The circumstance of science; Episode 13 of 13

How in the world and which one has fish and personal information storage as well as business information all kinds of information. How do you protect the privacy of the individual. The computer used unwisely presents all the possibilities of 1984 for manipulating the society. After all those who have the knowledge the computer provides will be very powerful indeed by virtue of that knowledge. The blights on our society the pollution blights being one of the major ones indicates to us that a technology which runs rampant without the control that we believe can be brought into it and this technology assessment capability is is only an aim in that direction is to develop a better society a better technology one which. One which will do a complete job rather than just a partial one. Science and the future. One program in the series the circumstance of science exploring the forces of contemporary science

and technology and their possible effects on society. There is a mounting concern among scientists and citizens that our society our human welfare is in a precarious balance. Our sophisticated science and technology brings us closer to both solutions and the chaos. We have created a gap in our traditional mechanisms for examining the social consequences of the new science are not as refined as our capacity to produce change. But not only find it difficult to survey the implications of today's science but we also discover our inadequacy for long range thinking about tomorrow's science and technology. In our last program in this series we will discuss with leading scientist in Congressman the chances for having all the problems of the science of the next 50 years. Dr Donald N. Michael a professor of psychology of the Center for Research on the utilization of scientific knowledge at the University of Michigan. The impact of cyber nation will require a great

amount of surveillance. Basically a cyber nation refers to the use of computers and automation while the organization in control of material and social processes. Dr. Michael feels it's important to look at the general social context in which cyber nation will evolve. The three characteristics of the developing society that are critical here are as follows. Number one an unprecedentedly tool large society that is with large numbers of people and hence in a highly mobile closely communicating society with large numbers of events happening in that society that have to be anticipated taken advantage of controlled and so on. So you've got to number one a very large society Number two an unprecedentedly complex society in terms of the interactions of these events in terms of the variety of demands that these large numbers of people represent notice. You know very in a

society with a very large number of people even a small percent now represents a politically extremely important part of the population because even though the percentage is small the numbers are very big. So these multiple demands these multiple events interacting with one another all provide an order of complexity that we've never dealt with before. And of course that's one thing that the computer can help with as well as one thing that the computer will help make more complex too. The third aspect of the developing society that needs to be specially kept in mind when we think about cyber nations impact is that for as far ahead as we can see we have at least a bifurcated society possibly more than bifurcated but at least we have in the United States and around the world two societies the society of the haves. Those who have the intelligence the skill training

the access to power the awareness of what's going on. That's at home and abroad as well. And the other society of those who have not the poor or the dispossessed the unskilled the unaware the impotent the powerful and the gap between these two is made in many ways all the greater as a result of cyber nation because of its demands for skills and because of the. And. The complex nature of the information computers deal with Dr. Donald haunting the president's advisor on science and director of the Office of Science and Technology has noted. If history can be relied upon we must be on guard. Lastly pay heavily for the boon conferred on mankind by the computer by making many many more things. Possible when they see. Them. More efficient it's going to bring great benefits. The problems I was referring to though are again this matter of social change

in the process. Many people are either going to have to learn to do. New jobs. Or are we have severe social problems. Makes it possible to. Automate. In the streets and to do tasks can provide new jobs but it's going to require a higher level of skill from law and education from our people if they're going to be in command of the computers instead of the computers and command of them. For example these problems are all soluble ones. But if they are if they are math then we're going to have disaffected people who've been displaced from their jobs. Social organizations which have been disturbed. And there's one very particular problem that I am concerned with which I don't have any simple answer and this is that the the computer of course as an information handling device

provides us with the the tools for dealing with this explosion of knowledge that you talked about before the computer is a means of assembling him from a shoe retaining a forever making it quickly available sorting at last. Buying at any way you want but this poses if you like a real threat to the privacy of individuals the notion of national information banks which have a dossier on everyone becomes a practical thing. As you look ahead. And one can begin to ask very severe questions then as to how in the world in which one has fish and personal information storage business information all kinds of information. How do you protect the privacy of the individual. You can ask political questions. Does the accumulation have enormous stores of information in the hands of any group of people does this provide them with a new source of

political power. Does this pose a threat to the democratic process. I think the answer to all these questions is that they can surely be dealt with. They're going to have to be explored and they're dangerous though. We don't deal with the recent report the United Nations and human rights developed by the commission to study the organization of peace raises many questions regarding the computer and the right to privacy. We ask one of the report's authors Dr. Lewis B sound a professor of international law at Harvard. If the computer is a boon or a pain I think the computer is to some extent very useful as long as it's kept nice proper place but something if we instance like the national data center in which all the information about everybody would be put in one computer they had a book too. Anybody at a moment's notice might be an extremely dangerous thing. Look I'm pewter all buying Dr Donald Michael.

Well it's going to be both. This is another one of these complexities it's going to be both. And they're not going to average out. When I say both one of the major problems we're going to have is deciding when the bone balances the brain so to speak. It's going to be a bone simply in the sense that we've got to use computers as a way of beginning to deal with these large numbers of events and people and deal with complexity. We need the computer to simulate our social environment to tell us what's happening and to calculate indices and other information about what's going on so that we can we can anticipate problems and deal with opportunities we couldn't possibly operate without the computer. We're going to be more and more dependent on it. At the same time the computer used unwisely presents all the possibilities of 1984 for manipulating the society. After all those who

have the knowledge the computer provides will be very powerful indeed by virtue of that knowledge. And if they are unwise. Or if they're power seeking the computer gives them a kind of power over the society which will be devastating indeed in this age of cyber nation you speak of the haves and the have nots. Will the computer help to bring these people closer together or will it perhaps spread them farther apart. Probably both. You know one of the things we have to be very clear about when we talk about the world we're getting into is that trends in circumstances which sound like they are contradictory may be but can still exist and develop side by side we have many things in our society where. That are contradictory trends and that will continue. The computer cyber nation in

general may help close aspects of this gap between the haves and the have nots by making productivity greater and hence in principle at least making the price of items less. It provides leadership with a knowledge about the needs of society which can help bridge some of these gaps. But at the same time it puts a greater premium on extremely great scale of the sort that you only get by the kind of education that begins when you're very young. And that's the kind that many people in the society have already lost out on. So in that sense the computer the cyber nation will widen the gap between the haves and the have nots It'll also increase the power of the power of the haves. Now whether they use that to further separate themselves from the have nots or two. Bringing the two groups together remains to be seen. We discussed the concerns for the year 2000 with Mrs Sally Shelly of the United

Nations scientific educational and cultural organization one of the areas that were particularly concerned with is the great lack of water on the planet fresh water fresh drinking water that will occur by the year 2000 hydrologists like Greyman ace of the US Geological Survey believe that there is enough fresh water for the world's population to last through the year 2000. But after that they don't know what will happen when the population doubles again. This is true because as countries develop economically individual demands for water increase a man in an Indian village for example requires one and a half gallons of water a day. In 1964 the daily per capita consumption of a US citizen was fifteen hundred gallons a day. Of course most of this for industrial not consumer use now of course you can easily say that given these facts by the year 2000 we'll be able to desalinate water

and today even in Florida the cost of desalinization has dropped to 85 cents for a thousand gallons. But as the poor countries are getting poorer and the rich richer. There is no question that there will be acute water shortages particularly in the developing areas of the world because they simply can't afford to. The process of desalinization. Not only that they also cannot afford to bring water up from the sea from the plants if such could be paid for into the into the interior where there the needs for water are most acute. So the thing that you Nesco is doing about this is started setting up has set up a 10 year program to study water to study the water table to try to find out what the actual world's water budget is now so that then we can look into ways of conserving it so that we won't be faced with such an acute shortage as we are now run into unless some measures are taken.

What are some of the other areas of science and technology that you know SCO is interested in especially of thinking in terms of the future. Well one of the areas that we're increasingly paying attention to of course is in the area of communication satellites. We are. We just completed a team mission to India where five experts one from the United States one from the Soviet Union from France and from Scandinavia went to India to look into the possibilities of actually using a synchronous satellite perched over India to start to beam eventually not yet because our technology isn't there. Eventually into the Indian villages. Already the change in the in the emotional makeup if you will of the Indian who is exposed to television and the one that is completely isolated is change quite remarkable. Barbara Hudson the senior vice president of any TV for example said that you know a few

years back when he was in India he walked into a village that they were running a radio farm formed to improve crops via a radio program. And when these people at the village heard that a group of foreigners were coming the whole afternoon that they were supposed to observe fell apart because the Indians were so fascinating and this is fascinated in this void to talk to a foreigner when really wanted to get to know him and find out what life was like on the other side of the planet. But he just returned from this you know his commission and reported that he went to another village and was a little alarmed on whether they'd heard he was coming or not and the mission was coming because he wanted to see how things were going and the manse of I don't really think it's going to make that much difference. And he was curious and when he arrived he said there were he saw 1000 people watching a television program the television set was in the square. Now this of course is a very limited experiment. But the program the people watching was about fertilizer and crop improvement.

But given the satellite which we think will be possible in the next few years. Eventually the possibility opens up to being able route literally to talk to every Indian village. This is tremendously exciting because they kind of trends that have been facing India has been faced with the trends of lower food. The trend of greater population growth can eventually be checked. With the introduction of these very modern media not that the satellite itself is going to solve the problem of the satellite is going to be a means whereby education can reach these villages hopping over all the lack of roads and the lack for instance in Africa to realize most Africans don't know in tropical African central tropical Africa what a steam engine is. They have jumped directly from the mule to the jet airplane. And so these great technological leaps that we hope will happen and that we think will happen with good will and good

sensible planning. Can take place we hope to use for example synchronous satellites eventually in Brazil in areas like Africa where you have communications difficulties and in fact you know as goes also planning to take in one African country half the students and teach them using television as a method to try a very very rapid upgrading of their educational process and in say one generation. So using in a sense it's a it's a and it's an exciting challenge. How can we use some of these things from the developed countries to push ahead to have this great great leap forward. And with the synchronous satellite that is one possibility. There's also a danger on the other side of satellites however and that is that we will create a world culture that is rather bland and in fact downright boring Can you imagine a world where everybody reacted the same to everything.

I think it is a similitude that we want to guard against. And you know it's going its program is pushing right now very hard for an international agreement to control what goes on to television eventually eventually world wide television networks and to make sure that the new devices don't in turn in turn. It turned into abuses of people's own cultural values you know Esko believes that if we can say so that the everybody's culture is add up to a rich rich hollow and that it would be tragic if everybody were cast into the same mold and we were very interested in preserving cultural differences if you will so that this sense similar march will be at least checked to the point of where we can preserve what cultural benefits now now exist in the world. Dr. Berry common error the director of the Center for the biology of natural systems at Washington

University stresses the need for viewing the effects of science on the total environment. I think that any administrative change that is made is going to be useless unless we develop a proper philosophy of how we ought to deal with the environment. My own feeling is that the main thing that needs to be recognized is that the environment is a whole and that every environmental problem is connected with every other problem that air pollution ties in with water pollution that the use of fertilizers in the soil ties in with water pollution and air pollution that all of these things tie in with a number of economic and social questions. And I think we have to understand that before we decide how things ought to be reorganized this understanding is just beginning to develop. It seems to me that for example in the Department of Interior there is an increasing recognition of the integrity

of the environment and that this I hope will lead to an understanding of the kind of reorganization that would be useful to improve our ability in dealing with these problems. Dr. Walter Roberts the director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science calls for a reorientation of science priorities in my view the. The mode of assignment of priorities among different science areas is a rather Helter-Skelter business. In spite of real efforts and. Genuine wisdom that has been applied to this question I think that some people and the Senate and in the house and some people in the in government office have struggled very hard

with the questions of appropriate balance among the big science and little science areas. Dr. Harding and Dr. Hayworth Harnick president science advisor and Dr. Hayworth of the National Science Foundation in particular have. Given a great deal of effort to see that that our national resources are expended in an intelligent way to embrace the different areas of science but even so it seems to me that priority system that we have established is not quite adequate to the task and. I suspect that there are areas of science that are grossly under supported compared to their potential social returns. I'm not sure they're what you call smaller areas of science however. One of the inadequate least supported

areas in my own view has to do with the environment. The whole the whole question of of weather and of air pollution and. Water pollution water resource preservation and development. These are environmental problems but they're certainly not small science. These are areas where even the enormous developments of the space program or the enormous expenditure as far as nuclear physics will be dwarfed if we throw all of the talent and resource that it seems to me the potential social and economic terms potential social economic returns justify We will spend large sums of money even compared to those efforts. So I suspect that that. The nation as a whole will have to take a new look at the

establishment of priorities and we'll have to take a look in the long term picture. We'll have to establish priorities that are to be achieved in 25 years rather than priorities that are to be achieved in two to three years. If we are to make attacks appropriate magnitude to the social returns and to do them in a thorough and systematic way rather than on a crash basis with all of the all of the waste and lost effort that's involved in that type of effort. Look concern has reached the Congress efforts to take an overall view of technology and its impact on the environment are becoming more common. The most important steps to date have been taken by Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine and Representative Emilio que to Derry or Connecticut. Congressman Dario as chairman of the Subcommittee on science research and development is taking the first step to

establish a capability for Technology Assessment. The idea is not to monist monitor undesirable by products of side effects of modern technology. It is to set up a technology assessment board which can assess technology and to make a determination about the way in which we can enhance the products of our technological capability both on the good side and to be able to overcome the problems on the bad side. So we're looking for both good facts and ill effects and to make a technology assessment on both and therefore to develop a complete capability now the need for this is that our technology is growing in such a such a rate. Knowledge is proliferating. To a degree which we which is unprecedented. We have the feeling that in this

society problems of population problems of our cities problems of urban growth transportation pollution all of the problems are technological society put us in a position where we need to do a better job from a technological point of view first to take new knowledge and to direct it so that it can be more expeditiously used and then to take a look at Ask society and to recognize what the problems on to apply our knowledge and to develop the technology necessary to overcome some of these the blights of society the pollution blights being one of the major ones indicates to us that a technology which runs rampant without the control that we believe can be brought into it and this technology assessment capability is is only an aim in that direction is to develop a better society a better technology one which is one which will do a complete

job rather than just a partial one. Senator Muskie proposes a temporary Senate Select Committee on technology and the human environment. Technology has an impact. Upon human beings. Which ought to be evaluated. AS. We consider legislation to deal with the resulting problems. Or as we undertake to study the problems to determine the need for legislation. An obvious illustration of this of course is. The impact of Transportation the automobile the airplane. Upon him would be the noise the pollution the congestion and how all of these are results of technology which were not taken fully into account as the technology was developed or as it

became. There is a came into common usage. And so in a sense we are constantly legislating it to deal with problems which we created perhaps decades ago all by the development of new technology. So the purpose of the committee is to try to. Look into the future and to try to anticipate directions in which we may expect technology to develop and to try to anticipate the problems that it may create. So that as we consider legislation which comes before us we do so with the benefit of as much foresight as we can develop. When you some committee on intergovernmental relations heard from scientists many of them suggested that the answer to problems resulting from the impact of technology on the environment is more technology. Do you agree with that suggestion.

Well certainly technology can be a very useful tool in dealing with problems created by other technology an obvious example is the automobile land and air pollution the automobile exhaust problem can be dealt with by new technology and under pressure. Federal legislation the automobile companies are in the process of developing new technology. So technology yes can be very useful. But as we apply technology to the problems created by earlier technology we have to try to anticipate its effects also. In comments before Senator Muskie's Subcommittee on intergovernmental relations chairman Glenn Sieberg of the Atomic Energy Commission underscored the urgency for studying the effects of technology on the environment. The year 2000 he said is not waiting for the fulfillment of our utopian dreams. In less than thirty three years it will be here with a vengeance. And whether we welcome it in jubilation or despair Well largely depend on how much we can learn

and how wisely boldly and quickly we can act in the coming years. You've been listening to the 13th and final program in the series the circumstance of science exploring the forces of contemporary science and technology and their possible effects on society. A transcript of this program is available without charge from W. K. our Michigan State University East Lansing. This series was prepared under a grant from the Lewis W. and Lauderdale family foundation of St. Paul Minnesota produced by Steve you shaved for Michigan State University in radio. This is NPR national educational radio.