Untitled Document

Friday May 18 2001, Isla Vista Theater, UCSB
Discussant: Paul Hansma, Physics Department
Discussant: Wade Clark Roof, Religious Studies Department

All text below is in unrevised form exactly as presented. Do not cite without permission of author.

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This talk will be about the practical problems of using modern technology to improve the human condition. All over the world, and especially in Africa, poor people are suffering abominably. Modern technology ought to be able to help them. To make this happen, science should supply the means and religion should supply the motivation. If the miseries of the poor, in Africa and elsewhere, are to be alleviated, tools derived from science and ethical principles derived from religion are both essential. This is an area where science and religion can fruitfully work together, arousing the conscience of mankind to help the poor and providing the resources to do the job effectively. Now I tell you a cautionary tale about a well-meaning effort that was made fifty years ago to help the poor in Africa.

1. Kongwa
Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, nobody has heard of Kongwa. Fifty years ago in England, Kongwa was in the news every day. Kongwa is a small town in Tanzania, then the British colony of Tanganyika. It lies six degrees south of the equator and three thousand feet above sea level, in the Central Highlands of Tanzania. In 1945 it was chosen as one of the main sites of the African groundnuts scheme. The groundnuts scheme was a grandiose project for growing groundnuts, known to Americans as peanuts, on virgin lands in East Africa. The scheme was launched at the end of World War Two with great fanfare and high hopes. Four historical factors combined to make the scheme attractive to colonial administrators in Africa and to the public in Britain. First, the impending demobilization of large numbers of African soldiers who had helped defeat the Italian and German armies in Africa. These soldiers had become expert in handling machinery of all kinds, and needed opportunities to put their skills to work in the civilian economies of their homelands. Second, the existence of great quantities of surplus earth-moving equipment that had been used in the African campaigns to build roads and airfields and was now lying derelict on old battle-fields. Third, the need for a high-protein staple crop that would help to feed the rapidly growing populations of East Africa. Fourth, the existence of large areas of scrub jungle, left untouched by the white settlers who had appropriated most of the good agricultural land for their own farms.

Politicians in London and soldiers in Africa shared a dream. They dreamed that the skills acquired by the Africans in six years of war could be put to better use in the pursuits of peace, to create a prosperous economy in East Africa based on mechanized agriculture. Given large areas of land, with the machines to make it productive and the skills to operate the machines, the Africans could build a modern economy independent of the white settlers. This was a seductive dream, especially for the Attlee government that came to power in Britain in 1945 after defeating Winston Churchill. The Attlee government freed India and intended to dismantle gradually what was left of the British Empire. It was a socialist government. In the year 1945 when the groundnuts scheme was launched, socialism was riding high. The wartime economy of Britain had been effectively socialistic and had functioned well. The white settlers in India and Africa were symbols of a discredited and oppressive capitalism. The transfer of power in the territories of the Empire would be a transfer from the old capitalist regime of white settlers to new socialist regimes of native Indians and Africans. The architects of the groundnuts scheme saw themselves as natural allies of the new generation of African leaders, united in contempt for the white settlers and in hope for a glorious socialist future. In those days, while the sun was slowly setting on the British Empire, it was normal for colonial administrators to be socialists. For the leaders of the government in London, the groundnut scheme provided a unique opportunity to demonstrate the blessings of socialism to the Africans before setting them free.

As the years went by, news from the front lines of the groundnuts campaign trickled back to England, and the news was not good. It took a long time to organize the transport of surplus war equipment to East Africa and to build adequate roads to the areas where it was to be used. Much of the equipment, when it eventually arrived, was found to be unusable. After the work of land-clearing began, it turned out that tree-stumps were unexpectedly resistant to mechanical digging. Many of the stumps had to be shattered with high explosives and excavated by hand. The progress of stump-clearing was so slow that only one-tenth of the area intended for agriculture was cleared. After the decision was made to go ahead with the planting of groundnuts on the reduced area, a final disaster struck. The removal of the natural vegetation made the underlying soil unfit for any sort of agriculture. A single season of exposure to the tropical sun converted the soil into laterite, a hard material resembling baked clay or brick. After the soil was baked, it could not be ploughed and groundnuts could not be planted. In the end, the total harvest of groundnuts was less than a hundredth of the quantity predicted by the planners. The scheme was quietly abandoned and the soldiers went home to their villages, leaving nothing behind but rusting machines and patches of baked red clay which had once been forests.

After the collapse of the project, the government set up a commission of enquiry to investigate the causes of failure. Many mistakes were identified, two of which were fatal. First, the decision to launch the project was made by people ignorant of the ecology of East Africa. Any competent expert in tropical forestry, or any local farmer familiar with the region, could have predicted the failure. The organizers of the project were not only ignorant of ecology but unaware of the depth of their ignorance. They never thought of asking for the advice of experts before plunging ahead. It would not have been difficult to find competent experts. Groundnuts were then, and still are today, successfully grown in many parts of Africa where climate and soils are suitable. But the organizers were politicians, dazzled by the political advantages of the project and unconcerned with technical details.
Their second fatal mistake was their failure to listen to bad news when it came. From beginning to end of the project, there were plenty of reports that things were not going well, plenty of opportunities for redirecting efforts or for cutting losses. But leaders of the project would not listen because for them failure was unthinkable. That generation of politicians and soldiers had learned too well the lessons of World War Two. After all, we have beaten Hitler, they said, and we can beat the African jungle too. They failed to understand that the African jungle was a more sophisticated enemy than Hitler. They planned the groundnut scheme like the invasion of Europe in 1944, as a military campaign. Once the scheme was launched, there would be no second thoughts and no whispers of defeat. So, when the bad news came, it was unheard or ignored. The project was administered without any regular procedures for assessing progress and reporting failures. There was no way for the leaders to learn from failures and change plans in timely fashion. Since small failures along the way were unacknowledged, the project ran blindly ahead to its catastrophic end.

Besides the mistakes that the government commission of enquiry identified, there was a third mistake that the commission did not include within its terms of reference. The third mistake was philosophical rather than technical. The philosophy of the organizers was enlightened despotism. They knew what was good for the Africans, and they intended to give the Africans what was good for them. They did not ask whether, even if the project had been technically successful, the majority of Africans would have considered it good. Would the conversion of large areas of virgin jungle to mechanized agriculture have done more good than harm, in the long run, to the local African economies? The answer to this question was not obvious, and the only people who could have answered it authoritatively were the Africans. Since the project failed, we shall never know what their answer would have been.

Almost two hundred years earlier, Benjamin Franklin gave a clear answer to the same question, [Allan, 2000]. His answer was negative. Franklin was at that time, for the last ten years before the outbreak of the American revolution, living in London as an agent of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for commercial and political dealings with British authorities. He was an active member of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London, as well as the American Philosophical Society which he had helped to found in Philadelphia. The London society encouraged inventions and manufactures by offering financial subsidies and prizes to inventors and entrepreneurs. The prizes were usually available to all subjects of the king in England or America, but they were often targeted to subsidize colonial enterprises that the society considered desirable.

When Franklin first joined the London society in 1755, he was an enthusiastic supporter of its efforts to encourage invention, which he saw as complementary to the efforts of his own Philosophical Society in America. But as the years went by and the relations between the colonies and Britain deteriorated, his attitude to the London society became more critical. He never openly disagreed with the society, and remained a member after leaving London to fight for American independence. He was a member in good standing, all through the war of independence and afterwards until his death. But he recorded privately, in the margin of a book, his true feelings about the system of prizes and subsidies offered by the society: "What you call Bounties given by Parliament and the Society are nothing more than Inducements offered to us, to induce us to leave Employments that are more profitable and engage in such as would be less so without your Bounty; to quit a Business profitable to ourselves and engage in one as shall be profitable to you; this is the true Spirit of all your Bounties". Franklin wrote these words in 1770, six years before the outbreak of the war that ended the British Empire in America. The same words might have been written by a thoughtful African businessman in Kenya or Tanzania, contemplating the possible consequences of the groundnuts scheme, if the scheme had been carried through according to plan, a few years before the end of the British Empire in Africa.

2. Two Questions
This talk will be trying to answer two questions. First, can we pursue high-tech science and technology without widening the gap between rich and poor? Second, is there a practical way to combine technological progress with social justice as we move into the future? These are the crucial questions that must be answered, if we want the public to believe that science and technology have anything to do with social justice.

At present our society is polarized into two communities, a community of technophiles who believe in the pursuit of high technology as an end in itself without much regard for social justice, and a community of humanitarians who believe in the pursuit of social justice as an end in itself without much regard for science. There is not much overlap between the two communities. I happen to belong to both, and that is why I ask these questions. I hold it to be ethically unacceptable to tolerate the gross inequalities that prevail in the world today, between rich and poor countries and between rich and poor citizens of individual countries. And I hold it to be intellectually unacceptable to abandon the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the technological power that scientific knowledge inevitably brings with it. Both our ethical and our intellectual ideals must be sustained, if we are to fulfil our obligations as stewards of a vulnerable planet. So we must confront the question, whether the demands of ethics and of intellectual freedom are compatible. I do not find it fruitful to discuss these questions in the abstract, arguing from general principles. We are dealing with human problems that can best be understood by examining particular examples. I will look at a series of case-histories, illustrating ways in which well-meaning attempts to improve the human condition with technology can fail or succeed. At the end I will try to deduce some useful lessons from the failures and successes. If we can understand what went wrong and what went right, we may have a better chance of avoiding failures and achieving successes.

3. Solar Energy
I shall talk next about a project called Solar Electric Light Fund or SELF for short. This is a private foundation based in Washington and run by a young man called Bob Freling. The project is still growing and we don't yet know whether it will be a success or a failure. It is certainly a success in the places where it is operating, in eleven different countries. It is operating in villages in remote regions far from electric power grids, in Western China, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Nepal, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Uganda, Vietnam, Brazil. Villages in several more countries will soon be added to the list. That is the good news. The bad news is that the project is not autocatalytic. Although it is operating well in each individual village, it does not spread spontaneously to neighboring villages. If to be successful means to make a major contribution to the welfare of a country, then SELF is not yet a success. To make a major contribution, it must learn to spread from one village to another like an infectious virus.

The business plan of SELF is to supply villages with solar panels that generate electricity from sunlight. Panels are installed on individual homes, together with storage batteries and switches so that electricity generated in daytime can be used at night. There is no need for an electric distribution system. Every home is supplied independently. In a typical system, each home receives fifty watts, enough to operate a couple of fluorescent lights, a radio and a radio-telephone, and perhaps a black-and-white television. The capital cost of the system is about five hundred dollars per home. The panels are not cheap. They are standard commercial products, engineered to operate reliably for many years in all kinds of weather. Before they are supplied to a village, the villagers must contract to pay for them at market prices. SELF gives credit so that the payment is spread out over four years. SELF also gives the villagers training so that they can maintain and repair the equipment. In the regions where SELF operates, the standard fuel is usually kerosene, which is expensive because it has to be hauled for large distances over bad roads. The electricity supplied by SELF replaces kerosene, so that the solar equipment pays for itself in about four years by saving money that would otherwise have been spent on kerosene. After the four-year period of repayment of the loan to SELF, the village has a free supply of electricity.

In the villages where SELF is operating, there is a substantial improvement in the quality of life. The most important change is the easy communication by radio-telephone with the outside world. The village is no longer isolated but is part of a wider community. Electric light in the homes allows children more time for study and home-work, so that they do better in school. Adults are also able to work more at night, either educating themselves or making things to use or sell. But Bob Freling, the moving spirit of SELF, feels strongly that these local improvements are not enough. Much more needs to be done if SELF is to fulfil its promise. Freling is not a technical expert but a linguist. He is fluent in many languages and takes the trouble to understand the local cultures of the people he is dealing with. He is more interested in the human aspects of SELF than in the technology. He knows that humans need larger visions to inspire them, if they are to break out of the traditional routines that hold them down and keep them poor. Fifty watts of light and a telephone are not enough.
A few years ago, SELF started a new venture at Myeka Secondary School, a rural public high-school in a district of South Africa without access to electric power or telephones. Enough solar collectors were installed to run twenty computers, an overhead projector, a satellite link to the internet, and a lot of auxiliary equipment, so that the Myeka children can use the computers and receive the same kind of education as children in the wealthy districts of Durban or Johannesburg. The effect on the children and on the local communities has been dramatic. The children will become employable in the modern economy of South Africa and can hope to find high-paying jobs. Melusi Swane, the school principal, is working hard to ensure that children and teachers make good use of the equipment.

Swane is also blowing his trumpet, advertizing the achievements of his school to the South African government and to the world community of educators. As a result of his efforts inside and outside the school, Myeka was chosen as the grand prize winner in a contest organized by the International Solar Energy Society. Two Myeka children who wrote prize-winning essays were invited with their principal to speak and exhibit drawings of the school at an international solar-energy meeting in Mexico City last September. You can see some of their drawings in a booklet published by the International Solar Energy Society, [ISES, 2000]. Myeka is now famous, and is becoming a role model for thousands of schools without access to electricity in South Africa and around the world. This is a very different model for SELF to follow, compared with the small-scale provision of electric light to village homes. The Myeka model needs kilowatts of electricity instead of watts, big inputs of money instead of small loans, big publicity and fanfare instead of quiet obscurity.

Freling welcomes the change in style. He believes the Myeka model is the way to make a major impact on the problems of rural poverty. As he says, big foundations and governments with billions to spend are not interested in electric light, but they are always interested in education. Big foundations find it much more exciting to put solar energy into schools than to put it into homes. It might happen that, with the help of the big foundations, the Myeka model could become auto-catalytic. Every school achieving a success like Myeka could stimulate ten others to raise the money to follow the same model. The big foundations have enough billions to equip them all, if enough competent teachers and principals can be found to staff them. Freling imagines that the sixteen thousand rural schools of South Africa which now have no electricity could follow the Myeka model, bringing high-quality education to every corner of the country, and opening opportunities to every child in every village to share in the growth and the wealth of a modern economy. This is a grand dream, which may or may not come true. But without grand dreams, the poor of the world will not be much helped. Freling knows that SELF must have a grand dream if it is to move the world. The dream of good schooling for every child is a good place to start.

4. Microcredit Banking
At the same time, while SELF has been slowly evolving, a much larger and better known project has been dramatically succeeding, namely the Grameen Bank. You have all probably heard of the Grameen Bank, an enterprise started by Mohammed Yunus, a professor of economics at the university of Chittagong in Bangladesh. To my mind, the most amazing thing about the Grameen Bank is that it was created by a professor of economics. Professors of economics are the last people I would expect to do something sensible in the real world. Yunus had been teaching economic theory to middle-class students at the university while people in villages all around were dying of starvation in a terrible famine. One day he decided that everything he was teaching was irrelevant to the real needs of his people, so he walked out of the class-room and visited the villagers in their homes. He quickly discovered that he could make a big difference to the lives of the villagers by lending them small amounts of money. He began in the village of Jobra by lending a total amount equivalent to 27 US dollars out of his own pocket. The money went to skilled workers who needed only tiny amounts of capital to buy tools and start small enterprises. They used the money well and paid back the loans. That was the beginning of the Grameen Bank. It was autocatalytic from the beginning and grew explosively. Now, twenty-five years later, Yunus finds himself running a billion-dollar operation with over two million borrowers. It has grown far beyond his wildest dreams. Repayment rates have remained consistently above 96 percent.

Yunus has become the leader of a world movement called Microcredit Banking. The basic idea of Microcredit Banking is that you can deal with poverty far more cost-effectively from the bottom up than from the top down. If you work from the bottom up, every dollar that you lend goes directly to help a poor citizen become self-supporting. If you work from the top down, as most banks and international aid agencies are accustomed to do, a large fraction of your dollars go to bureaucrats and middlemen, and only a small fraction trickles down to the poor. Yunus says that his success results mainly from following two simple rules. First, lend to women rather than to men. Second, lend to women in groups of five, and give additional credit to the group only when all five members are repaying what they borrowed. The first rule eliminates most of the drones and parasites from the system. The second rule ensures that each borrower is subject to the discipline imposed by her group.

Up to this point, the Grameen Bank had nothing to do with high technology. Yunus succeeded because he understands human nature, not because he understands technology. But he has recently added an important technical component to the Bank's activities in Bangladesh. The bank lends money to women to buy cellular telephones which provide commercial telephone service to a village. Villagers pay by the minute for use of the telephone, and the owners of the telephone make enough profit to pay back the loan and feed their families. In this way the bank is helping to bring the villages into the modern world as well as helping the villagers to escape from poverty.

After the spectacular success of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, many other countries have tried to copy it, with mixed results. The model generally works better in poor countries than in rich ones. The main difficulty is to find a large staff of full-time professionals, living in the communities that they serve, to administer the local operations of the bank. The professional managers must be educated, honest, impartial, and dedicated to their work. And they must be paid enough to keep them happy. Such people are easy to find in Bangladesh, because there is a big class of educated unemployed to draw from, and the customary wages of clerical workers are very low. In the United States such people are hard to find, even in poor neighborhoods, and a bank specializing in small loans cannot afford to pay them competitive wages. The Grameen Bank model works well in Malaysia and Bolivia, poorly in the United States. Because of the difficulties of staffing, it is easier to help poor people to help themselves in poor countries than in rich countries. Bangladesh was a good place to start, with a poor but literate population, heirs to an ancient civilization.

5. Green and Grey Technology
Rural poverty is one of the great evils of the modern world. The lack of jobs and economic opportunities in villages drives millions of people to migrate from villages into overcrowded cities. The continuing migration causes immense social and environmental problems in the major cities of poor countries. The effects of poverty are most visible in the cities, but the causes of poverty lie mostly in the villages. That is why the Grameen Bank is uniquely important. It is the only institution that directly and successfully attacks the problem of rural poverty by creating wealth and jobs in the villages. It has succeeded where Mao Tse Tung's great leap forward failed. It gives the villagers an economic alternative to migration. It gives them a chance to survive and prosper without uprooting themselves.

The shifting balance of wealth and population between villages and cities is one of the main themes of human history over the last ten thousand years. The shift from villages to cities is strongly coupled with a shift from one kind of technology to another. I find it convenient to call the two kinds of technology green and grey. The adjective green has been appropriated and abused by various political movements, especially in Europe, so I need to explain clearly what I have in mind when I speak of green and grey. Green technology is based on biology, grey technology on physics and chemistry. Roughly speaking, green technology is the technology that gave birth to village communities ten thousand years ago, starting from the domestication of plants and animals, the invention of agriculture, the breeding of goats and sheep and cows and pigs, the manufacture of textiles and cheese and wine. Grey technology is the technology that gave birth to cities and empires five thousand years later, starting from the forging of bronze and iron, the invention of wheeled vehicles and paved roads, the building of ships and war-chariots, the manufacture of swords and guns and bombs. For the first five of the ten thousand years, wealth and power belonged to villages with green technology, and for the second five thousand years wealth and power belonged to cities with grey technology. Beginning about five hundred years ago, grey technology became increasingly dominant, as we learned to build machines using power from winds and water and steam and electricity. In the last hundred years, wealth and power were even more heavily concentrated in cities as grey technology raced ahead. As cities became richer, rural poverty deepened.

This sketch of the last ten thousand years of human history puts the problem of rural poverty into a new perspective. If rural poverty is a consequence of the unbalanced growth of grey technology, it is possible that a shift in the balance back from grey to green might cause rural poverty to disappear. That is my dream. I will now try to persuade you that the dream may not be totally unrealistic. During the last fifty years we have seen explosive progress in the scientific understanding of the basic processes of life, and in the last twenty years this new understanding has given rise to explosive growth of green technology. The new green technology allows us to breed new varieties of animals and plants as our ancestors did ten thousand years ago, but now a hundred times faster, taking a decade instead of a millennium to create a new crop-plant. Guided by a precise understanding of genes and genomes instead of by trial and error, we can within a few years modify plants so as to give them improved yield, improved nutritive value or improved resistance to pests and diseases.

Within a few more decades, as the continued exploration of genomes gives us more complete knowledge of the architecture of living creatures, we shall be able to design new species of microbes and plants according to our needs. The way will then be open for green technology to do more cheaply and more cleanly many of the things that grey technology can do, and also to do many things that grey technology has failed to do. Green technology could replace most of our existing chemical industries, and a large part of our mining and manufacturing industries. Green technology could achieve a more complete recycling of waste products and worn-out machines, with great benefit to the environment. An economic system based on green technology could come much closer to the goal of sustainability, using sunlight instead of fossil fuels as the primary source of energy. New species of termite could be engineered to chew up derelict automobiles instead of houses, and new species of tree could be engineered to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into liquid fuels instead of cellulose.

Before genetically modified termites and trees can be allowed to help solve our economic and environmental problems, great arguments will rage over the possible damage they may do. Many of the people who call themselves green are passionately opposed to green technology. But in the end, if the technology is developed carefully and deployed with sensitivity to human feelings, it is likely to be accepted by most of the people who will be affected by it, just as the equally unnatural and unfamiliar green technologies of milking cows and ploughing soils and fermenting grapes were accepted by our ancestors long ago. I do not claim that the political acceptance of green technology will be quick or easy. I claim only that green technology has enormous promise for preserving the balance of nature on this planet as well as for relieving human misery. Nobody can predict how long it may take to try out the new technology in a thousand different ways and measure its costs and benefits. Within the next century we should know whether it is a grand life-saver or a grand illusion.

What has this dream of a resurgent green technology to do with the problem of rural poverty? In the past, green technology has always been rural, based in farms and villages rather than in cities. In the future it will pervade cities as well as countriside, factories as well as forests. It will not be entirely rural. But it will still have a large rural component. After all, the cloning of Dolly occurred in a rural animal-breeding station in Scotland, not in an urban laboratory in Silicon Valley. Green technology will use land and sunlight as its primary sources of raw materials and energy. Land and sunlight cannot be concentrated in cities but are spread more or less evenly over the planet. When industries and technologies are based on land and sunlight, they will bring employment and wealth to rural populations. It is fortunate that sunlight is most abundant in tropical countries where a large fraction of the world's people live and where rural poverty is most acute. Since sunlight is distributed more equitably than coal and oil, green technology can be a great equalizer, helping to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries.

6. The World Economic Forum
My last story will be a short one. In January 2001 my wife and I were lucky enough to be invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Davos was wonderful. An amazing collection of bright people of all kinds, old and young, not only business leaders but artists and writers and musicians and scientists and politicians gathered from all over the world. The formal sessions were brief. For most of the time we were free to walk and talk and get to know one another as we chose. The most impressive person we met by chance when we shared a table with her at lunch, at a ski-lodge high on the mountain above Davos. She is a thirty-year-old German lady, Sabriye Tenberken, who runs a school for blind children in Tibet. She is herself totally blind but became an expert on Asian languages when she was a student in Bonn. She became especially interested in Tibetan literature, and in order to study it she invented for her own convenience a system of Braille transliteration adapted to the Tibetan script. The Tibetan script was borrowed from India and not from China. It is syllabic and not ideographic, so that the characters can be efficiently transliterated into the sixty-three characters of Braille. Using an optical scanning system hooked up to a Braille printer with her own software, she was able to transcribe the documents into Braille so that she could read them conveniently. She continued her study of the ancient manuscripts and wrote a thesis.

Meanwhile, somebody in Tibet heard what she had done and invited her to come to Tibet to explain her system. When she arrived in Tibet, she discovered that Tibet has the highest incidence of blindness of any country in the world. Large numbers of children are blind because of the strong ultraviolet radiation from the high-altitude sun, the dusty dry winds, the generally unhealthy conditions and the lack of competent doctors. Many blind children are hidden by their families, never go to school, and have no chance to make anything of their lives. So she went to the Tibetan authorities and said, I intend to stay here and teach these children to read and write. It took time to persuade the authorities that she meant what she said. But she persisted, she started her school and it is now flourishing. The children do not stay long in her school. She teaches them intensive reading and writing, elementary mathematics and geography, and after six months or a year they can be mainstreamed. They are transferred to ordinary schools where they mix with sighted children while continuing to read and write in Braille. This gives them a chance to lead normal lives in Tibetan society. Tenberken has been in Tibet for three years and plans to stay at most for five more years, by which time she will have trained enough Tibetan teachers to run the school without her.

The theme of the Davos meeting was "Globalization with a Human Face". The big business tycoons and politicians were struggling with the question, how to enable the poorer half of the world to share the benefits of high technology and global market-place. There was much talk of Africa and AIDS. Four heads of state were there, from Senegal, Nigeria, Tanzania and the Republic of South Africa. Bill Gates came with a gift of a hundred million dollars for development and testing of AIDS vaccines. Everyone was agreed that globalization by itself is not the answer to Africa's problems. Somehow globalization has to be combined with local initiatives that are responsive to local traditions and local needs. Nobody offered us a clear picture of how this should be done. I was thinking, "While you big shots are failing in your efforts to use modern technology to help the poor, this young woman, Sabriye Tenberken, has found a way to do it". It seems that the most effective way to deal with social problems is to work from the bottom up and not from the top down.

7. Conclusions
It is time now to summarize what we may have learned from the stories that I told you. I asked two questions at the beginning, whether high-tech technology widens the gap between rich and poor, and whether there is a practical way to combine technological progress with social justice. I told you six stories, the African groundnuts scheme, the solar electric light project, the Myeka high-school, the Grameen Bank, the resurgence of green technology, and the school for blind children. One of them is a story of failure, the groundnuts. One is a magnificent success, the Grameen Bank. Four are still at too early a stage for us to pronounce them successes or failures. The four doubtful cases are solar electric light, green technology, and the two schools in Africa and Tibet. Unfortunately, the stories do not give a clear answer to my questions. The big failure and the big success are not high-tech projects. The four high-tech stories are still in the doubtful category. Many more experiments need to be tried before we can answer my questions with a definite yes or no. We who believe in science and in social justice still have work to do to prove our case.

Although the stories do not answer my questions, they give us important lessons to keep in mind when we are planning new projects. The first lesson that emerges from the stories is the clear superiority of bottom-up projects to top-down projects. The most conspicuously successful, the Grameen Bank, is also the most conspicuously bottom-up. The Grameen Bank is a classic case of a single individual, in a remote place far from centers of wealth and power, impelled by desperate needs of the people around him, creating an economic system that succeeded where national governments and international organizations had failed. The conspicuous failure was top-down, driven by politicians immersed in large bureaucracies and remote from the problems that they were trying to solve. The ground-nut scheme was a classic case of a remote government, impelled by abstract notions of social improvement, running into an economic and ecological disaster. I conclude from these examples that a bottom-up strategy is one of the keys to success. Any project that aims at the relief of rural poverty should begin with detailed knowledge of the needs of the people it is trying to help. Another lesson that these stories teach is the necessity of step-by-step experiments. Successful projects mostly grow from multiple small-scale experiments designed to find out what works well and what works badly. Spectacular failures mostly result from big schemes launched without preliminary trials. Step-by-step experiments give us the best chance to avoid disastrous failures and find unexpected paths to success. A third lesson of my stories is the necessity of collaboration between diverse enterprises and diverse groups of people. No single enterprise can hope to solve a deep human problem such as rural poverty. If we are ever to solve this problem, it can only be by a working alliance of people who are experts in different areas. In the stories I have told you, we saw three different approaches to the problem. First, the approach of Myeka high-school, emphasizing high-quality local education as the key to progress. Second, the approach of Grameen Bank, emphasizing local economic initiative. Third, the approach of Monsanto and other biotechnology companies, emphasizing science and technology. All three approaches are needed, and they will be most effective if they are combined in a world-wide alliance. The force that should hold the alliance together and give it strength is ethics, the shared conviction of all parties that the gross inequities in the existing distribution of wealth around the world are ethically intolerable.

Allan, D.G.C., "Dear and Serviceable to Each Other: Benjamin Franklin and the Royal Society of Arts", Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 144, 245-266, (2000). The Franklin quote is on page 260.

Dyson, F.J., "The Sun, the Genome and the Internet", [Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1999].

ISES, International Solar Energy Society, "Solar Schools, Brighter Future", [ISES Headquarters, Freiburg, Germany, 2000].

Tenner, E., "Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences", [New York, Alfred Knopf, 1996].

Yunus, M., "The Grameen Bank", Scientific American, 281, No.5, 114-119, (November 1999).

It is an honor to share the stage with Freeman Dyson.

He talked about the necessity of step-by-step experiments and about finding unexpected paths to success. I would like to underscore these points from my limited perspective as someone who builds scientific apparatus.

I work in Broida Hall, named after Herb Broida, who was the faculty leader in planning the building. He was a very active experimentalist and a great mentor for me. The saying of his that has helped me the most was “you should do every experiment as poorly as possible.” Let me give you an example to understand what he meant by that. I had some light emitting tunneling junctions and wanted to know what the spectrum was. Herb Broida said he would help me so I went, junctions in hand, to look at his spectrometer and started thinking about how to design some little fixture that would hold the tunnel junctions and focus the light from the tunnel junctions on the entrance slit of the spectrometer. But, Herb came in and said, “let’s try this first.” He took the tunnel junction, he held it against the slit of the spectrometer, and took a spectrum as he held it. Now, it might be nice to say that this spectrum then appeared in a publication, but it didn’t. What it did do was to reveal that the light was strongly polarized and that we would have to be careful in designing a fixture to do the measurement correctly to take this into account. So, we learned something important by doing the experiment as poorly as possible.

I learned a similar lesson from Swami Satchidananda who said he had shared a stage with Buckminster Fuller in a conference on technological innovation. The Swami said that his own talk had praised the benefits of innovation, telling how important it is, and how people doing innovation should be very focused on their work to avoid making mistakes. Buckminster Fuller spoke next and said that he agreed with everything that the Swami had said except for one thing on which he was dead wrong. That one thing was being careful to avoid mistakes. Buckminster Fuller said he believed that the key to innovation was making as many mistakes as possible, as rapidly as possible! And, of course, learning from all those mistakes.

These two teachings have been enormously useful to me in my own research, building microscopes. We know that we can never build the perfect microscope on the first try, so instead we work to build something simple quickly. We then try it, find out what the problems are - and this is the key point - the problems are often not what we anticipated. Then, we attempt to solve the problems we find in the first prototype with a second prototype. Then, we attempt to solve the problems we find in the second prototype with a third prototype. And so on. It usually takes us about seven prototypes to get to something that satisfies us. As Freeman Dyson said: “Step-by-step experiments give us the best chance to avoid disastrous failures and find unexpected paths to success”. For us the path is always unexpected. If we knew where we would end up, we’d start there!

So, how would Herb Broida’s and Buckminster Fuller’s language apply to Freeman Dyson’s stories? In the case of the Grameen bank, Yunas began by lending out a total amount equivalent to twenty-seven dollars out of his own pocket. That sounds to me like as poorly as possible! He could make mistakes such as lending to single men or to family groups quickly and at not too much cost because the loans were small. What he finally came up with, loaning to groups of five women, sounds to me like the kind of elegant, evolved solution that comes from making a lot of mistakes as rapidly as possible. It is not something that would come out of a board meeting, even if the board members were wise and kind.

In contrast, the spectacular failure involving groundnuts started on such a grand scale it was not possible to make mistakes rapidly enough and learn from those mistakes. Freeman Dyson talked about the two fatal mistakes that were finally acknowledged. Looked at from the perspective of Herb Broida and Buckminster Fuller, we might say that it involved too many resources and took too long to make just two recognized mistakes. They didn’t do experiments as poorly as possible and they didn’t make as many mistakes as possible as rapidly as possible and learn from those mistakes.

I’d like to tell you one final story that illustrates these points. Once, after I gave a talk about building microscopes and mentioned making mistakes rapidly, a student came up and said he wished he had heard my talk two years earlier. His thesis project was to measure the light emission from a certain low temperature phenomenon. He built a very elaborate set up involving photon counting so that he could be sure to get the measurement even if the signal was very weak. This apparatus took him about a year and a half to build. The first time he tried it he said there was so much light from the phenomenon it completely overloaded the photon counting equipment! He ended up needing to put neutral density filters that cut out most of the light to even do the experiment. He wished that he had put a simple photodiode down into liquid Helium and done the experiment as poorly as possible before developing the grand apparatus.

So, in summary, I’ve found it useful to do experiments as poorly as possible and to make as many mistakes as possible as rapidly as possible. Since I make a lot of mistakes anyway, and not just in my research, thinking in this way is a great comfort to me. So, I hope it may be helpful to you in some of your endeavors.

Thank you.

First of all, I want to applaud Freeman Dyson for his provocative presentation. It's heartening to have a distinguished physicist speak to us in so engaging and straight-forward a manner. And more than that, there is the human compassion that comes through, his genuine concern for the impact of technology on people. He's not just a physicist, but a humanist who wants to see his profession take some responsibility for it scientific advances and the decisions those advances open up affecting our lives.

I think he has it right about religion -- religion is less a set of beliefs or propositions to which we give accent than a living tradition in which we breathe and have our being. It has more to do with a sense of self, and human sensitivities, with strategies of moral action for dealing with the contingencies of life than with doctrine. Worries about having the right belief is a peculiarly Western obsession, and one which sidetracks us from religion as a lived reality. Certainly an emphasis on dogma sidetracks us from two realities of life that are inescapable to religion, and indeed, to science as well ---that is, uncertainty and mystery. Neither religion nor science is engaged in a zero-sum game in which the more we know, the less uncertainty we face. The unpredicatability and incomprehensibility of life assures a need for answers, if only approximate answers, to the big questions we as mortals have; and though many of us once thought that science would build up a storehouse of knowledge that would in time reduce uncertainty, we now know better. "Ever time science uncovers one mystery," says Dyson, "it uncovers two others. The ultimate basis of physical reality is as mysterious as the ultimate basis of religious experience"

As a humanist I appreciate having a physicist set some limits on reductionism. What that means is that scientific landscapes are not fully mapped and not likely to be. It also means that the ultimate powers religion gives names -- whether those names be God, gods, goddesses, spirits, metaphysical principles, Nature, the Force -- those powers continue to confront us -- indeed, provoke awe and wonder -- even in the face of modern secularity. Having established there's no shortage of mystery and uncertainty in either science or religion, then these two have a sufficient basis in common that Dyson looks for a partnership: Science and technology will supply the means to improve human conditions, religion and ethics will supply the motivation. In his case-histories, he tells us about efforts at applying technology to human needs, and underscores that we can best grasp how technology and values come together, or fail to come together, by looking at particular social settings where the spotlight is on real human beings and the consequences of this or that particular decision.

Can we pursue high-tech science and technology without widening the gap between the rich and the poor? Is there a practical way to combine technological progress with social justice as we move into the future? These are the big questions that concern Dyson. Or as he says, are the demands of ethics and the pursuit of technology and its application compatible? I of course share his conviction about the importance of these two coming together, and also share his frustration about how, and under what circumstances this can happen.

A few comments and questions:

First, our speaker is cautious in his view of technology and science. Every technological advance has unanticipated, and perhaps unwelcome consequences. To be sure, technology liberates humankind from the constraints of the past, but it opens up an uncertain future. What he calls for is a close monitoring of technology's social impact, a careful watching over step-by-step experiments. Find out what works well and what doesn't. Find out if people are in fact advanced by technology, or whether they have become only a market creating a business empire for others? In effect, we must build in a feed-back loop that evaluates, critiques, revises the course of technological development. Reflexivity is involved, I suppose, although Dyson does not use that word.

My question is: To what extent can we monitor and control technology, especially at the hands of corporate capitalism? Practical knowledge, of course, is one answer. We learn from mistakes. We look at the consequences of technological applications, one step at a time. But is it possible to do more -- to institutionalize reflexivity? That is, can the scientific community and the corporate enterprises connected with it impose limits upon itself? I don't know. But it would seem to be an imperative given the pace at which technology races ahead and a situation where control of knowledge is increasingly a major power struggle. In the university we say we are concerned about human subjects -- how our research might affect people. Might we really get serious about human subjects? Serious enough as a society, indeed as a global society, that we establish monitoring systems powerful enough to enforce some control over technology in the interest of human betterment?

Or if that seems too much like censorship, can we at least have better warning systems? Dyson says in his book that the function of technology assessment is not to measure but to warn – to identify snags and traps that lie ahead. The problem of course is that when technology and corporate capitalism become conjoined who has sufficient power to hold them in check? We need to create institutional structures that mount and channel grass-roots pressures on the technology/corporate capitalism complex in the interest of human needs and social justice, and most importantly, to encourage putting scientific skills to work in directions of human progress. In effect, we must try to direct the course of evolution itself, not leave it simply to chance. Nuclear winter and the possibilities of human genetic engineering are but two potential nightmares that lie ahead if we don’t step in and set limits.

Second, Dyson expresses a great deal of hope that religious values and teachings can provide direction for our future. I share that hope as well. The moral and ethical teachings of the world's religions are immensely resourceful –- they have more shaping potential than many of us who are agnostics and skeptics readily admit. As the world becomes more global there will be more encounters among the religions, and hopefully more agreement about the values and ethics that make up a common humanity. Though one never knows, militant religious nationalism and conflicts between faiths loom equally likely on the horizon in many part of the world as well.

My worry is not the religious values and ethics themselves, but the choices and interpretations people make of them. Under conditions of modernity traditions become fragmented, that which has been joined together is sundered. What was once taken for granted religiously becomes privatized; old solidarities fall apart and religion becomes more and more a choice, or as we say in the Untied States a personal preference. So the question becomes: Whose religion, whose moral and ethical values will inform us? Or religious values and morality as bound up with what political and economic ideology?

Essentially the question I ask is, how can religion inform debates on technology -- or the public square generally -- when there are so many voices, so many points of view. It might be said that we now face on a global scale what this country has long faced -- learning how to live together in a religiously pluralistic world. But religious pluralism is more than a challenge, it is a human opportunity. The opportunity it afford us, hopefully, is an enlivened debate on moral values and concerns that elevates us from narrow sectarian views, and brings us into a clearer focus of what we share as human beings.

Let me end on a note of optimism. What I have learned from Freeman Dyson -- from this lecture and from his books is that diversity is to be celebrated. It is to be celebrated if for no other reason because it is yet another basis -- along with mystery and uncertainty -- on which religion and science come together. At the extremes religious dogma becomes dogmatism, science becomes scientism -- both becoming rigid and closed as meaning systems. But this need not be. Both religion and science can be open, evolving, responsive -- which means that alliances and changing convergences of views between the two are ever possible. Certainly the interpretive worlds for both religion and science have shifted from time to time in the past, and there is no reason to think this will not happen again. To be sure, challenges still await both, demanding responses we cannot at this time fathom. And therein truly lies our hope -- that our scientific understanding of the universe as well as our interpretations of the transcendent are as Dyson says in his Gifford Lectures, Infinite in All Directions.