This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. This lecture in the series

The Triumph of Technology, given by Lord Breweres, was originally broadcast in 2005.

Good evening. For the second of this year's Reith Lectures, we've come to Cambridge University,

which was home to our lecturer, first as a student and researcher in the early

60s, then as a professor and head of department in the 80s and 90s, and finally, at the turn

of the century, as its vice-chancellor. He is Alec Broers, now Lord Broers. He's an engineer. Despite

his view that his particular discipline is underrated by his fellow scientists he's risen to

become chairman of the science and technology committee in the house of lords and a man in demand

internationally for his views on where advances in technology can take us he's broad-ranging in his

approach both to science and to life you You're as likely to find him sailing

on the Atlantic, ice skating in Central Park, and listening to Schubert as you are working in the

laboratory. He's in no doubt that technology will determine the future of the human race, as he

made plain in his first lecture. The question is,

how? How can the world harness the benefits of technology in a way that will endow its future

and eliminate its problems? Poverty, hunger, global warming, and so on. Tonight, he sets out his

answer. His views are strong and therefore controversial

in some quarters, possibly no more so than here in Cambridge, where are gathered pure

scientists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and representatives of the businesses, Rolls

Royce and Unilever, which he was central as Vice-Chancellor in bringing in to what's become known as the Cambridge cluster.

And we're linked by technology, of course, to an audience in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.

The questions will come later, but first to deliver the second in his series of lectures entitled The Triumph of Technology,

please welcome the Reith Lecturer 2005, Alec Broers.

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