THE NEW SOUTH WALES INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

g r a d u a t i o n  CEREMONY

Friday, 14 May, 1982 - 2.30 p.m.

AN OCCASIONAL ADDRESS

"THE LIMITATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY".

Barry 0. Jones,  MA, LLB,  ACTT, MHR  Shadow Minister for Science & Technology

Mr. Chancellor,  Mr. President, Graduands,  Ladies and Gentlemen, .

I was happy to accept the invitation of Mr. President to deliver

the occasional address at this graduation ceremony. In my role

as Shadow Minister for Science and Technology I am very well

aware of the quality of your graduates, the skills of your staff '

and the contribution you are making not only in the training of

people about to enter professions in an increasingly technological

society, but also those who are already employed and need to

acquire further and updated skills.

I noted with interest in your calendar the words of Sir Isaac Newton

which inspired your motto: .

'The best and safest method of philosophising seems to be, first

to inquire diligently into the properties of things and to

establish these properties by experiment and to proceed later to

hypotheses for the explanation of things themselves1.

After some reflection, and at the risk of committing an impiety

both to the memory of the great scientist and to the Council of

this Institute I am not sure that his order is correct. His .

recipe is appropriate enough for a Newtonian world-view, less so

for an Einsteinian one, and far less so for the Alice in Wonderland

world of quantum mechanics, quarks and black holes. Einstein

would not have proceeded very far if his starting point had been

empiricism. Edward Jenner proceeded empirically with his work on

vaccination against small-pox: he achieved results, and if

pragmatism is the only test to be applied he was vindicated.

2.

Unfortunately,  he didn't understand why he achieved his results

and because he had not mastered the theory it was not possible to

use vaccination against other diseases. That had to wait for

nearly a century,  until the time of Louis Pasteur,  who did

understand the theory and was able to apply it generally. Similarly,

John Logie Baird; whose name is commemorated in Australia's

television awards, reaped no rewards from his invention because

he saw television in the narrow perspective of electrical

engineering (and I hope I don't give offense by saying that),

and not as a problem in physics,  dependent on understanding the

nature of light and sub-atomic particles. Vladimir Zworykin did.

Your Institute was founded in 1965 and became an autonomous body

in 1975. Your student body has increased from an initial

enrolment of 300 in two courses to 8500 studying in more than

20 major undergraduate programmes, while you have significant

numbers in Masters and Graduate Diploma Courses.

Your foundation and rapid growth was part of that educational

revolution which developed at the secondary level of education

after World War II and passed into the tertiary level in the .

late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Enrolments at colleges

of advanced education have increased even more rapidly than at

universities and in April 1981 they had a total enrolment

throughout Australia of more than 165,000 students, compared to

less than 130,000 in universities.

3.

I regret to say that our educational revolution ran out of

steam some time in the 1970s and there are many who say - in

the face of all evidence to the contrary - that we have too

many people in higher education. Our problems are likely to

be exacerbated by the fact that we have too few.

In an increasingly competitive technologically oriented world

Australia faces a double disability. The first disability .

is that high technology industries in Australia are overwhelmingly

and increasingly in foreign hands. The. second disability is

that the participation rates of young Australians in the later

years of secondary education and through tertiary education

are very low in comparison with other technologically advanced

nations. .

I repeat the words of Mr. Justice Michael Kirby,  Chairman of the

Law Reform Commission,  in his latest paper "Legal and Social

Responsibility of Teachers" (C.20/82, March 1982):

"We are frequently told of where we stand in the OECD .

inflation table. I want to call your attention to how

we are faring in the OECD education table.. We are faring

poorly. Tables presented by the OECD relating to the

numbers of 17 year olds who are in full time education

in a secondary school contrast the position of Japan and

the United States,  on the one hand, and the position in

Australia,  which finds itself near the bottom of the

league with countries such as Portugal.and Turkey."

4.

At the age of 17, 88.1% of Japanese are still at school,  compared

with only 31.7% of Australians. Admittedly some Australians

are at universities and CAEs at 17 (Japanese tend to enter at 18) -

but even so our total figure of 17 year old Australians in all

forms of education amounts to only 39.9%. .

Australia, Britain and New Zealand share a significant educational

statistic; 60% of the age group 15-19 are in the labour force,

that is, are in work,or actively seeking it. In Japan the figure

is 24%. In the U.S. 28%, in Canada 33%, in Sweden 34%. Do

these nations have it all wrong? Or do we have it wrong? *

In Japan more than 50% of Honda's process workers have university

degrees. In Australia the combination of diminishing educational

participation rates and increasing control of high technology in

foreign hands is a recipe for disaster. Vie are sliding towards

the condition of a Third World nation in education. We will soon

lack the educational base for any fight-back capacity in high

technology. .

As I have argued - endlessly, my parliamentary colleagues think -

in many speeches, and more recently in my book Sleepers, Wake I

Australia has passed through a Post Industrial Revolution in which

a contracting proportion of the paid labour force is employed in

manufacturing and it seems very unlikely that the proportion will

ever rise again. .

The commanding heights of the Australian economy -coal, copper, .

aluminium, uranium, motor manufacturing,  food processing, computers,

drugs,  chemicals,  plastics,.petrol and advertising - are

5.

essentially in foreign hands. We have developed a derivative

culture,  largely due to our minority status within the English

speaking world, and a client.economy. This also leads to the

depressing situation where there is comparatively little demand

for industrial research and development within Australia - we

prefer to buy itÂ·off the shelf.

In Sweden for every Kroner invested by government in research and

development seven Kroner are invested by industry. In Australia

for every dollar invested by government,  primarily through CSIRO

but also in universities,  industry contributes a mere 63 cents.

This is an inevitable consequence of the high levels of foreign

ownership: Ford, General Motors, Mazda,  Hoechst and IBM have

little incentive to carry out fundamental research here if they .

can acquire it from abroad by merely lifting up the telephone.

Australia,- as we are told - is a resource-rich country, on a per

capita basis probably the richest in the world. And yet our

national per capita income is far from being the world's highest -

we generally rank as number 16, having fallen from number 8 to

number 16 in the period since 1975. ’

We are, as Max Walsh has suggested, the "poor little rich country",

sitting on a fortune (to use a phrase Wayland Young coined in a

somewhat different context). Yet in both income and quality of

life we are significantly behind Sweden, which has very limited

physical resources, and Japan which has none at all. There are

a number of reasons for this extraordinary discrepancy and many

of them relate to our failure to grasp that the development and .

use of our human resources is, in the long run,  even more significant

than our mineral resources.

This is not/taere semantic quibble but an important

philosophical distinction. If you ask an Australian what are

the nation's greatest resources, he will almost invariably

reply: "Coal,  bauxite, iron,  uranium or cheap energy". He

will almost never say the skills of its people, and rarely

will he say the vision and wisdom of its business

management ,  or of its politicians. Yet if you asked the same

questions of a Swede or a Japanese he would reply that the

Swedish people or the Japanese people were the principal

resources of each nation.

Whether we give priority to the development of human or material

resources has.important effects on national decision-making.

If material resources are the most important element in national

thinking, then the major questions to be faced involve digging

it up and getting it out,  the more the merrier and the sooner

the better. .

If we see resources in purely material terms then it follows r  Ã¢ÂÂ   . .

that the development of Australia's human skills are of marginal

interest. We can.use our minerals to buy finished goods, to

acquire foreign knowhow,  to derive R. and D .  from abroad and

it would not matter if our manufacturing industry wound down,

our R. and D. disappeared and our education receded.  If,

however,  we define resources in human terms, then it follows

inexorably that among our highest national goals must be .

raising educational participation rates and standards,  ,

increasing our expenditures on R. and D ., developing our high

technology industries and developing an intellectual capacity .

that we currently lack. .

7.

You may be surprised to learn that it was a New Zealander,

Richard William Pearse,  and not the Wright Brothers, who flew

the first powered, heavier than air plane with.controlled

steering and he did it about eight months before they did.in 1903. far in design

It was an advanced model, a monoplane,/more sophisticated/than

the Wright Brothers model. But as soon as he heard of the then

American success and news took a long time/to travel to .

New Zealand, especially the South Island - his response was

automatic, and.instructive. He said: "What's the use of

going on? I cannot compete, so I'll give up". ,

I have used the term'Pearse1s syndrome" to describe a

combination of diffidence,, pessimism and obsessive reliance

on economic rationalism which affects people in nations with

small populations such as Australia and New Zealand. As

Sweden and Switzerland have both shown, small nations can

compete, effectively but selectively, with their larger

technological competitors. But Pearse's syndrome becomes, a

self-fulfilling prophecy when it saps national will and leads

Government, management and entrepreneurs to give up any attempt

to develop our human resources capacity.

Taken to its logical extremity, Pearse's syndrome would mean

that small nations would have no manufacturing industry, no

inventions, no research capacity, no higher education, no

contribution to science, philosophy, architecture, music or .

the arts. Everything would be bought off the shelf at the

ruling market price. The end result would be to convert small

nations into completely sterile and. derivative societies

marked by the downgrading of intellectual capacity and

8.

competence, confined to the supply of raw 'materials and the

performance of routine service jobs by a servile army of wood

and water joeys.

Perhaps the worst psychological consequence of seeing

'resources' and Australia's future in purely physical or

mineral terms is that it leads to the false equation:-

Australia + minerals - Success .

Australia - minerals = Disaster

We come to accept the idea that without a mineral base,

Australia would be a disaster area.  Yet that would put us in

the same position that the Japanese and Swedes are in. Our

fundamental - but unspoken - pessimism is based on the lurking

fear:  "But what could be done with Australians?"

As I said earlier, more than half the process workers employed

in the Honda Corporation hold university degrees,  most,  but

by no means all, in engineering.  There's no suggestion that

the possession of such qualifications is a burden for the

Japanese worker; in fact the contrary is true. It has been a

major factor in increasing Honda's morale and the quality of

its products.  But to suggest university degrees for

Australian workers would be to invite derision and a questioning

of the sanity of any person making such an outlandish suggestion

But will anyone suggest that our manufacturing capacity,

innovation and quality control is promoted by the low formal

levels of skill requirements,  narrowly vocational at that,

which are part of Australia's industrial tradition?

9.

Despite the technological orientation of this institution,

impressively qualified graduands in architecture and building,

mathematics and computing at today's ceremony and the awesome

responsibilities of my Shadow portfolio I propose to utter a few

cautionary noises about the danger of making too large a psychic

investment in technology and not enough in human capacity.

As Carl Sagan has pointed out we live in an 'Age of .

Science'  but this does not mean that we live in an age of

rationality. The age of microprocessors,  lasers,  and the

new techniques in genetic engineering is also an age of .

credulity,  marked by a revival of belief in astrology,

clairvoyance,  Tarot cards, UFO's, religious cults and other Â·  .  ,

psychopathological manifestations. Is this mere coincidence?

Many Australians could fairly be described as 'technozombies' -people who are psychologically arid physiologically dependent on

the’  artefacts of high technology but do not understand

how or why they work and may be less disposed than ever to

develop their own personal capacities. They use the products

of Science withough having that scientific, analytical cast

of mind which is such an essential part of scientific professionalism,

In a perceptive review of Patrick White's Flaws in the Glass  (New York Review of Books,  April 15, 1982), Nadine Gordimer describes

the anguish felt by contemporary artists (and I include scientists in  that group): Â·

1  The Futurists dreamed that by our time technology would have

freed the imagination unlimitedly. What has happened is.that

technology has outstripped imagination in an unimaginable way;

capturing human responses in the shallows, instilling a yearning

for things instead of revelations'. Ã¢ÂÂ

10.

It is sometimes asserted that the technological revolution of

this century gives unprecedented opportunities for personal

development and for enhancing human capacity. Shakespeare

with a IBM golf-ball typewriter would, it. is felt, have been

far more productive than Shakespeare with a quill pen (a very

primitive piece of technology) and Shakespeare with a word

processor would be more productive than either. The tragedy

is that we have our word processors and IBM typewriters without

any Shakespeares to use them. Is technological advance inimical

to the development of human creativity?

In Paradoxes of Progress (W.H. Freeman, 1978) the American

molecular biologist Gunther S. Stent of the University of

California, Berkeley argues that scientific and technological

progress is intellectually and emotionally self-limiting. He

contends it is no coincidence that the phenomenon of the 'beat

generation1,  the beatniks and hippies of the mid-1960s and

thereafter with their adoption of the Polynesian life-style,

Zen Buddhism, transcendental meditation, the Moonies and other

religious or quasi religious cults, and later with increasing

dependence on psychedelic drugs should have been strongest in

California, the most technologically advanced part of the world's

most technologically advanced nation^ .  .

11.

The twin aspects central to beat philosophy,  the antirationality

and rejection of the success ethic, were very largely reactions

against affluent,  technological society. The wealth of

California was largely the result of its leading role in the

development of new technologies - movies,  television,  aviation, .

aerospace,  electronics,  then computers and microelectronics and

now biotechnology. This led to the development of the much

publicised California lifestyle with its heavy, even excessive

emphasis on consumption of material goods as an end in itself.

This,taken to extremes,  has produced a strong reaction by a

significant minority,  the counter-culture.

*  Ã¢ÂÂ   Ã¢ÂÂ  . Ã¢ÂÂ

Stent asserts that, "in the human psyche there exists a will to

have power over the events of the otter world" and that

"sublimation of that will to power" - that.is, directing energies

towards some useful purpose - "is the psychological mainstream of

all creative activity".  This will to power is not,  of course,

to be seen narrowly as winning a war,  winning an election,

taking over a company or thumping somebody,  but it might be (a

matter of self fulfilment - writing, working in the arts,  or.

achieving personal understanding. However if that will to

power is diverted by the fulfilment of material needs

there may not be much time or enthusiasm left for the exercise

of creative energy. The fulfilment of. physical needs may

weaken the will to power. We are then content to have others

do things for us - or not to bother about doing much at all..

12.

Gunther Stent told an international conference on extra-terrestrial

intelligence, held in Yerevan in 1971, that "once a civilisation

has progressed far enough to have radios,  the discovery of

psychoactive drugs cannot be far behind... Even if there were many

extra-terrestrial intelligences that once listened to radios,  by

now they are probably all stoned and no longer interested in

.  communicating". .  .

There is insufficient data to propose a mathematical formula but

it may well be that for every doubling of capacity in communication

technology there is a halving of the capacity or the desire of

humansÂ· to engage in significant communication.

Television may lead to a high degree of machine dependence as people

like Mr. Chance in the 1979 film Being There prefer to live

vicariously through electronic imagery than to respond to personal

contact and individual challenges in a broader social context.

Is the apothesis of mankind to be found in mastering 1  Space Invaders1?

Let me conclude by wishing you well in your professional careers

but also - at the risk of stating the obvious - to express the

hope that you will not be mere professionals: that you will be

architects,  designers,  mathematicians and computists who understand

and can relate to non-professional perspectives,  that you will be

active citizens,  and that you will recognise that there are not,

as C.P. Snow used to argue}  1  two cultures' in Western Society but

only one and that the exact sciences and the humanities must work

together if we are to get the best and not the worst out of this

age of technological revolution.

