james burke

• james burke'ün 2002 yılında cornell üniversitesinde verdiği konuşmanın elimden geldiğince çıkarttığım transkripti aşağıdadır.
  
  teknoloji, geçmiş ve bugünümüz arasındaki bağlantılar, bugünkü kurumsal yapılarımızdaki problemler ve internetin gelişiyle ortaya çıkacak daha büyük problemler üzerine çok masif, çok compress edilmiş veriyi bulacağınız bu knouşmanın tamamını ve james burke'ün diğer işleri ile ilgili bilgi için benimle kontak kurmaktan ya da google'ı kurcalamaktan çekinmeyin.
  
  ingilizcesini türkçeye çevirecek ne vaktim ne de ingilizceme güvenim olduğundan, o işi bir başkasına bırakıyorum.
  
  tüm yazım, semantik, gramer hataları bana aittir. james burke aslında derdini şahane anlatmıştır.
  
  "don't get too excited. this is not the edited version on tv. this is much lower.
  
  as some of you probably knows, i have kind of wasted the last 35 years of my life as a science historian and a journalist making tv programs and writing books and columns about technological change and its social effects.
  
  first, in order for you to be able to get into perspective with what i'm going to say this morning two things.
  
  number 1: i make television programs for a mass audience if you want the horse's mouth stuff talk to your faculty. i'm just here to rattle your cage.
  
  second thing i want to tell you is to remind you the thing that was said by the late great mark twain, when he might have been talking about people like my profession, he said "in the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. it is the task of journalists and historians to rectify this error."
  
  so i want to rectify this morning a few things about the general social and historical context of change. and the process is exercising about in the minds of people these days that is what the technology coming down the pike is going to do to us, how to best prepare for it and why that has not been easy up until now.
  
  and i want to argue that the high rates of innovation we live with today and the historical difficulty we have had in *predicting* change accurately up to now and finally the opportunities the coming technologies may offer to take a really different approach to knowledge management, all spring from one creative moment 500 years ago, well it probably springs from a dozen but i choose one. when somebody triggerred all this shmear with it today, with a solution to a local contemporary problem back then, then changed the world.
  
  but let me start with the problem of predicting the future because, if you get that right, you've got it made. grades, degrees.. that stuff.
  
  the unfortunate problem about the future is, if you think about it, it hasn't happened yet. and, never will, if you get my drift. the great danish quantum physicist neil bohr once said with great prespacasity: "prediction is extremely difficult, especially about the future." i don't think it was just danish humor. although, it could've been. i think he was talking more about the humongous number of variables involved in any change.
  
  and those variables have multiplide through history. once upon a time, not that long ago, decision making was simple. you would have any color model t ford, as long as it was black. today, by the time you get'round to reading the manual, there's been an upgrade. if, you can read the manual in the first place.
  
  by the time you decide to use a new piece of software, it's already obsolete. by the time the high schools are teaching material that they need to keep up with innovation, the material is already out of date. and as a consequence the reaction of the average person on the street and the many people in business and institutions to the flood of technology that hits us everyday, reminds me very much of the depressive who takes a couple of days off to get out of the clinic, to go to the beach, get himself a tan, the next day his psychiatrist back at the hospital receives a postcard from him. the message on the card is, i think very much like the average individual's reaction to the present very high rate of change, the card from the depressive on holiday reads: "having a wonderful time. why?"