The 2005 Reith lectures are being given by Lord Broers, on the progress of technology and its bearing on society - the first lecture was broadcast today. Criticising the views within is perhaps biting off the hand that fed me here, Lord Broers was formerly Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, the university that first educated me and then employed me for two years. But anyway…

First, the title is wrong, or rather it’s incomplete: “Technology is determining the future of the human race”, which is true, but equally true is the converse: “The human race is determining the future of technology”. Technology is not some wild beast which (in his words) should be “harnessed”; there is no “race” to keep up with it. To assume technological progress is naturally uncontrollable is to fall into the same misunderstanding that Lord Broers the public possesses.

Lord Broers demonstrates this public ‘ignorance’ by mentioning that a public poll picked the bicycle as Britain’s greatest technology. This seems to me a frightful piece of snobbery - the public have a point, and he is perhaps a little ignorant himself of the bicycle’s impact. The bicycle is 200 years old and yet (as a Cambridge man, he should surely notice) still a popular mode of transport; it was the first mode of transport the masses could own and use of their own accord, rather than relying on those well-off enough to own large capital investments like carriages and horses (and later trains). This helped the bicycle become popular; in turn the bicycle spurred advances in metallurgy, mechanical gears, road construction, rubber, pneumatics, and mass production. Although the bicycle was a common, to the point of ubiquitous, technology here, that time was 100 years ago, before the advent of the car, and time lends a distance that means we might not appreciate how revolutionary it was. To dismiss the bicycle is to go against the very title of the lecture - it’s one of the few technologies that actually can be afforded and used by the majority of the human race, not just the developed world. Today all over the world hundreds of millions of people use bicycles in their day-to-day business, and their lives are improved by them; the same cannot be said of his other examples like the jet engine. Even electricity isn’t as accessible to all; only the smallpox vaccination has touched virtually every human in a similar way.

Lord Broers implore scientists and engineers (the boundaries between science, engineering and technology are blurred throughout the lecture, but I’ll let that pass) to greater inform the public on their work and demystify the process. This is an honourable goal and can be done in many cases. But many of the cases where there has been public mistrust of sci/eng/tech is when the cutting edge of research, and all the messiness and uncertainty that goes with it, is brought to the public’s attention. These are usually health-based - the early AIDS debates, BSE/vCJD and MMR all come to mind, but the Challenger disaster and the Millennium bug are the best non-medicine examples I can think of. There was public misunderstanding of all these topics, but there was also plenty of expert misunderstanding - and this is perfectly acceptable; at the cutting edge of research you’re bound to get disagreements, conflicting data and arguments over what’s going on; knowledge takes time to gel and fit in with the rest of what we know. As I’ve said here before - if the experts can’t decide what’s right, what chance do the public have?

I found the lecture confused in its attitude to the evolution of technology. On the one hand, Lord Broers dismisses the idea of singular linear progress of technology to some final point, yet whenever looks back at its evolution, it is in reference to an endpoint of today’s technologies - aviation, the Internet, clean water, industrialised agriculture. It is ‘this is how we got here’, rather than ‘why did we end up here from over there?’. Along those lines, any solution to the problems of technology are, in his mind, technological as well; knowledge or expertise from other sectors is not considered. The only exception to this technocentric view is his recounting of the development of the radio, the only example that really grounds a technology in the richer contexts of where it came from (tellingly, he refers to it by its original name, wireless), with the consideration of old-fashioned government paternalism and how it gave birth to public service broadcasting; perhaps this is because he has had personal experience of its evolution from an early age. If only he’d considered other technologies in similar ways.

Still, I agree with some of his points. Many technologies are quite elegant and beautiful (although this is very much a matter of personal aesthetic - I consider them more beauitful for how they fit together and work than what they have done), and this is often dismissed out of hand without reflection. And he is right in saying that Britain is not very good at innovation (product development, getting it to work in the real world) while being very good at invention (coming up with the idea in the first place); the difference between the two is not often properly enunciated in public, and it’s a subject that needs to be more openly discussed.

The lecture is available in text, and podcast in mp3 format - I recommend the audio, it’s about half an hour long, and there’s an interesting (if short) post-lecture discussion from various distinguished guests; the BBC should have stretched out the programme to a whole hour and let them fight it out, the discussion was just getting interesting when they cut it off.

Right, back to the essays…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2005 at 01:03:52 and is filed under General.