Technology will Determine the Future of the Human Race
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2005
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith Lecturer is the distinguished engineer, Lord Broers. Alec Broers is President of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Chairman of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee. He was a pioneer of nanotechnology and the first person to use the scanning electron microscope for the fabrication of micro-miniature structures.
Lord Broers delivers the first of his five Reith Lectures in which he sets out his belief that technology can and should hold the key to the future. He argues that man's way of life has depended on technology since the beginning of civilization - the flint stone, the control of fire, the wheel, the printing press, but are we coping with the newest cascade of technological advances that are happening now?
Lord Broers examines the social implications of the advances and argues that it has become essential that we study their social consequences. He believes that if poverty and disease are to be alleviated and the environment sustained, then technology must be harnessed on a vast and all inclusive scale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. |
| 0:04.4 | This lecture in the series The Triumph of Technology, given by Lord Breweres, was originally broadcast in 2005. |
| 0:16.0 | Good evening and welcome to the Royal Institution for the first in a series of five lectures entitled The Triumph of Technology. |
| 0:23.9 | This year's Reith Lecturer is an engineer and he'll be arguing that it's technology which will determine the future of the human race, |
| 0:32.2 | but warning that it can only do so if it's properly harnessed on a vast and inclusive scale. Our audience, who will be joining |
| 0:40.7 | later in a discussion of the proposition, is made up of inventors, entrepreneurs, scientists, |
| 0:45.7 | artists and policy makers. We gathered here in the Faraday lecture theatre, named after the |
| 0:51.6 | grandfather of electronics, if you like, Michael Faraday, |
| 0:55.0 | who delighted his 19th century audiences here with his demonstrations of the physics and chemistry |
| 1:01.0 | of flames. Any pyrotechnics tonight are likely to be philosophical rather than physical, |
| 1:06.4 | although I do gather that the last time our lecturer stood at this podium, he managed to blow the power |
| 1:11.4 | throughout the whole building, but that's another story. No matter. He too is a scientific pioneer |
| 1:17.3 | who knows the excitement of breaking barriers. He it was who wrote the first nanoscale |
| 1:23.5 | patterns on the earliest microchips, the beginnings of nanotechnology. As a young boy in his native |
| 1:30.0 | Australia, he made hi-fi sets for farmers in the outback and made a bit of money doing it too. |
| 1:35.4 | And he was musical as well. In fact, he came to Cambridge where he studied electrical sciences |
| 1:40.3 | on a choral scholarship. 36 years later, he became that university's vice-chancellor and set about creating a marriage |
| 1:48.1 | between the strengths of academic study and the drive of industry. |
| 1:53.1 | Today, knighted and ennobled, he is president of the Royal Academy of Engineering. |
| 1:59.2 | Achieving the world's technological salvation will require, he says, |
| 2:04.0 | the recreation of the spirit that existed in this country 50 years ago. The spirit which |
| 2:10.1 | persuaded a young Australian called Alec Broers to abandon the sunshine and come to Britain. |
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