
James Burke predicted the future in 1973. Now he does it again - timthorn
https://audioboo.fm/boos/1574606-james-burke-predicted-the-future-in-1973-now-he-does-it-again
======
droopyEyelids
Perhaps the most frustrating thing I've heard all day was when Burke said it
was OK to collect all the data because it'll be ignored when those who control
it are not interested in it.

"They don't care about ME! They only take notice of people when they're
connected to an group or event that is being monitored"

Well no shit. Thats like saying a tyrannical government only silences those
who oppose them. They don't care about you today, but as soon as you stick
your head up everything you've said and all your human connections are
immediately tagged. I find that _discomforting_! And what a poor showing from
the interviewer not to mention this.

~~~
codex
Having large amounts of collected data on citizens doesn't create a tyrannical
government. Nor is it required for a tyrannical government: the Nazis did
horrible things with very primitive technology. In the same vein, the U.S.
government has had seventy years to become tyrannical with much more advanced
technology, but it has not.

The key to foiling a tyrannical government is to prevent a tyrannical
government from being created in the first place though the political process
--checks and balances, rule of law, preservation of values, citizen
involvement, democratic and fair elections. It is not by employing a few lame
technological defenses or prohibiting specific practice X, Y, and Z. Those are
useless against any sufficiently motivated government, and, if anything, they
create a false sense of security. Government is not as it has, but as it does.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I agree that preventing tyranny is not primarily a technological problem. But
the abuse of power is not unrelated to how easy it is to abuse either.
Technology can make it more difficult to abuse power, more difficult to hide
any abuse and hence it makes any checks and balances more effective.

Also, I think we haven't seen all forms of tyranny yet. It is very difficult
for a democratically elected government not to enforce something popular they
are technically capable of enforcing. Even if there is rule of law and checks
and balances there is also a tendency toward ever more detailed control and
even prediction of individual behaviour.

I fear that the erosion of individual freedoms is possible even in perfectly
good democratic societies if there are no technological barriers to that
collective power grab. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" remains true even
if that power is legitimate.

And my last point is that breaking the law is necessary for the advancement of
the law and our societies. Law is not something that falls from the sky or
magically emerges from the moral conscience of wise men and women. It is often
the result of conflict. If you give too much power to the enforcers of current
law that conflict could become too unequal for society to advance and avoid
tyranny.

------
mdisraeli
Half-transcript, half-paraphrasing of the key quotes:

something is going to change within 40 years to change our lives as greatly as
the changes since we came from the caves to modern day.

The problem is that, as we try to solve privacy, feeding the world, etc we
spend months of time discussing these short term problems in board rooms and
parliament whilst labs around the world are working on nanotech

Richard Fynman said that there is "no physical law against creating a personal
nanofactory", like a 3d printer, to print anything from basically air, dirt
and some Acetylene gas (for added carbon).

Everyone will be able to make anything they need for practically nothing, and
this will destroy current economic systems and government.

When nanofactories appear, they will address the problem of scarcity. All our
years have been spent constructing organisations and systems to share
everything. There will be no need for any social institutions, as they all
exist to share things, to address scarsisty.

Why would we still live in massive cities, when we have no more factories, no
more need for economies of scale? People will be able to then live by
themselves on a mountain using solar panels for power and no need for
utilities.

Physical contact between people will happen, but be rarer and and 3d
holography will be used to allow this over great distance, to allow you to
talk to someone as if they are there, no screen, but if you try to touch them
you'll just go through them.

We are going to live through extraordinary times over the next twenty-thirty
years!

 _Edit - Further good bits I missed on the first pass:_

In response to "You seem as optimistic as you were in 1970":

* laughs * Well you know what they say about pessimists: They jump out of the window and they're no longer involved.

~~~
lucb1e
You forgot the last part:

> You seem as optimistic as you were in 1970

> * laughs * Well you know what they say about pessimists: They jump out of
> the window and they're no longer involved.

~~~
nickff
Survivorship bias!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)

------
27182818284
I grew up watching the Connections series on VHS from my local library.

More than a decade later Netflix recommended the DVD set to me based on my
preferences—It was like running into an old flame. Watching them as an adult,
they are even more amazing than I originally remember.

------
ballard
Burke's naivete about the externalities of an out-of-control surveillance
apparatus are appalling: ignoring the fact that innocent people do get swept
up for happening to match criteria of a secret scoring algorithm is just
burying one's head in the sand. Instead, he alludes to a simplistic
perspective that the world is a happy-clappy paradise where innocent people
have "nothing to hide," and by virtual of volume of communication, shouldn't
worry.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6304729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6304729)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4453659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4453659)

------
dmoo
Lots of gold on YouTube
[http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeConnection?feature=wat...](http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeConnection?feature=watch)

------
lifeisstillgood
The original on BBC :
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038zhb9](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038zhb9)
see from 44 mins on.

It is the simplest and clearest explanation of _why_ nanotechnology matters
and what's happening while we all play with Web 3.0

I can't agree it's all coming to pass as be says, nor in those timescales. But
only a few technologies need to pay off and we will see an end to scarcity.

~~~
sillysaurus2
We will never see an end to scarcity. It isn't merely a flaw that humans seek
power. A society without concentrations of power is a weak society, and weak
societies will always be subservient. Concentrations of power means
inequality, and there can be no inequality without scarcity. Therefore
scarcity is both unavoidable and valuable.

~~~
nickff
Scarcity of what, and over what time scale?

Human time will always be scarce, and it is valuable to each of us. We can
also never have enough knowledge, so that is scarce in some senses, though it
is a non-exclusionary good. Material goods fluctuate in scarcity, one can look
at metals, silks, porcelain, and many other examples of commodities and their
products which vary in price by region and era.

~~~
infectoid
Interesting that you mention that, I was thinking along similar lines as both
yours and the parent comment.

A true knowledge economy is what I would expect as the result of a "nano-
factory" revolution. How much you know and what you know could be as valuable
in direct terms as how much you earn is today in dollars.

I am sure I have heard this discussed in more detail before. Probably on HN.

Obviously we are several generations removed from such an event as the
cultural shift would be profound. I don't think any of us would like it, me
included. I always feel dumb so imagine I'd be part of the lower class in this
world.

------
raintrees
Yes! I still own all three sets of Connections (I, II, and III) as well as the
game.

He is _so_ good at taking ideas from many sources and presenting them, showing
how they might fit together or did fit together to create whole new ideas....

------
npalli
Fascinating views. The privacy angle is quite in line with what is already
happening. With the recent Snowden affair there has been a huge brouhaha about
privacy etc. but if you look at “private” information that financial and
retail companies already possess you will find that people actually don’t
care. As long as you get a 0.5% less on your mortgage or credit cards and some
10% discount on purchases, people are more than happy to have companies record
every transaction that you make.

I’m not sure on the nanotechnology future that he has laid out though.
Specifically, what is the source of energy to transform the air/water/dirt
stuff into goods and what is the rational for saying that starting with
water/dirt/O2 will be the cheapest route to getting whatever stuff we need.
Not convinced on that front.

~~~
dev1n
Yeah well retail companies won't just throw you in jail if you disagree with
their new "marketing" campaign. There's quite a difference between a company
you willingly give information to and a government trying to find out who are
possible dissidents and how those dissidents could unseat those in power.

~~~
czr80
I'm not sure - if private companies maintain these databases, wouldn't it be
easy for a hypothetical corrupt government to access them?

~~~
dev1n
This is absolutely true, however there are alternatives to companies that
track you. Go to JCPenny and they don't force you to use a credit card to
purchase some shoes. If you use cash, as opposed to a credit card, you won't
be added to their database. The difference between a retail store and the
government is whether you have the choice of having your information stored in
a database. So yes, a government could just up and say "all your base are
belong to us" to supplement any information they already have, but there is no
opt-out for a government that might already have information on you based on
phone calls and your Internet graph.

------
6ren
He may soon be incorrect about them not being interested in the content of
your calls, only "who you speak to". Before long, always-used speech
recognition will be plausible, if it isn't already. Yes, imperfect, but more
information than just who you're speaking to.

~~~
abecedarius
It is doable already with the NSA's Utah data center to run existing speech-
recognition programs on all U.S. phone conversations. (By my back-of-the-
envelope estimate.)

------
treelovinhippie
James Burke is brilliant. I uploaded the full Connections series last year
(they had already existed on another channel but were split into 10min vids):
[http://www.youtube.com/JamesBurkeConnection](http://www.youtube.com/JamesBurkeConnection)

------
grannyg00se
Some interesting bits:

Nanotechnology will bring real personal manufacturing at the _molecular_ level
giving people the ability to produce nearly anything for virtually nothing.
This will result in the destruction of current socioeconomic systems and
government as there will be no need for any type of scarcity monitoring or
control or labour.

People will trend away from cities, and live in smaller more natural close
knit communities. Realistic 3D holographic projections will further enable
this.

He attributed the nanotechnology factory idea to the great Richard Feynman.

------
6ren
I would expect nano-printers to have the same effect as essentially free
digital reproduction had on music, print and video. There'll be free stuff,
and stuff you'll pay for. Why do people pay? Partly to be part of a community;
partly because (hopefully) it's better if a whole lot of people worked on it
to serve your demographic. I don't think it will change the structure of
society, but will have pretty similar dynamics to present day internet.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Today's internet and the digitization of media have had a _humongous_ effect
on the economics of content production.

------
ch0wn
There's a very relevant episode of Freakonomics Radio that discusses obsession
with predictions and their actual value:
[http://www.wnyc.org/articles/freakonomics-
podcast/2013/aug/2...](http://www.wnyc.org/articles/freakonomics-
podcast/2013/aug/22/folly-prediction-rebroadcast/)

------
raffi
I've watched his series Connections about three times over. It's excellent and
well worth your time.

------
grumblepeet
For a good examination of what kind of society you might get when scarcity is
gone and humans can create stuff at the drop of a hat, read Michael Moorcock's
'The Dancers at the End of Time". He doesn't go into details of how they got
there or how it all works, but very interesting nonetheless. The main
characters seem to settle into some kind of permanent battle to outdo each
other with lavish parties and collect people from passing civilisations and
time travellers just so they can have someone to talk to.

------
drpgq
We are already moving to a more and more service base economy though. People
still pay in one way or another for movie or television content. Nanofactories
won't change that.

~~~
nickff
I would not classify movies and television content as services, but I agree
that non-material goods provide real value that nano-factories cannot simply
replicate. We will continue to require labor intensive services (, such as
plays, restaurants, etc.), and non-exclusionary goods, (i.e. films, designs,
concepts).

------
loceng
I think he's naive with some basic human behaviours and economics of it all.
What he says is 90% true though.

------
saejox
Replicator and holodeck?

------
andyl
For a man who specializes in foresight, Burke misses the boat on
eavesdropping.

