|
||
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
 
|
|
|
James Burke is best-known to millions worldwide as the award-winning creator, producer and host of the three Connections television series. His wit, unique perspective and wealth of knowledge make the series an imaginative combination of education and entertainment as he leads viewers on a dazzling trip through the history of science, technology and social change. Hailed by The Washington Post as "one of the most intriguing minds in the Western world," Burke is also a best-selling author and magazine columnist, and he is in wide demand as a speaker on innovation, technology and their social consequences. That and his latest project, The Knowledge Web, are what Gartner Fellow David Mitchell Smith spoke with Burke about when they sat down together after a conference in Baltimore. Interview conducted 19 November 2003
David Mitchell Smith: You've pointed out that technology limitations in the past have divided the world into information haves and have-nots. What has that meant in the past, culturally and in terms of innovation?
It's a matter of hegemony. I mean, who has power and who doesn't? Usually, the people with the power are those who have the technology, as opposed to those who don't. The Romans made servants of the Greeks because the Roman Empire had organizational and bureaucratic technologies the Greeks didn't have. So, I suppose I'd argue that throughout history the have-nots have been ruled by the haves primarily thanks to technology shortfall which always limits access to the elite few. Smith: When did that begin to change in meaningful numbers? Are there any particular triggers you can identify? And how did those things change the world then?
Obviously, the printing press is one. Before that, the alphabet was very powerful, but its effect was limited for quite awhile after to the Sinai Peninsula and then Lebanon. The printing press really democratized information — at a stroke — like nothing had ever done before. Up until then, in order to have data, you had to employ human copiers. The only kinds of places you found those were kings' palaces and monasteries. So until the printing press, there was a very limited availability of information and because of that, change happened slowly. After the press, the process of change accelerated explosively. Smith: Is the Internet like that or is it over-hyped?
No, the Internet is like that. It can't be over-hyped, I think. Best thing since sliced bread. The problems with spam and ads will go away just as they went away in print. It is now possible to buy books without advertisements in them. In Gutenberg's time, every book had an advertisement in the front or the back of the book. Then, of course, we have successive generations of the Internet yet to come, each one of which will do more of what we want. I mean, in terms of the Internet, we're looking at the first five minutes of Gutenberg. Smith: There is a general perception among some that the information technology world is no longer the innovation-driven world that it has been over the past 20 or 30 years. Do you agree or is this just temporary?
I can't say if it's temporary. But it is true to say that in the main, information technology has got to the point where we need to pause and spend some time thinking about how to apply it rather than simply producing new gizmos. And I think that's going to occupy us over the next ten years. If you think about it, for 20 years we've been producing a new gizmo every ten minutes. I think it's urgently necessary that we sit down now and think about what it is these things are doing to us and how we want to use them. There was a guy — I think at Harvard — who said recently, "The market is mature, and there will be no new innovation in the foreseeable future." I'm not sure if it's going to be that far, but I think he's partly right. Smith: Innovation has long been a driver of Western values and the economy. Do you think the Western way of life is at risk if innovation is no longer going to be driving things? Burke: Yes. I think information technology is going to give the rest of the world the capabilities that only we used to have. And we will soon be faced, in terms of marketplace, with competition that we've never seen before at a level we haven't seen through history. I think without further innovation on our part, we're going to have to try very hard just to survive. And I think that is a good thing.
We keep hearing that information wants to be free. How will that attitude affect the creative world and the ability for people to make a living in that space? Burke: I think as long as we are driven by a free and competitive marketplace, we will have to deal with the matter of intellectual property right. Ideas make money. Smith: Some have gone as far as to say that copyrights should be done away with, that we should have some kind of socialist-style pay program to reward artists. Have you thought anything about this idea? Burke: Yes. I think inevitably we are going to have to accept the fact the Internet makes it too easy to access copyrighted materials. Therefore, instead of fighting it, what we ought to do is settle down to some kind of automatic metering system where access is open, but the user pays a fraction of the retail price.
Smith: In the world of software, there is a commercial model and there is an open source model. Have you given any thought to the future of either of those two ways of building, consuming and selling software? Burke: Not much. I'm not a software engineer, but I tend to think that open source systems could do nothing but generate ideas. And that's always a good idea. Smith: Many countries believe that kind of approach will create an opportunity for them. Do you think they're on to something? Burke: I think without access to open source material, many countries will find it difficult to develop. And if they don't, their market for our goods and services won't develop either. Smith: The historic digital divide between the haves and have-nots still exists, and most people, most countries have not yet joined the digital world. Do you believe governments are really very interested in solving that problem?
In history, the transition to representative democracy was directly driven by the spread of information due to the printing press. It didn't start in 1215 with Magna Carta which was a private deal between the king and the barons. Representative democracy emerged because that's all we could manage with the technology we had at the time. Think about it: lousy roads and no telecommunications meant the best you can do is send a couple of locals to the capital city to speak for all the others. Today, information technology is making it possible to think differently. People are becoming dissatisfied with the system in which one person represents the complex and different interests of tens of thousands. What comes next is a product of information technology — direct democracy. One person, one vote. On all issues. Every second of the night and day. Via electronic agents. What democracy was always supposed to be. Smith: Do you think that change will require something as dramatic as a revolution? Or, will it be more iterative of societies we have today? Burke: I can't tell you. I hope it's iterative. And I hope what happens is that we achieve it via the reform of many of our social systems. Smith: Would it be possible for us to innovate without the social stability that's provided by our relatively inflexible institutions? Burke: Social institutions are inflexible because they are backward-looking — set up in the past, to solve the problems of the past, with technology of the past. Look at the arcane way the law courts work, or the universities, or maybe even the boards of directors. And they're all top-down.
This is the greatest of today's challenges. That the process of change is beginning to affect people's lives in interactive ways our old social systems were not built to handle — especially in the way we are no longer separated from one another by time and geography. Today, if you Americans sneeze, we Brits catch a cold. No place is far away anymore. Smith: How does your Knowledge Web project fit into what you've been saying? What is it? What is its goal? How did you conceive it? Burke: The Knowledge Web project is a pro bono, volunteer based, free-to-be-used-online teaching and learning tool. At the present stage, it consists of biographies of 2,200 major figures from history linked about 18,000 ways, linked by the way everybody is linked: to friends, to influences, to people they influence, to people the work with, to the people they collaborate with and so on. And the name of the game is to get learners — in most cases, that's going to be children — to take journeys through these connected pathways from one person to another, to another and in doing so, to learn about how change happens. How change is anything but linear. How change through history is like a pinball — it bounces around. The reason I've taken this approach is because that's the way life happens. What I'm also hoping to do is to get kids to recognize, first of all, how what they are learning interacts with its context. Second of all, that their own lives are the same. That what they are learning is not something separate, isolated, different, boring, but part of their own lives. I'd also like Knowledge Web users to go away and use the technology to build their own webs, to build webs between them and the rest of their schoolmates, between their school and another school, between their state and other states, between their country and others — because online, they can do that now. And in this way they can see how everything is interconnected, and see that nobody is an isolated, unimportant individual, that everybody contributes. I think that's probably the most important thing a young person can learn. Smith: How far along are you on this? Burke: Well, it's grant-based because it's intended to be non-profit and free. So we need a grant to get the software written to do all the things I'd like it to do. Engineers and designers who know these things say it will take about a million dollars to complete with all the bells and whistles (and content) young people need these days. So, if somebody who reads this is feeling beneficent and they have a million dollars, this is a good cause. Smith: The technology necessary for this project didn't exist until recently. Tell me how technology has changed in your lifetime — and how it has changed your life?
When I was born, television wasn't there, so the first thing TV has done is given me a career. The second thing that has happened, I suppose, is that information technology has changed the world into a much more interesting, exciting, accessible place. It has also made the world more dangerous. You can organize bad things now much more easily, in many more places, with much less effort than ever before. But at the same time, it's easier to meet and talk to people than ever before. I think in the long run this will be what matters most. Winston Churchill once said, "Jaw, jaw is better than war, war." By jaw, he meant talk. The Internet makes jaw-jaw easier than ever before and ultimately, that's the way you get to know people. Ultimately it's harder to do harm to people you know. Smith: What do you think is the most important innovation in the last 100 years and why? Burke: It's very difficult to choose one because there have been so many. Smith: How about a list? Burke: Obviously, electronics. Obviously, molecular biology. Quantum physics. Penicillin. DNA. Space flight — not for putting men on the moon, but for putting Hubble up there to look out and back in time to the outer edges of the universe. Smith: Why is that one so important? What does that bring to ordinary people? Burke: When you see what Hubble shows, you realize we can't be alone. In 1961, Frank Drake produced the Drake Equation. Factors in the equation relate to all the conditions necessary for life to evolve and develop, so the equation allows us to make an estimate of the probability of the existence of other civilizations in space. At its most pessimistic outcome, the equation still suggests that there are thousands of civilizations in our galaxy alone.
Hubble is important because it is showing us how unimaginably vast the cosmos is and how impossible it is that we could be alone in it. It's a matter of great sadness to me that I will very probably be long dead before we make the first contact. Smith: If you could predict the next big innovation, what would it be? Burke: It would be a marriage between electronics and the life sciences. It would be something to do with artificial life. And it scares the hell out of me. Smith: You have spent a lot of time as an historian, looking back. Take a little peek into the future for us. In what ways do you believe life will have changed 100 years from now? Burke: I suppose the world 100 years from now will be almost unimaginably virtual. I think if I had to make one guess, I'd say we may live in virtual reality more than we live in real reality — to the extent that we may never leave our personal, virtual environments. We may live and have predominantly virtual experiences, indistinguishable from the real thing — with profound social consequences. Smith: Someone has to stoke the furnace of services, of information sharing, the financial markets.
Machines will do that. Smith: You can imagine those virtually, but in terms of the capital, the infrastructure to actually build things, somebody has to do that. Burke: Yes, but that's ideas, and ideas are cheap. The brain is gigantic. We have not yet begun to tap its potential. Smith: Sounds like Isaac Asimov. Burke: Thank you!
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
