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Polis Media Agenda Talks: We expected jet packs, but we got 140 characters – the unfulfilled promise of the information revolution
01:01:35
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- [00:01]
A
Tonight we're going to be talking about innovation. And we are very pleased to have here with us tonight Norman Lewis from PricewaterhouseCoopers, who comes to us with quite a long background in research about technology and about developing technologies and strategies for development. He's currently working particularly on crowdsourced innovation. And I'm not going to take any more time. I'm going to hand it over to him and as you know, we'll hear from him for a little while and then we'll open it up for questions. And the hashtag, which I couldn't actually write up, is polisjetpack.
- [00:53]
B
Right. Well, thank you, Sally, and thank you for inviting me to this wonderful gathering. Very pleased to be here. One apology. I don't have any PowerPoint. I'm really sorry about that. And I don't have any lecture notes. I'm not going to give you any prompts. I'm just going to talk and hopefully make a little bit of sense and provoke you into some response, which I'm sure I will do. I want to begin by just taking a straw pole, which is. How many of you know what the Jade Rabbit is? Just put your hands up if you know. Okay. How many of you have seen that incredible video on YouTube called Fire with Fire? That's interesting. You guys do watch YouTube? Yeah. You've heard of YouTube? Well, fire with Fire is a remarkable video about doctors and scientists who have re engineered the HIV virus to attack a very virulent form of leukemia and have in the process have cured that form of cancer. They've reprogrammed the HIV virus to not attack the immune system, but to attack leukemia cells. It's the most remarkable video you will see. Go and watch it. It's absolutely extraordinary. Continue with my poll. How many of you have heard of Snapchat? For our radio listeners, the whole audience has put their hand up. How many of you have heard of Instagram? And how many of you have heard of Facebook? How many of you are on Facebook? Thank you. That's my lecture. But I'm making a point here because when we talk about technology today, we talk about social media and we talk about social networking and all of this, but we don't talk about technology. Jade Rabbit, by the way, is the name of the Chinese lunar module that they just put on the moon. It's the first time in 40 years that man has been back to the moon, which is doing all this research. Fantastic achievement that they've done this. No one seems to know anything about it, but you all know About Facebook. And it's a very interesting question because I'm not doing this as a way of condemning you, although I do. What we do is we have little reference to technologies that are actually reshaping our, our world, that are creating speedier, wealthier worlds where we are increasingly beginning to understand nature more and more that we are being able to re engineer the natural world in a way that is really going to transform our lives and has transformed our lives. Instead. What we seem to be doing is concentrating on gadgets and technologies which are very much about self absorbed consumption, about self reflection. If I really want to insult you about narcissistic self absorption rather than engaging with the natural world. And so I really think that there is something fundamentally problematic going on here about why is it that those technologies capture our imaginations and the ones that we should be concentrating on, the ones that are really transformative, that are really shaping the world around us, we are kind of completely ignorant about. Now you might be thinking, okay, you know, what's the big deal here? I do like sharing videos about what my cat's doing. And it's a very important thing that I do see the latest video on why cats can't jump and all of that, or what my best friends have eaten for breakfast, or what they're having, what pancakes they're eating. You know, you might be thinking, okay, you know, this is an old guy at the front, you know, hashtag chillout, old guy, old dude, etc. But I think there is a very fundamental question that we need to ask here. Why have we become so uncomfortable with science? Why have we become so uncomfortable with experimentation, of doing the big things rather than focusing on our narrow selves? Why are we so uncomfortable with the kind of uncertainty of research, of open ended research, of research that is looking to transform our planet and the planets around us, but rather we're comfortable with looking at ourselves. Not going where no man has gone before, but sitting on our couch, concentrating on this little screen and thinking about ourselves and our inner thoughts and our fleeting moments. Nothing captures this better for me than I don't know if you saw the controversy that surrounded the shirt of Dr. Matt Taylor, the guy who led the project that put the comet, the spacecraft on a comet. Just amazing, unbelievable achievement, you know, 135,000 kilometers an hour. This thing's traveling at billions of miles away. Ten years, and they've put this thing, this spacecraft onto this, which is going to yield unbelievable insights. Potentially it's even discovering how life began on the Earth. Never mind what might be going on outside of the earth. And what do we have? We have some feminist author who writes an article saying, and her title of her article was I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet. Your shirt is sexist and ostracizing. Because he was wearing this ridiculous shirt with a scantily clad woman touting a gun or something. This is a scientist, he's a geek. He's not thinking. He could have probably turned up naked, he wouldn't have even been aware of it. But this now becomes the big debate. Isn't this terrible? The women aren't in science, et cetera. I don't care if you put a spacecraft on a comet. I mean, just think about that for a second. I don't care. You are sexist. Can you imagine what they would said about Neil Armstrong's words when he landed on the moon? One small step for, for man, one giant leap for mankind, I would imagine. I don't care that you've just stepped on the moon. Why didn't you mention woman? This is sexist. Not understanding. This is not about you. This is about humanity. This is about our knowledge of the universe. This is about understanding where we've come from. This is about a fundamental, potentially fundamental transformation. But we are obsessed with ourselves. This kind of self indulgent egotistical posturing which is really about my identity versus your identity, never mind the knowledge. And this being done in the name of all of us, of all humanity, men and women. But it's not just one individual feminist. I think if you look at government, if you look at business, if you look across the whole of society, we are very, everybody's looking for predictable outcomes. They are very much nervous about expertise, about science, about what this digital technology might do. And it's a very worrying trend. Take Facebook. I don't know if you're aware of this, but Facebook's IPO initial public offering is the largest technology IPO in the history of technology. Now you've got to ask yourself, what is Facebook? At least I know if I go to Google, I get some service, I get searches, I get some applications, I get different things. If I go to ebay, I can buy goods. If I go to Amazon, I buy goods. But what is Facebook? Facebook is you and me. It's us, it's our data. That's all it is. It's nothing more than that. And it's very much in the mold of being a service that concentrates upon self reflective, self absorbed, individuated entertainment and therapeutic communications. That's what Facebook really is about. And it's become so popular. But this is the largest IPO in technology history. Do you remember when Facebook bought Instagram? They spent a billion dollars on Instagram. That same week that they did that, Kodak, the company, I don't know if any of you remember, Kodak went into receivership. In other words, went bust. Now just think about the contrast here. Kodak was one of the most pioneering companies in the 20th century with regard to film, with regard to developing medical technologies like X ray, MRI scans, all that technology, printing. They were on the moon when the lunar lander landed there. They were the people that developed the technology that took the pictures that mapped the moon before the the moon shot took place. They have been a company that has transformed. They invented microfilm, which I don't know if you realize, but in the 20s and the 30s, this transformed so many institutions from the banks to libraries to God knows what. They really made society different. They go bust. And Instagram, which has no revenues, which plays upon, you know, what does Instagram do? It makes. It uses technology to take pictures so they look like your grandfather took them. That's what it is. So it's about nostalgia again. It's about the self absorbed. This is about, you know, reflecting and using image as a way of self expression rather than just, you know, updating your status or whatever. And so here we have this amazing contrast. Kodak, transformative, pioneering, unbelievably successful company with regard to innovation and how that changed the world. Instagram, nostalgia. Billion dollars for that nothing. Kodak goes out of business. Now that kind of, you know, really worries me. So, you know, this old guy at the front is getting even more worried as he's talking, so. Even more worried, old dude. Do you know that in 2009, US consumers spent $2 billion more on potato crisps than the federal government invested in R and D for energy. $2 billion more than the federal government spent on energy, R and D. The Federal Reserve worked out. I think it was the end of 2013 that all the publicly quoted companies on the US stock market had between them nearly $5 trillion in cash reserves. $5 trillion. That is about a third of the USA's GDP in cash not being invested. No research and development sitting on cash shorts. Look at a company like Apple, which is the richest company in the world today, is sitting on something. I don't know what the latest figure is somewhere in the region of 165 billion in cash reserves, that it's not doing anything worth they're waiting to buy up other companies or whatever. I don't know what they think. They create a new headquarters for themselves. They're not investing in R and D. In fact, if you look at a company like Apple, which is supposed to be the pinnacle of what innovation is today, you will discover that in those wonderful devices that you're carrying around with you, that they don't own any of the ip and all the stuff in there is other people's ip. Now, to Apple's credit, they spotted an opportunity, they spotted a gap in the market. Their real innovation in all of this was the business model behind itunes, which was to take the music industry and make it buy as you wish, cutting down how much it cost to buy music, making that journey easy and making it an integrated experience. And that's really where the genius of Apple layers. But innovation, there's not much innovation in the sense that what they've done is they put things together in a different kind of a way, but they themselves are not taking any, putting anything back as far as R and D is concerned. And so this really does raise a big question for me because you've got to ask yourself, where's the next wave of innovation going to come from? If we're a society that is now more inward looking, that we're afraid of experimentation, of research for the sake of research without predictable outcomes, where's the next wave of innovation going to come from? Who's going to do this? It really summed up to me the kind of meekness of society today. I don't know if you remember at the time of the bird flu epidemic where there was this big threat that bird flu was going to happen. There was this wonderful. If there's one slide I would have shown to you tonight, it would have been this picture. And the picture was the Evening Standard had on their banner headline, scientists say lock up your chickens. You think, wow, a society that's scared of its chickens, ladies and gentlemen, is not going where no man has gone before. And that kind of sums it up. It's kind of this fear, this quest for predictability of being able to work within the known universe, rather than going all out to discover what's unknown. To make the unknown known is what we have done historically as humanity. The very opposite seems to be the case. We're kind of escaping from the past. And it really strikes me, I've just recently been researching this. I don't know if you're familiar with the debate around big data and about the Internet of things and everybody's going on about big data. The problem with big data is that there's no big ideas behind big data. When you look at the Internet of things, where people are talking about how everything's now going to be connected, that you know, everything, you could pick up data from sensors and, you know, from your mobile phones and blah, blah, blah, it's very interesting what kind of inversion has occurred here. I was the director of technology research at orange for almost 10 years and we began that whole revolution about everything everywhere connected. What was interesting about that when we were doing this 10 years ago was that what we were talking about was people being connected, that the person was the critical thing about using these devices to connect. Now we've got this thing called the Internet of things, where people just become another data point in all this sensory networks that we're going to create. And the big data is going to be able to take all this data, analyze it all for us, and it's going to play this back to us in a way that we're going to see things about our lives that we don't already know. In other words, the human being has now just become another data point. The technology is now the operative, the subject object relationship has changed. What used to be the subject is now becoming the object, namely us. And that our behavior is only going to be made sense to us through some kind of system that's going to provide this for us. And what's the objective of all of this sms? Sell us more stuff. So what we want to know is, okay, so I'm walking down the road and I'm outside Starbucks and it knows that I like, you know, a cappuccino with blah, blah, blah, and I'll get a voucher that says, you're outside of Starbucks. Why don't you pop in and have a coffee? And I think to myself, my God, I didn't realize I was so thirsty, I must go into Starbucks and buy this. And so what's this all going to be about? Advertising? About getting us to consume more? Again, it's about me, about consumption. It's got nothing to do with productive forces, with productivity, with changing the world around us rather than just indulging ourselves once again. And the irony here, ladies and gentlemen, and I think this is part of the dilemma that I'm really obsessed with, is that it seems to me that we're at a moment where there's such a gap between technologically what we can do and where we are going as a society. We are like parasitically living off the gains of the past with nobody taking responsibility for where this might go in the future. Or what is going to be the next phase that's going to lead to the kind of innovations that have brought about this kind of digital revolution. This phenomenal technology that we all use every day. You know what we obsess with today? The digital technologies that we obsess with today. I have to share with you a secret. Was only made possible by the experimentation of the past. The risk taking, the earth digging antics of old and modern day users of technology to exploit nature's resources. That's where this all came from. Today we're kind of bowing down to nature, the kind of eco environmentalist lobby that says that we shouldn't be doing anything unless we know what the outcomes are going to be. So the precautionary principle in scientific experimentation should be put in place. This is a directive that comes from Europe. Every single government has adopted this. If you don't know the outcomes, you shouldn't do it. This is just man's arrogance. We're exploiting the planet, we're destroying the planet for future generations, etc. But you know, that's a really weird kind of postulation that. Because the idea that man and nature are kind of opposed to each other is slightly misleading. We are of nature. We came from nature. The fact that the world is not in balance is the reason why we exist. If you try to hold things in a steady state, which is what everybody's saying, no more development, growth is bad, it's bad for the environment, etc. I'll give you an example of what a steady state is in nature. The moon, it's a dead rock. That's what a steady state is. Nature is constantly in evolution, it's constantly changing. And that's something we should welcome. It's something that we need to understand better so that we can enhance that, we can understand that better and use this better in a way that doesn't threaten anything in the future. That if it does create environmental problems or whatever, that we'll find a solution to that, that we won't. You know, nature throws up things at us and we respond because we are human beings, we have the consciousness, we have the ability to understand these things and change nature to meet our ends. Nature creates chasms between mountains. Mankind builds bridges to bridge that. Nature forgets to give us wings. We invent the aeroplane. Nature doesn't allow us to swim in the sea like fish, so we invent ships and boats that turn something that used to be Created an enormous amount of fear in society into a channel that allows us to communicate around the world, to explore the rest of the world. This is human beings at their best at discovering what nature has as a bounty and how we can change nature, control nature to human ends. It's very interesting because if we are concerned about uncertain outcomes, just think for yourself. Just think to yourself for a second. If Albert Einstein was alive today, working in the universities, imagine if he came out with this thing called E equals MC squared, five pages, a proof theory of relativity. You know what would happen in the university today? The first thing people would say is, what's the practical outcomes? Defend your research. It's like now all big research that we do now is predicated on. It has to have practical outcomes. The Large Hadron Collider, the big debate about that was, what's the outcome going to be? We've spent billions on this. We could have used this money to build hospitals. We could have done. What we're really looking for in the God particle is again unlocking the key building blocks of what makes up our physical environment. But Albert Einstein would also then be asked, okay, so what's the practical examples? What's the practical outcomes? Well, I don't know what they are yet. This is what Einstein said, I don't know. What I'm looking at is the purity of trying to prove one of the laws that govern the way the world works. And they would then say to him is, okay, what's your business model? How many products is this going to lead to? How many in the first year? What's your turnover going to be? I want to see a business model to see if this is worth investing in, et cetera. Now you just think about it. I mean, I'm obviously being ridiculous, because it is absolutely ridiculous question. I mean, how do you begin to unpack something like that? But if you then went from the time when Einstein came out with this, go forward 20, 30 years, and you look at what quantum physics and quantum mechanics achieved without quantum physics and without quantum mechanics, we would not have the digital revolution. You cannot engineer the stuff that makes up smartphones and all that. Without quantum mechanics, you cannot have the wonderful capacity that we have today. Without the theory of relativity, you would never be able to engineer that using it, using the science that existed prior to that. That's the fundamental point here, ladies and gentlemen, that Einstein had no idea what the outcome of this was going to be. What he was trying to do was to prove the purity and thought of an ability to really explain the physical world around us in a way that gave us such amazing insights that we are able to take that knowledge and apply it in ways that he and nobody ever, ever thought would be the case. And what do we have? We have our kind of modern society that we have today. So if you even look at something like the Internet, the amalgamation of computing on the one hand and telecommunications on the other, the coming together, when that came together under military purposes, whatever the motivation might have been to begin with, no one thought at that time, no one imagined that we would have a Google, that we would have eBay, Amazon, YouTube, multiplayer online games, that we would have the online porn or gambling in the way. Nobody saw that. And you couldn't. If you had to stipulate what's going to be the practical outcomes of all this research into this thing called the DARPA Net, you wouldn't have been able to, you would have justified it on the most moronic grounds whatsoever. And nothing would have ever happened because it would never have passed that kind of tick box test that we have today. The kind of regulatory frameworks around which are now imposed upon and unexpected outcomes are the things that have led to all the great things that we experience today. You know Columbus, you know Columbus, if he was now operating in a multinational corporation, he would have got fired because the schmuck was supposed to go and discover India, but he discovered America instead. Okay, he came back, he didn't meet his target, you know, he spent a lot of money, he couldn't account for it, etc. You know champagne invented by Don Perignon, the kind of the monk because a bottle accidentally of wine had an accidental secondary fermentation. We have champagne 3M invented a glue that didn't work. That's the basis of post it notes. That's a thing that failed. Great failure. Fantastic. You know about Viagra? Well, you guys wouldn't really know, but you're a little bit young for that. But think about Viagra. The outcome of an attempt to find a solution to blood pressure. The most successful failure in the history of mankind. The Jacuzzi brothers. Do you know who the Jacuzzi brothers were? They initially invented the Jacuzzi as a way of dealing with, trying to help people with arthritis. Didn't work. They reinvented it as a luxury tool. And you know, everybody now is sipping Dom Perignon in, in their Jacuzzis at home. Penicillin by Fleming. Leave something out, culture out over the weekend, comes back, sees this thing, sees that there's an area that's not affected by this bacteria and kind of puts two and two together and discovers penicillin. You know what? That wouldn't happen today, because in a laboratory today, anybody that leaves a culture out would be reported and health and safety would be in there and they'd be cleaning it up because you're not allowed to leave anything lying around, et cetera. So obviously, I'm being a little bit flippant here, but the point I'm trying to get at is that a lot of the great breakthroughs that we've had in society, in the development and progress of humanity have been the result of accidents, have been the result of experimentation, of risk taking in the past. And yet today we're in a society that does the very fact. You know, I think what's remarkable is, when you think about it, most of you have got smartphones. I should imagine, you know, that you're walking around with more computing power in your palm of your hand than the lunar landing module that landed on the moon. It's a fantastic achievement. I mean that in and of itself, I'm not here to discredit digital technologies and the communication capacities of all these things. I think they are brilliant. I think the fact that a billion people can be connected on something like Facebook is remarkable because the more we connect people, the potential for collaboration, for cooperation, for interaction between people is absolutely fundamental and fantastic, but is the pinnacle of what we should be doing. 140 characters tweeting what we're thinking, tweeting. Is this really what this technology is capable of? And what I want to end on is I just want to make a case for what I think is the beginning of a real revolution, a potential to transform the world in ways that we've never, ever thought of in the past. You know, you think about nanomaterials. Nanoscale work has started to transform some of the technologies that we use today. It's improved the surfaces of cars, the dressings applied to wounds, the flame redundancy, retardation of plastics. Carbon. Nanotubes have incredible implications for all fields of energy and the environment, for mobility, for lightweight construction, for health and safety. These are phenomenal inventions with potential. You know, biotechnologies, genetic engineering, miniaturized electronics. Nanomaterials could really fundamentally transform biology and everything around us in the world that we live in. It's just a new book that's just come out about biotechnology and about what they're calling microbiology, which is about the application of quantum mechanics to biology. And basically what they're doing is they're getting to the point now where we for the first time can manufacture life. Now, you know, some people, you know, obviously these are not issues that are without their moral questions and ethical questions. And those are important for us as a society to consider. But the potential of what we can do with that is unbelievable in terms of helping people with genetic disorders, creating new organs in the body, reproducing elements of life in a way that would fundamentally transform our health going into the future. Absolutely fantastic potential. I think the problem is we have this technology on the one hand, but at the same time, we are standing on the shoulders of giants from the past. But nobody is taking responsibility for who's going to do the next, who's going to be the next giant, who's going to take that leap, who's going to invest that money without demanding that there have to be practical outcomes, that there has to be a business case, that there has to be a sales chart, that there has to be market research that justifies why that should take place. Why not research for the sake of research which is what yielded all the things that we saw in the past? So I think my main message to you is to think the following. I think it's about high time we looked beyond our iPhone screens, remembering that there are still skies to conquer, that there's a universe to explore, that we still need our flying cars, we still want those jet packs that will get us to work much more efficiently than what we do at the moment. And for those endeavors, we will need huge scary nature exploiting nuke powered machines that do a lot more than tweet 140 characters. Thank you.
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A
Okay, thank you very much. I think there's some challenging statements in there and I would love to have some questions.
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B
Silence.
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A
We were just talking about taking risks. Well, if you guys are being shy, do we have one? Yes.
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C
Okay. Yeah.
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B
Okay.
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C
So first of all, thanks for the talk. What I'm wondering is what made you so pessimistic? So you listed all these great achievements in humankind and you could start with fire even. And some expected. Everything is supposed to be linear. So there should be a new innovation every five years. We should have jetpacks tomorrow and maybe moon landings the day after. And you also talked about how all innovations were sort of selfless tinkering that sort of led into these great things, which I think is not true. If you, for example, think of the moon landing, there very much was political motivation behind that and actually was a military complex that had sort of trickle down effects. So it's not as if those people just sort of tinkered a bit and all of a sudden, hey, we were on the moon. There were actual concrete goals behind that. And why would you think that even with social media, where we don't see the use now, there cannot be a revolution later on? And I mean, what about the Arab Spring or Hong Kong? That's actually a point in time where social media is used quite differently from just egocentric self reproduction. So, yeah, my basic question, what made you so negative all of a sudden? And why have you sort of lost his faith in humanity after it seems to have been working quite well for such a long time?
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B
Okay, okay, I can answer that. Well, I think you're kind of slightly misunderstanding the point I'm making. I haven't lost faith in humanity. In fact, the very opposite. I'm actually saying that I think there's a gap between what we've achieved as humanity and where we could go and with what is the kind of become the dominant outlook today as opposed to the past. You make a good point about the moon landing. Now, if you go back to the moon landing and you look at particularly Kennedy's justification for doing it, that fantastic speech that he made, it's really wonderful. It's fantastically inspiring. And despite the fact that, as you correctly say, it was about the military, it was about the race against the Soviet Union, et cetera, and that that was the context within which that took place, it was truly inspiring because what he said was, he said, we will go and put a man on the moon. And we do this. One, because it's difficult, note that, because nobody's saying that today. And two, because in the quest of doing that, we will discover so much about our world and about the world outside of us, because that this will be of great benefit to humanity. Now, you might argue that he was saying this because he was trying to ideologically justify spending so much money. It doesn't matter whether that was the case or not. What was fantastic about was that it inspired an entire generation of people to go into science, to go into mathematics, physics, chemistry, and just look what came out of the space program. You know, I could give you a list of 30, 40 things that came out of it. But very importantly, they didn't justify the space program because there were going to be these outcomes. They said, we don't know, it's difficult. That's my point. Today the opposite is the case. Today things are constrained, and I'm talking now about in companies, by governments, because we want to know what the Outcomes are going to be before we've actually done the work. And the problem with that is not that humanity has lost its mojo. It means that we've lost our courage. There's no leadership anymore when it comes to this. Think about, can you name one politician who today has got a vision that society could mobilise behind? I can't think of. It's inconceivable to me today. You have the equivalent of what Kennedy said at that time. And I suppose that's really the point I'm trying to get at. So it's not that I've suddenly lost faith. I think this is a development that's taken 30, 40 years. I think you can already see this towards the end of the last century, in fact, from the 70s onwards, this ambiguity begins to creep in. And ambiguity is very much about the fact that after the oil crisis in 73, people start losing a bit of confidence about where the economy is going, about growth, about all those things. And then you start at that stage, you start having these discussions about sustainable development, about the oil crisis. Are we running out of this? Are we running out of that? And slowly, what is a fringe question becomes over. I think 30, 40 years becomes a mainstream outlook, which everybody now just kind of accepts. Nilly Willy. There's very little critical engagement if you question sustainable development. You know, it's like saying, well, I stand for rape. You know, I'm in favor of rape. It's almost the kind of reaction you get today because everybody says, how can you not be for sustainable development? And my point is that, you know, sustainable development is a misnomer with regard to innovation, because, you know, why would we stick to the old materials if we can find new ways of doing things far more efficiently? You know, nature gave us uranium. What did we do with. We discovered, you know, how to use uranium to light up cities. That's all we did. Gave us a material. We discovered an amazing use for it. Okay, it's got problems associated with it. That's fair enough. But, you know, everything contains some kind of a risk. The more we understand it, the more our ability to. To contain that, to mitigate that risk. But we shouldn't. Our starting point today is if we don't know the outcome, don't do it. And that's very different.
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A
We have one more question there in the middle. Yeah.
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D
And then I have two comments that are a bit connected. I was interested in your comments regarding narcissism, kind of, I'd say, of millennials. Right, because you're kind of Talking about our generation. And I think that narcissism is pretty predated. I think that the audaciousness to say that we can go to the moon or to put bridges to connect us, those are all quite narcissistic, having to do with the ways that we position mankind. And I'd say that the era we're in now, we're more introspective, which is not a bad thing because you're talking about technology, but we could also talk about arts and poetry and the ways that that has also brought about introspection and asked us to be introspective. I think that relating that to this idea of innovation for innovation's sake, I think that introspection has allowed this generation to ask ourselves questions of what are the implications of those innovations? And yes, we can go in and we can mine, but at the same time, if there are people who are evacuated from their lands or there are surges of refugees, or there's coups and there's military strife, that too is a reality that we need to be conscious of. And I think that this idea that there's a small sector of the sciences that can do what they will, no, I think that that's quite problematic. And then two, I think that this idea of, again, what the previous comment, the man who made the previous comment about how accidental inspirations happen. I mean, we know that things are legacies. I mean, there's a genealogy of thought that comes into blossoming where people are able to create ideas, where we see ourselves. Now we see that most innovations coming are due to the funding of the CIA or the NSA and different security intelligence forces. And this has been a historical kind of reality. We have the Internet because it was first created through these security intelligence offices. So there's politics, there's funding, there's a lot of other things at play. And so I think that we have to kind of weigh in all these different convergences before we just simply say that we're not doing one thing. And to also see that perhaps where we are today is actually maybe going to bring us to a better type of humanity that can lead to those sorts of sustainable development, quote, unquote, not being a liberal hippie, but just saying that perhaps we are trying to become better people, to create better innovations.
- [42:27]
A
Okay. I think we touched there on some very serious issues of power and who has the power to invest and what kind of relations might result from various innovations. And because we are running out, I'm going to let go ahead and take a question before Another one before we go to a response. That's okay. Hi.
- [42:57]
E
I'm just wondering why you've dismissed digital innovation as innovation at all. And I think that we're living in a time where individuals tinker with the digital world and code in creating all kinds of things in an unorganized manner that has led to a lot of developments. And why you think that that doesn't count as innovation. And also in going back to the particle hadron collider, I don't really understand. That was very clearly exploration for exploration's sake. There were implications. There was a fear that we would all be sucked into a black hole, and they definitely did it anyway. So I don't really understand why that doesn't count as scientific exploration.
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A
Okay, I'm going to take one more in that same row and then we'll give a response.
- [43:42]
F
I'd just like to come back to the point made down here about narcissism, because it sparked something inside of me about comparing, I don't know, taking a no makeup selfie on Facebook, for example, to, I don't know, the narcissism of humanity, sending a probe to a comet. I think they're completely different kind of things. And in a sense, I agree with the statement that I do. Narcissism, Facebook. Yes. But comparing narcissism to big technology, I don't agree with. I think that's humanism, not narcissism. That's a confidence in man, that's kind of a faith in humanity, and they just simply can't be compared.
- [44:18]
A
Okay, Joey.
- [44:21]
B
Yeah, I very much agree with that last comment. But this narcissism issue is just one thing I didn't really touch upon. But it's something that I've done a lot of research on and an area that I'm very passionate about, which is that if you look at Facebook and you really try and understand where did Facebook come from? There's not many analyses that really explain Facebook other than through. If you look at the movie the Social Network or whatever, I can't remember what it's called, where Zuckerberg doesn't get laid one night and he decides he's going to go and do something. What absolute rubbish. The points about Facebook is that it's not about the technology that was important here. What was important was the culture, cultural changes that had occurred 20 years before Facebook came on the scene. And the fundamental shift that occurred was that childhood changed because of all the things I kind of mentioned, this kind of precaution, this kind of Risk society that we, we live in a society now where we are all potentially vulnerable. From whether it's rapists, whether it's the food that we eat, everything around us has become problematized. Risk culture is something that, for example, Ulrich Beck was writing about 30 years ago. What happened as a result of that was that children's experience of society changed. So when I was growing up, I had the freedom to run around like a lunatic with my mates after school. I'd come home from school, my mother used to say, get the hell out of the house. I don't want to see you till dinner. You do that today, you're going to have social services knock you on your door, your children unsupervised. What happened is transformation of childhood. And so as a consequence of that, children, young people growing up with this technology suddenly discovered through this technology that they could create spaces for themselves that were outside of their parents, where they could escape adult supervision, where they were no longer under the gaze of their parents. And so they were able to experiment in this kind of virtual space, which is where my space and all of that came from. The desire came from that need, that social need. But what it was was about young people. And I don't blame young people because that's what young people do. Experimenting with their identities, wanting to express themselves, gaining acknowledgement status, being part of groups. All the kinds of things we all went through when we were teens and were the kind of things we had to do as we were going towards adulthood. Except that now took the form of this taking place with, in cyberspace. And that's where the desire for this came from. And I think it's a really important point to grasp because that's what's the motivation behind Facebook, the fact that today you have adults doing what the kids were doing. In fact, the kids are moving off Facebook, they're going onto Snapchat and all these other applications, but the adults are populating Facebook. Like you never believe. What that says to me is, is that adults are behaving like children, that adults now are doing the same thing as children, expressing themselves. Self expression has become this big thing, and that is narcissism. That is about looking at yourself. It's about looking about your inner feelings, which I think is a completely different way of engaging with the world. So we're engaging with the world through this technology in a way which I think is very, very, very inward looking, very kind of inward focused, rather than lifting our eyes up and looking at the world around us. And this goes to Your point about coding and all of that. Now, I suggested to you that when you connect a billion people and you've got something like the Internet, and you've got the ability to sit in your bedroom and create something that can connect with people anywhere in the world, it's fantastic. The potential is absolutely wonderful. The problem I think we've got is that instead of saying to the kids, oh, you're so wonderful with technology. That's what we do the whole time. We always say, oh, the kids are so. The millennials are so brilliant with technology. In fact, they're not. They're pretty crap at technology because most of them don't understand the technology. They don't understand the maths, they don't understand the algorithms, they don't understand the physics, the, the chemistry. There's very few. It's only now that we're starting to introduce coding into schools. So playing with a piece of technology is not the same thing as being a technologist or understanding what that technology might be able to do in terms of solving problems or creating really useful applications that would make our lives easier or whatever. And so what we're doing is we're indulging ourselves.
- [49:24]
A
We.
- [49:25]
B
We are really. This is what I'm trying to get at. Instead of saying to the kids, slap them around the head and say, stop playing with that screen and go and study some maths and go and study and inspire them about what a fantastic achievement that piece of technology is, so they can create that technology, not just play with it. That's the difference.
- [49:47]
A
I want to push you a little bit on the power issue that came up because you mentioned Christopher Columbus and other great explorers and innovators of the past. And there were great powers behind them and investing in this exploration and innovation. And aside from their willingness to take personal risk, there was also significant, I would say, disregard for the consequences that the young woman up in the middle mentioned. The consequences for others in humanity and the impact that might have on other people's lives. And I want to know, what kind of risk are you talking about when you criticize sustainable development? Are we not eliminating a bit of responsibility for others by doing so?
- [50:44]
B
Well, I don't have time to go into this in the detail that I'd like to, but I think it's a fair question. I think it's an important question. It's one that we should really engage with. I think that my basic point would be that development progress is never clean. You're always going to have some kind of change, change in these Circumstances is going to mean that for some people they're going to lose and some people are going to gain. I think that in general, what I'm talking about is that the things that I'm highlighting on the whole, humanity as a whole has benefited. Although individual communities might not have had a great time. Just for example, think about something. Think about the invention of the car. Now, when you think about the car, do you know who went out of business as a consequence of the car being invented? The people that created anvils because there was no longer a need for blacksmiths, because there was no coaches to build anymore. There were no. And the anvil and the blacksmiths lost their jobs, they lost their livelihoods. When you think about what happened with the industrialization of clothing production, cotton for example, and textiles, think about the impact that that had on cottage industries. Lots of people were forced to go off the land, to go into cities, work in terrible conditions in order to live. Now, of course, power is power and those who yield power will do it to the extent that it serves their interests. But the inadvertent outcome of all of that is that you still have progress. So today there's billions more people in the world living at a much higher standard of living than they did in the past of our previous generations. We live a lot longer life, a more healthy life and more, I would suggest, sustainable life. Because we've had these developments and in the course of history, some people lose, some people don't. I'm not suggesting that what we need to do when I say let's experiment is just screw everybody. And it doesn't matter if this impacts. I think we can, if we do this consciously, we can limit these kinds of impacts when they're going to have those kinds of adverse effects. And I think, you know, the other point about it as well is that through political engagement, people can resist these things. You know, look at the Luddites, the Industrial revolution, look what came out of the Industrial Revolution, the trade union movement movement who kind of fought back from capital just in an unbounded way, just exploiting them, grinding them down, you know, cheap labor, etc. They fought back. Nothing is given, nothing is given in the technology or how this is organized. And to your point about, you know, who's funding this and everything, and you're talking about the state and everything, you know, the post war period of the 20th century, you will not find any technology development that takes place that is not somehow funded by the state. And you should understand this point because, you know, if you look at America, what used to be termed the military industrial complex. They were very much involved in underpinning a huge number of research programs. The Internet was one that came out of that. But there was a lot more. In fact, a lot of this technology that we have today is the consequence of that. And so my point there is, okay, it might have been that the state is thinking, well, how can we do this so that we, you know, America can exploit the rest of the world or whatever. That might have been their kind of thinking. But the fact that they did this, the fact that they unleash a process which they no longer can control, so that we see what's happening today, that China is no longer the home of just cheap labor, where they are now producing more scientists than anybody else in the world, that they are doing research in materials that nobody else is doing in the world today, that they are really becoming cutting edge. It happened to Japan in the last century, it will happen again in the future. In other words, once we unleash a process, technology is not a thing. It's a set of relationships. Relationships and how the outcomes will be influenced by how the different forces interoperate and who's got what the balance of power might be in that relationship. I think we should be comfortable with the fact that that's how progress takes place. It's not lineal. It's not something that we can control in every single aspect. That's what's the wonderful thing about human beings. But on the whole, I think the outcome is that it's better for the whole of humanity. And I think that's how you should measure these things. That should be the litmus test.
- [55:47]
A
Okay, then. Oh, we have one more question. Yeah, There any other questions? Because then I'll take just one more after that and we'll finish. Okay, so go back to you.
- [56:09]
G
Hi. I just want to know what you think the capacity of social scientists to make innovation. Because from your talks and your answer, my feeling is that technology can make a huge contribution to, to our life. But then social scientists, we don't invent technology. We can't make human land on the moon. So what do you think that social scientists can make innovation in the society? Thank you.
- [56:45]
A
Okay. And Mike gets past.
- [56:55]
F
It sounds like your talk was kind of a criticism of the postmodern condition of like, looking inward and overanalyzing everything. What kind of steps would you suggest or just kind of comments to. Would you provide to kind of go past that and move forward into this culture of innovation that, that you suggest?
- [57:20]
B
Thank you.
- [57:22]
A
And did we have one more right here?
- [57:26]
H
I was just. You mentioned that people are all becoming data points. And quite a lot of what you said sounded like a sort of fear of becoming a data point and not people being less special because there's more of them. And I was just wondering if to what extent you think, well, I don't know, but they did sound like you had a fear that we were becoming data points. But that does just seem to be what is happening. Anyway, that's sort of a question.
- [57:56]
B
I'll leave it at that.
- [57:58]
A
So we're introspective over analytical data points. And what can we as social scientists do about it?
- [58:13]
B
Well, leave university. And I think, no doubt, actually, I think these points are all related as it happens. I think that social scientists have got a fundamental role to play here. I think that what we need in the academy is we need a much more critical engagement, a kind of sociological engagement with this technology, interrogating where this technology is going, what the kind of possibilities of this might be. Because what I think is the solution to all of this is to go beyond the kind of post modern crisis that I think we're facing is to reposit and reposit the notion that human beings are the solution to all of this, not the problem. That's where I think the postmodern moment has taken us. We kind of moved away from the kind of rationality of the enlightenment and rational thought where we think that that's all now suspect that we, you know, so in the academy we need to be able to resurrect the idea of mankind as being history making, of having the capacity to make that change, rather than being the object of forces around them which we're just trying to control and stop, rather than taking more control of. And I think what we need is more control, which means that you and I and everybody in this room has to engage in this, take some responsibility for it and understand that nothing is inevitable here. What I spoke about in Big Data is that what I'm concerned about there is, is this kind of, this idea that's being posited, particularly by the technology firms and everything, that the algorithm will set you free. Well, technology doesn't set you free. Technology is technology. It depends on how we use that technology, how we adopt that technology, what we do with it. That's within our capacity. So what I'm really arguing for is a kind of human based, humanist based approach to technology that says that these are all human creations and they can be used for the betterment of mankind rather than for the betterment of a few, that we have to resurrect this notion that, you know, we are not the objects of the things that we have created. We have created these things. Things. And it's within our capacity to kind of reclaim them and shape them according to real needs, according to solving real problems. That's. To me, it's the way we begin to attack postmodernism is we reclaim humanism. We reclaim. We put human beings at the heart and at the center of everything we do, and we look at everything through that prism. I think we do that. I mean, you're welcome to tweet about this. Maybe humanism, human based technology. Maybe we can start a real debate on Facebook, and who knows where it will lead? Thank you.
- [61:25]
A
Okay, let's give a round of applause. Thank you very much.