"Yesterday, Tomorrow, and You."

I think this will be of interest to some of the folks here, though since I wrote it for my own blog and pertaining to my novel, I feel a little awkward about posting it to the front page.

Jim D.

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I've mentioned previously the work of science historian James Burke. This past weekend I finished watching the last couple of episodes of his ground-breaking series Connections. Overall, you would probably enjoy watching the series, and will find a lot of chuckles over what was "high tech" in 1978 versus the reality of what we have today. But the closing bit was just stunning - it was a prediction of the need for and use of the Internet before DARPA had even begun to let the cat out of the bag. Here's the last ten minutes:

In particular the bit that starts out at about 5:00 is the culmination of his entire thesis about change - that understanding how things change is the key to understanding everything. At about 6:45 is this remarkable passage (transcribed myself, since I couldn't readily find it online - how's that for irony?):

Scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion and ideology. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches is because thanks to science and technology, they have begun to know that they don't know so much, and if they are to have more say in what happens in their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge they know exists and that they don't possess.

And by 'helped towards that knowledge', I don't mean give everybody a computer and say "help yourself." Where would you even start? No, I mean, trying to find ways to translate the knowledge, to teach us to ask the right questions. See, we're on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before. Or, if that's not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don't have access to it as powerless as if we were deaf, dumb, and blind.

Digital divide, anyone? Anyway, I find it just fascinating that Burke was so dead-on in his prediction of the Internet, even if he didn't have the term for it, and yet even he failed to understand how phenomenally all-encompassing it would be. Whereas he thought that it would be impossible to just give people access to the information and say "go to it", that is exactly what we've got - and self-organization of information and resources like Wikis make that information understandable, not just accessible.

When, as often happens, I feel somewhat pessimistic, that our greed or violent tendencies will outstrip our maturing as a culture/species, it is helpful to come across something like this. And I think that is why I read SF, and have written Communion of Dreams: because there, with all the ugliness and human folly, there is nonetheless room for hope. Look at what we've done in just the last thirty years - what more can we accomplish in the next forty, if we don't destroy ourselves?

Jim Downey