The White Heat of Technology and the Rapid Pace of the Changes it’s Causing is Driving Us All Nuts

Well over half a century ago one of my TV heroes was James Burke. I hung on his every word, especially during the Apollo missions which he presented for the BBC. I also loved him on the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World with its visions of a future where punch-card computers with all the processing power of a cheese grater would control our daily lives while we walked around with mobile phones the size of cricket bats and lived in houses maintained by Forbidden Planet-style robots. What I loved was Burke’s invigorating optimism.

Burke developed the idea of connections (in a programme series called Connections, no less), the notion that finding links between all sorts of unexpected concepts, processes, and materials, was at the heart of human development. Crucially, he identified that the increasing rate of making those connections in modern times was also driving an accelerated rate of change in all our lives. From that he predicted that the rate of change was going to lead remorselessly to a point when the rate of change would exceed our capacity to cope.

Burke was right. That time has arrived. And AI, with its ability to compute connections at an unprecedented level and way beyond the human mind’s capability, is already pushing change at a rate unimaginable only just a few years ago. The trouble is it’s still unimaginable because we literally cannot get our heads around what’s happening before our very eyes.

As a historian, I always try and focus on what makes our time different from others. Human beings do not change. But machines and the world around us do. I have in my house a clock made by John Tolson who was apprenticed in 1709 in London during the reign of Anne (1702–14). The clock, with a little maintenance, still works – a whirring collection of wheels and weights. The skills Tolson acquired served him for a lifetime and were good for generations of clockmakers after he died.

Today, that level of mechanization is still easily understood by human beings. Enthusiasts can still repair, and even build, such mechanical clocks just as others can rebuild 1970s motorcycles, carve wood, paint pictures, make pots and a host of other manual skills. It is entirely possible with training and experience to get one’s mind around such artefacts. Hence the 2008 completion of the brand-new 1940s Peppercorn Class A1 steam locomotive Tornado, to be joined by Prince of Wales in 2025. A bunch of enthusiasts armed with the skills, the tools, and the funding can build brand-new steam engines, just as others can build Spitfires.

But technological change means that today our houses are filled with, and our lives are ruled by, machines that are impossible for most of us even to try and understand, let alone maintain or build. You can’t fix a smartphone with a set of miniature screwdrivers (though once I did repair a computer processor with the clipped-off ends of a staple). Car maintenance is a hobby for those with old cars, not owners of current models. There are no comparable durable skills to John Tolson’s to be acquired in our digitized world. Knowledge and ability become swiftly obsolete in a relentless fury of updates.

It is also the case, as Carl Sagan pointed out, whom we were reminded of the other day in these pages by Hugh Willbourn, that we have ‘arranged things so that almost no-one understands science and technology’, despite totally depending on a world run by science. The brilliant Sagan was right, but his was a plea to set ignorance behind us. Unfortunately, we have reached the point where no amount of education is going to lead to a level of understanding that matches the pace of change that is hitting us right now.

Worse, governments are deliberately encouraging reckless change. Covid was utilized shamelessly as a pretext to digitize further our every existence and envelop us in dependence on computers, phones, and software. Environmental concerns are being used to impose change and obsolescence in every part of our lives from cars to the way we heat our homes. Regardless of what I, you, or anything else thinks about heat pumps and electric cars, we are being propelled along a travelator in which perfectly good machinery that has already been manufactured is being disposed of long before it needed to be in favour of rushing out new machines, whose carbon footprint is conveniently ignored as well as the running costs.

And if you imagined that changing to your new electric car or heat pump was going to leave you in peace for a while, forget it. Before you know it, you’ll be told both are obsolete and you need to change to newer, better, more efficient, greener replacements. All this is being done coercively through legislation, financial incentives or punishments, and gaslighting. If you can be fined for using certain vehicles in Ulez fiefdoms, then how long before you’re fined for still having an oil boiler to heat your house?

The scientific principle of hypothesizing and testing every hypothesis to destruction before it can be accepted is easy enough to understand. But it’s not intuitive to the normal human brain; we have to try hard to hold on to that way of thinking. Even scientists instinctively resort easily to preferring what they believe or would like to believe unless they can keep a grip on themselves. They are, after all, only human and they are also prey to normal human emotions like the desire to be prominent in their fields, to attract funding, to be successful, and feel worthwhile, as well as jealousy and a host of other vulnerabilities.

Belief always steps in at the point understanding gives out. For a while, from the 16th Century on, it was possible for most people to accumulate a level of scientific understanding and gradually accept the changes going round them while mastering the necessary skills to participate in that brave new world. The rewards were changes that yielded huge medical advances, the management of sewage, warmer homes, electricity and all its glories, mechanization, aviation, and a host of other innovations that have made it unthinkable we could go into reverse.

But we are no longer able in the same way to get our heads round what is driving human-caused change and the steady loss of control over our own lives. No wonder panic and the instinctive medievalism of the human mindset is setting in. I don’t think I can be alone in being frustrated by the endless updates to the electronic equipment all around us, the ceaseless changes to how we are supposed to bank, park our cars (so long we are allowed to own one), interact with the government, or any other organization. All of it is supposed to be for the better but the overwhelming effect is to make things worse, more difficult, more frustrating, and dispiriting.

This is all being compounded by an accelerating daily narrative of catastrophic change in the environment, causing us to lose sight of the fact that our planet changes all the time The last few weeks have been extraordinary with a new apocalyptic vision almost every day. They have included warming seas and now that there will have to be Ulezs for buildings, coming off the back of claims of ‘global boiling’ (made by people apparently unaware of the boiling point of water). Ludicrous waves of hyperbole that serve only to provoke fear make it impossible for any normal person to come to a balanced and informed understanding.

Unfortunately, the panic affects scientists as well. Belief also sets in as much among scientists as anyone else. There are now so many scientists, so many scientific hypotheses, so many research institutions, so many papers, concepts, claims, counter claims, critiques, and analyses – as well as the extraordinary rate of change and to say nothing of the epidemic of pseudo-science – that it’s impossible for anyone within professional science to understand or read even a small part of what they are dealing with, let alone the rest of us.

The result is that we ordinary mortals are presented with divergent scientific opinions that we cannot evaluate, each one of which we are exhorted by its proponents to accept as a certainty.

But since science is so often presented as ‘The Science’, how on earth is the average person ever going to be in a position to distinguish pseudo-science from real science?

Here’s one BBC headline from July 22nd 2023: ‘Climate records tumble, leaving Earth in uncharted territory – scientists.’ Read a bit further down the story and you get to ‘some scientists… say’. Two days earlier the BBC said: “A leading British climate scientist has told the BBC he believes [my emphasis] the target to limit global warming to 1.5C will be missed.”

Believes? Believing isn’t science, whether well-informed or not.

In this new world of a cavalcade of change, scientific opinions have entered a world of recreational competitive apocalypticism. Too many spend their time telling us what to be terrified of rather than doing what real scientists do, which is to solve problems.

What are we supposed to make of modelling? This mathematical crystal-ball gazing is a latter-day version of staring into the entrails of a sacrificial victim, a fantasy of knowing the future founded on the cult of numbers. It is another agent of driving change because it predicts futures we are then told to fall over backwards to avoid.

Most people cannot follow the maths involved but it doesn’t take a lot to discover that even modelling’s proponents don’t fully understand the maths either. Even worse, modellers come up with different models and then argue among themselves, dismissing each other’s methodology. How on earth can the rest of us decide what to believe and understand? All of them pretend to be able to predict the future. Any deviation from the mean is jumped on as an aberration and a sign of the impending end of the world. But the future has an unfortunate habit of going its own way, not the route that a gang of boffins decided it was going to, based only on the parameters they have happened to include in their models.

Then of course, the more apocalyptic the modelling prediction is, the more likely it is to be picked up by the credulous idiots in the press, gaining attention for the scientists involved and sales for the journalists. This toxic partnership, which Carl Sagan also scathingly identified as “the uninformed cooperation (and often the cynical connivance)” of the media, whips up the accelerating rate of change into a panic-fest of misinformation and confusion.

What we are therefore seeing is a backlash with an increasing reversion to belief, cult, and factionalism. It’s happening everywhere. Organized religion has been so debased by war, oppression, sex abuse and a host of other ills that new cults have emerged instead that worship causes, not gods.

All around us we can see these cults masquerading as informed and rational interest groups. I don’t need to name them. You know who they are. Like the proponents of medieval cults their beliefs are driven by a righteous and intolerant zeal that leads them instinctively to seek to crush their critics and opponents, some of whom are just as religious in their zealotry and opposition. A new Orwellian world has been unleashed. Free speech means silence. Inclusivity means exclusivity. Supposedly peaceful, the latent (and sometimes open) aggression and intolerance in the behaviour of many of these movements is clear to see.

Their actions are borne partly out of a desperate desire to cling on to some level of control in an age when control is the last thing we are in possession of. Terrified by the change they see all around them, some of them want to change everything back and hurl us into a revived Middle Ages.

Panic and anxiety are among the most unhelpful and destructive of all human behaviour, but they are the bedrock of totalitarianism. Unrestrained change is an unmatched way to make us all more controllable but it’s a moot point whether it’s being deliberately imposed on us or is something we have lost control of. It’s no wonder that panic and anxiety are integral features of dementia among some elderly people. Whatever problems we face as a society, driving us into panic and anxiety will do nothing to solve any of them properly. Panicking is likely to lead us into a world of unintended consequences.

We need a middle way – change can be stimulating, exhilarating, and the agent behind exciting improvements to all our lives, and human beings are superb at dealing with change. And perhaps I’m being over concerned. The most likely eventuality is that some dramatic new event or wholly unexpected change in circumstances, or perhaps just a change in the wind, will cause the madness to pass.

I need only end with the wisdom of Charles Mackay:

Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)