#forecasting
James Burke, on how he would extend Connections (2004)
In 2004 the creator of the 1979 public broadcasting masterpiece of technological history, James Burke, spoke with KCSM, a local San Francisco Bay Area telelvision station, about that series and its successors. Those included two further series based on Connections, neither fully measuring up to the original in my view, as well as The Day the Universe Changed, which did, and even possibly exceeded it.
The interview is online at the Internet Archive, and I recommend it in its entirety:
https://archive.org/details/JamesBurkeReConnections_0
At about 47:45 into the interviewer, Burke is asked where he would take the series today, extending the story of eight key inventions: the telephone, plastics, the atomic bomb, mass production, manned space flight, the jet airplane, television, and the B-52 bomber. I find his rationale of specific interest: that he considers "the connective principle that you'd go for something fairly unexpected". It's not the invention itself or its direct effects that are most significant, but what it interacts with that matters. Anticipating those interactions is difficult, and I think he misses on a few of his answers, but two in particular seem painfully prescient, particularly concerning telephones and jet airplanes.
The underlying principle is that of unintended consequences, a concept developed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, and strongly tied to another concept of his, that of manifest and latent functions. A manifest function is one which is readily and immediately apparent. A latent function is its opposite. Merton specifically discusses the significance of these, and notes that awareness of latent functions represents a greater advance of knowledge specifically because they are less apparent to the observer. It is a more valuable insight delivering greater value.
I've transcribed the segment here, lightly edited for clarity.
Transcript
Q: James you ended the 1979 Connections with eight key modern inventions. Now the world has changed a lot since then --- if you were to make Connections now I'm curious how you'd continue each of those threads in turn? Could I list them for you
I'll try
The Telephone
I think I'd probably go forward on the connective principle that you'd go for something fairly unexpected. I think for the telephone i think i'd go to what's going to happen when very very cheap wireless communication gets to the Third World.
Q: The idea that the third world doesn't need copper wire; they can go right to wireless.
And it's going to cause massive social change
Plastics
Plastic is a difficult one. I suppose really continuing that kind of work, the next big thing in that field would be finding some kind of plastic solar cell that makes it very very cheap to generate electricity. The point about that being that when that happens you change the face of the planet, and you need to start thinking about heat budgets, and when you cannot use electricity not when you can.
The Atomic Bomb
I think probably the atomic bomb would have taken us to the Internet. When Russia gets the bomb, the DEW [distant early warning] line across the northern frontier of Canada gets built to protect us against incoming bombers, and that's the beginning of distributed networks and that's the beginning of the internet.
Q: ... And that gives us darpanet which gives us the Internet
That's right.
Mass Production
I suppose from mass production i would have gone forward to the end of mass production, because that's what's happening, and the consumer as designer. I dont think it's too far fetched to see quite soon intelligent agents acting on behalf of the consumer to go and make the object that the consumer wants to buy, customised totally to that individual consumer's desire.
Q: True mass customisation
Yes.
Manned space flight ...
Ah...
Q: The story that ends ...
.. Nowhere... I would have gone forward I think to unmanned spaceflight, things like GPS, Earth imaging, and maybe ultimately the use of satellite imagery to look at things like taxes and land ownership and that kind of social aspect, rather than adventuring out into the black yonder.
The Jet Airplane
Pandemics.
Pandemics. [Repeated]
The more people fly, the more they contact each other, the more we're going to see more and more virus moving around the world.
Television
I would probably have gone to us being out of a job.
Q: Fade to black.
Almost.
I think when those relatively new cellphones with a camera looking at you and a camera looking at the scene get out there, that's the end of formal reporting and the end of formal international television in the old sense. There will be 20 million reporters.
Q: Do we end up with better news, or do we end up with Farenheit 451, where you're inside the television serial?
I think we end up with better news. I tell you why: I think what we're getting at the moment is ethnocentric news, we're the kind of news that the British or the American or the French television people think their audience wants, and we're getting it from that point of view. With these new devices you're going to get very local news, from a very local point of view, whether you like it or not.
The B-52
Q: You finished the original connections, the penultimate image, with the B-52. Is that still the ultimate invention , the final connection, or have we moved to something else and what would it be now?
I think if I had to do the series all over again and end with something that pulled everything together, it would be some aspect of the coming marriage between electronics and nanotechnology, between the life sciences and electronics. I think that's going to bring about a revolution the likes of which we have not even begun to understand yet.
Q: You mean like biochips, DNA?
The modification of life. Why not?
Q: Does that become the final link in the chain? Forever?
In a sense, of course, it is, because from then on you don't discover, you invent.
What Burke gets right and wrong
One concept I've (dredmorbius) been playing with is what the mechanisms of technology are, arriving at a list of nine fundamental modalities: materials, fuels, power transmission and transformation, process ("technical" or "how") knowledge, causal ("scientific" or "why") knowledge, networks, systems, information, and hygiene (unintended / unwanted consequences or side effects).
In many of these cases, Burke is, or perhaps ought to be, addressing the last cause --- the unintended and often disruptive side effects or consequences of technology.
In the two cases I'd noted, his views strongly suggest this. Most directly in the case of air travel (and when you listen to the passage, he sounds far more certain of this conclusion than of most others, with no hesitancy). Events of the past two years with the COVID-19 global pandemic strongly bear out his concern. Similarly, his assessment that the impact of telephones would be severely disruptive, notably in the developing world, also seems borne out. His comments predate the Arab Spring, Syrian civil war, and conflict in Myanmar. I strongly suspect we've not seen the full development. And of course, there's the role that mobile phones, social media, and algorithmic amplification and manipulation have played in the US and Europe.
Burke's answers in the case of plastics and television strike me as weaker, though he's also less certain. To my view, what we're discovering with plastics is the consequences of both bioactive materials, where many compounds found in plastics mimic hormones found in plants and animals, and of the simple problem of a material which does not readily degrade, with plastics accumulating in the environment both on land and in the oceans. For television, his focus on capture devices (camera-equipped phones) neglects both the much role of journalism itself and of the ultimate distribution network. He does make a strong point on the ethnic (and socioeconomic) framing focus of media, and I'd argue that much of the present cultural backlash being seen in the US and elsewhere is a response to formerly-repressed viewpoints and frames being presented. Established power does not like this, and rarely does. But simple cameras-on-the-ground are not the same as true investigative journalism. As Lee Scott-Heron said, the revolution will not be televised. In a later interview he explained: the revolution is in your head, out of reach of the camera lens. Storytelling involves image, yes, but also narrative which connects and relates those elements. He also fails to consider the role of networks and gatekeepers in filtering and amplifying stories, whether in broadcast or online instances, which has a huge impact on what stories reach what audiences. This is true both in the mass-media sense of broadcast, but also of the directly-targeted case of online media.
A book I've been reading, Andrew L. Shapiro's The Control Revolution (1999) addresses this last point at length.
His insight that spaceflight turns out to largely be of informational significance is also powerful, though I'd add in climate science to the list of benefits delivered.
Still, prediction is hard, as they say, and in both specifics and spirit, Burke does quite well here.
#JamesBurke #Connections #Technology #Forecasting #UnintendedConsequences
On the Media: Black Swans
The One News Programme I Can Stand^TM^ covers Coronavirus (and is ... alarmed), prediction, and race.
Excellent as always.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-black-swans
(Transcript in a few days.)
Audio: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm022820_cms997580_pod.mp3
#OnTheMedia #Covid19 #ncov2019 #forecasting #race #LaurieGarrett #FarhadManjoo #IbramXKendi #podcasts
