james burke

• ingiliz bilim tarihçisi ve nazarımda bir yirmibirinci yüzyıl peygamberi.
  
  kendisi hakkında aylardır yazmak istiyor ancak kendisini halen yeterince kavrayamamış olmanın verdiği eziklikle tek bir kelime dahi yazamıyordum. herkesin tanıması ve bilmesi gereken bir insan olduğunu düşündüğümden bu probleme bir çözüm olarak, kendisinin 2002 senesinde cornell üniversitesinde verdiği bir konuşmanın şimdilik deşifre ettiğim kadarının transkriptini yazarak başlamayı uygun gördüm.
  
  kendisinin ne dedigini anlaya baslamak icin ozet bir yazisi http://www.forbes.com/asap/2000/1002/278.html adresinde bulunabilir.
  
  eğer ki biraz dahi olsa "yarın ne olacak" diye düşünen bir insansanız, james burke'ü tanımıyor olmanın hayatınızdaki eksikliğini kendisini tanıdıktan sonra fark edeceksiniz.
  
  çok önemli işleri connections ve the day the universe changed isimli onar bölümlük iki belgesel olmakla beraber, scientific american'da yazdığı yazılar, beyin üzerine yaptığı the neuron suite ve diğer birçok belgeseli de internetten bulunabilir. ayrıca halka hizmet adına tüm bu belgeselleri isteyen herkese bilaücret ulaştırmak da kendimi topluma faydalı kılmak adına üstlendiğim bir misyondur, sağlam bant genişliği olanlara download, olmayanlara da eve dvd postalamak suretiyle üstesinden gelmeyi düşündüğüm bu görevin ne kadar önemli olduğunun ise ancak aşağıdaki konuşmayı okuduktan sonra anlaşılacağını düşünüyorum.
• james burke'ün 2002 yılında cornell üniversitesinde verdiği konuşmanın elimden geldiğince çıkarttığım transkripti aşağıdadır.
  
  teknoloji, geçmiş ve bugünümüz arasındaki bağlantılar, bugünkü kurumsal yapılarımızdaki problemler ve internetin gelişiyle ortaya çıkacak daha büyük problemler üzerine çok masif, çok compress edilmiş veriyi bulacağınız bu knouşmanın tamamını ve james burke'ün diğer işleri ile ilgili bilgi için benimle kontak kurmaktan ya da google'ı kurcalamaktan çekinmeyin.
  
  ingilizcesini türkçeye çevirecek ne vaktim ne de ingilizceme güvenim olduğundan, o işi bir başkasına bırakıyorum.
  
  tüm yazım, semantik, gramer hataları bana aittir. james burke aslında derdini şahane anlatmıştır.
  
  "don't get too excited. this is not the edited version on tv. this is much lower.
  
  as some of you probably knows, i have kind of wasted the last 35 years of my life as a science historian and a journalist making tv programs and writing books and columns about technological change and its social effects.
  
  first, in order for you to be able to get into perspective with what i'm going to say this morning two things.
  
  number 1: i make television programs for a mass audience if you want the horse's mouth stuff talk to your faculty. i'm just here to rattle your cage.
  
  second thing i want to tell you is to remind you the thing that was said by the late great mark twain, when he might have been talking about people like my profession, he said "in the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. it is the task of journalists and historians to rectify this error."
  
  so i want to rectify this morning a few things about the general social and historical context of change. and the process is exercising about in the minds of people these days that is what the technology coming down the pike is going to do to us, how to best prepare for it and why that has not been easy up until now.
  
  and i want to argue that the high rates of innovation we live with today and the historical difficulty we have had in *predicting* change accurately up to now and finally the opportunities the coming technologies may offer to take a really different approach to knowledge management, all spring from one creative moment 500 years ago, well it probably springs from a dozen but i choose one. when somebody triggerred all this shmear with it today, with a solution to a local contemporary problem back then, then changed the world.
  
  but let me start with the problem of predicting the future because, if you get that right, you've got it made. grades, degrees.. that stuff.
  
  the unfortunate problem about the future is, if you think about it, it hasn't happened yet. and, never will, if you get my drift. the great danish quantum physicist neil bohr once said with great prespacasity: "prediction is extremely difficult, especially about the future." i don't think it was just danish humor. although, it could've been. i think he was talking more about the humongous number of variables involved in any change.
  
  and those variables have multiplide through history. once upon a time, not that long ago, decision making was simple. you would have any color model t ford, as long as it was black. today, by the time you get'round to reading the manual, there's been an upgrade. if, you can read the manual in the first place.
  
  by the time you decide to use a new piece of software, it's already obsolete. by the time the high schools are teaching material that they need to keep up with innovation, the material is already out of date. and as a consequence the reaction of the average person on the street and the many people in business and institutions to the flood of technology that hits us everyday, reminds me very much of the depressive who takes a couple of days off to get out of the clinic, to go to the beach, get himself a tan, the next day his psychiatrist back at the hospital receives a postcard from him. the message on the card is, i think very much like the average individual's reaction to the present very high rate of change, the card from the depressive on holiday reads: "having a wonderful time. why?"
• let me start with one of the reasons why that happens, why it has been dificult for us to second-guess change, to recognize for example, what unlimited bandwidth and technology convergence will do to almost every aspect of our lives before it actually does it.
  
  the challenge of being able to do that kind of thing, the challenge of prediction was once very amusingly was highlighted with the great modern philosopher wittgenstein, you may know wittgenstein, he's the man who ruined university administration. because he once said: "if anything can be said at all, it can be said clearly."
  
  anyway somebody once went up to wittgenstein and said what a bunch of morons we europeans were back 700 years ago before copernicus told us how the solar system worked. to have looked up in the sky and to have thougt that what we were seeing up there was the sun going around the earth. whereas every idiot knows that the earth goes around the sun, and you don't have to be einstein to get that!
  
  to which the great philosopher is said to have replied as philosophers will, "yeah yeah", "but" he said, i wonder what it would've looked like up there, if the sun *had* been going around the earth.
  
  the point being of course, it would look exactly the same.
  
  what he was saying was, in any decision, you're constrained by your knowledge context. by what you know at the time. you're in a box. and science and technology, is no exception."
• "if as an astronomer, you believe that the universe is made of omlettes, you build instruments to search for traces of inter-galactic egg. and if you don't find any? no problem: instrument failure, not ofcourse because your view of the cosmos is wrong.
  
  because at any time, the contemporary view, the view from inside the box, is the only right one. or there would be anarchy. we have to have a general agreement from time to time on how to think, on which way is up, that we can all stick to.
  
  conformity is a security matter.
  
  trouble with being in this box however is, that it also dicates how you see the future and plan for it and act on that plan and you are all doing it right now. the problem is the view from inside the box, as you may also have experienced yourselves, is often not right.
  
  principally as i want to show, because the future is almost never a linear extension of the present. this can sometimes become embarassingly obvious. to people like guttenberg, who thought he'd print a few bibles and that would be that. or the head of ibm who 50 years ago said: "take it from me, the world will need 5 computers." or the same year, 1940something, popular science magazine said: "take it from us, none of those will ever weigh more than 1.5 tons". and my favourite prediction, bill gates, 1984: "640k ought to be enough for anybody."
  
  the trouble with second-guessing future, i think lies partly in the process of change itself and the only thing you could say with certainty about change, is that it is *un*certain. because as neils bohr said about those number of variables involved. because while you're in your box, planning to bring about change with some new idea, new theory, new gizmo, at the same time in a lot of other boxes that you don't know about, other people are doing precisely the same thing.
  
  so even if you decide on your straight pathway to the future, somebody out there is putting a bend in the road."
• "let me illustrate how non linear the path of change can be, with a not very serious sequence events from the history of technology. this story will end in the modern world with a modern technological artifact, with which i assure you every single person in this room is intimately associated.
  
  so you ought to get there before i do. because you know the end of the story.
  
  one dark and stormy night in 1707, an english off the southwestern coast of england, an admiral called sir cloudsly showel -i'd have changed my name- is bringing the great english fleet back to england.
  
  he decides to turn right. and only one of the 44 navigators on the fleet says don't do it,so he does. hits the rocks off the southwestern coast of england, the entire fleet, the entire english fleet sinks. think about that.
  
  all the sailors drown, including admiral showel. this stimulates the english parliament, to offer a billion-dollar prize for better navigation techniques -like surprise! surprise!
  
  this offer prompts a clockmaker called huntsman, to look for a better steel clock-spring. those of you who sail will know that if you sail east or west the problem with longtitute means that the most important thing you can have is to know what time it is back at base to the second. because that will tell you that the star here, just came up so many minutes and seconds earlier or later than when it usually does at home and that tells you where you are, on the path east-west.
  
  this is very important for us english at the time, because we are coming over here to exploit you guys. we saw nothing wrong with taxation without representation? what's changed?
  
  anyway, the steel which huntsman invents is great for clocksprings. so that's solved. and also it turns out, for cutting other metal. so an iron maker called wilkinson uses it to bore out thin walled water pipes and then thin walled cannon-barrels which in spite of the fact that we're at war with both of you at the time, he sells to you and the french. nothing changes.
  
  a little bit later napoleon uses this lightweight cannon barrels to create a new thing called "mobile horse artillery" and wins all his battles!.. except the last.. sorry :)
  
  in 1810 napoleon sets up a prize to encourage french inventors and a champagne bottler called appere steps forward with an idea for which he wins the big prize, for putting food in bottles, champagne bottles, corking the bottle, boiling it, and killing the germs nobody knows exist. it works, everybody loves it.
  
  10 years later an english company is doing it also because they have bought appere's patent. which they only buy because it is literally sitting on the desk next to the patent in paris that they went there to buy in the first place. which is for a new paper technique that allows the first toilet-rolls to be made. you see what i've been saying on how innovation can be surprising? how could anybody could've forecasted the toilet-roll from even the most frightening of the navigational problems? english joke."
• "what's happening here is i think, the fundamental process involved in innovation and the main reason it has been hard so far to second-guess change is the way change happens when things come together in ways that never have before. and when that juxtaposition occurs the root of maths change and one and one suddenly makes three.
  
  the result of the process, is more than the sum of the parts. and almost always unpredictibly so. couple of examples:
  
  late 19th century german automotive engineer wilhelm maybach, puts together the perfume spray and gasoline and creates what we call: the carburator.
  
  another one: around the same time, a medical researcher accidentally spills one of the newly invented chemical dyes into a peatry dish containing bacteria. next morning he sees that it has preforentially stained and killed one particular kind of bug. bingo. chemotherapy.
  
  now, in the face of this kind of serendipity, the only question that matters is "why?". what is it about change, that makes it hard to manage because it is constantly so surprising? good surprising, if it's you doing it to your enemies in the battlefield or marketplace, bad surprising if it's hitting you in your face. "
• "i believe that change is a surprise because of that knowledge management idea i mentioned 500 years ago which brought all of us today and which also happened because of an amazing bit of serendipity, an accident if you like. a surprise. one hell of a surprise. and a surprise that also brought us all here today. i'll get you in a moment but first of all let me get back for a moment to the beginning where knowledge management first emerged as a concept: in the caves of paleolithic prehistory. which is where we get our attitude about pretty much everything and our institutions and systems. which i would argue beginned with the first flint tool.
  
  at the time if you think about it, the first flint tool is the best thing since eating berries and dirt. because now it is possible to look out and hunt for lunch that is walking by on the hoof. and whatever it was that we human beings were going to be, the flint tool, in one sense freezes us at that point in our development. freezes the way we think and act and organize and innovate from then, until about yesterday.
  
  first of all, if you're going to go about hunting, you will need noodlers -specialists- whou will go on making the axes and flints and butchering tools. and then you need a man with a plan or you won't coordinate the hunt and lunch will get away.
  
  and then you need lots of people who do what the man with the plan says. so you make a top-down decision-making command structure in which -you may recognize this- the very few get power and reward and the very many are excluded from the process and do as they're told.
  
  so when i say we freeze at that point in our development, that's because while i was describing what went on in paleolithic caves, i could as easily have been describing what happens in general motors. the entire command structure of the modern society starts with the flint tool and shapes the culture and the way we think from then on, which is what technological change always does.
  
  the flint tool triggers a cultural cascade effect because its first use creates a discontinuity. because it introduces the first non-cyclic once-for-all change which people get used to and want more of.. which they always do.
  
  which generates public expectation of an even better tool tomorrow as it always does. which generates the requirement that noodlers will come up with tools that satisfy those public expectations.. which they always do."
• now, because of some work in the lab not too far from where i live in france, it is known that to produce the hottest flint tool on the market about 200.000 years ago, took around 100 extremely precise blows to a piece of flint in an extremely precise sequence taking into account the exact fracturing characteristics of the stone at each blow.
  
  and to pass on that kind of skill as a noodler instructor you had to be able to instruct with the same linear and exact precision. and this, according to an eminent dutch paleontologist, is why language happens. "language", he says, "is advanced axe-making." and like axe-making, is linear, precise and step-by-step.
  
  and like the axe, language cuts reality into conceptual pieces that you can reassemble in different ways and some thousand years later when the greeks find themselves in a situation very like ours today, where innovative solutions will open up global markets for them, they use language to cut up thoughts and reassemble it, so as to innovate using a new tool called: logic which is the flint-axe magnified a million times because as you know, with logic you can solve problems by putting together two things you know to discover a third you didn't know.
  
  like: stars give off light, light comes from fires, stars are probably fires. not bad for people with no infrared spectrometers right?
  
  what churns this entire process into the cutting edge of modern science and technology, is that knowledge management idea which i selected. triggered as i said by an off the wall accident.
  
  the accident was the rediscovery of america by colombus on what he thought was a straight short for japan. america blew everybody away. it was not in the two fundamental databases of the time: the bible and aristotles.
  
  so what the hell was it doing here?
  
  and then all those plants and animals that started flooding back into europe, and they are not on anybodys lists either so what the hell are *they* doing here?
  
  as well as all this, copernicus is going around saying that the earth is not the center of the solar system and galileo's saying "you're right i can see", and a dutch engineer called simon staven is saying: "vonder ist hein vonder" (???) which means "don't believe in miracles" the poet john dunn sums it all up: "the new philosophy calls all in doubt"
  
  well in the intellectual panic that spreads, like, can they trust anything they know anymore? a french noodler whom i blame for absolutely everything, comes up with a knowledge management idea that changes the world. his name is rene descartes. and he works out how to generate trustworthy knowledge and not screw up. i'll paraphrase: "use methodical doubt when you're thinking." he says "if a guy says it's definite, consider it probable. if a guy says it's probable consider it possible, and if a guy says it's possible, then forget it."
  
  and then he says take a reductionist approach, reduce the problem down to its smallest component parts, you'll know how it works, and then you'll know how to fix it when it goes wrong. methodical doubt and reductionism turn the process of change into a noodler's paradise.
  
  and pretty soon, the mission statement becomes "learn more and more, about less and less".
• like a pal at oxford who had his doctorate in the 17th century english poet milton's use of the comma.
  
  you laugh? he's now a head of department at a major american university. because he did what reductionism requires you to do to be a success: "make your specialist niche so *small*, there's only room in there for you." and in his case, your comma. and then and above all, explain yourself only in gobbly-gook. that way you are incomprehensible and therefore irreplaceable - you may know a few.
  
  this is one of the reasons why innovation is always a surprise because as reductionism is applied the body of the knowledge has ever become more specialist, ever more fragmented, ever more complex.
  
  so even as a specialist, you don't know what the guys at the next workbench are doing. scratching their heads over something so esoteric, you can not even spell it. and then letting it out there into the world, letting it loose, to interact with other products of other noodlers to create change that nobody expects, least of all the unsuspecting slob in the street.
  
  small wonder then that this process generates the holiday making depressed i mentioned at the start and the non-linear toilet-roll innovation sequences that make planning so difficult.
  
  so not surprisingly a lot of people find managing change difficult because the reductionist process has not prepared us above all to handle the ripples that spread out from innovation.
• let me give you one grossly oversimple, as is everything i do, example of the ripple effects of one very minor by-product of the printing press.
  
  in the early 17th century, right at the beginning new printed maps happened because now you can update them every time the sailors were back: "did you find anything new" and he says "yep. the island everybody says is north of the headland, is south" thanks you say "like that?" "yes". print.
  
  this makes it safer and safer to go out to the east looking for cargos in places like china and japan profits from tea and porcelain coming back from those places are so high like i think like creamed off 600% profit. so everybody wants in on the game. the problem is, cash.
  
  so a new thing is invented called a land register so you can formalize title against your land and then borrow money against it. so another new thing is invented called a mortgage company. most of the borrowing goes into another new thing set up to take the risk out of shipwreck called insurance, so now it's a little safer and lots of money is coming in thanks to another new thing called a limited joint stock company, so there's a stock market running with the help of another new thing, called a national bank. providing money through another new thing called a credit agency and the whole shabang running through another new thing called a business contract which finds its way into political arrangements in the contract between citizen and state embodied in another new thing called the constitution of the united states. the ultimate ripple effect, one might argue, of printed maps. or not.
  
  the reason ripple effects surprise people i think is because, if some institution or company procedure works very well, pretty soon you want to set it in concrete. so that nothing can prevent it from going on doing valuable work. which soon becomes, blocking any further change, because change will bring destabilization. which is why every people in any institution all the way from ancient egypt to the latest internet startup can very soon find themselves with one aim above all: perpetuating themselves and their institution or procedure.
  
  whether or not that institution or procedure has been outdated by events outside the institution. and institutional thinking can be a very powerful tool for ignoring the obvious.