Focus 580; How Society Shapes Technology

And that's our focus 580 and we will be looking at the relationship between society and technology and most of the time when we talk about that we look at the ways in which technology shapes society and certainly that's appropriate because in many ways technology does shape the way that we live but this is not just a one way relationship. It is also the case that society determines the directions of technology and that is the topic that we'll be talking about here this morning. How it is that society shapes technology and we will be talking with the author of a book that has that phrase as its subtitle The book is titled Beyond engineering how society shapes technology and our guest the author is Robert Poole. It's a book that was first published by Oxford University Press back in the summer of 1997. And then came out in a paperback edition just last May. So the book is available if you'd like to look at it you can find it. I'm sure in the bookstore possibly in the library. Also this book was the

basis for a program that will premiere on many PBS stations around the country this week. And in fact we'll be airing the show on Sunday. It's called The Next Big Thing. And you can see that program on WRAL TV on Sunday. This coming Sunday at 6:00 o'clock in the evening. And then it will air on other public stations too so if you get your public TV from some other station you check the local listings and find out when the program will air. We'll talk about some of the ideas that you can find in this program and in this book. This morning with Robert Poole as we do of course questions are welcome. I like to call him the number in Champaign Urbana where we are 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Also we have a toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us that's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 3 3 3 3 8 W I L L and toll free 800. Two two two. Wy Hello Mr. Poole Hello. Good morning. Thanks for talking with us today.

Quite welcome. How is it that you started to look at the this particular relationship that he has how society shapes technology in particular since we so often when talking about this relationship we look at the other way around. Right. All right. I actually backed into it. It's a long story in itself and I actually tell the story at the beginning of the book. I started off to write a book about nuclear power one more book about nuclear power of this one was going to be about the coming generation of nuclear reactors that are being built and with a look back at you know what happened to Nick. We're power in the past and why it didn't turn out to be quite the panacea that everyone it hoped some 50 years ago. And I found it difficult as I started writing the book to really get a handle on it because I had started with the idea that I was going to find the answers to what went wrong with nuclear power and the engineering

details the designs of the plants the risk assessments and maybe some mistakes that were made along the way there at the more I had to read about it the more I studied it the more I spoke with people about it the more it became obvious that the actual technical features of nuclear power were probably less important to how it all turned out and less important to my book than the way that society reacted to nuclear power and society in the broad sense. I'm talking about political influences market influences the psychology of the individual psychology of groups and so on and so the book took a turn on me and I suddenly found myself writing about how the society had in in some way shaped nuclear power but as I continued to read more and more about it I discovered once again that.

It was not just nuclear power that you could say this about but that pretty much any technology that you you look at out there if you if you look at it closely enough you find that the way it ultimately turns out is indeed dependent upon the guys there in the rooms with the drawing pads and the calculators and the engineers. But also it's very strongly dependent upon many factors besides what the engineers decide is the best way to design this technology and so the book be came of sort of general look at all of the factors outside the technical ones outside the decisions that the engineers themselves make based purely on engineering. I Dia's and principles that shaped technology and that's that. The title beyond engineering how it's technology. I think it's a really interesting way of looking at it because I think it's our perception that so often when new

technologies come along they are that where we don't have a lot of choice in whether we adopt them or not that we're sort of victims of the technology that it's kind of dumped on us that the developers say here it is you'll love it it's great. And then we have to live with it and we don't have a great deal of choice but in fact when you look at going back some some ways as different technologies came along. You do in fact appreciate that people's willingness to use something or not use something or the various attitudes or prejudices or mindset or experiences that they bring to the new technology can go a long way in determining whether that technology succeeds or falls by the wayside. And it may not have a great deal to do with it. Or as much as you would think to do with whether or not it was a good idea or a bad idea just on the face of it. All right try your exactly right David it's actually very empowering because people can

especially today when we have these huge technologies and huge corporations developing them we we sometimes can feel that we're just overwhelmed with technology that that something comes out and we really have no say over it that that were just presented with it. And at most the only say we have is a yea or nay. Yes we like it or no we don't so it's either going to succeed or fail. But that's not the case that all the directions that the technologies take are also shaped very much by individuals as well. These other factors and and when you realize that you begin to realize that as a as an individual you can make some sort of difference in the direction that technology takes. And that is a very empowering realization. Well maybe we should give some examples so people will get a sense of what it is that we're talking about. You did talk a little bit about nuclear using nuclear power to generate electricity that might be one or maybe

it might be something else. We offer one of the one of the ones that people are very familiar with. And that's just the personal computer. It got its start back in the 70s. In fact you can trace it back somewhat earlier than that but it got its start with just a tool for hobbyists and it was never understood as something that was going to be of general interest con computers were available for businesses at this time but they were these big things that you needed to make a big investment to buy and you needed a big place to put them and you needed people to run them and no one was really thinking in terms of computers for individuals and so these things got started off as little hobby as kids basically people could put them together and and play with them. And it went on from there and there were two in the in the end there were two very different sorts of approaches to personal computers that came to dominate and one of them was the

the IBM approach the company the. It had had its name made on these big computers that companies had been using for decades and when IBM came into the market and said Where we're going to build our own personal computer called the PC then that suddenly set a standard and everybody looked at it as a personal computer has arrived now. Now maybe I can take a look at the personal computer and decide if I want to buy one if IBM is involved it must be real. And so IBM is the entrance into the market set a standard but it was the type of computer that IBM offered was very much shaped by the corporate culture at IBM it was a business culture was aimed at business people and it was in particular aimed at the sorts of people that could take a little bit of time and understand how to to run a computer these were serious people who used computers for serious things so the IBM computer came out very much a business oriented sort of thing. On the other side of the spectrum I was in that there was a

small company out in California that got involved as hobbyists. Originally making these kits for hobbyists and that was Apple Computer and this was a completely different culture. It was a couple of old. Well they weren't so old at the time a couple of hippies from California that had started the company and this was a computer for the people very consciously designed to be not a corporate thing but something for individuals as a way of increasing your freedom and your ability to do things and enjoy life. And so the way the apple was designed was it was very different it was very consciously made to be easily accessible to people that they could learn how to use the Apple computers very easily. And so you were presented with two very different visions of of a computer and this was. Something that the engineers really had a lot of say over this was that this was more safe by corporate culture than anything else. And what's what they got out into the marketplace what you've actually seen it's been a

convergence. The IBM types of computers have come to take on many of the user friendly attributes that the Apple had particularly with the Windows operating system now that basically is a knockoff of what Apple was doing in the early days. So at that point once they got out into the marketplace and people started making a difference the technology started to take on the attributes that people on the quai did that they liked and now the IBM compatible computers are a very different creature because of that. But but the whole history and shaping of the personal computer is something that you can't understand unless you look at the factors that are non-technical nonagenarian factors. Let me take this opportunity. Reduce Again our guest with this part of focus 580 We're speaking with Robert Poole. And if you're interested in reading some of the ideas here that we're discussing you should look for a book that he wrote the title of the book is beyond engineering how society

shapes technology. First came out in 1907 and is now available in a paperback edition published by the Oxford University Press that came out last May. And so the book should be available. And also the book is a basis for a program that's going to air on many public television stations here in the next few days on ours as well. The title of the show is the next big thing and it will premiere on many stations around the country on Friday. Tomorrow on our station you can see this program on Sunday 6 o'clock in the evening on TV so if you're interested in some exploration of these subjects you can look at the show and then maybe you want to go on from there and take a look at Mr. Poole's book of questions of course are welcome to the number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. And we also have that. So that's for local folks also have a toll free. Line that's good. It would be a long distance call for you. Eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5. I think also one of the things that you write about and when you when you were talking about the personal computer this came

to my mind is that at it within the development of technology a certain momentum can build up behind something that is really difficult to fight. And I don't know if this if this is the proper connection but I think about them on the personal computer and wonder if for example today if we had sort of no history of the personal computer if today we decided to build one and design one what would it look like. I don't know if it would look like the things that we have now. It seems that our attempts to break out of that pattern to do something different are hampered by the fact that we are used to thinking of it being a certain object in a certain way that we interface with in a certain way and that. Once you've kind of gotten once you build up enough momentum behind a certain approach or a certain thing it becomes hard maybe impossible even to imagine doing it differently.

Absolutely. It's exactly that way with the Windows operating system which as I said had its roots in the old Apple operating system and the whole idea and actually that goes back even further to something that was developed by Xerox actually and never successfully marketed but the idea of files and folders and using a mouse to move things around on your screen. A few people came up with that idea as a way that seemed easy for humans to interface with computers. And it you know from through various historical accidents came to be the dominant system we have now now it would never have become dominant if it weren't something that people found relatively easy to use. But if no one had ever thought of it in the first place if the guys working at Xerox had been doing something else and it never came up with this idea we would certainly have a very different sort of way of interfacing with our computer than we have right now. And we might be just as happy with it we might be

even more happy with it than than we are with Windows. There's no way of knowing of course but but what we can say is that right now we're pretty much. Set on this path. There is it's not very likely that we're going to have a way of interfacing with our computers anytime in the near future that's significantly different than what we have now they'll be minor improvements and modifications but we have been trained now to think of interacting with our computers in this particular way there is. So there's that this tremendous economic and social momentum that has been built up to do it in a different way with demand retraining millions hundreds of millions of people it would cost individual companies more much more money than they would want to spend to retrain everybody and individuals would have to learn something completely new. And unless there were some overwhelming reason to do that some overwhelming advantage that you could see in moving to a new system it simply

wouldn't happen. And. Furthermore if you're not you're not likely to ever see that overwhelming advantage clearly enough in a new technology that has yet to be truly developed. Let me move a little bit and over in a parallel track and talk about the keyboard itself on the computer which goes back to our old typewriter keyboards and which goes back to the invention of the typewriter in the late 18th hundreds. The layout of the keys is known as the Cordy layout because of the first six letters there on the second row. Q W E R T Y and the. The reason that those are laid out is basically a historical one someone working on one of the early typewriters for the Remington company laid out the keys in a particular way one of the things they wanted to do with have all of the letters that spelled out typewriter on one line. This typewriter was actually the brand name of the thing that they were that they

had created and they wanted their salesman to be able to type out the word typewriter without their fingers moving from that one line. They moved some of the keys around because they found that they wanted to get commonly used keys far enough apart that people wouldn't would have to kind of move their fingers more around the keyboard to hit the commonly used keys otherwise they might type a little bit too fast and the keys would jam. So we get this corny keyboard for historical reasons more than anything else. There have been various attempts to replace it with something that is better keyboard to use that you can type faster on the one that people like seem to like best is called the divorce keyboard it was laid out in a very scientific way so that people who wanted to pipe on the divorce can type more words a minute than you can on Cordie it's not a huge amount maybe 5 to 10 percent but it's a better keyboard. But you simply cannot replace the chord keyboard with the Divorce Act keyboard because it would demand such an

investment of time and money people learning to type all over again companies. That have done this the Navy did this in the Second World War have found that their typist do indeed type faster once they learn to code to work with the divergent keyboard but it's not going to happen as in society as a whole. We've we've built up this momentum for the Cordy keyboard and there is just not enough advantage in moving to another one to make it worth our while to switch. So this is again the sort of thing that that happens in shaping a technology for completely almost random reasons you can get stuck on one sort of technology like this qwerty keyboard that may not be as good as other technologies but once you've invested in it once people have learned how to use it once companies have invested in training programs and bought this particular technology it becomes very difficult to switch over to another technology and the phrase for that is actually a technological lock in phrase that the economist Brian Arthur

invented and Arthur says that if the whole idea of technological lock in some detail that that gets it one of the basic questions that you deal with and it's very interesting one that is how is it that we do become locked into technology as a way of doing things that are not optimal. And that one explanation is as. As you've offered is that things things become so firmly entrenched or we come so attached to them that the idea of doing something else even if it would make sense becomes so overwhelming that it's just not it's not possible or at least we say well it would be more trouble than it was worth. And it's usually not even that. There are some psychological barriers that are certainly true but I think the the stronger barriers are the economic ones and the training ones. When you look at for instance of the gasoline powered automobile we have this tremendous

infrastructure developed for the gas automobile you with gasoline filling stations with repair shops with the manufacturers. If if we are to go to a different kind of automobile Fe an electric powered one. It's the investment in the new infrastructure in training people to repair it and to work on it service it is absolutely outrageous. If you have to have a very very strong reason to move from this particular technology to another one to justify spending all of that time and effort and money. To have to redo everything that we have spent decades building up at this point. So technology is something that it gets just tied into the entire fabric of society and when you stop to think about OK if I want to change this one technology what is it going to entail. You find that if you're going to have to change in an amazing amount of things and there's a ripple effect. And

and so once you once you have been doing using a technology for a while and have truly invested in it that is is where you get your your lock in. And the only times you use which are when there's a relatively easy path that you can take to switch because you can do incremental changes or when there is a very clear and strong reason for making that change. Now if you have the gasoline engine is causing so much pollution that places like California decide that they can't live with it anymore that's a strong reason and maybe you would have to switch to a new technology there but that will not be easy and it would never happen on its own that it would have to be something that was imposed from above. I wonder can you could you. Give an example or two cases where really superior technologies failed

for not because there was anything wrong with them but for the other kinds of reasons that we've talked about. You have to be careful when you say really severe ear there. First of all it's very difficult to measure two technologies because you don't really know which one is going to be superior until each has been fully developed and you have a chance to measure the two of them side by side and it almost never happens that the two of them are are fully developed they. Generally you make a decision somewhere early in the development when it's not clear which is going to be the superior one and so you kind of have to guess well in engineering calculations show that this is probably going to be a better technology but we can't be sure because there might be some problems down the path that we haven't figured out yet and so that that's part of the calculation the other the other. I want to issue here

is that if there is a clearly superior technology and its superior enough then you generally will make the switch. It's when there is a. Not enough of a superiority but still some superiority that you don't make the switch like with the vortex vs. Cordy that has said that the improvement you get in typing speed is probably 5 to 10 percent. Now if if you could double or triple the number of words you could type per minute typewriter keyboard I bet you that you would see the new keyboard appearing very quickly but when you only have 5 to 10 percent difference then the investment is not really worth it. So you have to you have to be careful what you mean by by truly superior but but one. One example that people are familiar with is just whether there are videotapes. The Everybody pretty much agrees that the Sony Betamax with a pretty much a far superior format to the VHS format that they came to dominate. What happened there

was that the two came out of about the same time and for reasons that nobody quite understands at this point the VHS got an initial lead and so more movies came out on the VHS format which means only of people went into the stores to see what movies were available while there were more available on VHS so they'd buy a VHS video player and. That minute because there are more people buying the VHS systems the manufacturers made more VHS videotapes available and you just had this this feedback loop where it got the advantage grew and grew and grew until the Sony system just dropped out because not enough people were more interested in it. But. The VHS is a perfectly good system. The advantages that the Sony Betamax had over it were were technical ones and you would you would see them on your television screen and somewhat better but not enough better that when people were first making the choice between the Sony and the VHS

format that they had a reason to pick one over the other simply because of the format. Instead they would look at what was which had more movies available or something like that which had the cheaper. Video cassette player. So this this is what happens you can point to little things like that there are good reasons to believe for instance that the the type of nuclear reactor that we ended up with this probably not the best nuclear reactor that you could build there. It's a good nuclear reactor of snow no real problems with it. But if you look at it and ask well if we had chosen one of these other types of nuclear reactors and had to spend as much money in as much time developing it as we did developing the light water reactor would it be a better reactor. A lot of people think yes that we could have made a choice for a better nuclear reactor and but and but that's not going to happen now because we've got decades and I don't know how many tens of

billions of dollars spent developing a particular type of nuclear reactor nobody's going to go back and start from scratch with a new one a new type of nuclear reactor and try to say we've got a better system here by ours instead. We have several callers now to bring into the conversation. And I'll again introduce our guest We're talking this morning with Robert Poole if you'd like to read more on the subject you can. Look for his book beyond engineering how society shapes technology. It's published by the Oxford University Press is available now in a paperback edition. Or you also might go to library and look for his book which came out in hardcover in 1990. Seventh same publisher. And also you might want to keep in mind that there will be a program that was inspired by his book Running on a lot of public television stations coming soon. And in fact it'll be on our TV station w wild TV Sunday at 6:00. The program is titled The next big thing. Questions welcome 3 3 3 W

I L L or 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 to WRAL. First caller here in line is in Champagne County and it's live. For well I only have a moment. So I guess I'll hit the major point I was going to go on about the graphical interface and the other thing that people compared to beta and Apple's introduction of it and the fact that they actually did pay for it. But the court case. That was against Microsoft failed. But what I what I think is more important is the idea that nuclear power you know. Well I think of thinking outside of the box. It's hard to do but I think the whole idea of the centralized power generation plant is I think the problem there are there's a major engineering firm in Switzerland Energy Consulting I forget the acronym for it but they say they're declaring that the grid is dead

and that what we need to look at is more localized generation whether it's mixed formats of fuel cells and the generating the the stuff local load more locally to it so. It's you. These are these are possibilities. But the problem is the vested interests it seems to me are the ones that want to keep the power generation centralized and their handmaidens government and they're not going to do any of the programs that are necessary to. I mean even the even the supposed subsidy of solar didn't come back under the eight years of Clinton particularly. So that it's it's not just people. Druthers or they're what they're used to. I think there's vested interests that have a huge stake in this and that's why we have you know locally Deiner Gee buying all of my power but splitting off the power plant and the Clinton plant here. I don't know if it's a broader issue that I don't have time to campaign to well but I don't know how all of

it resonates with you I'll take the answer off the air. But I think the point is that. It's not just people are used to going to the mains for their electricity it's also that there's you know the Capitol says this is the way we do it this is the way we can control it. We don't want anybody you know. Subsidizing or advocating using government to try to develop a different alternate future. All right. Well I will hang up and like I say you think well. Excellent point there. Mr. Paul what do you think. I think he's dead on it. It's exactly the sort of thing that I'm talking about I didn't mention that specifically but there is a tremendous amount of momentum or inertia if you prefer that it's created by business investment once you have once businesses very large businesses have invested in a particular approach to

technology. It's very difficult to move away from that because they have a lot of money and a lot of institutional momentum built up in that direction and it's difficult to underestimate or you shouldn't underestimate the institutional inertia here because a company gets vested in thinking about and doing things a particular way and they really understand that particular way they know the pluses and minuses of it and they are focused on that way of doing things and it it's there's nothing malignant about it. It's perfectly benign. But they they truly believe that they have the right approach that they have thought about it clearly that other approaches have their problems that simply. Rule them out and they'll fight for it and one of the ways they fight for it is try to to prevent other competitors from arising and yes when they see the government talking about maybe providing some subsidies to a competing technology they'll go

to their congressman or their senator and say this is a bad idea we really don't want you providing subsidies to this and then they'll give them a list of reasons for why it's a bad idea and can put as much pressure on them if they can. So you definitely see that sort of inertia against new technologies as well. And an institutional inertia and it's very difficult for a large company that's vested that's put lots of money and lots of time into a particular approach to a technology to turn and go into a go in a different direction and it's equally difficult for them to see a competitor arise that that may threaten them. So the caller is exactly right about that. All right let's talk with someone else here this is. Paying 1 1 0 0 0. Yeah and I think the previous caller raised you know something that would be a perfect For topic for entire show maybe more than one really like to hear that and moving away from the nucular can of warms

back to you when you're talking about the keyboard and you know the inefficiency of that and I see a lot of people with repetitive stress problems because of their interactions with a keyboard and mouse but I think in you know correct me if you disagree but speaking of the next thing I think that it seems kind of obvious that within the next few years part of the standard operating system of computers will be voice recognition. That would that would be great fun I I don't I'm not that familiar with the pluses and minuses of that but I don't see a great. Any sort of great inertia that would prevent that from coming around. If if indeed it's something that people like in fact the whole history of the personal computer has been that people very quickly adapt new things that are made available. If if they serve a purpose. So if if we if somebody develops a voice recognition system

that works for people I suspect that it will very quickly come to be something that people use them I guess just from the way I use computers is that it would probably be more useful in the handheld devices and things like that where you don't have a full size keyboard. I I'm a writer and I've been typing on a computer for a long time and I personally can't see typing my books or my my magazine articles with by speaking instead of by sitting at a keyboard but maybe somebody coming along just. In a junior high school or something instead of learning to type on the can puter keyboard Bill learned to speak at the computer and it all seemed perfectly natural to them. My own personal bias of the keyboard has a lot of things going for it in that it may not be easy to replace. As far as just sitting at your desk and typing but I suspect that it will. Voice recognition systems will become very useful in other areas where

a keyboard is not as convenient. Well yeah a lot of people aren't as you know aren't very speedy typer. And they also know you know I like I said there's a lot of injury because of the really you know archaic keyboard layout that causes a lot of strenuous reaching and people who have to spend their entire day rather than just a couple hours in you know typing. It would be I think a huge benefit. You're probably right and I know that when I'm working in the middle of a book I'm doing six eight 10 hours a day. My wrists get really sore after awhile so I have at that point you me may be exactly right. But I I would be very interested to see how it works because. And I would just have to try it out and it would be interesting to see but one of the things that I do feel that I would continue to use the keyboard and the mouse for us is moving text

around in and they're racing things same when you're looking at something you've just written and you say oh I didn't want that or I wanted something else it seems to me is going to be a lot faster to use your keyboard to go back up to that word in a race and instead of trying to instruct the computer with exactly which words you want to change you know and where it is they may be able to do that in a way that it's very quick but I suspect it'll be simply you read something in and it appears on your screen and then you'll probably continue to work with it with your keyboard in your mouth that those aren't going to go away. That is the voice recognition may be something that is as an add on to what we already have. Yeah I didn't mean to suggest the keyboard would disappear I just think that you know probably be something that will supplement rather than use solely. Of course with people with disabilities that will be just a lifesaver. I've often wondered how I could survive if I didn't wasn't able to move my fingers and at that point I decided that I absolutely would have to have a voice recognition system because I

would want to continue writing but who wouldn't be any other way to do it. So that's it seems like it's I don't know much about it but from what I've seen in the newspapers it seems like. To far away do you know anything more about that. Well IBM has via voice out and they just upgraded it to a more enhanced system so you know it's coming along and computers get more powerful and that's the real you know the thing that really the lemming factor is the power of the computer more I think than the software capabilities and they both developed something. Well thanks very much. All right thank you. Let's go to her benefit or someone else your line. You know I bought a video recorder about 15 years ago and the SOS person went on and on about the virtues of Betamax. And that's a technology that I think it's a period of VCR that has lost out. We just talked about. We look at it a little bit ago and I think what you say is correct and in fact it

it's at our house is Christmas we got a DVD player and we had to find someplace to put itself finally unplugged. Well actually wasn't even plugged in it was just sitting there. My Betamax. And if anybody listening I'll make him a good deal on a used Betamax there and he wants when I finally got the old box out and put it put it in the box and I think like you and a lot of people and everybody I knew said well beta is definitely the better technology get a better picture so you know I went out and bought one of those in and it was good for about I don't know five five years or something and then pretty soon there was nothing to rent anymore and finally I had to break down and buy a VHS machines already with a better picture that was the selling point because I was not buying a video recorder at that point so I did not talk to any salesman its all been this is all been just reading all that. I believe that was the argument that there was a superior picture quality was superior. I believe there were also some engineering features that you may not have seen as a consumer until it came time to repair it or something like that. But I

believe that there were also some of those features that were superior but that was the picture that was the main selling point for people going into the store. OK thank you very much. Thank you. Well one of the things that I'm interested maybe you might talk a little bit about and I note that the program that mention the Next Big Thing deals with is is a technology that's on the horizon that a lot of people feel is a very good technology and that's the. The fuel cell right thinks that it the kind of thing that could be very useful and powering vehicles and in fact in other sort of power applications to a device that takes combines hydrogen and oxygen produces energy and some water as the byproduct it doesn't doesn't create pollution and seems to be very promising. And yet there's there are a number of things going for it and that there are a number of car benumbed issues raised too including infrastructure

issues. Maybe you could talk a bit about what's going for the fuel cell and what we might suspect would either lead to that being adopted or maybe work against it. That's certainly the thing that is pushing for the adoption of the fuel cell is purely and simply the disadvantages of the an internal comprised combustion engine that in particular the pollution that it causes and and secondarily the depletion of the petroleum reserves around the world. So those are those two things are basically convincing people that at some point in the future we need to find an alternative to the internal combustion engine that if it weren't polluting our and if we weren't worried about running out of oil at some point in the future then we wouldn't be looking at things like the fuel cell basically so. There is not a strong advantage to the fuel cell except when it's compared to the disadvantages of the of the internal combustion

engine or the other ways that we have of generating power. It's not just as a replacement for the internal combustion engine itself. I mean look at is this generation for generation of electricity. But the idea behind the fuel cell is that this is a pretty much environmentally benign sort of technology that its main byproduct its main waste product is water you get to combine hydrogen and oxygen as you said to create electricity. And when hydrogen and oxygen combine you get water now depending on upon the system used to combine the hydrogen in the water and also the system used to get the hydrogen in the first place you get various other sorts of waste materials and pollutants. But the generation of the power itself is something that is non polluting. That's what's driving it. Now as you as you indicated the main problem that we're facing is well there are two main problems one is just it takes a long

time to develop something that is economically viable here and that we've been developing the internal combustion engine for over 100 years and to have something competitive. It's going to take a while to reach that level of development so efficiency and economics are one problem the other. The other problem is you know I lost my train of thought so let me let me have the infrastructure. Yeah that's what I was going to say. In from where you where do you go to fill up your fuel cell car. Right and that's actually there's an interesting story there because. Yes if you're if you're just going to have to run on hydrogen and oxygen all oxygen you can get from the air but you're going to have to find hydrogen filling stations which means you're going to have to create those and then you've got problems about running around with liquid hydrogen in your car and people are concerned about the possibilities of explosions and you start worrying about all sorts of things. So that's one possibility but the better possibility seems to actually be to create the hydrogen on the spot or to chemically

break another compound and create hydrogen. And one of the most intriguing technologies I think takes advantage of the fact that we already have this tremendous infrastructure of filling stations and you've got gasoline out there and it uses a particular system to take gasoline and break it into break off hydrogen from it and then use that hydrogen to combine with oxygen to generate electricity. And so. Career and power car. And it turns out you can use all sorts of things in the system you could use methanol or ethanol for instance and in fact those make maybe a little bit better but the point is that you could create these cars that you fill up with gasoline but the gasoline is not burned. You actually crack the gasoline inside. Forget what that what it's called now little chemical system that that pulls the hydrogen out

to combines it with oxygen and creates electricity and therefore you can you just fill up at a gasoline station. And that may be kind of a midway point between the internal combustion engine and some system of automobiles that runs on either hydrogen or ethanol or something like that which in the end would probably be better fuels but we are not ready for those yet so if you can get these these cars out there that you can fill up with gasoline but also perhaps the up with nothing else say of that. That would be a nice stop an on the way and then gasoline stations. Foley had this new kind of fuel as more of the cars were got out on the road they could use that kind of fuel and eventually and decade or two or three we might find ourselves moved to a completely different system or gasoline pops or there's maybe one gasoline pump and a gas station and everything else is pumping methanol or something else like that because that most of the cars on the road are using these fuel cells.

It seems that when we think about it when I think about technological change in the past that it was more the case that it was particular the kinds of technologies that we've seen developed in the last century that they were more often revolutionary than evolutionary but that perhaps in future do we think that the China changes that we will see will be more evolutionary then revolutionary. That's there's a pattern here. You actually get both what you have is a new technology appears that can do something that has not been done before and. If it if there's a need for that then that new technology is that adopted and that's what you might think of as a revolutionary change because that is something that simply hasn't been done before the telephone the invention of the telephone as it is a good example but the invention of the personal computer was completely equivalent sort of

revolutionary. It allowed people to do something that they had never done before the Internet is another revolutionary technology it allows people to do things that simply hadn't been done before. Email for instance. Downloading things from websites. Once that revolution happens then you a long period of development sets and where you build on that technology and you do different developments here and there and you have an evolutionary period. But it's not an either or set up at all you. You have to have that initial revolution to get started and the revolution faces some stringent criteria you have to offer something that hasn't been done before or if it's been done before you have to do it enough better than the existing technology that people will move to this new technology. Where is the evolutionary. Change is face a very different sort of criteria. You're just looking for something that's a little bit

better because it's easy to adopt the evolutionary changes the adoption of the revolutionary changes. It's harder for all the reasons that we talk about and therefore you actually have to have a stronger reason to adopt a revolutionary technology than you do that just these evolutionary changes. Well there we must stop because we've come to the end of the time we want to say to you Mr. Poole thanks very much for talking with us they enjoyed it. We appreciate it our guest Robert Poole and if you'd like to read more on the subject you should look for his book which is titled Beyond engineering how society shapes technology published by the Oxford University Press and then you might look for the program. The next big thing you can see that on our station w i l l TV this Sunday at 6:00 and also coming soon in many other public stations around the country.