Science and Technology

A hundred years ago, on 22 April, poison gas was first used in warfare. Though about 95% of casualties in World War One were caused by explosives, sickness and malnutrition, there is a peculiar horror associated with the use of chemical weapons. It is also true that, apart from isolated examples, World War One was the only instance of the systematic and widespread use of gases in war. As early as 1854, the British Secretary for Science and Art, Lyon Playfair [sic], suggested bombarding the Russians in Crimea with shells filled with cacodyl cyanide, an evil-smelling substance which vapourises...

Martin Thomas’ criticisms of my review of Nicholas Carr’s book on automation ( Solidarity 370) focus on two related issues: the deskilling effects of automation and my rejection of the full automation of safety-critical systems through e.g. driverless cars or pilotless planes. On deskilling, I think there is one misunderstanding and one difference. Firstly, I do not “want to have all traditional skills kept in general use” indefinitely. I am not proposing we return to handloom weaving or horse-drawn carriages. But I doubt that Martin as a maths teacher believes that his students should not...

Eighty-four years ago, John Maynard Keynes wrote: “The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption”, and predicted that that generation’s grandchildren (that is, the “baby boom” generation now in their sixties) would work only three hours a day. Twenty years ago Jeremy Rifkin published a book entitled “The End of Work”, and predicting “a near-workerless world”. Keynes and Rifkin were not wrong about technical progress. The 1930s, despite the slump, saw the start of the modern chemical industry, and modern plastics...

Automation is everywhere. From robots on production lines to the cockpits of planes; from automated market trading to highly skilled medical diagnosis via a whole range of blue and white collar occupations, few jobs seem to be immune to the replacement of human, living labour by computerised systems. One report has recently predicted that as much as 47% of US employment is at risk. This is not just futuristic hype: the US has just gone through a “jobless recovery” from the 2008 crisis. Automation also affects our everyday life outside work. The GPS maps in our phone or car; the algorithms...

According to the authors we are entering a “second machine age”. The first came with the invention and development of the steam engine by James Watt and others in 1775 and now “Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power — the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments — what the steam engine did for muscle power. They’re allowing us to blow past previous limitations and taking us into new territory.” Previously it was thought that computers, despite their prodigious capabilities, were limited at certain tasks particularly those which require...

In April 1915, American newspapers reported that the USA faced a “dye famine”, with only two months’ supply left. This was not a minor inconvenience but threatened the livelihoods of two million workers as dyes were essential in the textile, paint, paper, and printing industries, among others. What had happened? You may recall the Bunsen burner, the Liebig1 condenser, and the Haber2 process from your school days, named after just three of the many world-leading chemists underpinning the German chemical industry, the largest in the world by the outbreak of the Great War. Developing in the 19th...

In her claims that exposure to Facebook is the cause of changes to the brain and thus at the root of a range of behavioural and social problems, Susan Greenfield adopts positions that regularly reappear as science and technology develop (discussed in Solidarity 342 and 343). There is a tendency to blame new technologies for whatever social worries happen to be top of the agenda of social conservatives. Greenfield contrasts internet use with watching television in a group, perhaps forgetting that fifty years ago excessive television watching was being blamed for similar problems to those she...

In her book Mind Change1 (reviewed by John Cunningham in Solidarity 342), Susan Greenfield says “We may be living in an unprecedented era where an increasing number of people are ... learning a new default mind-set ... one of low grade aggression, short attention span and a reckless obsession with the here and now”. The key word in that statement is “may”! The dangers of digital technology have become a major theme of Greenfield’s but what is less known is that this is way outside her area of expertise. This matters because Greenfield is a “public intellectual”, one who is listened to. A...

Films about scientists are a rare occurrence and films about mathematicians are even rarer; it’s not hard to see why. For every Good Will Hunting, there are many more films that are quite unbearable to view, such as the vastly overrated A Beautiful Mind about the life of John Nash. But the Imitation Game is a surprisingly well-made take on the life of the father of computer science, Alan Turing. Predictably the film was lacking in the concrete mathematics, with only vague references to how exactly the Enigma machine worked, or how Turing’s machine was able to crack the code. The film can’t be...

Susan Greenfield is a leading neuroscientist and her book on how the new electronic media, “cybertechnology”, impacts brain development and human behaviour, makes for fascinating and alarming reading. The latest research and statistics are clearly summarised and deftly employed to pursue her analysis. Although the jury is “still out” on many of the issues she raises, it can be said with some degree of certainty that cybertechnology and the culture surrounding it (iPhones, ipads, e-mail, computer games, chat rooms, Facebook, blogs, snapchat, twitter etc.) is impacting on brain development and...