The American Scene; Job Hor: A Look at the 21st Century

Hi, near 70 except near the lake tonight showers and thunderstorms likely and warmer low in the upper 50s tomorrow partly cloudy and warmer with some showers and thunderstorms likely high near 80 current temperature 47 this is WMAQ and WMAQ FM and BC in Chicago at 7 o 'clock the American scene a series of pre -recorded programs providing a closer look at those things which form our contemporary society produced by the Illinois Institute of Technology and cooperation with WMAQ the discussion today will take a look at the 21st century now here's our host Don Anderson good morning and welcome to the American scene today we're going to present the last in our current series investigating the American scene we're going to take a look at the 21st century and because we only have 30 minutes in which to do this I think we better launch into our discussion immediately and to give us some ideas about what might be expected to be found in the 21st century

I'm pleased to welcome this morning Dr. Leonard rifle who was vice president of the IIT research institute and who heads the staff of some 220 scientists and directs research projects in a wide range of areas including space physics aeronautics nuclear and atomic physics and Dr. Peter G. Lycos associate professor of chemistry at IIT and director of the IIT computation center gentlemen welcome this morning thank you for coming and we've just completed a series of about 12 programs dealing with the job horizon of various career areas in the 21st century are people going to be getting up in the morning and entering the mad rush to the officer factory and spending a few hours working there and then rushing back home in the evening is this the way the things are going to be run at that time do you mean by the 21st century the beginning of it are all through it there's a hundred years there let's start first with 36 years from now and the 21st century will begin I don't know Pete

I would think that by then certain industries will be pretty heavily automated but others will still have a lot of people getting up and going to work in the morning wouldn't you think well I'd be inclined to agree with that and furthermore I think that some of the industries that we know today will no longer exist I think that in the 36 years between now and then industries will come alive and die and not exist 36 years from now that's right I think there's going to be an evolution of the kinds of things people do but I think in general they'll still probably be busy at something the pattern will be about the same however indications are that they might not be spending as many hours at a job as they are now if not eight hours a day maybe four days a week or three days a week that's that's possible I should think well let's look into some specific areas that will be gaining importance during the rest of this century and will be very important in the 21st century for

instance oceanography as a developing field well that's that's something that I think is really coming along in fact you can see it growing almost before your eyes there are programs going on in various parts of the world to really begin to do things with the ocean and there are industries which I should think would grow up between now and the end of the century that really depend upon the ocean for their existence farming for instance in the ocean under the ocean really scientific ways of getting food out of the ocean of getting minerals out of the ocean and so on and there are even people who feel that people will be living under the ocean there there's some experiments in France now of by Kostow I guess it is who has a group of people living under something like a hundred feet of water for weeks at a time just to try it out it's possible that cities might be built underwater and people would be living

there well I don't know about cities I shouldn't think it would be very attractive but cities are bad enough the way they are on top of the underwater city when uh what what are some of the things that that are influencing the the future the changes uh Dr. Likos you're involved with the computer is this one of the major influences that uh it's going to affect what's going to be here in the 21st century well undoubtedly this will have a tremendous influence on what's going to be going on in the future witness what has happened in the past 12 or 15 years which is really the lifespan of the computer as we know today it's something which uh well on a financial basis for example involves a half a percent of the gross national product chemical industry is only ten times as important when measured on a dollar basis and this growth is all taken place within a period of about 12 years and the computers we know today is uh a relatively

unsophisticated device many directions that which it's going to develop and its importance is going to increase at a rate which is just going to be fantastic don't you think that uh fancy computers are going to make lazy or not very bright human beings are they're going to have a pretty hard time in a lot of places a lot of industry well I don't quite follow what you mean well I have in mind somebody who uh for instance does a very routine job could do a lot more perhaps but doesn't use more than his eyes to say look at uh for a flaw in a stream of bottles going by isn't he going to have a lot of competition from computer techniques coupled with all the uh say electric eyes and so on we already know how to make well not only competition he's going to be put out of business it's precisely this kind of thing of course which lends itself to computer control those things which are routine those things which are repetitive once the flow of logic has been worked out once the technique has been worked out this can all be programmed into the machine

and once the program is correct it will always be correct we execute it and so you have no need for that kind of individual well this this is going to um create a situation where people are going to have a awful lot of time to themselves they're not going to have to spend it uh in terms of a job in terms of working for something it's going to change our values of what's important if if people aren't going to be able to exhibit their worth in a job they're going to have to exhibit some some other way what what about this what i think that's that's a very serious problem i think you see it right now uh i think that uh for example there are a lot of women whose jobs have been made very much simpler by industry they no longer have to go out and gather the uh vegetables out of the garden and cook them and so on and so they have uh i think uh from what i know of women at least a real problem in in filling their lives meaningfully and i think men are going to run into the same thing more and more uh i think uh what you do with leisure

uh in the 21st century is going to be a very crucial problem and one that i don't see any great progress in in coming to meet either well then his opening remark however i think is a key one where he says he implies that you have to justify your existence or you have to work now this is an attitude that uh uh has been inculcated during our uh growing up process we come to feel that we have to justify our existence we have to make a meaningful contribution society and this meaningful contribution is measured in some sort of productive labor um i think what is going to happen is we're going to have to re -examine our values as you pointed out earlier and this is one of the things that we're going to have to look at closely uh a good bit of this in part is uh as he added to the person has he feels that he has to justify his existence and contribute a productive labor i'm not sure that this is essential in fact you might almost imagine that someday sooner or later if this were to continue for a long time you you've got to dream up some new way to distribute the wealth that you don't do it on the basis

of uh productivity alone and of course that gets you into all sorts of complicated political and uh philosophical and the meaningful contribution that a person makes uh uh assuming that this is something that everybody has to do regardless of what kind of society is living in will will be in in terms of perhaps intellectual pursuits rather than physical pursuits possibly this is i think what's going to happen uh you're going to find many more people getting involved in education uh i think that the uh tutorial system is going to evolve this is going to have to be hand in glove however with uh team teaching uh and other kinds of techniques which are really a consequence of the age of automation uh where we seek out the best teachers with regard to a particular subject who are going to spread their influence wide that kind of thing is going to happen but in addition i think there's going to be a need for a lot of personal attention uh tutorial

kinds of sessions uh mechanisms whereby uh people who are adults and have gone through most of their lives can pass on their experiences to those who are coming behind isn't there likely though to be a net decrease in the amount of tea the number of teachers required aren't things like uh teaching machines and television and uh so on going to actually reduce the overall number of teachers well this is what i meant before about uh two uh effects which are really quite opposite in their consequences one being that uh team teaching television uh program learning uh devices and so on will decrease the need for the um teacher on the other hand uh there are things which don't lend themselves very well to this kind of teaching uh those things which are abstractions uh complete unto themselves i guess the thing which lends itself past to this would be certain areas of mathematics certainly will lend itself to program learning uh things like languages where what you are

doing is learning a set of rules uh this kind of thing i think lends itself very well to that kind of an approach but i think there are other subjects however where uh the relating of an experience by someone more mature and older uh is not going to be easily replaced by a machine but uh even under those circumstances i wonder whether you would use this individual tutor or small group approach which i guess is really what you're saying uh on the majority of the population if you use it on only uh the best one percent intellectually uh it really isn't going to absorb much of the overall leisure that all the machine technology is going to release is it? well i'm not sure though that you want to restrict this to the upper one percentage you put it uh one of the things i've discovered is that uh in organizing some conferences and i've been involved in organizing four this year uh introduced uh something which i experienced myself which has proven to be quite valuable and that is to uh take a large group is divided into a number of small groups and to

uh generate discussion groups to give the uh the individual an opportunity to express himself uh this is a thing which we have been going away from and i find in introducing this kind of approach into a conference uh has uh yielded some interesting results above and beyond the desired result of discussion of a particular subject around which the conference was structured we're just seem to be a very definite positive reaction on the part of the people who are involved they appreciate this kind of opportunity look forward to it well i think it's a it's a wonderful thing if it really is economically and logically defensible i personally don't like the idea of uh sort of a dispassionate society run at a distance with the only thing that you see most of the time benevolent machines instead of other human beings uh well you just don't know whether that can really happen well the economic factor we've agreed is sort of going to be suppressed in other words um we're not going to really be concerned

anymore with large amounts of productive labor as a matter of fact the concern it was expressed here was what are people going to do with their time and i think that this will be a very good use to which this time can be put well it may be that you don't have economics in the sense of supplying food and shelter basic needs but i suspect something which may not really be called economics might evolve of uh uh how important is your contribution still and if you could do it with machines but uh largely it's done by people then those people may not feel the satisfaction they they would want so they might not get into it well feeling a satisfaction that you want again is uh a conditioned state that you're in as a consequence of the attitudes that prevailed when you were developing um but i think the kind of thing will come out of discussions of that of that kind will be uh a better defined sense of values uh at the material level things will be happening uh we will improve our

environment our water supply our food supply will do away with sickness uh the mds and the biologists and the chemists will be doing molecular engineering in order to uh better prepare us uh for a happy life and so on there is a real moral issue now there you see uh at the uh at that level these things will be satisfying but then we have to ask ourselves uh why are we here where are we going uh and things like this you're not going to get out of a machine this is going to come out of this country that's right i hope uh we get it out of something because uh you better well know where you're going and why you're here before you start doing molecular engineering and changing heredity and all the rest of the things that that might conceivably be possible in the next century is the danger that uh science and technology is progressing far too rapidly for the philosophers to catch up that it might get out of hand it might run away from us well it's already clearly running away in in certain areas nuclear war is a little bit premature i would like to see it be possible say um

a thousand years from now when maybe mankind's growing up a little bit and could handle it uh i think uh there's no doubt that technology is moving very rapidly compared to the social uh sciences or political skills of man i would rather put it the other way around that the political skills and the other things that go into controlling technology haven't come along as rapidly as one would like to have them come we're kind of painting a picture here of a poor soul in the 21st century who doesn't have to work very long in a job who lives in an automated society who goes home to an automated home he's got hours and hours to himself and he's lost and and doesn't know why he's there or where he's going is is this the indication you know we're making well i personally think there's a certain element of separating the men from the boy so to speak i don't know who it was who said that the real measure of a man is if you can sit in a room with four walls and no furniture other than that one chair and not parish and i think

in a certain deeper sense we're coming to that kind of thing i was um i like to take issue with the uh way you expressed your question um you said we're coming to a period when a man is not going to have to spend as much of his time working i think he's going to be spending more of his time working because i think that when you uh address yourself to some sort of a routine task you can uh just sort of fall into a pattern and you become a machine and you are sort of escaping uh from conscious reality or as we no longer have this kind of way to spend your time or or it's no longer just a file before you to spend your time doing this kind of thing then you're going to have to address yourself to more fundamental problems you're going to have to ask yourself these other questions that i was bringing up before and i think that's going to be harder work the work you're employing is mental work that's right but i think there's a real question as to whether the total population on the average is going to be willing to work that hard and willing to do that kind of thing there are certainly a lot of people alive now who could do it but don't and i'm not sure that in 36 years which would bring us to

the start of that next century or in 136 years man's going to have changed so much that there won't be that same tendency to just go along and not think very hard well but i think this is a distinction between man and the other animals and that is the fact that he uh he does get himself involved in introspection that he does think about the future and ponder the consequences of today as it's going to affect tomorrow uh true maybe not enough people do this uh but i think that when this is going to be sort of forced upon one or when he's going to be sitting there with nothing else to do but this is what he's going to address himself too well i suspect you're right it's either going to go very markedly one way or the other he's either going to become very introspective and at peace with himself or you make him at suicide that that possibility also it's well you mentioned when the advances are being made in the health field and even if we do create a society that's full of frustrations for the individual the health field might have

progressed equally as rapidly and was able to counteract this i would hope so uh one are some of the things that are going on in the health field today that well this is one where i'm not much of an expert in terms of mental health of course there's uh i gather a general soul searching by the psychotherapist and so on to try and get more toward uh group uh treatments so that you don't have this one to one situation where one man takes care of another man i think that would probably have to come along if you're going to handle some of the problems i foresee at least the kinds of things we've been talking about as far as other aspects of health are concerned uh whether it's all sorts of things happening of course the antibiotics and as Pete said the molecular biology molecular engineering to increase hereditary strengths and so on. Describe but talk about him electing a molecular engineering a little bit more what

does this mean what what are when you talk to fight well it sort of defies description i guess but i'll attempt to do this since uh the research activity i'm involved in really addresses itself to that kind of problem and this is the uh place where the research chemist i guess plays the most significant role what he attempts to do is to uh become aware well he becomes aware of a need and uh in terms of a molecule having certain properties and he can actually design a molecule so that we'll have the properties that are desired uh of course when the individual molecules come together and aggregate to make a solid or a liquid uh the properties that the molecule has will be reflected to a certain extent and the properties of the solid but then again it will have properties unique unto itself which depend only in part on the molecule that made it up but i think this is sort of what you can call molecular engineering and that is actually putting together molecules uh according to some preconceived notion as to the properties that you would like these

molecules to him. You see all of that sounds very innocent until you add to it the fact that uh the biologists are learning a great deal about the molecular structure of the hereditary elements and uh you're beginning to see speculations on not doing molecular engineering on say tabletops but on people and while that certainly isn't around the corner i don't know that one would be safe and saying sometime in the next hundred and thirty or so years it wouldn't be possible to actually modify the uh hereditary structure of a human being and that really gets you into some trouble. It does does this also imply not only uh working with existing molecules but that you might be able to create molecules in other words. Well i mean this has been going on for a long time uh well for example uh people thought at one time that molecules can be divided into two classes those which were produced by human beings or by living matter and required some essential life force and those and and the rest

but this theory was shattered a long time ago when uh urea was first manufactured in the laboratory which up until that time have been considered one of these products of a living being and since that time a number of molecules are being produced which are principle constituents of living matter and uh there's really no limit to how far you can go it's a question of the complexity of the molecule you're trying to make and the technology which is available that enables you to bring together the different parts separate away the unwanted parts which are produced in the process and get the file material sufficiently concentrated form that you can use it. Could you possibly create a synthetic man? No not not in the 21st century. Well no what Len was uh talking about was uh shortly after conception you can take the fertilized egg for example before it has begun to subdivide and uh you could treat this. I don't know if this would require uncoiling uh some of the proteins and modifying them or

uncoiling them and substituting other ones for them and in this way uh affecting the development of the a living thing uh as would subsequently grow which you couldn't start from scratch and build on yourself. No the uh the closest that's uh that's we've come to that and it's really a long long way is that uh cyan is trying to figure out how life got started in the first place have produced a relatively complex molecules by taking some pretty elementary gases such as you might have found in the earth's atmosphere way back four billion years or so and uh sort of cooking them with a guess an electrical discharge and out of that process comes some uh organic materials that you find right now in living things but no one's come near synthesizing life but modifying it is uh is not going to be too far away. Well there's another area of uh of health however that is more uh more likely to be realized in the immediate future and that isn't the area what we might call biomedical engineering

where in the first place we have uh grafting of limbs and organs and uh although the number of successful cases has not been very high for example kidney transplants I think something like 290 have now been made uh something like 10 cases are successful but yet the fact that there have been some successful cases means that there's some hope for this kind of thing in the future and you'll have other organs being replaced. In addition one company the manufacturer is hearing aids for example has a device which is now implanted under the skin and connected directly to the auditory nerve and the event that the entire uh three -bone structure out of ear is non -functional and uh what is what happens is a man wears a device on the outside of his head and it's a receiver and transmitted it receives a signal transmits to the inner receiver which cannot be made sufficiently powerful to be a transceiver on its own and the signal goes into the person's auditory nerve the uh problem now being that it only transmits at one frequency and so you hear a monotone kind of sound and they're trying to uh make it more sophisticated

so it can receive at say five frequencies. This general class of thing marrying biological things to mechanical or electrical things is coming along very fast and I think this uh grafting of organs and limbs and so on is really uh quite close. The Russians have had a dog alive with two heads for at least a couple of days as I recall with the second head functioning in a perfectly reasonable way. There are little mechanical gadgets that are sometimes key to these things. You know how to do a great many things but for instance until recently you didn't know how to sew together the little tiny blood vessels that you had to. Well now mechanical engineers and surgeons have gotten together in Russia and in the United States and they can staple blood vessels together. You can do the same thing, same sort of thing with nerves and so on. If you can lick the body's natural reaction against

foreign objects this uh rejection reaction then there's no limit to what you can replace. This is fascinating uh it looks like we're going to be developing a society where perhaps people not only don't work as long during their working years but also lived much longer. Accidental deaths might be prevented because of its the abilities to to alter them in some way. Well even there there's progress the so -called uh clinical death where somebody is literally dead. Reverse of that is uh is now possible and has been going on. Again both in the US and in Russia people have been taking human beings or lower animals for instance dogs and literally killing them and then waiting a certain amount of time and bringing them back to life. But dogs have been brought back to life uh 15 or 20 minutes after they've been killed by

pumping their the sack around their hearts full of full of liquid. It stops the heart they wait 15 minutes and bring the dog back. In human beings there's a whole institute to worry about that in in the West. They're in the East. Well let's let's jump off to another area here if we have people with so much leisure time living longer working less or at a gainful job of some sort working less of that. They're going to have a lot of time to spend for themselves and with themselves uh land in your area. Today people will take a vacation to the Mediterranean in the 21st century might they vacation on the moon. Well if they do I think they're making a mistake. I wouldn't go much more pleasant on the Mediterranean. Yeah I should think so uh especially with the beaches and so on but maybe

people will go into space for for vacations. I don't know necessarily that they go to the moon but they might even go into space for therapy because not having to fight gravity might be pretty healthy once in a while. Well I hate to interrupt here gentlemen this has been one of the fastest half hours we've had and I want to thank you very much for giving us some insights into what may be taking place in the 21st century Dr. Reifel and Dr. Lycos. The American scene is a fascinating subject to study and the Illinois Institute of Technology has been pleased to be able to bring together so many stimulating experts who have presented their viewpoints on some of the things which make up our contemporary society and to distill these many viewpoints into one concise statement would be impossible but perhaps one theme has occurred more frequently than others and I think it has been reinforced in this morning's discussion and that is that the individual in order to find and

maintain his place in our society is going to have to have as much education as he possibly can get. He's going to have to have a sound solid all around basic education and he's then going to have to make an effort at a continuing education and the more the better education is going to have much greater value in the future and the best insurance policy for the future as we face the great social economic and cultural impact of science and technology is going to be found in the school. This is Don Anderson. Good morning for the American scene. This has been the American scene. Today's discussion, a look at the 21st century, had his guest Dr. Leonard Reifel, Vice President of Physics at IIT,

Research Institute and Dr. Peter Lykos, Associate Professor of Chemistry at IIT. Post on the series is Don Anderson Director of Public Service Broadcasting at Illinois Tech. The American scene is pre -recorded and is produced by the Illinois Institute of Technology in Cooperation with WMQ. Here's a fact April is teaching career month. Now we'll have a spot quiz. What's the largest profession in this country?