New Technology: bringing us together or pulling us apart?

The Rhodes House Conferences inbox is a very busy place to be in the week before an event like the Forum on Technology & Society, full of logistic details for speakers, queries for would-be attendees who missed the registration deadline and “here’s version of 11 of the Forum handbook” sorts of messages. But amongst this, one conversation stood out as a thought-provoking highlight. 

It started with a complaint about our choice of promotional image for the Forum from Dr Robert Knapp (New York & Magdalen 1965). A lightly-edited version of our conversation is reproduced here with his permission.

I keep hoping that this Forum will embody the connection between personal character and public presence and action which has been part of the Rhodes Scholarship from the beginning. We all know the wording from the Rhodes will about what the scholarships were looking for—

qualities of [personhood] truth courage devotion to duty sympathy for the protection of the weak kindliness unselfishness and fellowship and his exhibition during school days of moral force of character and of instincts to lead and to take an interest in his schoolmates for those latter attributes will be likely in afterlife to guide [them] to esteem the performance of public duty as [their] highest aim

But communications from you organizers aren’t yet doing it. The opening image of two people in VR masks has no visual message about connecting those people with protection of the weak, kindliness, fellowship and so on. The image is of two people not connected to each other, nor to us the viewers of the image.

I am planning to attend. My hopes continue. But you can do better than what you’ve shown so far.

Yours,
Rob

We hadn’t given that point about human connection any thought when choosing the image and felt it was best to admit as much.

Thank you for your email, and your interesting observations about the promotional image for the Forum. Why did we pick that image? To be honest, simply because it was one of the most striking photos taken at last year’s Forum. 

But you’re right that it does raise an important question about whether technology divides us or brings us together. That is a theme that has run through the series since its inception in 2022 - it’s easy to be gloomy about the role technology plays in society so this year we have made a concerted effort to focus on reasons to be positive about the future. New technologies like VR headsets can definitely have both positive and negative impacts - how do we ensure we benefit from the positive and avoid the negative?

I wonder what Cecil Rhodes would have made of VR headsets? It is often hard to interpret the will in the context of technology introduced more than a century later. We’d like to believe that he’d consider it important to bring together a wide range of views to discuss how new technology affects us all - that’s what we hope to achieve at the Forum.

Best wishes,
Georgie 

Robert, of course, noticed that we had ducked the specific question about VR headsets by writing a more general response about the positives and negatives of new technology…

On VR headsets — notice the drift into abstraction when you go from whether technology divides or connects us to what its good and bad impacts are. The former has people in the picture, rather explicitly, whereas the latter doesn’t, or at least is going to be just as happy treating people as statistical abstractions as it will be approaching them as whole persons. “Positive and negative impact” is a useful general term, but it’s far too general for comfort here. Maybe attention to whole persons—living, breathing, finding their way in a complex world—is a conscious, considered piece of what you and your speakers will do—that’s one thing I keep hoping for—but your (and their) presentation so far isn’t showing it.

Maybe “What would Cecil have thought about VR headsets?” should be the title of some piece of the Forum.

With thanks for your quick response, with the feeling it carries of conversation with a whole person,

Rob

This called for a rather older, grumpier-about-new-technology sort of a response!

I am something of a VR headset sceptic myself. They always remind me of the famous Douglas Adams quote:

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
   2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
   3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I’m afraid that I am well over 35, so #3 very much applies! I share your concerns. But what I do think is helpful is that the Forum offers an opportunity for people to try the technology out and form their own opinion. It’s a shame you won’t be here in person to get that opportunity. But if you do find yourself in Oxford at any point, please visit us and have a go. 

best regards,
Richard

But VR headsets are far from the only thing “against the natural order of things”…

As someone who just turned 80, I do find myself surrounded by things well outside the natural order. Some of them (e.g. live GPS mapping) seem to be making this brave new world a genuinely better place, some (e.g. fast fashion, McVitie’s “dark chocolate flavor coating”) not so much.

My training in physics is helpful in maintaining stability, because it’s so much about getting used to really unintuitive things (e.g. quantum entanglement), but even so, it takes work. Your offer of an out of body experience when I’m next in Oxford is gratefully noted; I’ll try to take you up on it.

Meanwhile, think over my notion that “Cecil Rhodes and Virtual Reality” might be a good session for The Rhodes Trust to put on.

With thanks again,
Rob

Due to the timezone differences, Robert wasn’t able to join the Forum “live”, but we were delighted to receive his thoughts a few days later.

I owe you some reaction to Saturday’s Forum. Time zones meant that it was almost completely over by the time I woke up that day, but you were very prompt with the videos, and last night I watched the Intro, some of Sustainable Communities, and all of Reasons to Love the Future.

I’ve come away grateful to have heard Georgia Nicolau’s talk about citizen labs in Brazil, and I’ve been provoked in quite welcome ways by the discussion of “the future” by the futurists. The chair and all three of those speakers were impressive. Their very evident thoughtfulness, awareness of how tangled the subject is, and ability to speak clearly about it were exemplary.

Futurism is a very tricky business, full of pitfalls and quite prone to both kinds of bad abstraction (over-sweeping generalization and omission of troublesome detail), but this four had good observations to make, offered some phrases I’m taking away with me (for example—"it’s not the future"; "today’s problems are yesterday’s solutions"; "rigorous imagination"; "only diversity can cope with diversity"), and got me looking at some of their other writing with genuine interest.

So thanks for putting on the event! Even this partial exposure has given me things I want to think about. They include some puzzles:

• • How does it make sense that Heba Chehade, if anything the most grounded and widely aware of the four futurists, is at work in Dubai, which in so many ways has been one of the least grounded and most self-regarding places on the planet?
  • How can we get discourse past the facile linear scale of optimism-pessimism, and on to richer ways of characterizing the inevitable mixture of good, bad and indifferent that any future will immerse us in?
  • How can the forward-looking energies of entrepreneurs energize the evolution of futures that are genuine improvements and not get captured by megalomania of the Musk, Bezos, or Zuckerberg variety?  The Forum talked me into entrepreneurship as much more genuinely and constructively engaging with the future than academia, the professions and almost all of politics. But the parts I’ve seen didn’t acknowledge the radical instability of entrepreneurship: it doesn’t know when to stop or even moderate itself.

Anyway, thanks again. I know an enormous amount of work goes into an event like this, and for me, at least it has had good results.
 
Yours,
Rob

We hope the Forums are generating conversations like this widely among their participants, as we all navigate our way forward in societies being shaken and reshaped by technology. Even finding the good questions is an adventure. What would Cecil Rhodes have made of VR headsets? Next year, maybe. 

 
Dr Robert Knapp is an Emeritus Faculty Member (Physics and Sustainability) at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington; Georgie Thurston is Global Programmes and Alumni Engagement Lead at the Rhodes Trust; Richard Hughes is the Online Community Manager at the Rhodes Trust.