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Making the Connections between the technology of today and the learning of tomorrow

James Burke, producer of such award-winning shows as "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed" and author of The Axemaker's Gift (with Robert Ornstein), is famous for looking to the past and revealing the connections between technological discoveries, social events and the development of civilization. But what of the future? In this interview, Burke reveals his thoughts on the technology of today and what it means for tomorrow.

EDUCOM REVIEW: Your work suggests that you see information technology not just as part of the solution, but also as part of the problem. How do you define the problem?

JAMES BURKE: The problem is that for the last half a million years we have lived with what I would describe as a culture of scarcity. Ultimately, information technology is power, and power belongs to those who have information. Throughout history, the availability of this power, the concentration of it, the ease with which it was generated and distributed, and the ease above all with which it was denied--have been a kind of driving force in our social development since we came out of the cave. At any one time throughout history there have been only limited sets of technology available to society to do what it wanted to do. This has led to at least two consequences.

First, technology has tended to be in the hands of relatively few people, because there was not enough technology to go around. And, second, many of those people became what we call "leaders." They were the ones who made the decisions. And what we are living through right now is a sudden and accelerated form of that same problem.

ER: In what sense?

BURKE: In the sense that--particularly since the advent of radio and television--the majority of people have lived with a very rapidly increasing awareness of the sense that they don't have what they need, don't know what they need to know. Many of the structures that were originally designed to give people some kind of freedom of action--and I speak here, for example, of democratic government forms--have not so far lived up to their promise, in the sense that you cannot really have a democracy without a democracy of information.

ER: And what is the consequence of that?

BURKE: The social turbulence we are living through at the moment--and will continue to be living through for the next couple of generations at least.

A period when people's expectations, thanks to the fueling of those expectations by information technology like television and radio, exceed the ability of the social institutions to provide what it is people increasingly want. We have a couple of generations coming up where the serious problem created by the culture of information scarcity will not be satisfactorily dealt with for people well aware of the fact.

ER: A number of people are quite agitated about what they perceive as the increasing gap between the so-called information haves and the have-nots.

BURKE: Yes, that's primarily a problem of the awareness I've just mentioned.

But agitation is good. Making a fuss about something is the first step towards doing something about the problem.

ER: Tell us about your notion of the axemaker, as you developed that concept in your book, The Axemaker's Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture.

BURKE: Well, the axemaker is the person I was talking about when I began by saying that when technology is limited only a small number of people can get their hands on the tools. This has been the case for a half million years or so. The people who created flint tools were the first technologists, so I chose to use the term "axemakers" to describe the elite minority who through history possessed the tools of change.

ER: All tools are equivalent in some ways, but you've also pointed out differences among different tools. For example, radio and television certainly can be contrasted with, say, the Internet as tools.

BURKE: Yes, well, it really boils down to what I believe about what's coming on the other side of this turbulent period of transition we're headed into. Until now, all tools have brought about a concentration of power: the flint ax; the printing press; the ability to write and read; ownership of a mode of transportation (like a horse in the 18th century, or a private railroad car like the robber barons of the 19th century, or an automobile in the 20th century). Such tools were always limited to a very small number of people. I think the Internet will entirely reverse the process. And in that sense, in a classical sense of the word "tool," the Internet is not a tool at all; the Internet actually destroys the concept of the tool as a specialist artifact.

What the Internet does in a sense is to create a medium in which ordinary people can express themselves without needing the kind of specialist knowledge and specialized tools that have been necessary up until now to manufacture and use information and therefore wield power.

ER: But will the Internet always be a medium for empowering ordinary people? What do you make of the fact that there are these increasingly large media conglomerates that seem to play larger and larger roles in cyberspace? In spite of the idea that the Internet allows everyone to be his own publisher, Disney and companies like that seem to think that they can remain the same kind of dominant forces that they always have been.

BURKE: Yes. I can only think of one parallel, and that would be the abuse of the printing press in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the output of the presses was guarded very jealously by a small group of printers in Europe. And overall control of that output was also jealously guarded, first by the Catholic and then the Protestant churches, and third after that, by national governments. And it took a long time before those people who could afford to buy books could start producing their own books on commercial presses in sufficient numbers to offset the constraints of censors in the church, or government.

I think the same thing can be said about the present media conglomerates in the sense that they are the last gasp of the nineteenth century when control of the mass means of expression was both power and money. These guys who run today's media conglomerates will before long be obsolete. The Internet has let too many cats out of too many bags to close all the bags now. It's just too easy for the individual and the small house to publish.

ER: Nowadays, the promotion budgets of some Hollywood movies represent an enormous percent of their total budgets, and that makes one wonder whether the access to the people is dependent not so much on the printing press itself--or the Web site itself--but rather on the promotion mechanism needed to get the public's attention.

BURKE: Yes, I know what you are saying. I think again this is another example of being at the end of the nineteenth century mass old way of looking at things. All of what I am talking about, I suppose, refers to what comes on the other side of that turbulent transition period--all of it related to what I believe will be the fundamental educative effect of the new technology. The less informed pre-Internet people are, the easier it is to con them, the easier it is to persuade them of one thing or another because they don't have access to any source of material that would allow them to deny what you are telling them.

I think that's why it was so easy to get people to go to war in 1914, a little less easy in 1939, and I would guess a good deal less easy today. And I think the kinds of technology we are talking about will bring about a kind of diffusion of knowledge that will render the public at large "educated" enough for it not to be so easy to persuade them one way or another about anything. On that score, I think the increasing dissatisfaction with what used to be called representative democracy is because people are now educated enough to recognize that it is neither representative nor democratic.

ER: Do you see this as an age of educated cynicism?

BURKE: No. I suppose initially cynicism, but--to be aphoristic--cynicism is what you experience prior to understanding.

ER: Let's go back to the educative function you mentioned. Do you see any radical changes coming in the way education is conducted?

BURKE: Absolutely. The most radical changes of all. The information technology we are discussing is going to make us change the way in which we assess intelligence, the way we describe intelligence in order to assess it, and perhaps also the way we think it necessary to assess intelligence in any of the old-fashioned senses. What we're looking at with the new technology is the beginning of the end of reductionism.

Up until now, there has been a view of knowledge which says that the more you know about less, the more intelligent you are. The ultimate end of reductionism is of course to know absolutely everything about almost nothing. A pal of mine got his Ph.D. in Milton's use of the comma. I think that's a very good example of what I'm talking about. That, up until now, has been the classical method by which you assess someone's intelligence, by testing their ability to use logic and numeracy to split the universe up into smaller and smaller bits--the inference being, of course, that someone who understands the bits will know how they fit into the whole. Well, this has become increasingly less true as the bits have become more and more arcane and more and more separated from one another. Ask any quantum chromodynamicist what they do for a living and I don't guess you'll understand much of the answer.

So I think what we are going to be seeing with the new information technology is a way of seeing the whole while at the same time becoming as reductionist as you care to be. And I think this ability to see large-scale patterns simultaneously with small-scale detail is something that is going to become available fast enough and easily enough and comprehensively enough for people to start looking at patterns and looking at the way in which knowledge interacts with other knowledge. I've been huckstering this for thirty years.

What we will start to look at will be intelligence not in terms of can you memorize something or can you use Occam's razor, and instead start thinking of intelligence in terms of the way that people make imaginative links among data. We will value people who are able to look for--I hesitate to use this word--"meaning" in information, relevance in data, context in knowledge, and we will start valuing those talents of those who were previously ignored because they were not good at such things as reductionist logic, numerate forms of thought, linear thinking, memorizing stuff, and so on. Because if you think about the way the brain actually works, the reductionist way of functioning is not what it does best. Intuitive a-rational thought, it seems to me, is what the brain is good at. And yet, because of technological limitations up till now, we have not had the means to let those a-rational, tangential talents express themselves or the means to evaluate such talents. But I think the new technology will allow us to do so. In other words, I think we will be able to assess people's intelligence in terms of imagination rather than memory.

ER: In addition to those substantive issues, there are also educational support and structural issues. What do you think about the issues that have to do with the educational guilds, the formal structures of education, the degree-granting apparatuses, and so on? Do you see any changes coming?

BURKE: Well, going out on somewhat of a limb, I would have said that formal qualifications are again the last expression of the old way of looking at things, in the sense that to have a doctor operate on you, you need to have a doctor who knows what he's talking about. And you don't want to cross a bridge built by an engineer who failed his degree or didn't take a degree but just said, "I want to build a bridge," but knows nothing about stress. And almost every aspect of the mass-produced modern industrial world has until now relied on a means of assuring society that the persons to whom it gives these responsibilities are indeed what they said they were. However, increasingly what will happen is that qualified machines will do the jobs instead of human experts. For example, it may be that surgery 50 years from now will not consist of some extremely talented butcher slicing meat, but of harnessing the body's own repair mechanisms, the immune system, or whatever, to do the necessary work to cure disease before the need for surgery develops. If that happens, we may no longer have need of surgeons. It's happened before. How many people can shoe a horse today?

ER: Did you go to university?

BURKE: I went to Oxford. And Oxbridge is the epitome of what I am talking about.

ER: Yet Oxford and Cambridge are held throughout the world as paradigms for personalized, "real" learning.

BURKE: Well, they are in the old sense I was discussing. Yes.

ER: And so what would your prediction be about their future?

BURKE: I suppose they will go out of existence, and be replaced by universities without walls. I think that's probably going to happen rather fast. I mean, they are terribly expensive, blundering behemoths. Look at the cost of just the upkeep, the physical infrastructure, the need for people to congregate in a place where the price of property will go sky-high as a result, many other things like that. But they will go away when the requirement for people to congregate goes away. I've seen enough and I'm sure you have, of the most recent juxtaposition of teleconferencing and virtual reality so that soon, you are not going to know whether you are sitting in a room with a real person or not. So I am not sure that the physical proximity of people is going to be essential, given that in most cases there isn't any real interaction going on anyway.

ER: Not even at Oxford?

BURKE: No. At universities today you listen to some guy and take notes, and at the end you regurgitate the notes if you want to get a degree. You don't really interact with him in the sense that would make it important for you to be there physically present with him. I suppose at the level of younger children, the Socratic dialog, the requirement to teach children to grow up to be responsible adults is still vitally important.

But you still don't necessarily have to do that in a classroom when the community at large, and especially parents, are key in passing on these precepts to children. Children went to schools initially when their parents went to the factories. But the new technology will put the parents back with the children, perhaps in small communities. If you think about it, I suppose the industrial revolution was only a blip in the flow of our social development. The other day I heard someone saying, "The only thing I dislike about telecommuting is that I really miss people"; well, that is a sad reflection on this temporary Industrial Age transition we are going through, because if what you mean by "meeting people" is going to a place where you stand or sit next to them working from nine to five every Monday through Friday, well, that ain't much of a way to meet people. Anybody living before 1750 would have thought of a modern factory or office being much like a prison.

So I think information technology may well return to an altogether socially healthier way of doing things and that's why I rambled on about precepts and Socratic dialog being better taught by communities and parents than by teachers.

ER: Looking back, let's say 25 years, what has been most surprising to you?

BURKE: I suppose the speed with which all this has happened. Technology always moves faster than the social institutions, and the speed with which information technologies have developed is what has made that such a shock. I look back 25 or 30 years ago to a world where the availability of and the propensity to use information by the community at large was, compared to what it is now, extremely limited. We accepted unquestioningly the social infrastructure as it had been, and above all the authority of those "in power over us." And I think the biggest surprise has been the speed with which our acceptance of that infrastructure has lessened.

ER: And you've looked ahead already a number of years in different aspects of the conversation. What would you guess you would be most surprised at 25 years out.

BURKE: I think the most surprising thing for me would be to discover that the process I've been describing as a 30-year period of turbulent transition had ended before then. I think the turbulence is going to last much longer than most of us might think. That's not really a good answer, but any other surprise I might have mentioned is detail. The biggest surprise will be for me if we survive this turbulence without serious social disruption.

ER: And when you say that are you thinking mainly in terms of the developed nations or are you thinking in terms of the world?

BURKE: Both. The description "developed nations " tends to relate, I suppose, to the physical products of our technology. We have manicured lawns and a car that works, and everybody has a shower and all those other consumer durables. However, I don't know that the "developed" world is, in many areas (particularly, in terms, let's say, of the political process) all that developed. It doesn't take too long for us to fall into anarchy--in Northern Ireland or Bosnia or Northern Spain or Turkey or the Middle East. I think the turbulence is going to affect us . . . possibly not quite as badly as the Third World, but it's going to affect us nonetheless, I believe, because the number of people who can enjoy the kinds of conversation we're having now is still pretty small, and until it is large, the potential for disruption is as large in the West as anywhere else.

ER: In spite of your prediction of turbulence, are you basically an optimist?

BURKE: Well, if you're not basically an optimist, instead of handling a problem you jump out the window. After which you can't be part of any solution. So, yes, I'm an optimist, I suppose, because over the millennia we have survived. So I'm a long-term optimist. But short term I guess I'm a pessimist. I think we are in for some really bad times and I think the end of my lifetime is going to be less idyllic than the beginning was. Because short term, information technology is going to bring change faster than the social institutions can cope with.