Q(26,

 

 

Perspectives:
Past, Present and Future

1981 Worldwide
Management Conference
Boca Raton, Florida
 

Joshua Lederberg
President
The Rockefeller University

DR. JOSHUA LEDERBERG: Thank you. In fact, | have
some trepidation about finding myself on the program
this morning at this particular point. My dilemma is not
wanting to break the spell, the mood that has been cast
by my predecessors, which has engaged all of us so
deeply, but at the same time, not to distort my own
character, not to break out of the limitations of my own
interests and history and expertise, and not to pretend
to a culture that | enjoy and admire, but which is not
really mine to join as a creative producer.

My theme is the love/hate relationship of modern
society with science and technology, to scan something
of the sources of resistance to technological progress.
Forgive me, if in this morning’s mood | do recall that
this is no more than an echo of the ancient myth of
Prometheus, a myth whose centrality to our culture is
evidenced by the endurance of a play that was written
and performed over two and a half millennia ago, and
has been restated and revived even in the last few
years by Lowell.

Do you remember who Prometheus was? He was an
engineer, though perhaps if one looks more closely at
the magnitude of his claims to have stolen fire and to
have invented every useful art, he must have been the
CEO of the global technology transfer corporation of his
era. He couldn’t have done all that by himself. And for
his pains, he was chained to a rock and had his liver
pecked every day by a bird — which may not be too far

Wednesday, April 29— Second Session

from what a CEO’s life is today.

More seriously, it is all of us — and to turnto
another manifestation of that myth — who would now
also say it is we, the children of Adam and Eve, who are
the victim and heir of that same sentence: to live our
lives now, by art, by the arts on earth, to be the tillers of
the soil and the miners and smelters of metal, and to
increase and multiply beyond measure, rather than enjoy
the more primitive paradise of hunting and gathering.

Before | attempt a somewhat more systematic
sampling of that love/hate relationship — and time,
again, may not permit my doing it in the fashion that it
deserves — let me make a couple of very general
remarks. The Promethean myth, | think, demostrates
very adequately that there is a love/hate relationship in
our attitudes and feelings about change, and particu-
larly those changes that are upheld by technological
innovation.

In Aeschylus’s time, as well as our own, most of
that resistance came from the traditionalist — we
might even call them the radical — conservatives, who
were concerned with the established order, with the
preeminence of the gods, which in Aeschylus’s myth
would eventually be toppled by the Promethean insight.

Today, besides that source of anxiety and concern,
| believe that we find, paradoxically, that some of the
deepest resistance to technological innovation comes
also from the radical revisionists, who are concerned
that technological progress, economical rationalization,
the reform of a liberal society may preempt the more
violent political change that many of them espouse. And
both from the right and the left, of course, we have
resistance from those who are concerned that power will
be steered from those who are concerned about the
mobilization around political ideologies towards the
technocrats, towards the aristocracy of expertise, whose
claim to power frightens everyone, even the older
technologists in the same tradition who might be
displaced by the very rapid pace of new technological
innovation.

My second general observation is that, in the
framework of this Promethean problem, there is really
nothing that remotely approaches the apocalyptic vision
of the nuclear holocaust, of the possibilities of large-
scale nuclear warfare as a manifestation of what we
know we can do to one another with 20th-century
technology. This is, in the view of many — | think few
will dispute it — the underlying, most pervasive, most
central problem of adjustment in our time, based on
technological advance.

The reactions to this threat — not surprisingly
because of the very enormity of it, and of our difficulty in
coping with the grim prospects of the future, for
example, as addressed by Peter Jay earlier this week —

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are often quite inappropriate. Many of them avow an
appreciation of the actual history of the geopolitical
framework of national competition anda world system
that made it inevitable that some power would discover
nuclear weapons, given the immutable fact of nature —
which is not an invention of human consciousness,
which is not a question of the structure of language,
which is an objective reality out there — that the laws of
physics, objectively, make such weapons possible. The
only issue was when, where and by whom these powers
would be uncovered.

Unfortunately, many of those who even espouse the
use of nuclear weapons, who have come to grips with
that geopolitical reality, perhaps as part of their coping
— again, as Peter Jay reminded us — still today pay far
too little heed to the profound mischief that may be
bursting upon us at the present time from the prolifera-
tion of those technologies beyond the seats of larger,
more stable polities that originally had them. And | regret
that we will, very nearly inevitably, all rue the very low
priority that, in fact, has been given to technical and
political measures to contain this process. With ail of
the difficult, if not impossible-to-resolve issues of
national competition that we have with other powers,
with all the other evil that there is in the wortd, we must
still also recall that the United States, France, the Soviet
Union, China, other great powers, have shared interests
with respect to this problem that transcend the stakes of
the side games that we find ourselves inevitably playing
in other modes of internatinal competition.

One of my concerns about their having developed a
demonology of technology, and one that points to the
technologies themselves, weapons themselves, as being
the objects of fear, of concern, of hatred and rejection, is
that that mood has generated a tendency to responses,
that, I think looking back just over the last 10 or 15 years,
we can see as having been entirely inappropriate for the
most effective and the most humane ways of containing
them. The notion that such powers reflect an overkill,
that the weapon itself is what must be the source of our
attention, has led, in my view, to an overweening concen-
tration on those measures of arms control that appear to
be directed to reducing their numbers. And we heard that
statement reflected, again, earlier this week.

| would have no objection to that course if it had
not, in fact, papered over the far more serious implica-
tions of the continued progress of technologies, of
delivery systems, of improvements in accuracy of MIRV-
ing and all of the other measures that the powers under-
took, in some degree, in order to evade the limitations on
military power which were an obligation under the
treaties for the limitation of strategic forces, which were
sometimes part of some of the domestic bargains that
were needed in order to get to some agreement to

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comply with the systems. And the result is that it was an
entirely inappropriate target at a time when it really
hardly mattered whether there were 1,000, 2,000 or 3,000
launchers and where modest differences in the total
volume of that weapons capability really did not matter
from the point of view of the survivability of the two
sides. The cat really has come out of the bag with
respect to high-precision delivery of these weapons, the
possibility of their being launched from mobile and very
difficult to inspect and verify sources and so forth. We
really are in the soup today trying to figure out a method
that joins the residual shared interests of the great

powers in trying to put some cap on this capability for
mutual destruction.

This is an area where there have been some impor-
tant technological fixes, and! can think of nothing more
important in this domain of the extension of technology
than the development of a reconnaissance capability.
That has really been the source of the peace in a major
way over the last 20-odd years. Our capability to know
what our principal adversaries are up to, and vice versa,
under the impact of that kind of capability for national
means of intelligence, is the only way that either side
could have satisfied itself that there was a potentially
stable equilibrium, but it was not necessary to undertake
a preemptive strike in order to get there before the other
side did and so forth. | just hope that we can find other
countertechnologies still more advanced that will cope
with the very dangerous situation that we find our-
selves in today, from having had an excessive preoccu-
pation with numbers and not paying enough attention to
the limitation of issues about precision of delivery and
soon.

Let me just sample a few other issues and takea
rather different tack with respect to the examination of
that love/hate relationship, paying some attention to the
cultural framework of those reactions.

There has not been very much systematic study of
this question. There are many passionate statements
and volumes written, mostly by people with a somewhat
anti-technocratic bent, pointing to innumerable abuses
and difficulties that have arisen from a wide variety of
technological introductions, almost always paying no
attention to what the alternatives are or might have been.
The underlying imperative, after all, is that what we did
inherit from Adam and Eve, we have multiplied to an
unconscionable degree over the years. We have widely
disparate standards of living, we have rising expecta-
tions on the part of a very large part of that ever-increas-
ing world population, and there is simply no way that
that is going to be met, except with the introduction of
more technology to enable the cultivation of the earth on
a scale that will permit its inhabitants in their present
numbers to survive at an even approximately decent
level.

But there are problems. I’ve spent the last 15 years
attempting to listen to them with some sensitivity, to try
to understand some of the sources of anxiety, concern
and opposition, to a set of values, that, as a scientist
and technologist, | very deeply sympathize with.

Perhaps first of all | should be careful to briefly
elaborate some distinctions between science and
technology, just to remind you that they were mentioned
briefly by Mr. Levin. Science, at its core, is the pursuit of
understanding of the world around us. Technology is the
development of those powers to modify the world around
us, which are only effective with the exploitation of
profound scientific knowledge. You can’t builda
machine from materials that don’t exist. You can’t
design it in defiance of the laws of mechanics and have
it work. You cannot invent new technologies without the
discovery of many new natural phenomena, which can
then be exploited.

However, they are different enterprises. | know a few
scientists who are rather vehement protesters against
technological growth, and | know some technologists
who don’t care much about investing in basic scientific
activity, but | think, by and large, those are exceptions.
Nor do! espouse the view that there is a linear march
from the exploration of scientific pursuits and the
accumulation of a storehouse of knowledge, and then,
and only then, to the actual exploitation and develop-
ment of new technologies to use them. Life, as far as!
know, has never gone that way, and basic science has
been much enriched by the experiences of people who
have encountered problems in practice in technological
exploitation, as technologists have been stimulated by
the discovery of new natural phenomena from observa-
tions in the laboratory. So there is an extraordinary
degree of overlapping interchange which is unfor-
tunately not reflected in our academic institutions to an
appropriate degree. At the present time there tend to be
dissertations on cleavage or differentiation between
these two branches which are unrealistic and
unproductive.

For the time being, I’m going to use these terms
interchangeably and leave it to you to understand from
the context which of the principal cores of these over-
lapping enterprises I’m referring to.

There are degrees of resistance. There are some
who are so defensive about the nobility of the scientific
enterprise — that it represents that which is unique
about the human species and its encounter with nature
— they hold that anything short of diverting the entire
GNP to basic scientific enterprise would be resistance.

More widely, we find a range of reactions that may
range from diffidence about support, inevitably from
government sources because basic science, by its very

Wednesday, April 29— Second Session

nature, is something on which we cannot put a pro-
prietary tag. You cannot properly reap yield on invest-
ment in basic knowledge. | wouldn't know how to charge
you for what | can communicate to you about what I
discovered yesterday in my laboratory. There must be
some way of socializing, of generalizing the sources of
such generally available knowledge. So that even that
diffidence can have, in the end, the same effect as active
hostility in frustrating the efforts of individuals in their
laboratories to pursue their work. And in this respect, it’s
very different from literature — almost poles apart from
what was discussed by Professor Howe.

If | attempt to make a more systematic overview, |
have to ask first of all, by what scale, by what parameter
{am going to do this, and in a very hasty effort I’ve tried
to do this by the scope and character of the system, of
the belief, or of human action, or of human organization
that appears to be impacted by technological develop-
ment. The first of these has been touched on ina very
different vein by my predecessors this morning — the
ethical ones — in view of the person in relation to God,
or if you would like, to the mystery of his own person-
ality. Here, of course, we have some of the traditional
conflicts between science and religion, the processes of
skepticism against traditional belief that have gone back
through the ages, but which are epitomized today by the
names of Galileo and Darwin. In the very process of the
exploration of the facts of nature some forms of literal
interpretation of mythical belief have inevitably fallen
aside. | think here we’ve had no better and more elo-
quent statement than that of Iris Murdoch on ways to
approach the proper nurturing of the need for religious
involvement in human nature, in the face of an evolution
of our perceptions about the literality of revealed facts of
our origins and of the nature of the universe.

Within the ethical domain we also face profound
dilemmas that we fear, such as that we have the power
to influence prolongation of life. There can be no deeper
ambivalence than, on the one hand, enjoying the
possibility of conferring a new episode of life and of
health on others, and then the recognition of the
dilemmas and the costs and the responsibilities that is
then invoked when single individuals must make such
decisions: a question of whether to pull the plug on the
respirator or whether to pay for a kidney dialysis pro-
gram that one knows will cost billions of dollars, fora
technology which is quite secure in being able to assure
the lives of a limited number of others.

These are dilemmas so difficult that individuals shy
away from them for decisions that may be put on their
own shoulders, and individuals are equally perturbed
when they’re taken out of their hands and assumed by
others. We have yet to learn how to cope with them. |
think there is then an unconscious response: Why did

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you, the doctor, the medical scientist, the technologist,
give us these problems when you gave us these powers
to do the very things that we were begging you to do in
the first place?

Technological advances, starting with Prometheus,
can be given blame for our population explosion — both
the enhancement of food supplies and the alleviation of
infant mortality, which in the natural balance was the
way that populations were sustained at some lower
equilibrium. But can you blame anyone for having
provided the measures to save an infant’s life? Can you
blame anyone for applying them? There is such a diffi-
cult dilemma that each of us faces, but again perhaps
projected at a more unconscious level.

We would prefer to escape from the freedom of
choice and from the freedom that these powers offer us.
These are then reflected in other areas. | find it bizarre
how far we have gone in our anxieties about medical
experimentation and the bureaucracy that’s been built
up to provide the last conceivable iota of an almost
impossible-to-define attribution of informed consent.

But so long as human beings are involved in experimen-
tation there are, of course, necessary measures. It’s the
depth to which they've gone in the bureaucratization that
| think does reflect an underlying concern as to whether
we can really cope with the positive consequences of
medical advances.

And of course, biological and other technological
knowledge opens up all kinds of embarrassing ques-
tions. They open up the issue as to whether there are
systematic biological differences among the races.
Here, as in many other areas, it’s the halfway science
and the halfway technology that give us the greatest
difficulty. Those people who would like to make a great
deal out of the speculative possibility of genetic
differences among races don’t know very much genetics.
But even if there was a shred of evidence to support the
hypothesis — and, in fact, at the present time there is
not — how would it matter?

Someone really versed in genetics does not fall
victim to the myth of genetic fatalism — that the con-
stellation of genes that an individual is born with is the
totality of expectation of that individual’s future life. A
skilled person, and a fully developed scientific intellect
in this arena, knows that genetic factors are necessarily
among a great many others that will eventually work
together to determine the final outcome, and the more
we know about genetic difference among individuals, the
more we can do to make those differences irrelevant by
providing the appropriate environmental framework. |
guess the most obvious examples of this you are already
familiar with — diabetes can be repaired with insulin,
rare diseases like phenylketonuria can be repaired with
an appropriate diet, and there are many other examples.

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There are very real concerns that the more we learn
of the biology of human nature, the more we provide
tools for the potential manipulation of the ideas and
ideologies and votes and behavior of large numbers of
people. Certainly, it is in the control of the media that |
myself have the greatest trepidations and see the
greatest opportunities for the humanization of
technological development.

Another terribly important system is the land that
we live on and the environment that we occupy. Here we
know that technological opportunities have arisen
everywhere that enable us to exploit a common resource:
the amenities of nature and the environmental sink into
which inevitable pollutional products can be poured. The
very scale of technological enterprise today is a new
dimension of this problem. Today, unlike 50 years ago,
we recognize that a single corporation is capable of pro-
ducing other products and using energy on such a scale
that the environment of the entire earth might be
influenced by its effluents — that that sink is not
infinite, that is has a finite capacity for absorption,
before you begin to see the toxic wastes and the smog
and the other manifestations of the utilization of that
capital resource. | believe it to be primarily a problem of
economic and political adjustment, about who has the
right to use it, who gets the benefit from its exploitation.
It is also a very deep technological problem and here
again we're at a halfway stage — we worry about smog,
we worry about cancer from toxic chemicals, we do not
have a very well-founded scientific technology of assess-
ment as to just which of these issues, and at what scale,
are really important to our health, and which of them are
just yesterday’s scare story. Here again, I’m hopeful that
we can get over this halfway stage and come to a more
equitable and rational adjustment of the utilization of
these resources.

In the industrial sphere, the greatest problem is that
of the modification and displacement of work by
technological innovation. It’s not only technological
unemployment — there are all grades of this. There’s
technoiogical obsolescence; there’s the assembly line
motif that condemns people to an alienation from their
product, the removal from their sense of involvement
with the particular fruits of their own labor.

Again, | believe this is very much a halfway
technology, and that particularly in the arena of the
communications and electronic technologies with which
your firm is associated, where we have the greatest
opportunities to make work that much more creative on
the part of a multitude of people. Meantime, we face an
impasse.

In the economic discussions yesterday, | had hoped
that someone would make a more careful calculation as
to whether it was the inappropriate price of labor —
Peter Jay said “a price of labor above the market clear-
ing price” — whether that was really nearly as important
as the resistance of labor to technological innovations of
any kind because we have not really found the right
social and political and economic formulas to maintain a
sense of security of life in the face of that kind of tech-
nological change. My own belief is that resistance is far
more costly and prevents the remedies of increased pro-
ductivity that would alter the clearing price of labor.
These are problems raised by technology that cannot be
answered by technologists.

Perhaps it is the very process of economic progress,
of economic change itself that poses our most serious
problems. Here again, we all share a profound dilemma. |
think alt of us really know and believe that it is not at the
levels of the utmost economic deprivation and oppres-
sion, but on those intervals when reform has begun,
when economic improvement has begun, when we have
individuals who are beginning to receive an education at
some scale and an exposure to the opportunities of
modern economic society — that it’s those rising expec-
tations that are the most explosive from the point of
view of maintaining some degree of political stability.
Since the whole point of technological introduction is
the improvement of economic productivity and of
economic conditions anywhere, this is a dilemma that |
see no immediate answer to. | can only hope that we
find the microscopic ways of dealing with such conflicts
place by place, people by people; that can avert the
explosions of frustrated expectations. Technologists
will still be blamed for it.

The very complexity of the technological industrial
system, on the other hand, makes it even more vulner-
able to political dissidents and insurgents. Small
numbers of people can bring a technological society toa
halt by going at its communication systems, at its power
supplies, at its airlines. There are such manifest points
of vulnerability and so few people. We have built
systems that seem to be designed to make us less
robust and less able to withstand assaults from small
numbers of dissatisfied members of it.

There are ways, | believe, in almost every one of
these spheres to combine approaches of technological
with those of political and social amelioration. There’s
not nearly enough discourse between those spheres, as
I’ve already illustrated, | believe, with respect to our
approaches to weapons control. Perhaps the greatest
opportunity that | foresee is precisely in the area of
communications, and I’ve written about that before this
week, so it was not invented for your benefit. And here |
think there are options, there are alternatives that we
ought to contemplate. It’s not easy for any individual or
group of individuals to make the guiding decisions about
the direction of these technologies — they’re usually in

Wednesday, April 29— Second Session

response to market forces outside. But there is some
possibility of using one’s own ingenuity in certain direc-
tions versus others.

Now I'll offer some contrasts: Much of television is
rubbish, and almost all of it dissatisfies everybody —
primarily, | think, because the basic technology and
economics of the system have necessitated, during what
| hope is a transition period, a highly centralized produc-
tion of material sent out over the air for limited periods
of time. You catch it as catch can. You have only a few
competing producers. The eletromagnetic spectrum is
just too precious for it to be readily partitioned to a large
number of competing channels, and there are just a
certain number that are there.

We therefore have not had that much avenue for
pluralistic and discriminating subscriber choice in that
domain. One person’s joy is another person’s rubbish. |
think one has to take some account of that, but there
simply is not room for very much variety, for response to
very much pluralism, in a broadcast-oriented system of
mass communications. The contrast of that is cable
television, the video cassette versus the video disc. The
video disc is a product which has a high cost of initial
entry. You can replicate it over and over again, but there
will be much more limited numbers of them, and the con-
sumer, the subscriber, can't copy them for himself,
which | suppose is one of the reasons that it’s been pro-
pounded. There is an ultimate loss of control in some of
these uses of mass communications as compared to
others, which | think does deserve some orientation of
one’s technological ingenuity.

Prestel is the most magnificent, positive exempli-
fication of the the technological possibilities that these
new communication technologies offer. It’s not a very
big leap to think of that becoming universal access to
universal knowledge, that we really have the technology
by which it’s possible for everyone to be in touch with
the world brain, with the community of human know-
ledge, accessible through a wide variety of routes,
available to every subscriber from the kindergartener,
the first grader, up to the engineer and scientist, with
means to access that library of knowledge and to get to
it at every level of educational inquiry that one wished to
have. It’s tantalizing to see such fragments of this
readily available and to see how slowly, primarily for
reasons that have nothing to do with the technology,
such ventures are moving in this country. But they will
arrive — they surely will.

Digital communications for similar systems may, |
hope, evoke a new literacy. I’m one who believes that we
have been tyrannized by the telephone and that the myth
of instantaneous accessibility through this instrument
has let us forget that it puts us at the mercy of one or
two or three layers of secretaries who have to then

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schedule our calls, hold people back, and the game of
telephone tag, unless you're in a position to change the
rules of the game at any particular moment — makes
this one of the slower forms of communication. Then,
when you’ve got it, you have no record of it. It’s very
difficult to prove your authenticity of telephonic
communication. It comes on the fly; it’s an uninter-
ruptable s¢ream, as | am afraid mine is to you, soll
conclude shortly.

The alternative vision is an extension of the mail,
but one which through electronic media makes the
dissemination of messages instantaneous. But more
important than that, it’s multi-point to multi-point at the
easy will and interest of the users. If you wish to
embrace a larger community of critics and commen-
tators on your own work, it’s extremely easy to do that
through those media. It may put more of us closer to our
own verbal productions, taking us away from the tyranny
of our secretaries, transcribers and stenotypists and so
forth, where we inevitably lose a good deal of the detail
that we had wished to insert and it’s just too much
bother to go through 14 drafts of a letter or acom-
munique and so we just let it stand. And it’s so much
bother to have these looked at by the variety of other
critics and commentators who deserve to come into it.

| think we have here an instance of what might be
the most creative and humanly oriented development of
technology, as against a variety of other alternatives.
And | think ail of us here have something to say about
those options.

Just one final word: There are many technologies,
many in the biological sphere, but all of them provoke a
certain amount of anxiety and concern, primarily by
people who don’t understand them very well, but ina
number of areas these have already provoked demands
for government intervention for regulating their spread.
My plea is to avoid the multiplication of victimless
crimes by diffuse and not very well specified anxieties
about such technologies. There are very few of them
that, if used in private by untrammeled private individ-
uals, and do not involve harm and damage to other
specific individuals, would really warrant the level of
policing and control that is sometimes invoked. The
development of large categories of victimless crimes and
of an entrenched and growing bureaucracy to control
them is, in my view, a danger much more serious than
what they appear to be addressed to.

There is an enormous educational role for all these
new technologies that may bring individual people back
to some sense of understanding and control of those
technologies themselves, and it is this self-referential
use of these technologies that | would advocate to
emphasize their most human applications.

Thank you.

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