Philip Morrison and Lester Thurow—Symposium on Forecasting the Future Across Industries

PRESENTER: It's, I think, exceedingly fitting that as we move into the home stretch of our program, rather than looking backwards, we look forward. The basic notion as we look at the group of senior executives that's gathered here today, is that most of us will hopefully be at the very pinnacle of our responsibility and authority at roughly the turn of the century. Since we very much believe that education is not a process that ends with graduation, but one that really should and must continue through one's career, the question that we're really going to be addressing today and for the next several days is where's the world going between now and say the year 2000? Where is management going between now and the year 2000? And what do we as managers need to do to make ourselves as effective as possible in what's bound to be a changing context?

I think it might be useful to think of a simple model perhaps of where we are. If we argue that right now we're here. This is the year 2000. And out here there's some sort of environment. And if we can understand what that environment looks like, what the world's going to be like, we can begin to deal with the question of what is it going to take to be as effective as we could be out in that environment?

Our plan for this process, as you know, extends over several days. Step one, which is really this morning, is to look at that world out there. To really ask where is that they were going, what is that we're going to look like? And then based on that picture, for us, using what we've learned in these eight weeks plus what we've learned in our entire careers, to really focus on the question of what our manager's going to have to do to make that work?

We're very fortunate, this morning, to have with us two of the most distinguished people possible to help us with that task, our Dean, Lester Thurow, and they extraordinarily renowned physicist Phillip Morrison. Phillip is going to be the first to speak. I know you've all had a chance to look at his biography, as have I, so I'm not going to go back over it. It's obviously a very distinguished one. I guess, there's really one thing I'd like to emphasize, however, one thing I'd like to add to it.

As I went through the biography, which is obviously replete with important publications, major appearances, and extraordinary awards, and honorary degrees, I think, the thing that struck me most is the fact that Phillip is an institute professor at MIT. And, I think, it's important to know that within MIT, there's really no honor that is greater than that. The other thing about Phillip Morrison is, I think, in addition to being an important scholar, he's a very, very effective communicator. As a symbol of this, and Phillip doesn't know I'm going to do this, but Phillip, in fact, has made a very major contribution to marketing. There's a company out there that manufactures this particular device, and I'm not sure you gonna all be able to see it, but it really has a pretty remarkable--

[LAUGHTER]

[TOY FLIPS]

--characteristics and--

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--I think, one more maybe.

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For reasons that Phillip will explain to you, not I, this has been, in fact, a very major part of his recent work. Phillip.

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MORRISON: By the way, where is that made?

[LAUGHTER]

PRESENTER: Hong Kong, I suspect.

[LAUGHTER]

MORRISON: I understand that May Day is deferred till tomorrow. Perhaps the Red Hats will not reappear until then.

[LAUGHTER]

MORRISON: My task is really an onerous one. I have always to begin by quoting the hero of all physicists, Niels Bohr, who was a man that was no hand at the epigram, but everything he said was so full of meaning that it-- most prosaic statements become epigrams. He said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future."

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MORRISON: And it's in that vein that I'm supposed to talk for a while. And I thought I would-- what I'm about to do is just give some feeling for what I think and, really, why I think it. Concerning the technical and scientific, particularly the scientific a lesser degree than the technological environment, that will surround the industrial world in the next decade or so. That's not the most impossible thing to do because I've, with many other bold profits talked about it a century in the future, and that's very safe. You'll never be contradicted, confronted with the test of that, so it's all right.

But even 10 or 15 years is very difficult. I will mention one or two times earlier forecast of the same kind, so to be discussed. But I thought that just to come boldly out and do this affair, enumerating a number of changes, which most you will think are plausible, I thought it'd be fairer to try to put the whole thing into context, the context of how it is if this is done.

Of course, it is done, whatever one does is done essentially by continuity. Allowing for the existence of discontinuity as well, which one has to jumps conceivable, but are not that easy to predict. But we know nowadays, nonlinear systems, which history is the most extraordinary one, allows itself all sorts of creative leaps, as well as, study continuous evolution. Nothing is clearer in the lessons of physics or biology than that. Now being mathematicized to great public acclaim, but, in fact, not so new as it's cracked up to be.

So what I want to talk a little bit about is, what is the basis for what I think is coming. And of course, the accident and whether it comes the next 10 or 15 years or not is a little harder to be sure. But what I think I can say very reliably is what kind of stance, what kind of machine is running here. And then how its wheels turn is something a little bit harder to guess. We don't know the full design of this device.

What I'm prepared to say is-- and to defend, rather firmly, is that we have come more or less to an end, worthwhile looking at it, of a century of extremely powerful, unprecedentedly powerful, natural science, particularly those sciences that are around and derived from physics. Modern physics began, physicists are never very good dates, and so it can be said to have begun in 1896, not the 20th century. 20th century physics began in 1896, four years earlier.

And that's at the discovery a the x-ray, Roentgen's famous discovery of the x-ray, which is a prodigious discovery, not so much for its content, which in a way could have been and should have been predicted, but for its impact. It turned out that within a month of Roentgen's original publication, absolutely unexpected result, it had been duplicated, multiplicated, replicated, all over the world-- in Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado, in Dartmouth, in Japan, in Siberia, you name it. Wherever there was some kind enterprising department of physics in a college, those people had the equipment which would demonstrate what Roentgen found that wonderful evening in his lab when he was preparing to look into these things.

And that's remarkable. It was latent everywhere. And a latent discovery is one of the hardest kinds to predict because you say, if something really new is going to be found out of all this stuff, why hasn't it happened yet? And, of course, the answer is, it will happen soon. But you never know that and running the movie backwards is much easier.

Exactly the same thing happened the second time with even more fateful consequences, not for physics but for the world as a whole, in 19-- December 1938 Hahn and Strassmann published the remarkable fact that when you bombarded uranium with neutrons, you produced barium. And they, among the most skilled of radio chemists in the world, certified that it was barium that it produced and not the neighboring element, a transuranic or something like radium which simulates barium quite a lot, but is not the same thing.

That very discrimination had escaped Fermi five years earlier. The result that they published in an obscure way, which is not the way a physicist would do it, was picked up by Frisch and Meitner two weeks, three weeks later. And in January 1939, the world on the brink of war, that discovery, too, the discovery of fission, was repeated all over the world. The apparatus was present. The materials were present. The ideas are present. All you had to do was add this-- you had failed to notice, it goes, you had failed to notice this latent result.

And those, of course, are the hardest things to predict. And they are naturally becoming relatively less frequent. That's important because there are more conscious people trying hard to do those things with everything that they have. But that does not mean it will not happen. They will happen. Therefore, that's the sort of thing we can not really disclose. What is latent in what we're doing today that we don't know in the whole of the domain of science?

But I want to talk about, now, the side of continuity. And I think I can fairly say that-- I'm going to have three or four points of this general kind. I'll try to do it rather quickly. The first is, we had 100 years, maybe 110, to people like Boltzmann and Gibbs and the later Maxwell, who understood, for the first clear time in physics though it was well known in gambling and actuarial insurance and so on, that probability, like causality, played an essential role in the prediction and understanding of complicated, interesting, physical systems.

I don't want to oppose them. I think that the philosophers, by now, are almost talked out of the view that between causality and chance there is a great gulf. And that passing from one to the other is a complete change in the view the world. I don't think that's true. I think they interpenetrate. We can't understand the world without both of them. And this realization was what came to the physicists slowly, slowly from 1880, maybe, until 1900 or so, and then sealed in blood by quantum mechanics in 1925. And I think we'll never go back on that.

The present concern, which has the rubric chaos, is only a replay of this same game in a little unexpected quarter where, indeed, [INAUDIBLE] had pointed to it 50 or 75 years ago, but it was too hard to do without computers. With computers you can explore the whole thing.

So I claim that for-- well, yes. And I right? Let me illuminate the analytical changes that occur. First, that we understand that probability and causality are related. There are causal chains and they have probabilistic interference and consequences as well. There are atoms. And atoms make up all the matter of the world. Indeed, if I extend the idea of atoms a little bit, also radiation. We call them quanta or photons, but it's atoms of radiation from the point of view of general thinking.

And the most striking development, which only goes back to the eve of the Second World War, acquired its strength only after the Second World War, is that language, description, all of the superstructure of knowledge is also to be analyzed in the atomic sense and turned into a category which I may call, broadly, information. And the understanding of information, and noise, and signal, and all those things with it, you see that the metaphors come already from electrical engineering, which is where it arose.

But now, of course, it dominates understanding in biology. The whole world of the computer is based on it. The entire feedback system we inherit from the eve of World War II has come from electrical engineering to be a very wide concept throughout all thoughts. And I think that's the third analytic change that we have to have.

And on the basis of this analytic change, I feel that we have moved through testing and elaborating these methods very far. Until now we are prepared, not quite ready, but prepared for the systematic synthesis of all this analytic understanding, in a variety of ways. And I will talk about them quickly.

First of all I think, based on this, we have now, and will gain steadily, but only incrementally, a control of material. Control of the material world is very great, the best examples of which are now shown by the powerful actions of polymer chemistry, manufacturing substance more or less the design. Rather limited range of substances, but still very, very important ones.

But the other side of my coin is the recent extraordinary discovery of the high temperature superconductor, which I suspect will be for a long time, the last really chance-y discovery of a fundamental physical change in materials, which we really did not anticipate.

I think over the last few weeks, we've been given very good arguments to show that we do even to understand the high temperature, so that we have a working theory of it. And the working theory suggests very strongly that we will go to room temperature and beyond, and the superconductivity will really be a much more common phenomenon. I hasten to say-- and I hope I'm right, I don't know that I'm right in this-- but I do not believe that it will lead to a revolutionary change in engineering practice as many prints.

Now, I'll tell you, I think this is self-serving, and to some degree, naive. I think it will be important, but it'll be important incrementally. It is a powerful discovery for the power systems, for electric motor design, for computer and instrumentation, miniaturization and reliability.

But if you look everywhere, it deals, so to speak, with losses in frictions, and losses in frictions are well known in engineering and technology. They're always present. Getting rid of them makes a difference, yes, it's economically desirable. But of course, it won't take care of all of it. And what you're talking about, 20%. That's-- I mean otherwise, you wouldn't do processes that are more loss-y than 20% in general.

And this is the general idea. So I don't believe it's a revolutionary thing. That doesn't mean to say, will here and there make a great change? It will. But broadly, it is not like introduction of electric power, which transformed the entire world. It's an improvement in electric power. Which will not transform, though it will certainly modified and affect the world everywhere

However, I think that we can see that the quantum control of materials will spread widely. And step by step we'll more objects like this, we'll have super fluids on a high temperature scale. We'll have other quantum phenomena that happen in controlled materials, of which of course the earliest one is the transistor, in a way. And that will be extended. But again, this is not something that will spread to everyday life. It'll be embodied in the technology of the future in 10 or 20 years, but in a way which will be recognizably as incremental improvement of what we have. Just as chemical synthesis is.

In connection with this also, the rational analysis of material has already led to the development of structure among the most important sides of material science, by understanding the nature of failure. The analysis of the nature or failure, giving rise to the behavior of composite materials. This, I think, is quite important now, because it touches not so much the engineering world-- which it will touch, technology-- but it touches the environmental supply of raw materials. Because it is clear to me-- I'm not saying-- it'd be premature to say it is over-- the age of iron is not over, but its end in sight.

Silicon, the glasses in general, diamond in the future, are going to be structural materials. Composites complexly designed, intricately built and designed to meet each purpose are going gradually to replace the minerals which we supply. In spite of the strange concomitant truth is, that the same analysis, which has a second-- [INAUDIBLE] I'll come to it-- comes to my second point, that physics and chemistry, electrical engineering, the related, these fundamental sciences have given rise to a second change.

Not only do we have an analysis, which gives rise as what we've-- I said we now understand the world pretty well in these domains. But a second thing has happened which takes us to the edge of the problem of natural resources, and indeed to sciences far beyond resources. And that is what I like to call the beginning-- we don't have it yet. But we have a sophisticated view which will gradually lead to something like mastery, what I'd like to call perception.

Perception, not only human perception, but also perception of the scientists and the technology. The instrumentation and the detection of what's going on out there, whether out there be another planet, or a tested bar of glass that you're trying to see how cracks propagate in it.

In every case it's the instrumentation, and the sophisticated way of collecting and handling data, because we have mastered the way of doing interfaces with all sorts of physical parameters. We have a very powerful instrumentation world. It is on this basis that the field sciences, meteorology, geology, oceanography, astronomy, ecology I suppose, to name a few, are now in phases of active understanding, exploitation.

Mainly because physics, which was not particularly valuable in understanding these matters. Its analysis is somewhat remote. But physics and the concomitants of physics have given rise to instrumentation, enables you to measure everything very well, very quickly, in all kinds of domains of parameter space that you've never investigated before. And as you know, you can buy these wonderful sensors for most things.

This perceptual improvement science was, I think, the prerequisite for the success of the field sciences. Up till now, it was all pioneering work. We still can't proceed very well the depths of the Earth. We can do the first few thousand feet pretty well. I think this as a barrier to us. We're probably not easy to cross. And of course it's also rather remote from us. Because to gain it is very difficult. That diamonds come up 100 miles down in the pipes is a remarkable and dramatic event. We haven't seen one yet.

Some one will happen one day. They occur every million years or two. They scatter over the whole world. They are independent geological time. There are huge coal volcanoes coming up, and they make the diamonds in the world, until we learned how to make diamonds. And now, of course, not the same problem.

And as I said, I think it's fair to say that diamond and diamond-like materials will gradually take their rather interesting place in the commodity, in the commodity market, in the engineering materials in which we make our world. It's going to happen quite soon. The beginning of it is now. So I can say what happened in ten years' time. Some of it.

Now the most important of all the perceptual gains is the-- oh, I meant to say that this-- because we have a powerful [INAUDIBLE], because you understand, for example, the teleconnections of meteorology, we get an understanding of them. We know that the monsoon and its success or failure which waters the entire South Asian subcontinent, and is the staff of life for a billion persons at least, is intimately connected to events on the coast of Peru and Chile.

There's no question about this any longer. The correlation was dimly seen 50 years ago by perceptive meteorologists, and is now beginning to be the domain of analysis. And pretty soon we'll be able to make forecasts of those things, I think. It's very likely we can.

And that's the beginning of teleconnections. And I strongly suspect that we'll gradually have a more mature climatology than the present one, which is confronted with nothing but skepticism and uncertainty. That's got to improve. We don't know how to do that yet, but I think that's one of the big things that we'll have, on the basis of this. Now of course, one is an optimist, maybe it'll take more than 10 years. But it's coming.

The other important side-- of course what comes, there's the ability to predict the occurrence of minerals, already being happen. Already happening. However, it happens at a time when the minerals that you would so wonderfully predict, like diamonds and copper, are going to be less and less economic value, in my view. And so while you will be able to predict the presence of copper mines, and find that South Africa's not the only place endowed with huge numbers of diamond pipes.

You won't care so much because anyhow, the glass, the fiberglass cables, and the synthesized diamond layers will probably be more useful than the natural commodity. Though they won't drive it off, out of existence, as nothing ever goes away. So that's a curious anomaly that is there.

Now I tried to say it, I come to it, that the most important perceptual consequence, I think, of a contemporary understanding of atoms, which is based on chemistry and physics, and of the-- what I said, probability, causality, atoms, and information-- taking these together and applying them since the double helix to these substances and processes of living forms has made a huge development in scientific thought, and in everyday life, which will grow the biology of information.

Primarily based on microbiology, which I hasten to say, and has given an enormous change, I think, in view of the world-- which I want to put forward to it-- I think you probably would recognize but probably, as I did, underestimate. And that is what we recognize now, I think it's quite clear, is that the wonders of life really cut into. There is the development from a cell to a multicellular organism, which we ourselves are, which is responsible for the entire complexity associated with life as we think of it.

The museums show us the earliest fossils. And between earliest fossils and the rainforest of today, and the ecologist tramping across it, there's a big judgment, a big gain, a big improvement in complexity. We talk about that all the time, and the museums are full of it, which we call evolution. But that's only the last 15%. The 85% was buried in biochemistry. But all the biochemical tricks are held by the microbiology. The cells do everything. Except this wonderful trick of finding out to cooperate and make multicellular creatures, which is still beyond us. We will not solve the problem of development in the next 10 or 20 years.

But we will really, and we have made, great progress in the biochemistry of life, and some reconnaissance into how that biochemistry effects the developed organism, which gives rise to the success and failure of medical pharmacology and so on, where we have all kinds of drugs, and all kinds of effects, and all kinds of substances, good and bad, and all sorts of new information carrying, and metabolic systems, subsystems, which constantly fill the news and win the Nobel prizes, but still come primarily as surprises out of the domain of, you find some substance you can isolate that does something else in another test cell, and that's the way it goes. There's no-- we don't have a true picture of development in all its stages.

I think it's very important because it makes clear to us that the evolutionary process is not related to size, necessarily. It's not related to this thing, that the history of Earth, history of life begins about three or four billion years ago with very modest organisms indeed, which transcended the geological world. Introducing the chemical modifications made in life, and the self reproducing system, in ways not yet understood, which still dominate. As I say, what we understand about the developing the human body or all higher forms, but we'll not always do so. But that break will not come next 10 or 20 years. That's the serious battle for the future.

Of course in practical events, the molecular model of human behavior does-- of human physiology-- does give rise to many novelties. Practical surgery gives rise to many novelties. We see much control being taken on all sides. But it is still-- as I recognize, it just looks at what happens in the papers year after year-- is very much a matter of chance and exaggeration. We don't really have a systematic growth, as I think we have, say, in solid state physics or something like that. We're on the edge of it.

And I should mention particularly, because it is so much on everyone's mind, the return of infectious disease, of epidemiology, as a major public concern, which I think will continue because we don't yet have the skills to beat back the ingenious genetic apparatus of viruses, of which course, HIV is the one-- the human immunovirus is the one that takes all the news today.

But I recommend to you that you consider the still urgent fact that we do not know why 1% of all influenza virus cases in 1918 and '19 led to a fatal primary viral pneumonia, that we cannot cure the primary viral pneumonia. We cannot yet immunize against the effects of influenza, new strains. We don't know where they come from. We are puzzled before this disease, which has been reasonably benign for 60 years, but may not always be.

We have the arsenal of molecular biology to attack it, and a lot of information, but short of solutions. This of course goes as well to the other important biological-- the other, besides health, the most important biological concern of science and of technology, and that is, of course, the crops. Someday indeed we will not do crops as we do today. Someday indeed we will have a much better understanding of biological processes which we gain our food. Someday indeed that will be an industrialized structure.

But that day is not here. And I don't think you will even live to see it. Oh yes, occasionally here and there. But we're going to take energy from the sun in green leaves to make proteins and cellulose, as we've done for a long-- and starches-- that we've done for a very long, long time. For a long time to come, 100 years or 200 years. But I don't think it will always be true. We have not come to the end of the agricultural revolution, which begin not with 1948 or 1955, but began at 6000 BC. That still has a little while to work.

Influences improvements, yes indeed, but not the whole thing. The other perceptual change, which I think I have to talk about is, the gloomy subject, but very important in the world economically, and in the thinking, very reasonable person, is the problem of warfare. And I have to say that two things of course, the understanding of the atom, which gave rise to the inordinate outpouring of energy which we associate with nuclear weapons is now augmented by the development of perception, which I think is come because it's most extreme and most costly, the battlefield has now become a place where perception is all, and where self guiding devices are gradually penetrating more and more, so that which can be seen can, with high probability, be destroyed. And this is going I think, for the first time in a long while, to favor the defense. That is, to oppose the distant interdiction which is the projection of power, which is so characteristic of the great powers, especially the United States.

It's getting harder. And if you don't think it is, consider the situation in the Persian Gulf. Consider the situation in Afghanistan, just to be evenhanded, and you'll see what's happening to the great powers, limited both by the social perception of their citizens who don't want to fight so much, but also by the fact that the opposition, with a few tens of thousands of dollars, could do in some mighty million dollar equipment that we're very proud of, that you've manufactured to great success in oversea [INAUDIBLE], in El Segundo, and it's not going to last too long out there.

That's another story of perception, this generalized improvement of the sensory, which has made physics what it is today. And physics is given, now, to every other scientific activity, and now the technical ones.

And the third element I want to talk about, which is a novel quality of the new sciences, which is going to continue it in large, is more important probably for the truly important matter science, our understanding of the world, our views and metaphors tell us what we are, our place in the scheme of things, than it is for direct improvement of economics, or-- but still quite important. And that is the understanding, the physicists, the astronomers, the geologists especially-- natural science has grown-- of the great importance of history. How contingent are the things we see around us? Rather than how fixed and immutable and just the way things are.

The best example I can give, I think, to make a long story, which has many ramifications, a short one, is to consider the solar system. Because I grew up through this. I can tell you as a thoughtful physicist, I believe I grew up with this, and I found my views completely erroneous, and completely transformed in the course of a single career. And I'm not the only one. When I was a graduate student I studied, almost risibly, the careful dynamics of the 19th century heroes of dynamics, who showed us elegant ways of making little calculations, not very exciting, in classical physics, Newtonian mechanics.

And their real purpose was to, essentially, to improve the almanac. To make possible predictions of the motions of the planets of the solar system 100 years in the future, accurate to ten seconds, which was more or less what we could do. The eclipse, you don't expect it, doesn't overwhelm you anymore. And of course that was the-- even the 19th century that was the great metaphor for scientific causal prediction, the mechanical right of science. You could predict the eclipse, predict the unseen planet Neptune could be found from Newton. And the Enlightenment seemed fully fulfilled in this mechanistic way.

And it was a great try, not denying that. And we studied very hard. The Poisson Brackets, and the full paraphernalia that enabled that improvement. It depends, in principle, upon Newton's laws. Nothing new about that. That's why it comes to the enlightenment. But it much improved their practical applicability, by developing mathematical techniques for handling many body systems of the kind of the solar system.

That means, what is the solar system? Well you all know what it is. It's an awfully regular thing. All the plants go the same way. If there's one exception among the 60 satellites, it's written down, everybody memorizes it school, which it is. All the planets lie in a disk. Well if one is tilted by five degrees you're quite worried. And this is the way it goes. They all spin, with one exception, again, more or less perpendicular to that disk.

And everything is so regular. And it's this great architecture of the world, right? And so as a student, I thought it was a very dull subject. I did not want to spend my time learning how to improve the ninth decimal place, by really quite elaborate calculation. Especially, I must admit, because [INAUDIBLE] the calculation. I did that for a whole summer. It was a really tedious activity with a millionaire made in Zurich in 1912, a wonderful machine which [INAUDIBLE] the streetcar controllers handle. It really did, and a hand crank. I could have a motor, but that was the-- my boss use the motorized millionaire.

It didn't make much difference. You still have clank, clank, clank, clank. It just saved your arm, but it didn't improve your patience. Well we learned that that's not intrinsic the laws of gravity, the nature of Newtonian mechanics at all. That's a consequence of history. The planets have worn each other smooth. They've won the orbits smooth. That's why we're all in a disk. That's why we all go the same way.

Once upon a time was a highly chaotic mess. And what evolved is what is stationary. And all the rest was thrown away or lumped together to make the planets. There's no doubt about that now. The signs of it are clear. We have a few exceptions like the comets, which still don't share that. But that's not the topic of astronomy, it's a very interesting subject, because a metaphor for all our change in the philosophical point of view.

We know now that what we see around us in the world is not only the result of the irrefutable laws of physics, but also the contingent result of boundary conditions. And we gradually understand, we can understand those boundary conditions as being connected to the conditions of the world. And so we gradually have a historical element in physics, it's especially strong in cosmology today. And the best discovery at MIT, in physics anyhow, was that of inflation, the universe, which is essentially a way of saying that long, long ago, when matter was quite different, from the way it is now, there was a thing called repulsive gravity.

Gravity, you know, is attractive. But in those days it was the other kind dominated. And it blew world apart, the universe apart, and gave rise to the expansion and the uniformities in which we now see, and we begin to understand how this happened and why it was inevitable, and one of the great issues that connect that with every day particle physics, we haven't quite done that yet, and it will not happen in the next 10 years either, but it is on the agenda. And more and more interest will come from that. And the philosophical, lagging philosophical view that we all have to have will rise out of that.

And I think for me, that was quite clear that Newtonian mechanics, like the motion of continents, like the bombardment of the earth with asteroids, which is the pre-- which was the sterilization act that fixed the time of the origin of life, because you couldn't have life when nothing on the surface was not churned up every million years, turned up and flung into the air, if not vaporized. That's what was happening in early times on the Earth. And we see the signs on the moon which froze as geologists nothing but craters. The Earth was nothing but craters, either.

But that's a long time ago. And when that rain subsided, then the earth began to have the cycles, which we now think of these inexorable cycles which give the routine, the establishment of the history of the Earth, but are contingent upon the presence of the solar system, which was long worn out, and gave up flinging things at all parts. That the sort of the story.

So this is some view of what I think has happened and is happening. And I should go a little bit further and try to make some statements about what I think is going to be the case in the next 10 or 15 years on the more economic side. Well, I am a reluctant incrementalist. Having read a good deal, especially this year, I tried very hard to-- some lectures I had to give at Cornell-- I tried very hard to read the literature on agricultural economics and agriculture, the Green Revolution and the anti Green Revolution, and all these things. And I've come broadly the conclusion that incremental change in agriculture will continue, probably increase, but we will not see any substantial worldwide change in the situation. People remain hungry until we can grow better crops. They'll grow better crops the way they grow them now, only better. With more inputs, with more attention, with more genetics, with more plant breeding. But nothing different, in principle, from what the prudent farmer has been doing ever since the 17th century and the really excellent parts of the world, the garden spots, ever since 3,000 BC. And it's going to the same thing.

Of course, with the inputs of modern chemistry, modern biotechnology, but it won't look different. Health, too, has the same phenomenon. We have, of course, wonders. I point it out to molecular biologists, and the micro surgeon can do wonderful things. The development of all sorts of hormone and quasi-hormone like systems makes possible the attack on all kinds of human difficulties.

But I think everybody knows that the end of medicine is the reduction of all human ailments to iatrogenic disease. That is, when medicine is perfectly powerful, it will still make mistakes. And mistakes will be the cause of your troubles. So the statistics will tell you, there's nothing to be said about that. There's no question, that that's the case, in my view, is an asymptotic affair. Were far from that now.

But right now it is pretty clear to me that the marginal dollar in public health does a great deal better for the population than the marginal dollar in the best preventive surgery. But it has different purposes and different ends, and we don't like to change our lifestyles quickly, and so that's why we tolerate the way we get along with automobile accidents, and smoking and so on, and traumas and drugs and everything else that dominate the newspapers.

And when we look back upon as a sort of way we look back at the 19th century problems of public health, where there was no sunshine, and no light and no air and no clean clothes, which have done much more than, I believe, all the medicine and all the bacteriology in the world to make a difference in the vital statistics. Which is probably where the answers is to be read, I think what you would call the bottom line, and I think that's the situation.

Well we will improve that too, but it's a very complicated system, which I'm not prepared to unravel. Now, in engineering, and engineering machinery, it's clear, everyone see what's happening, it's happening, it going to happen even more. What we are going to have is, of course, embedded intelligence in machines. We're gradually transferring more and more subtle skills from craftsmanship, artisanship, judgment, to embodiment by analysis, and then by synthesis of the device that can do it, by the perception of the device that feels environment. Every machine, every operation is going to get better and better, and incrementally improve.

But I don't-- I'm not witty enough to see any grand change in this that'll say this is the revolution. It's not so. We saw with the programmable electronic calculator in 1945, we saw the wave of the future, in the sense of the idea. And with the transistor we saw something better could be done about it. But the real change, I think it was an amazing change, which goes well beyond the domain of physical chemistry into what I would call the most elementary, but wonderful kind of engineering, was simply a modification of packaging.

Done by-- well actually, foreseen by an English electronics expert called Dummer, the man who invented the radar position indicator during World War II. The same man came to Washington in the 1950s and said he foresees the time. This is the time when transistors-- this is the time when the bureau of standards and the IBM company we're busy making cord wood circuits by machines it's stamped out, you know, and put resistors on the circuits. And you got cards pretty fast, 42 resistors and nine condensers and some things, and this little circuit was wonderfully put into a shell.

You could put it along the shelf and have a computer that only filled up a room like this. And it was transistor [INAUDIBLE], it was quite nice. And was made automatically, and it was system whatever it was, I think 36o-- thank you-- but it was a failure of imagination. And of course what happened was, the noise, and a few others discovered from Dummers idea, I think.

You could make one transistor that would be subdivided. One little piece of silicon. And now of course this has gone to the point where it's now the equivalent of a million or eventually 10 million gates in that little thing, and we have the chips, and then the world of the future will not go back on that. They'll get better. They'll have quantum mechanical effects that will do very well. But it's the same thing.

And it's a packaging change. It's not really a change in understanding. Now to carry it out required profound understanding of a thousand subtle details, having to do with etching and lithography and dopants and epitaxial deposition, a panoply. So again, it's the same kind of thing. Perception and analytic control of the solid state world, the atomic world, understanding statistics, and that's the power of what we have today. And power will not go away. It will spread, of course, to all countries in all domains. But is not a fast thing.

Now one thing you all know, and I'm sure you deal with, and I have to end this way with what I recall information at the human level. Dealing with people, telling them what they're doing, what's good, what their inputs are, and so on. And here of course, I can't say more as much as you can, about what you see and know. But I wanted to make one remark, which is a very interesting, for me, a very interesting and important remark, and that is, the more we intervene between the observation and the human perception, and understanding, what we tend to do is we have digital processing and collection of information, all those wonderful things, the more we intervene, the more the evidential chain is made complex. And the more, therefore, it is corrupted.

I'm very concerned about this we already see at MIT, it's far gone. Our students, our engineering students, our physics students are farther from the data than they ever were. For them, data appears on a screen. Maybe they were clever and designed the interface that brought it there. But even so, and when our colleagues publish something, we're not so sure what they've said, because the intermediation is so great you haven't the time to go back and examine their software. A software error could corrupt an entire domain of physics today.

And if that's true for the physicist, I suggest it's much worse for everyday life. Because what I hasten to remind you, I'm sure you know this-- once upon a time, the philosophers, popular philosophers of science, Eddington and Jeans were very strong on this-- if you can remember their names, they're very able people, there's no question about it-- pointed directly at the fact that the physicist had reduced the world to a rather abstract structure based on pointer readings.

And they're putting together this collection of coincidences, what meters said was a very strange way to describe the world. It's remarkable effectiveness. I don't think it is that strange. It's much what happens inside the head, but we don't think about that. But in any case, it's, whether they were right or wrong, they were able to talk about pointer readings. And then what came as a great surprise to everyone is that, of course, pointer readings are obsolete. You have a hard time finding meters outside the amateurs laboratories today.

Because it's all being displayed in a complicated way on a screen, even an image. An image is evidential. If I want to know if the smokestack is belching out smoke, I could read the meter. But maybe the meter's wrong. If I see the image on the TV set, the closed circuit TV, it looks at the end of the smokestack. I know it's smoke. You can't have an error that makes the white smoke look black and different, you know.

You don't expect that. The system is redundant. But alas, I can tell you now, that you'll buy an interface pretty soon, that you can connect the image of the white smoke, and comes out black smoke in the image. And this is happening, perhaps is happening in a more subtle domain, we watch the presidential candidate, we see the result of a complex corporate structure, advisers, and makeup men, and speech writers. We know that. But alas, even the image will not be the man or woman one day soon.

You'll buy it from some frame store device that can smooth out the wrinkles and improve the speech, and this worries me a great deal. And therefore, I like to close by saying I think I'm against this world which I've portrayed, and some of the roots of it, and some of the changes that are going to happen. I think that an industrial society, we have to work especially hard to democratize the understanding of this structure. Because we are getting farther and farther from perception. We want to, I think, to make science and engineering, not in detail-- they never will be a place where the population at large can feel at home.

But I'm very anxious to see real ends to a world in which we have a minority who are well at home with these things, and eager for the latest, develop the latest change we can understand, in some degree. It's not that they're going to design the software, but they understand what's going on. And then the vast majority who look rather passively at this and worry about its consequences, as indeed, well they might. I think it's an unhealthy situation.

And the only way to do is not to have experts who tell you more what's going to happen to you. That will not do it. What you have to do is make everyone feel he is at least aware of what those experts can do and cannot do, because he has participated. He doesn't fear, she doesn't fear the poet. Because you can memorize a poem yourself. You could write a poem, very bad poem. And almost everyone has done that. Many, many people. 80% of the school children write something like verse or poetry, and in a good school they can. That's not deathless verse. But it's the same participation.

That's what's got to be there for science and engineering. And I think also, it has to be done, and this is coming too, it has to be done in another emotional tone. If pros, if learning to read and write were always carried out on successive levels of complexity, in contract law, or insurance policy technique, with parties in the first, second, third and fourth part in all the codicils and all the careful logic-- which is a real skill. It's a real skill, and it does make beautiful models of the world, suitable for people to sign contracts on. But if you had to learn how to read and write only on that, it'd be a vast illiteracy in the land.

We learn how to read and write because we use it to describe the moon, to say loving words, to write poems, jokes, graffiti, whatever it is. And science and engineering must play that same role. I believe it a change in the emotional tone. And therefore I think the artists who are doing it now, have to be much encouraged, who are doing what I call playful engineering. Things like use the techniques and even the modalities and the social institutions of the engineer, because they can't do otherwise, to make "useless objects", quote. Which don't make money in the direct way, don't improve health, don't improve foodstuffs, don't make war better, but are part of an improved aesthetic quality of living.

And I mentioned a person I hope who is somewhat controversial, the wonderful artist Cristo, who made, for example, the fence across northern California, 25 miles long and 18 feet high, right across from the Petaluma to the sea, which lasted for two weeks, was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people who flew over to see it, and millions of people on the ground, went through the whole impact statement ecology, even an injunction brought against him.

But had a wise judge looked at the injunction through the blind eye to the telescope and said, yes, it's a very interesting injunction. I must hear it. I will set the date of hearing as two weeks in the future, knowing that Cristo's plan had been from the beginning that this whole event was temporary. The fence would be taken away. The ranchers who had given him the land, right? Were given all the materials to use on the farm, the posts, the cloth, the tie lines, the turnbuckles. The men would come by, and the women, the crews that did it all, and buried the small concrete footings deep below the ground so that the cows would not be interfered with.