedom. When people are given time to put their ideas onto the net, just as one plus one equals three, the new global synergy is achieved and there will be a move away from rules and regulations towards a crazy free-for-all.
There will be privacy and intellectual property rights considerations, but there presumably will be safeguards put in place to protect people. "Things tend to break down before they break up." The world will go to hell in a handbasket, the new innovations will bring the second class up to the level of the first class and this change will be global and multi-cultural. You will have to be able to have the talent to deal with change, but the good news is that we are the evolutionary success stories. The truth for a long time has been "sooner or later, something will eat you," but that is the price of survival and we will all have to hang loose.
Burke finished his talk and then, after exclaiming "God almighty, look how many people are here!" He answered a few questions, revealing that his favorite colour is gray, and he gave an anecdote describing what the last resort is when fixing instruments on the moon.
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