Ideas - Massey at 60: How Physicist Ursula Franklin's Prescient Ideas on Technology Persist

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Technology is much more than a tool. Physicist Ursula Franklin argued that it’s a system — one so powerful that it can shape our mindset, our society and our politics. Her observations were prescient when she delivered her Massey Lecture in 1989 and they are all the more relevant today. Ursula Franklin’s friend and collaborator Jane Freeman reflects on the power of Franklin’s message. 

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. We often think of technology as gadgets, things we've invented to make our lives and tasks easier. But these things take on a life of their own. Technology has built the house in which we all live.

There's hardly today any human activity that does not take place within this house. And compared to people in earlier times, we rarely have a chance to live outside this house. Ursula Franklin was a widely revered physicist, educator, and peace activist. She delivered her Massey lectures entitled The Real World of Technology in 1989. I want to know as much as possible about that house that technology built, about its secret passages, and about its trapdoors. about its secret passages and about its trapdoors. And I also would like to look at technology in the way C.B. Macpherson looked at democracy in terms of the real world.

Technology like democracy includes ideas and practices. It includes myths and various models of reality. And like democracy, technology changes the social and individual relationships between us, and it has forced us to look and redefine our notions of power and of responsibility. The prescient insights she shared in her Massey lectures came in an era before email, before smartphones, before social media. Technology is not the sum of the artifacts of wheels and gears, of rails and electronic transmitters.

For me, technology is a system. It entails far more than the individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedure, symbols, new words, equations, and most of all it involves a mindset. Technology also needs to be examined as an agent of power and control. Like democracy, technology is a multifaceted entity. It includes activities as well as a body of knowledge, structures as well as the act of structuring. Our language itself is quite poorly suited to describe the complexity of technological interactions.

the complexity of technological interactions. How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as ends? That's why I think it is better to examine limited settings where one could technology in context, because context is what matters most. To begin with, as I said, I would like to look at technology as practice. Ursula Franklin died in 2016 at the age of 94. Her ideas live on and are all the more relevant today. She defined technology according to Kenneth Boulding's definition as the way we do things around here. And this definition allowed her to connect technology directly to culture. Jane Freeman was a collaborator and

friend of Ursula Franklin's. She's the founding director of the University of Toronto's Graduate Centre for Academic Communication. As part of Massey College's 60th anniversary celebration, Professor Freeman shares her reflections on Ursula Franklin's ideas and legacy. She said there's always been a way of doing things. Groups of people in different times and places have always found a way of doing things. She said it's hard to think of our own period as history, but at some point in the future, people will look at the artifacts of our age, and those artifacts will tell them many things about what we valued, what we prioritized, and what we didn't. She said technologies are not God-given. They change, and we can and must not only be aware of the forces that change the way

we do things, but also, if possible, both critique and modify them. Early in her Massey lecture, she distinguishes between two very different forms of technological development. Holistic and prescriptive technologies are the names she gives to them. I want to distinguish between two very different forms of technological development. The distinction that I need to make is between holistic technologies and prescriptive technologies. and prescriptive technologies. Again, we are considering technology as practice, but now we are looking what is actually going on. What happens on the level of work? And these two categories of holistic and prescriptive technologies

have very different specializations and divisions of labor and consequently they have very different social and political implications. Again, let me say what interests me is not what is being done but how it is being done. Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metals a pot, on the products of their work are one of a kind. However similar the pots may look to a casual observer, each piece was made as if it were unique. It is this specialization by product that I call holistic technology. And it is important because it leaves the doer in total control of the process.

Holistic technologies are normally associated with artisans. So, for example, a potter who chooses the clay and makes the pot and fires the kiln controls the process from start to finish. And this kind of holistic technology requires knowledge of hand and heart. Knowledge is cumulative. Decisions have to be made along the way and judgment is required. And if something goes wrong, the artisan understands what happens because the artisan understands the full process. So Ursula called those holistic technologies because the doer is in control of the whole process.

The other category she called prescriptive technologies because they are prescriptions, the how-to or else. It is quite different from the specialization by process, which I call prescriptive technology, based on a quite different division of labor. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down in clearly identifiable steps, and each step is carried out by a separate worker or groups of workers who need only to be familiar with the skills of performing that one step. And this is what is normally meant by division of labor. The notion of division of labor is most familiar to us from the Industrial Revolution,

where the factory system resulted from large-scale applications of such divisions of labor. divisions of labor. However, that form of division of labor, that form of breaking something up in separate processes, separate steps, and giving each person just one little step to do, is much older. The ancient Romans made much of their pottery, particularly the ware that is called terra segilata, in a mass production mode. Essentially, by such prescriptive technologies, we have the texts. We, of course, also have the artifacts. But more than a thousand years before the Romans did that mass production, the ancient Chinese made bronze vessels, and they organized the prescriptive technology par excellence with that clearly defined division of labor. And she first understood the potential social impacts of prescriptive technologies when, as a metallurgist, she was studying ancient Chinese bronze cauldrons of the Shang Dynasty.

These cauldrons were made of bronze, they weighed over 800 kilograms, and they were cast in bronze that melted at over a thousand degrees Celsius. Her investigation of them indicated that they were made in one, they were cast in one pour, and that caused her to contemplate the planning and organization and precision involved. Each worker had to perform to very narrow prescriptions or else. Prescriptive technologies are based on focused specialization and the division of labor. So the making or doing of something is broken down into discrete parts, such as in factory work, and each step is carried out by a different worker who is responsible only for that part. While this type of technology is very old, it really took hold in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and it's expanded quickly ever since. She quotes Sir William Petty, who wrote in favor of the division of labor as follows in the 1680s, related to the growth of the City of London. He said, in the making of a watch, if one

man shall make the wheels, another the spring, another shall engrave the dial plate, and another shall make the cases, then the watch will be better and cheaper than if the whole work be put upon any one man. And even within this brief example, we see some of the goals of prescriptive technologies. They're designed to make production faster and cheaper, so more products can be made more quickly with more money to be made for factory owners. So immediately we see the link between prescriptive technologies and a production mentality. Prescriptive technologies have restructuring impacts on everything, on work, on workers, on workplaces, on infrastructures. And Ursula, with her physicist's mind, investigates those structural impacts. A fundamental characteristic of prescriptive

technologies is that work is fragmented, it's broken into parts, whether that's a factory those structural impacts. A fundamental characteristic of prescriptive technologies is that work is fragmented. It's broken into parts, whether that's a factory worker tightening a screw or a grocery checkout clerk scanning a barcode. As the work is fragmented, there's a corresponding de-skilling of workers. Workers are no longer required to understand a whole process from start to finish. No judgment is required of workers, only compliance, and compliance is mandatory. As work is fragmented, there's often a loss of reciprocity. Workers' input isn't invited or particularly wanted.

And there's also a loss of accountability. No worker is responsible for the quality of the whole output or even for the nature of what's being made. You know, I don't make bombs. I just tighten this little rivet. That's my job. These days, we're seeing an increase in the lack of accountability in the output of generative AI. The prescriptive fragmentation of next token prediction produces what looks like human language, but there's no sender. No one's accountable for the output or its potential racism or its lack of accuracy.

Unlike asynchronous and inherently fragmented nature of AI, when prescriptive technologies are adopted in workplaces, they require very strict oversight. In order for all the parts of the factory to work together efficiently, and efficiency is the key, control over work and workers is needed so that the concept of the manager is introduced, said Ursula, to ensure that all pieces of the work are progressing as required. Since work has to be coordinated, breaks have to be tightly timed, and the acculturation into a culture of compliance is built on a willing adherence to prescription. Ursula notes that some technologies are introduced to make work easier, and she calls these work-related technologies, like a better design shovel that allows us to shovel more snow without hurting ourselves.

But other technologies she calls control-related technologies, and these are introduced not to make work easier, but to make control of work easier, such as a punch-in clock that determines when workers sign in, or in the case of a doctor who has to sit in front of a computer screen filling out computerized forms. That's not a technology that's designed to make a doctor's life easier or a patient's life healthier. It's technology introduced to make control of doctors easier. What they record, what they bill, those are control-related technologies. As prescriptive technologies expanded after the industrial revolution, economies of scale were

presented as key benefits of industrialization. And as factories get bigger, they need more capital, and there's a corresponding impact on infrastructure. You can't have a successful light bulb factory, for example, without an electricity distribution system that allows consumers to use light bulbs. So planning is needed, participation of government, more roads, closer access to airports, taxation systems that benefit investment in production. And Ursula notes that such distribution systems have increasingly linked the private sphere of industry and commerce to public spheres of local and central government. In considering the increasing role played by governments in supporting the spread of prescriptive technologies since the Industrial Revolution, she introduces the idea of divisible and indivisible benefits. Indivisible benefits are those shared equally by all. If the air in Toronto is clean, we all benefit.

But divisible benefits, on the other hand, are benefits that accrue only to a few, often at the expense of many or at the expense of the earth, such as the wealth gleaned by a factory owner who benefits from the increase in production. In considering the social and environmental impacts of technology, Ursula encourages us when someone talks of the possible benefits and costs of a new project to ask not what benefits, but whose benefits and at whose cost. The traditional role of governments, she notes, has been to safeguard the commons, the common good, as a source of indivisible benefits, schools, roads, hospitals. But as Ursula points out, the publicly funded infrastructures that have made the development and spread of technology possible have become more and more the road to

corporate profits and divisible benefits, while sources of indivisible benefits, like clean air and uncontaminated water, are less and less protected by those who govern. In her Massey lecture, she said the global environmental destruction the world now has to face could not have happened without the evolution of infrastructures on behalf of technology and its divisible benefits and the corresponding eclipsing of government's obligation to safeguard and protect the sources of indivisible benefits. In her final chapter of The Real World of Technology, she wrote that she sometimes thinks if she had one wish, she would wish that the government of Canada would treat nature with

the same respect with which all governments of Canada have always treated the United States, as a great force and a power to fear. We need now redemptive technologies. We need technologies such as those that that Emery Lovins discussed, technologies that reduce the demand for electricity. We need technologies that are redemptive for people, that bring people in the workplace and not push them out. We need redemptive technologies that are concerned with nature. We need also totally different technologies in accounting. We need technologies essentially on three levels.

We need an accounting system that allows us to keep three books. We need the dollars and cents book for the bankers, and that needs to include a column for money saved. We need a people book, a book in which we catalog, measure, and account for what happens to people for their betterment or for the deterioration of their lives. And we need a third book that's an ecology book that we can account of what a project might do to nature. of what a project might do to nature. And only if we can optimize those three books with their proper weight can we know how to proceed.

But the redemptive technologies that we need are not more of the same, but they are those things that incorporate in them a real demand for justice. I would think that this essentially means a different sort of social contract, one that's sort of social contract, one that's appropriate to the real world of technology, in which the consent to be governed depends on the stewardship by the government for nature and people. Fifteen years later, in her university lecture of 2004 entitled Thinking About Technology, she considered again the expansive spread of prescriptive technologies. She said, we can see how those prescriptive technologies worked. They worked in terms of output, stuff, and wealth. They worked in terms of acculturation to compliance and conformity.

And they worked in terms of scope and management and control. As a result of their effectiveness, they were very quickly and then very extensively transferred to non-production activities, to human and social activities that need not be looked at as production and that are in fact diminished if we look at them that way. So we go from agriculture to food production, from education to skill production. And 300 years of that brings us to look and say, she says, wow, isn't this globe a giant production site with very fancy mechanisms? And what does it do? It makes money. It makes money for some. Of the production mentality that took hold in the Industrial Revolution and that continues to dominate so many aspects of public life, she wrote in her university lecture, increased production appeared

to be the road to plenty. Prescriptive technologies with their science were so obviously going to help eliminate hardship and need. Even when it became apparent that things might go horribly wrong, when these same types of prescriptions produced war, when compliance produced fascism. The search was for better and more enlightened prescriptions, different planning. The thought that there was something much more profoundly wrong is much more the thought of our time. One of the things that was profoundly wrong was the failure to take into consideration the fundamental distinction first introduced by Immanuel Kant in 1724 of the difference between an organism and a mechanism. In a mechanism,

Kant wrote, for which the clock was a prototype, each part is designed for a particular function within the whole, made externally, and then assembled. That's a mechanism, parts working together, designed to work together, externally fabricated, and then assembled. A mechanism is fundamentally different from an organism. An organism is a functional and structural unit in which the parts exist for and by means of each other in the expression of the particular nature of the organism. It also has parts, roots, leaves, flowers of a plant, or the limbs, eyes, and brains of an animal. But the parts are not made separately and assembled, as in a machine. They arise out of the interaction with each other in a developing organism.

Ursula draws our attention to this distinction, in part because the production mentality seems to involve an inherent trust in machines and devices and a basic apprehension of people. She says if we're considered to consider people not as sources of problems and machines not as sources of solutions, then we need to consider machines and devices as cohabitants of the earth within the limiting parameters applied to human populations. She notes we know a great deal about the demographics of people, but we have almost no idea of the demographics of machines and devices.

Production technologies need a steady stream of consumers to keep the production lines running, so obsolescence may be built into devices, as seen, for example, in the move from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray. This ongoing production of stuff produces divisible benefits for factory owners without consideration or accountability for indivisible benefits, without demographics of the number of devices going to landfills or consideration of how much energy is required to run the increasing number of devices produced. Ursula writes,

if the real world of technology is to become a globally livable habitat, the knowledge has to be brought that organisms, people's communities, as well as the biosphere, are our resources. A related problem is that prescriptive technologies, which were designed for assembling mechanisms, are too often applied to organisms. She notes, for example, that when communication technologies were introduced to school, they were seen as production improvements, promising better products, students better equipped to get jobs, not because they were deemed to enrich the soil of nurturing a student's growth. Professor Jane Freeman on the enduring insights of Ursula Franklin, who delivered the Massey Lectures in 1989.

You're listening to Ideas, where a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA,

the news you got to know and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Ursula Franklin was born in Germany in 1921. She and her family were sent into concentration and labor camps, but survived the Holocaust and eventually moved to Canada, where she became a renowned physicist and metallurgist. In 1984, she became the first woman to hold the University of Toronto's highest distinction, University Professor. She was also a well-known pacifist and peace activist, and thought deeply about the impact technology has

on how societies function and develop. She delivered the CBC Massey Lectures in 1989. They were called The Real World of Technology. As part of a series celebrating the 60th anniversary of Massey College, Professor Jane Freeman reflects on Ursula Franklin's prescient observations. Between 1989 and 1999, when she published her second edition of the Massey Lecture, the internet and email landed full force. And in her expanded edition, she extended her examination of prescriptive technologies to the realm of communication technologies, which she often calls non-communication technologies, and their impact on our perceptions of time and space and on our

collaboration. She notes the fragmentation of communication in what she calls the bit sphere. Electronic devices digitize and render into bits, information being transmitted. And the bit sphere has a fundamental lack of structure. We don't always know where messages come from or where they go to. Many so-called communication technologies are designed to be non-reciprocal. We can watch a debate on TV, for example, but we can't boo or applaud collectively as we can when the speaker is present. She saw asynchronous technologies, which became increasingly prevalent with the widespread use of computers, as particularly concerning because they separate sender and receiver in both time and space.

They remove reciprocity and the opportunity for building social skills that come with synchronous in-person social contact in families, classrooms, workplaces, and communities. The role of asynchronicity and unraveling social and political patterns without apparent replacement, she believed, could not be overstated. And at this time, after COVID lockdown, when we got used to doing so much teaching and working online, and asynchronous technologies seemed, what, the road to efficiency, many of those opportunities have been lost and not replaced. She worries about what happens to people, to communities, their culture, their land,

and their future under the weight of these new practices. In discussing the struggles between the human sphere and the bit sphere, in very Ursula form, she uses the analogy of a cake. And she says, if you imagine a cake, a whole cake as the world and every slice as a country, she notes that in history, law and culture has been identified vertically in terms of locale. The way we do things is determined locally and governance is determined locally. But modern production technologies with their prescriptive fragmentation lend themselves very well to global restructuring. Goods are manufactured overseas, call centers provide support from places in other countries. And she says the quantum jump came through electronic

technologies with the growing importance of horizontal transactions that demand facilitation. And as one example, she talks about the divestment of power of the vertical in favor of. But in 1995, the corporation share was only 11% as, quote, corporations slither along the horizontal cuts in search of suitable tax havens. Ursula called her Massey lecture the real world of technology, as I said, in honour of C.B. Macpherson's real world of democracy, but also because she wanted to be practical. She wanted to think about how technology impacts our real lives. As she often said, she wasn't a philosopher. She regarded herself as a citizen with a toolbox. And in her talks, she wanted to help us as fellow citizens to equip our toolboxes so we felt resourceful in the face of today's challenges.

She often asked the question, and I'm sure many of us have heard her ask it, what do we do after we take a dim view? And it sounds familiar, doesn't it? And in several of her talks, she shared possible answers to that very question, and I'd like to share a few of her suggestions here. In her university lecture in 2004, she said, for me, the first step is clarity and thinking without blaming in the scientific tradition of evidence, describing what is there. She encouraged us to de-escalate speed and de-escalate hype. She noted these are industrial production attributes, that things have to be faster and better and bigger and more fabulous. As she said, there's a lot to be said and better and bigger and more fabulous. As she said,

there's a lot to be said for clearer words and fewer of them. At the end of her 1989 Massey lecture, she offered a checklist of seven points that might help us in the discourse on public decision-making regarding support for a new project. She said, when a new project is proposed, should we not ask if it promotes justice, if it restores reciprocity, if it confers divisible or indivisible benefits, if it favors people over machines, whether its strategy maximizes gain or minimizes disaster, whether conservation is favored over waste, and whether the reversible is favored over the irreversible. Before closing, I'd like to share two stories that I'm fond of. The first she tells in the final chapter of her revised Massey lecture. And it's a story I think of often because it's been a real guide to me, a real teacher of sorts. She talks about the ski lift.

She said when she first came to Canada as a postdoctoral fellow, she was surprised that her colleagues would often come back from ski weekends with very bad injuries, broken bones. And this surprised her because she'd grown up skiing and she had not seen such terrible injuries. And she said it took her a long time to figure out that she thought the culprit was the ski lift. Because when she grew up as a child, there was no ski lift. You had to climb the hill to go down it. And so you had to learn balance and snow skills. You had to be able to test the condition of the snow today and find your balance on one leg. You need the muscles to catch yourself if you fell. And the better your snow skills developed, the higher you could climb up the hill. But she said when ski lifts arrived, they allowed

people to just be plunked at the top of the hill with no snow skills so that they could more quickly fall to injury. And she refers to this story as a means of teaching by the way learning. She says often when we're focused on learning one thing, we're actually learning many other teaching by the way learning. She says often when we're focused on learning one thing, we're actually learning many other things by the way learning. So for example, when we're in a classroom learning to conjugate French verbs, while we're focused on the goal of what we think we're learning, we're also learning social skills. We're learning to listen. We're learning humility when others get the answers faster than we do. We're learning patience when others get the answers faster than we do. We're's concerned that with the move toward prescriptive technologies and asynchronous technologies in particular,

we are losing these opportunities, not just in our classrooms, but in our families, in our workplaces. One of the things I've consciously done, guided by that story, is I'm trying to find ways to reintroduce in-person learning with my students. And it's not efficient, and it's not convenient, but it's more important than some of those production attributes. And the last story I'd like to end with, before we open it to discussion with Nicola and then with you, in the spirit of reciprocity, as Ursula would want, is I'd like to refer to the wisdom windows on the side wall. As many of you will know, that beautiful stained glass called the wisdom windows was dedicated to Ursula Franklin and to Rose Wolfe. And when they were installed, there was

a wonderful gathering in this very room in which both Rose and Ursula were asked to speak. And I always remember very vividly that she encouraged, Ursula encouraged us in her comments to go up to the windows and to touch them and to notice the individual bubbles of glass, the individual parts of glass. She asked us to see that those individual parts, the windows look very different when you get right up close and you look at the individual parts. And then when you stand back, you see the collective. And she used that as an analogy for what we can do individually and collectively, that we have different strengths individually and collectively,

and we need all of them as we face this world of technology. Thank you. University of Toronto Professor Jane Freeman, reflecting on Ursula Franklin's 1989 Massey Lectures at Massey College in Toronto. Professor Freeman was a good friend and collaborator of Ursula Franklin's. She herself is not in the sciences. Her areas of specialty

are in Shakespeare, classical rhetoric, and oral and written communication. I'm curious because you have a background in theatre. You have a background in theatre. So what drew you to a physicist who is interested in technology? Well, my friend and colleague Dave Robertson and I were junior fellows here at Massey together. And we worked on a group of the Ethics in Society lecture series. It was a lecture series that ran when I was a junior fellow. And Ursula was our mentor. And you don't need much exposure to Ursula to get really hooked on her way of thinking.

So that's how it began. And what was it about her that drew you in? Her big heart, her goodwill toward audiences. You know, I'm a rhetorician by training, and Aristotle said one of the most important things when we gather is goodwill toward an audience and a speaker. And Ursula had that in spades. when we gather, is goodwill toward an audience and a speaker. And Ursula had that in spades. Every time we heard her speak, we knew that her interest was in the common good. It was never about her fame or never about her reputation.

It was all about how do we solve problems together. And, of course, she opens her very first Massey lecture by stating, and I'm going to quote, that technology has built the house in which we all live, and there's hardly today any human activity that does not take place within this house. And it's kind of an eerie thought that we just maneuver within this thing that technology has built for us. So what degree of power would you think or what would she think that we have within this space? Like you mentioned that she did have solutions, but it does feel like we are somewhat powerless. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. And she didn't shy away from the real challenges that we face. They worried her deeply.

shy away from the real challenges that we face. They worried her deeply. But as I tried to mention, she never ended with the dim view. She had the knowledge to just say, we're in real trouble, the end. But that's never what she said. She always said, what do we do next? And what do we do collectively and individually? And she made choices individually, like she never took funding from defence, military funding. She never did any research that could be used in the development of an atomic bomb. She made principled decisions with her own research expertise about where she would focus her strengths and where she wouldn't. And she believed deeply in the power of the collective.

So she encouraged us to think about that and to strengthen the social bonds that help us to be connected to others and help us feel our connect collective responsibility. And I don't even think she would have been able to imagine the world that we are in right now with what's exploding in social media, within a space like that, would she see that there's space for reclaiming it for a collective good in any way? I think she was a very optimistic person. She believed deeply in the power of people and groups to make change. So I don't know that it was in her nature to just give up. I wish I could talk to her about artificial intelligence. You know, that's been so discussed on campus in recent months. And certainly the fragmentation, the asynchronous fragmentation, the lack of accountability, those are all things that are directly out of her Massey lecture. She was really prescient in seeing the nature of the changes that were coming.

So I think we can glean from what she did right some of her reactions to very things that are happening because she predicted the trajectory we're on. Well, thank you very much. And I would like to open the floor to questions. And yes, I see a question up here at the front thank you very much for your wonderful talk um and a reminder of the genius of this wonderful wonderful scientist i believe the word of the year is authenticity in some recent research we did we found people learning language with talking machines. At the time, we were looking just at Siri, but of course, we've got this huge progression. We found that people had this amazing trust in the language presented to them by machines

that are fed off of illicitly, off of our own writing and every other blog that's out there as well. And there was this amazing sort of belief that somehow or another it was authentic. And I'm thinking of the organism, mechanism moment that you explained so well to us. I wonder what Ursula would say what's next with that in terms of AI and communication. Yeah, wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to hear her talk about it? One of the comments she makes is that language is associated very profoundly with human beings. You know, humans' capacity for language and the social implications of that, the cognitive implications of that.

And of course, now that language is being produced through next token prediction, and it comes from no one, and it can mean nothing, but it's called, it's seen as language. It kind of tricks the mind into thinking it's the coherent thought of an organism. And I would have loved to hear her talk about that. And I think we can predict some of the concerns that we have about that. But I would have loved to hear her think about it structurally and the larger implications of, as you say, readers trusting language or not being able to tell about language. I heard recently, you know, there's a lot of talk about our students going to write their assignments using generative AI. And I heard the other day about a faculty member who's experimenting marking student assignments using generative AI. And I just sort of thought, aren't we kind of losing the plot?

You know, it's the efficiency. I came, as many of us did, to hear Janice Stein talk about her Massey lecture, The Cult of Efficiency. And there is a cult-like quality of it. If it's efficient, it's got to be good without consideration of what's being lost in the exchange and what do we value. So thank you. That was really a fantastic lecture. I really appreciate that. And one of the things that I was struck by was the equation that you articulated of accountability and judgment. And as someone with a background in rhetoric, how do we get people to be more accountable for their communications and therefore improve both their accountability and their judgment

about those communications, in your opinion? That's a very old question. Plato and Aristotle argued about that. Plato thought that rhetoric shouldn't be taught. It was too dangerous. People would throw curveballs at each other. They'd say things that weren't true. He didn't use the curveball analogy. And Aristotle said, well, people are going to throw curveballs at each other, so we better teach people how to catch them. And the function of learning rhetoric is to understand when people are not being truthful or when they're not providing evidence. So rhetoric sometimes has a bad reputation. It's thought of as tricking people, but in the original, you know, in the classical rhetorician sense, it was understanding how we

are being persuaded and having the capacity to say, that's not clear. I don't understand that. That's not, that's a source of divisible benefits. Who is benefiting? Lursla was very careful about language. So while she wasn't a rhetorician by training, she was a rhetorician by nature. She was a listener and she wasn't blaming, but she was asking without fear and understanding the importance of clarity. So I do feel concerned with increasing asynchronous comments, which is, you know, social media feels like a conversation, but it's actually sequential monologue. I do feel concerned, as do so many, that there is not accountability. And I know this concern also goes up to journals. Journal editors right now are

expressing concern. Where's the accountability behind the science if any portion of something is written by generative AI in the spirit of efficiency? But that accountability, being able to track back to a reproducible process that a scientist can explain. We count on that accountability to take our steps forward. My question is, how do we get more Ursula Franklin? So, I've never met her. And my question, every time that I hear about the questions she asked, the lectures she gave, there's a clarity of thought, there's a prescience, there's an ability to understand the world in a deep way. We acknowledge that she has a scientific mind, but she's worried about the words. She uses words very carefully. Was there a way in which she was educated outside the natural talent?

So how could we recreate more Ursula Franklin's that are so needed today? Boy, do I ever wish I had the answer to that question. Yes, I don't have any quick answer. She certainly grew up in a family in which discussion was valued, and they never had a television. She and her husband never had a television. They continued to really prize interaction and reading. They were voracious readers. And she was a real polymath. I don't know if you're aware, but she was the director of museum studies for several years, But she was the director of museum studies for several years because she took her knowledge of metal alloys to investigating Chinese bronze.

And she worked in the Royal Ontario Museum and was the director of museum studies, in addition to being a professor of engineering and a metallurgist and a physicist. So she was a real polymath. She understood that disciplinary ways of seeing are narrow, and she bridged different disciplines. She was a very active Quaker, as you know, and many of her sensibilities came from a very, very deep connectedness to being a Quaker. She talked about silence as a common good, because, of course, Quakers,akers as you know worship in silence they gather together and wait on god and she wants to explain to me it's not waiting for god we're not waiting for godot you know it's not waiting for an answer abracadabra deus ex machina it's being receptive waiting for inspiration and she believes that that place of silence is where we encounter the holy, where we encounter scientific discovery.

So she did believe in the benefits of the slow, you know, of contemplation, of discussion. But of course, you can't account for that genius. She also often would say that, to me and to many, she would say, we didn't make this mess. We just work here. Sometimes we just have to muddle through. Could you just, if you could, try to just identify the core values that she practiced in her activism, in her feminism, in her pacifism? Well, I often heard her say, why does anybody want to know anything? And her answer, as you've probably heard her say, is to cope. We want to learn to cope.

And she had a very developed sense of struggle. You know, as I think everyone here knows, she was in a concentration camp in her youth. She was just months away from turning 18. She'd been accepted to university in England, and she was just months away from going. But they had turned her down because she was only 17, and the war broke out. And she and both of her parents were sent to concentration camps, separate concentration camps. And they agreed they would meet back at their family home if they survived. But they didn't know until they returned that they had all survived.

And she talked about the mortgage of the survivor, the mortgage on our energies. You know, what does it mean that she survived and others didn't and the kind of feeling of mortgage she carried on behalf of others to work for public good and so she didn't talk about that experience much it was well known uh in her as part of her history in the last the most recent of recent of the lectures in our book, she talks about that very, very powerfully and that moral mortgage. And I think it was a deep motivation for her that there was something to pay forward and to help others cope when they may feel beyond coping, to use her gifts of insight and training to participate.

Thank you so much for that wonderful talk. I just enjoyed so much hearing the sort of great way you pulled that red thread through of all those wonderful themes. And I'm struck, actually, in that review that you provided of the managerial versus the worker and the holistic versus a prescriptive, how much some of these themes seem to have become part of almost part of popular culture. Like I don't think we've, it seems to me anyway, and I'm only 53. So, you know, I only covered a little bit of history, but it seems to me that we've never been in a period where people have been both so critical of the everyday technologies that sort of permeate their lives and at the same time feel so passive or sort of de-agentified,

if that's a real word, in regards to them. And so I was really struck by that. What do we do after we take a dim view? But I'm just so struck by the level of criticality that I witness every day and the sense that we have absolutely no capacity to intervene in that. I'm wondering, what would Ursula say? Which, by the way, was a wonderful collection put on by the Culture and Technology Institute a few years ago. But also your ventral equation of that. I'd love to hear what you have to say. Yeah, again, I wish I had her mind, but one thing that comes to mind quickly is I think part of the danger, and this is not a new idea or an idea from Ursula particularly, but the social media allows what looks like reciprocity, but what isn't reciprocity.

She writes a lot about the lack of reciprocity. So when people do a hit and run comment on social media, on Facebook or Twitter or, you know, whatever is the mode of the moment, there is a sense that they're getting their two cents in, but there's no accountability. There's no, it's very different than sitting in a room with another person and saying that. And as we know, it's led to bullying and all kinds of behaviors. So I, it sounds like a very simple thing, but I would say one of the most profound things that I try to do, and it's not always easy to push back against people's desire of efficiency is how do we get people together? How do we, you know, with my graduate students, they're all busy. They all have reasons why it's more efficient to do something online. Or I'll tell you what, I gave a workshop recently

on generative AI and academic writing, and I got a question that really troubled me. One of my graduate students said, could you tell us about how best to use chat GPT to write a literature review? And I thought, wow, you know, the function of a lit review is to dig up the soil. Ursula called, she said, the Franklin earthworm theory, that we have to prepare the theory, the soil like earthworms for new discovery.

You know, that's what happens in a lit review is you have to, as a thinker, a researcher in whatever field, you have to be deeply knowledgeable about what's happening in that field. And there's no shortcut. There's no way to just get to the end and have a product without the knowledge, the disconnecting of knowledge from experience. She talked about working in the lab. She worked at the lab bench in her own lab. And of course, she was famous and she had all sorts of students and postdocs. But she said, that's the seedbed. The lab is where I understood the problems differently. So sometimes in our rush to

efficiency, I keep mentioning Janice Stein's talk because it really just rang so many bells for me that we prize efficiency so highly in this day and age when we have not enough time. and not always paying attention to what's lost. And that reciprocity is what comes to mind first in relation to what you're saying. I don't know if that feels relevant. Thank you so much, Professor Friedman, for your incredibly thoughtful lecture. And thank you, everyone, for those incredibly thoughtful questions. Truly an honor to hear you speak of Ursula Franklin and we really appreciate all of you.

It's a pleasure to be here. Professor Jane Freeman is the founding director of the Graduate Center for Academic Communication at the University of Toronto. She collaborated with Ursula Franklin on a book containing a collection of Ursula's previously unpublished lectures and interviews. The book, entitled Ursula Franklin Speaks, Thoughts and Afterthoughts, was published in 2014. This episode is part of our series celebrating the 60th anniversary of Massey College. Thank you to our colleague at Ideas, Philip Coulter, for his work on the series, and to Massey College for hosting the event. Ideas web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Ideas senior producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Ideas senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.