Listen Here; Margaret Mead: The Future

I'm told that it's cold just talking about the futures because to a big magic and I didn't really mean it to be prophetic. I only meant to discuss the problem of how we are really going to begin to think about the future. Because on the whole we never have. We have thought about continuations of the past and we have wondered how long it was going to continue when the second coming when Armageddon was going to be. But we have never really learned any techniques for thinking about the future. We would accept little bits and pieces and it's becoming a reasonably important job for everyone today. And I'd like to start with what happened to my mom's people in the Admiralty islands when they came into contact with modern

civilization and got that wonderful thing a calendar. Which we take so for granted and we don't realize how very valuable it is. But when I study the moccasin 128 they had no calendar of any kind no system of dating no sense of origins and people located themselves simply here. And. In my father's time. In my grandfather's time. That was the end of that in my sons day was the furthest they could look forward to and. They were continually dating what they were going to do ahead in number of days. So you would hear a drumbeat in the village and the drum beat the tattoo would say in a minute I am going to announce when I am going to do something. Everybody would then stop and listen. And then the drumbeats would start and everybody would come to and it might come out in 40 days I am going to give a certain kind

of feast. People said oh yes that means. Nani's going to give that kind of feast in 40 days. The next day or the next week to be another drum beat and somebody else will announce something they were going to do. Each person put his own track ahead of him. And paid no attention to what other people were going to do there was no method of actually coordinating it. And all these courses of action continually collided and they were dipping and as they were dependent each person was dependent on many people who owed him debts paying the debts before he could do what he was going to do. And people who were planning what they were going to do when he done it. It was a system in which everybody felt under tremendous pressure. No one ever felt they were sure when anything was going to happen. And each course was independent of other people's. And then they got the calendar. And you could announce. A date. And people could agree on it. And they could decide that they would do something on a given date

or on another day and their individual courses of action didn't have to collide anymore. Now the. Calendrical day didn't really make that much change except. That it gave them a way of thinking about the future. That was not simply a collection of collision points in which each person thought ahead from his own future but instead it gave them a kind of fixed future that everybody could think about. The first of June or something of the sort and make plans in relationship to it and they feel that life is much easier now. I have a calendar in which they can plan things they not only have that but they also have bells for stopping work. And in the past you just worked and you worked and worked and worked and you never worked enough to please the ghosts. And if you got sick the ghost said that you hadn't worked hard enough. And if they couldn't find any debts

you hadn't paid they said you were out of contract and some new ones so that life was one long continuous treadmill. But after the coming of these wonderful European inventions you could ring a bell and start to work and you could ring another bell and stop it. He was stopped for a whole hour or so that noon. Then you could ring another bell. And people didn't have to work on Saturday anymore because they'd heard about Saturday. And. This made an enormous difference in their sense of time and they don't feel driven as they did thirty seven years ago. They feel that life is relatively leisurely and you can plan and although they still working very hard they don't feel that they're working as hard as they did before. And this gives us I think a slight model. Of one of the problems that we have about the future that at present. Almost every bit of thinking about the future that we have is somebodies projection about something. Somebody projects the

population ahead. It just cumulatively and it goes on and on and on until we're smothered. And no one can see any way in which this could possibly be stopped. Really it's just going on. Short of catastrophe someone else projects roads or across the United States until someone else calculates that most of the country will be in roads where someone else is projecting automobiles. Someone else is building airports and almost everything that we build is too small before it's built. And. No plans have any clear way of being coordinated. And one of our principal scientific devices of course is to announce the intractable Z absolutely known intractable as they change almost every year but this time they're announced they're intractable. The size of the population the amount of oil that will be left in the world.

The amount of any kind of fuels that will be left all of the. Or someone writes an article saying all the working population that we will ever be able to have is here. It was an article in Harper's at the end of the 40s. Just face it this is all the people you've got. You can't possibly calculate beyond these this range. You're stuck with it. This is all the people that we have to work in this is the limit on our production. Well today of course we're wondering what in thunder we're going to do with the same people calculated the same way. Because you're not going to need them for production. And our problem has shifted enormously in 20 years so that our present situation is very much like the monist before they got the calendar. Our capacity to cope with any ideas the future very poor We've almost no practice at all and we haven't thought out yet with any scale or any really scientific planning how we're going to do it. Now about 10 years ago people began to discuss for the

first time really the possibility that we might have in universities chairs of the future. After all we have chairs of the past. We had professors of Greek history and civilization and professors of Roman history and professors of Egyptian history and the Middle Ages. And. If the future was becoming so important why shouldn't we have chairs of the future. And the thing was the University of Colorado had the first chair that looked a little bit like the chair of the chair of the future. It's cold I think as the cherries name the history of space. Now they begin with the Greeks but there isn't much of it. You see so it's located in history very comfortably. But there isn't much history till we get here. And almost the whole of what's going to be dealt dealt with within the course lies in the future instead of the past. But it's firmly located in the past.

And suggested possibly the place for chairs of the future is in the history department. But one can't be absolutely certain that that's got to be examined a little further. And before we examine it a little further it's worth realizing that in throughout all civilizations that we have any record of the record the mark of a civilized man and that the difference between the educated member of a civilization and the un educated member of that society or the Barbarians the outsiders in one form or another was a knowledge of the past. This has right through history discriminated the educated elite from everyone else. And has made it possible for them to recognise each other by illusions. And if you would just allude today or tags of quotations or a point that everybody had learned us stablished to each other when you met.

Immediately as educated people who understood each other and were not an educated like others. Meanwhile children and. An educated people and members of societies without a written tradition tended to live in the present and to have an extraordinary little time gap. And be unable to discriminate the sequence in which things had arrived in the world. This was reserved for the adult highly educated members of high civilization. Now it's just possible that this is going to shift and that the important mark of the highly educated members of high civilizations is going to be at least to add as much of a capacity to project forward as they now have a capacity to remember backwards. And there are few indications that are coming up that suggests this may be so.

If we take older people people around 75 or 80 and ask them how long ago was long ago they get back to the age of myth and fable and fairy very fast. And once once upon a time there was a king and a queen. If you asked the children who were roughly speaking their grandchildren. How long ago is alone and go they go back to prehistoric man and to pre prehistoric man. And this is the Xanth refers to all the scenes. And for say proceed slowly backwards into an enormously greater time depth in the past. But these are also the children who are moving into the future so that it looks as if we were shifting in the general orientation in the world from at leat who or so are anchored in the past

that their enjoyment and function in the present was a function of the past. And this is of course particularly true when they have the kind of. Script that one finds in China or Japan. Or Bali where the knowledge of the whole. Complex tradition of the past was necessary actually to be able to make very much of the script or reading or writing and. The present. Was after all dignified blessed illuminated or sometimes cursed by its relationship to the past. And this whole tradition everywhere in the world has been on the whole very conservative tradition tradition that demanded a great deal of learning for young people if they were to be regarded as educated and expected to function in the world and a tradition where the

old were always in a position. Superior to the other. This was automatically so as long as we were trading on a knowledge of the past that depended on accumulation and sophistication in interpreting. The contrasts that is made some. Sometimes between science and the humanities or sometimes a social science or put in one and sometimes the other is that the social sciences and in the social sciences and history experience is substituting for rigor. Now the type of history that we're moving the type of world that we're moving towards is a type of world where those that can call on rigor have the dominant position and those who could call on experience and sophistication in the handling of the past. Are having less and less to say. And. It may well be that this is part

of a shift between generations that is going to become more and more important in our general handling of the world. But before. I get further to that I think it's worth considering that if we want to move forward in the future does it mean we have to anchor ourselves further in the past. That if one only goes back say to the Greeks. And that's of course where most civilized people have stopped. If we only go back to the Greeks we don't go very far in the future either. After all the Greeks started everything they did it better than we do. So it is not something that invites projection into the future but only a mild hope that we may someday attain the same degree of sophistication. And at another level one gets the groups who are internally moving into a better future by insisting that it is a reinstatement of the past. Pentecostal groups of various sorts who are living in between a better life as it was

once lived and an immediate future apocalyptic life of some sort so that running through our society at present there are these series of attitudes balancing the past against the future. Now we do also some very odd things in the American Museum of Natural History. For quite a long while. It's my own institution. There was an enormous mural. In the. Cafeteria that showed an archaeologist you know as an archaeologist because he wore sun helmet. And he was digging up a bone. And the bone had written on it 2300 B.C.. And which typified. And this is in a museum devoted to science typified some of our confusion on the whole subject. Then another. I'm trying initially to bring in a

series of. Facets that I think that we're. Going to have to it's possibly useful to bring together in my childhood. Science fiction. We didn't call it that then. We just called H.G. Wells or Jules Verne. But there was quite a lot of science fiction. It wasn't named. And. Children curious lively children read it and most of the contemporaneously literate people who grew up before World War 1 read H.G. Wells and. And Jules Verne and some of the read some other things like British barbarians and the woman who did and. Caesar's column which is a fascinating bit of science fiction in which they imagined cables across the Atlantic on which planes went back and forth but nobody had invented the automobile. So that world they drew that was drawn by Ignatius Donnelly of the future in those days

was quaint and in many respects but these were things that people read that everybody read as part of their ordinary exploration of literature. And it was thought of much more as literature than it was as something peculiar called science fiction. And in fact it was literature to a degree. H.G. Wells could write. And then something very peculiar happened in the United States. The vision of what science was going to mean to the future. Suddenly last a generation skipped a generation and 15 and 16 year old boys started writing science fiction. Many of the great science fiction writers today are barely old enough to be grandparents now because they started so young. And they started writing with tremendous technical. Imagination. Playing all sorts of

games with the possibilities of space exploration and satellites and electronic machines that would cook your eggs for you when you told them to. And a great variety. Of explorations and no sense of. Human character whatsoever. No almost no knowledge of the literary tradition in any sense. So from the standpoint of people who had enjoyed literature or science fiction suddenly ceased to be a part of our literary tradition it was a thing that boys read Girls stop reading it entirely almost completely and we have had a bigger break in the reading of science fiction by sexes than we've had since women learned to read. And this is being reasonably fatal fairly often because they have almost no grasp of the technological possibilities of the future as a result because

generations of boys kind of boys are going to be engineers the kind of boys that we're going to be many kinds of physical scientists grew up on this strangely detached and dislocated group. They used to put a woman in once in a while she usually was a giantess and a leopard skin roaming around making a lot of trouble. But she clearly did not belong. And there was no. Virtually no projection at all of human affairs or human events. There were sometimes caricaturists of race relations or the CIA or something of that sort. But there was an almost complete divorce and this is still true when many of my contemporaries if you ask them if they read science fiction they say well yes or Ray Bradbury and Ray Bradbury is almost the only person they'll danger read. These are of course a

good many of these are people who won't have television in the house either. And we had a progressive break. Due to in a sense I think an accident that would have been quite impossible to predict. Between those people who are feeding the imagination of young people with their view of the future. And the reading literate public there was drawing on the past and was Bill still building a literate tradition. This is I think a great deal more complicated than that. The question of the two cultures we've been had served out so liberally that we're dealing with something far more complicated here and we're dealing with the relationship between generations which is something quite different than Mr. Snow's tendency to identify the ability to write and the ability to read in the same culture and his total failure to include the social sciences

so that we build up now a quite a large K of people. Who are not surprised by what's happening in the world. Who expected it to happen in fact some of them were didn't want to get a little bit disappointed or when Sputnik went up because they'd known it all the time and they didn't want other people to understand it. And you had a sort of break off of the group that had known the future and understood all about it and knew all the clues and knew when they open the book and as people climbed on the spaceship there was one character usually named Lefty or Lindy or something of the sort who lived and spoke with a mountain Appalachian accent. And you knew that when the computer broke down he was the man with the ESPY would start reciting the numbers as you blasted your way through an asteroid. And. These conventions were very highly built up but they were shared by a relatively small

sector of the population. And as late as the year before Sputnik we did a sample of about 35000 high school students all over this country in discussing their attitude toward science. And in these high school students replies. There were quite a little space. We had this classified by very sophisticated people who saw these students as suffering from severe disturbances and extreme fantasy development. And this was done by people who had literary high literary pretensions and psychoanalytic pretensions also. We had this much. So that the if we look at this country or we look at England it's a slightly different problem in other countries and I'm not an expert except that we do know that science fiction in Russia has a totally frozen social organization.

They invent more and more delightful things such as blasting the icecap out of existence and flooding the portions of the world. But the social organization remains absolutely frozen. They don't experiment with social organization at all but we gradually build up in this country and in Britain the series of fragmented attitudes about what can be done with some people being fixated on technology and a series of technological developments. Some people living in the past. Very very sad about these new developments and the fact people don't memorize anymore or and they don't know any poetry or a whole whole series of patches. And so that our perception our discipline and informed perception of the future is as patchy as our planet. And they're not done by the same people but they present the same

overall pattern if one looks at it. Patches of planning some of the some people are worrying about the wilderness and other people are worrying about the location of a building and other people are worrying about digging up the harbor. Other people are worrying about the harbor being polluted and other people are worrying about packaging waste and getting rid of the pollution. And each group of people are proceeding without any way of relating to each other and the same thing is true of this generalized strange perception through the country. At the same time with the children and especially the post-split make children. And there is a whole generation of small children that never knew any world. But Sputnik and know that the way the count is 10 9 8 7. Then you find this even in nursery school children drawing rockets they may not be able to get the numbers in the right

order but they know which way they go. So they were building up today a group of small children who are beginning just beginning to put together. Into some kind of more organized whole. Perception of the possibilities that are going to come in the future. Now this is partly that they are postponing. They didn't read about satellites and trips to the moon. They've lived through satellites and pictures of the moon. And what were dreams and mists and speculations and prophecies and fears to their elders our everyday experience to them. And this focuses I think what is perhaps going to be one of the most striking differences between the life that we all have lived virtually up to the present within every civilization that has existed and the life that we're going to have to

live in the future because this dependence upon the past. And the dependence of the young on the tradition that is passed down to them by the old is an older and old is no longer adequate to the rate of change in which we live and. We're reaching a position in time that is somewhat comparable to the position of our ancestors who were immigrants to this country who came here as young adults and well endowed with the culture of the country that they left. Understanding its language and its skills and its traditions but landed in a strange country as young adults and had to learn to live here and never learn to live here entirely. They named the wrong birds robins and they did their best but. And the bees and the wasps got all mixed up and most of the trees and they tried to create an environment where

they felt at home. But actually they were immigrants here and it was their children who lived here. We are moving now towards a comparable position in time in which the adults and the older they are of course the truer this is for immigrants as we grew up and learned to live in a different kind of world. All our perceptions all our expectations are tuned to a world that has disappeared and this is true from the smallest things to the largest things the things we don't think of. We forget can be done. It would never occur to us to do to such points as looking up in the sky. Everybody here over 35 and it's probably younger than that might be down as low as 25 but I'm not I don't want to be rash.

When you look up at the sky you do not think of satellites in the sky. And if you're part of a tracking station a group that's been building. But for the average person in this room there are no satellites in the sky and if somebody were you remember that there are. You pick up the telephone when Echo was going around and you pick it up in the Middle West and ask for the time and they would say the time is now four twenty seven Echo can be singing tonight at six twenty one and for a brief period almost everybody remembers that Echo was up there. Then they comfortably forgot it again. After Sputnik went up almost everybody learned Bill satellite but a great many people had forgotten again. And. For the elders. If we stop and consider that the world that we live in is a world in which there was only one Earth

it was this Earth. And the firmament of wherever you were locating heaven and hell when you were still being very concrete and had hell down below which is always been a difficult top a logical consideration. Or whether you had moved heaven and hell to more abstract positions. We found this very interesting and modest by the way because. When they began worrying and becoming rather heretical about some of the Christian doctrine they'd been taught. They said Of course they understood about heaven. It was up there and it was. You get there in an airplane and this is somewhat the position that the Russians have been trying to dispute. You know they said finally when their astronauts got to the moon and God wasn't there to prove he wasn't anywhere. So they had a fairly concrete view that they were working with before. Now the monist people said heaven was all right. They understood about Haven't they been told about heaven that

was undoubtedly true and it was up there and go in their place. But nobody ever told them how you got down into hell. And they concluded wasn't true it wasn't a help. So now they only believe in him and they don't believe in hell anymore which is like most of the American people. And. Of. It's interesting to know whether the top or logical incredibility of a medieval spatially located as compared with a medieval sports spatially located ever is one of the things that may have been possible for this increasing belief or disparity among Americans where enormous numbers of people believe in heaven and hardly anybody believes in hell may be possible. This is just a point that I throw out in passing. But. This accept space for my generation and for the generation that came after us didn't exist as a

place for anybody was going to go. At all 15 year olds are writing science fiction and the 12 year olds who are reading science fiction when they wrote it. But for that and a certain limited number of engineers and scientists who are steadfastly working ahead experimenting but for the boke of the most literate and I think this was far truer of the most literate than the least. And this is one of the serious and important points that for the most literate. The moon was somewhere well if you were terribly literate and read Marjorie Nicholson you knew all about voyages to the moon. They were written about a long time ago that made you very sophisticated made us much less likely to go to the moon than otherwise. And. Or it was something that H.G. Wells wrote about but it had no reality. And for that same generation it still has no value. We have to work to remember it and when. If you just lapse for a minute you

look up at the sky and the sky has stars in it Sun and the moon and stars an occasional comet. If you're old enough to met a few and that's all. And then you pick up a newspaper and they say U.S. satellites at present acting in space with a long list compared with us says our satellites in space and we say oh yes. And then you have small children to draw it and they draw a space that's so filled with special stages and nose Combs. One thing in another looks like current times where and they know about space when they look up at the sky. The sky contains manmade satellites and space is a place that you go out to and we don't talk they don't talk about the earth anymore they talk about Earth. And very often they upset their parents. In a conversation because you find that the

child you're talking to is standing on the moon looking at us. You of course are still standing on the earth looking at the moon. And. Now this is a tremendous transformation. And it's a tremendous transformation in the relation between generations and the relations between the literate the sophisticated students of the past and those who live in the present because the more literate the more sophisticated. People are in a sense the more difficult it is to move in to this world that was not predicted in any shape that it is in now by the literature that they have read in the past and is in doubt with no meaning. So there we have a series of breaks. We have a break between men and women in the last 20 years in what they read. Girl I read science fiction is a

very rare bird indeed. We have a break between older generation and the younger with the children at home and the adults being immigrants very very good immigrants sometimes you know they work hard to learn the language. They try to remember about things. But nevertheless there are immigrants in the modern world and a break between a highly literate and the highly sophisticated who knew about the past and don't know and are not the ones that know about the future so we have a three fold no in the sense that they feel it's here that they deal with it easily and it's part of their own world. There are all those people that were brought up very carefully to know that we would never see the other side of the moon. It's very rough on them. And. Our problem is to work out new forms of

communication within these different groups so that we can begin to knit together again. Our methods of apprehending the future and our chances of planning for the future. Now there are a whole series of controversies going on as to how this should be done. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has just had a big commission called the Commission on the year 2000 and its responsibility was to think about the year 2000 and nothing closer. Got it anchored out there it's like you know being a rural socially ologist and you must never read anything about a town bigger than twenty five hundred. And they were anchored out in the year 2000 and then people began to worry maybe this wasn't quite practical. So they've appointed a second commission which is for Nineteen seventy six which is a good day. And the people in 1976 are not supposed to think about the year

2000. They're just supposed to think about the year 1976. Well as these attempts are made to localize the responsibility of the projectors forward. So you have people who become virtually the keepers of the year 2000. It's their business to say if you do this now this will be very bad for the year 2000 in year 2000 we won't have any of this or will have too much of that or this will be overcrowded or this will happen. And in a sense they take responsibility. A new kind of responsibility such as the professor of history took in the past. For all the knowledge that there was about the fall of the Roman Empire now it's their responsibility to know all that there can be known now about the year 2000. And then of course within industry we may have even our projections five years ahead. What are

we going to do when this product is displaced. What are we going to replace it with or when we really have to fix the automobiles what kind of automobile you're going to devise. Oh there you get limited prediction and planning within industry. But no one has yet decided whether. This is the way to do it. Should we have groups of people who are responsible for 10 years ahead. Another group that's responsible for 25 years ahead 35 years ahead 50 years ahead 100 years ahead for the little small voiced group possibly dealing with two hundred and fifty years ahead. Who sit there take all that comes in all the plans that are made and scrutinize them in the light of the interests of the people who will be living at this particular period. If you start thinking about this is a very curious kind of new responsibility we have had. People who spoke for the public interest.

We have the friend of the court. We have a variety of devices that we've invented through time and. We have. Devices for loosening the dead hand of the past as we have the device of the trust or the foundation that binds the future and the court that on binds it. When it becomes too bound. But we have never yet devised any social institution where those who held held the post were primarily responsible for the future. For a point in the future and this may be what we're going to have to do these commissions that were for founding it present me 10 times and write a book. I mean they're not what we're going to need. They're predictors and prophesies are brilliant people thinking about things. But what we're going to need are institutions. A group to whom you can turn with any plan and. It's their business to

look at the plan and say but this is going to mean if you see the clouds in this spot we need them right now. If you if you monkey with the clouds in the northwest part of the United States you may ruin the fruit crop in Florida. We know this is coming fairly soon and this is surely spatial. Now if you add to this spatial point what may be will be done and what will happen to our all our great lakes if we continue if we continue the way we're going. And what are the likely things that will stop it. We can then we could consider having people who were the custodians of the welfare of the next generation in this fashion and who spoke for it. But then. We have a further problem. That all projections that we may do in a sense bind the future. Every person who writes a prophecy about the future that

that catches the imagination of the planners then produces a self-fulfilling prophecy and we start creating the future that we've planned and we start creating the catastrophes that we've planned or creating the specialized solutions that we plan as the declaration of Athens 33 years ago when the young architects of course made their plans about the city of the future and the green belts should be in it. But the imagination of city planners for a very long time. So that we're simultaneously faced with the job of trying to invent open ended Miss. How can we make a set of plans that will be open ended enough to change in which they will be participants from those who are going to be affected by them later or their representatives in this time because we

ought to have representatives for the unborn or the unborn or in very funny state at the moment. We we really haven't a clue what we're going to do with them. I give a lecture on the population explosion and I get passionate letters from usually from the Deep South of people who say but I think about all those little unborn children beating at the windows. Well. What are you going to say tell them to go back to sleep for a hundred years and be born later. We had a court case in Washington last year where a mother because of her religious beliefs refused a blood transfusion which physicians regarded as necessary for her survival and the survival of the child. And the court took over that unborn child. And ordered the mother to be given the blood transfusion whether she wondered or not in the

name of the child that was not yet born. This is creeping up on the end board. This is giving it a giving this unborn child a legal status. Separate from its mother. Before it's born. Or as we still have a society where on this whole children have no status or reason their parents and us their parents happy them to death. But short of terrific maltreatment children still in our society don't have any separate status from what their parents give them. And yet we have this new court case taking the part of the unborn child so the possibility of defenders of the unborn is coming up. And whether one thinks of them as already crowding the gates of heaven ready to be born. Whether one thinks of them as genetic combinations.

That we ought to have more of a balanced against genetic combinations we ought to have fewer of. Whether we think of them as the sorts of genetic combinations we'll be able to produce when we swap nuclei. And then we will be able to have replicas of anything you like. And as Dr. Platt said in his very interesting paper on diversity in science two weeks ago a mother now could decide she'd like to try our hand. At bringing up the replica of a great musician. And I mention this is my students this afternoon some of them were very worried at the dreadful responsibility this would give parents to know what you got. They seem to think it was better not to know. But. This is. In a way a statement of our relationship that we can. Parents don't have to have too much responsibility as long as they just breed. Now because they can have anything.

It's been well demonstrated that coming from the best line doesn't guarantee what you can get. And in fact it's been pretty well demonstrated the coming from off the good lines is great has it. And that the best families seem to have not only the best people in them but some other very odd ones. And so that as long as one takes no steps of any sort and simply takes what the good Lord sends sex unspecified and which relative they'll be like uncontrollable one we're leaving an open ended future. The minute we start or replicas of Winston Churchill we are dealing with the future in a very different way. And. So this whole question of the degree of responsibility that can be taken in the present and whether this degree of responsibility takes out the element of some people call it randomness and some people call it creativity in the

future is another one of the problems that we're going to have to face. Now what I would like to suggest is that what we need to do is to do something about the future rather comparable to what my mama snideness were able to do once they got a calendar that is that we begin to build the kind of computers that will need computers to do this no. Very few human minds. Can match. If any can manage it into which we will be able to feed and nuff contemporary materials so that we will know at any moment where we are. You know that is the tenth of June. Now this calendar will not be a statement the statement will not be against the simple calendar but it will be a statement against the level of change where we will know in quite simple terms. Said things that American universities are quite incapable of counting. You know they build student unions that are always too small

before they're built. This is right across the United States and they could think they could count. And know how many young people there are and how many are likely to come to their institution. Airports systematically built too small and you know again we ought to be able to count simple. We can't then we can't for reasons that we don't yet know. I think something is suggested by the fact that the Mormons seem to be particularly successful in building big buildings that are large enough and roads that are wide enough in student unions that are big enough. I don't know why except of course they have an indeterminant relationship to the past is quite different from any other group in the United States because you know you can convert your ancestors retrospectives away. This means that the group that are included within your group at any moment may be enlarged backwards as well as forward and this gives a degree of open

ended generosity and hospitality that is perhaps a little different from many of our linear one way systems. In any event. We at present don't know how to figure in all the different kind of things that will happen. We're still worrying. You read the current economic reports we're still worrying about things like employment although. Anybody knows that employment is not going to be the issue 10 years from now but I just heard a lovely projection the very best statisticians from VO daily is considering the cost of a voluntary army and this will be a function of the level of unemployment they are willing to projected ahead to 1975. Automation never mentioned and the fact that automation is going to utterly upset the present position of women. Employment in the country so that at present. Probably because of the

fragmentation and because of the different relation between adults and children where the children know more about the present than the adults and the adults have to continually act as immigrants. We have very faulty methods of projection and faulty methods of taking into account all the things that have to be taken in account at once. But what we need is a device for a continuous asset. How far we're getting on one point how far we're getting on another point and feeding a tremendous number of variables the wonderful thing about computers is that they can handle such a very large number of variables into a computer so that we can look at and say where are we now in relation to the roads the ports the airports the expanding city population the rate of growth. The amount of automation the state of fuels and all that. These are all the technological things. The number of the relationship between

those who teach and who need to be taught all the points that are getting out of balance in our population is it or is it not true that all babies are going to be born at home 25 years from now because there won't be any hospitals for them being born and there won't be any doctors to deliver them. Is this true or not. One group project this forward we're going right back to midwives which some people think is a good thing. Another group don't think this is a problem at all. How are we going to overcome the fact that the A.M.A. learned 25 years ago that it was virtuous to close medical schools and there's never an learn the less. And so we can get them to open them when we need them. How are we going to deal with such points is that we decided venereal disease was settled. We could cure no problem. Close the clinics close the case funding agencies close everything. And of course 15 years later we were very much up against it again because we had closed all the devices which were part of the reason it was settled.

Now if we can devise some method. Of a continuous asset where we stand as a country in relation to other countries so that we're not binding the future with deciding how many roads we're going to build 20 years from now but are only binding the future a year or so ahead with a ratio of roads to cars to people to planes. Which we realize will change next year. For instance when I accepted the invitation to come to Galle I stipulated that the New York New Haven and Hartford continue to rough. Going on. About a month ago I thought it was fortunate that I had a class that had a reading period because it looked as if it might in the run after Christmas it was a good thing I wasn't coming. Now it's running till spring I could have come longer. But. It's of course a rather sharp and conspicuous example of unpredictability

but nevertheless. We are. I think one useful way of saying it and possibly discussing and I hope we're going to have some questions for a few minutes is that instead of projecting way into the future and building towards this picture of population or need or food or something what we need is a continuous essay of the next year and then the year after that and then the year after that with devices for changing every single plan. And every projection each year as we seed in what has actually happened instead of feeding in this disjointed and fragmented prophecies from different age groups with different backgrounds and different apprehensions and different perceptions of the world ahead to AA. OK now we're going to have one request from them.

First of all Illinois thank you I'll let you be my. Probably yeah the OS the standard knowledge in the social sciences isn't good enough to fit all the variables we'd like to fit in. But there are a fair number of variables that could be fed in such a simple things like. Demography. I mean we have we're capable of quite good birth statistics demography states of education and things of this sort. We can predict we can collect the information I will tell you which counties in this country are going to have people who were going to be turned 60 percent of them the draft. Next year as compared with the turn down in other places. We have enough information so as to make it possible for us to do much better than we do now. And I think one of the principal

points is that it is not necessary to be able to predict the future perfectly. It's necessary to be able to take the next step. Responsibly. And that the thing that is destroying the future we're trying to build is not not knowing about the next step and wanting to wait until we can do it perfectly. Damn you're going to take me to literally one of the things that I'd be a little bit if we had a computer there was a failure here what would you do. So long as you're thinking oddly enough you're going to go in you. You might hear the sound. Now I'm not talking about a computer that will tell us what to do. I'm talking about a computer will tell us where we are. That's all just where we are. And if all the foreign aid we've appropriated still in the pipeline never got there at all will tell us that. The current wave of our

time I worried about the accumulation of power in the hands of human beings. This is something they will have to deal with. But. Making a blueprint and forcing people in it into it is with power is a far more dangerous thing than insisting that one has contemporary No. And if we can also insist that contemporary knowledge is in a form that can be diffused and understood then this is. Perhaps the best guarantee that we can work out at present. That the knowledge will not be misused. If we can put it in a form that it can be widely understood and we cannot expect people to understand all these separate projections on under different fronts that we're facing at present. Arab oil is a very serious problem here. Just ordered murders of others very serious. Though it isn't going to be accomplished it isn't going to be a prediction at all. This is

what I'm talking about. And what we're suffering from at present is too many unilateral Lou you know lineal predictions and what we need are asks a case as SES of the state that we're in now. Now we can we can essay the state of air pollution in New York City right this minute without any difficulty. And if we asked say that state we have some idea what to do next. But dire prophecies are all going to be suffocated 10 years from now. And equally encouraging prophecies that by that time General Motors are going to make electric automobiles. These are the two things that confuse and distort our ability to deal with the fact that we've got air pollution right this minute from our kind of garbage disposal our kind of factories our kind of politics and our kind of automobile. Which.