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9486 in the collection
Book Review
Tomorrow's People: how 21st- century technology is changing the way we think and feel
Susan Greenfield Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 284pp, £20
ISBN 0713996315
The last time I reviewed a book by Susan Greenfield I was broadly sympathetic, sympathetic enough, in fact, to be quoted on the cover of this latest work. But in the last paragraph of that review, I pointed out that, as Greenfield could not write, it might be a good idea if her publisher helped her out. They seem to have chosen to ignore my advice and so, I'm afraid, the gloves must come off.
Tomorrow's People is the worst-written book I have ever reviewed. It is not enough to say that Greenfield has a tin ear. She has absolutely no idea how English sentences work, nor any feel for the vernacular. Euphony I can live without, but rhythm and clarity, in some small measure, are essential. Here is a fairly typical Greenfield sentence: "At last, at the turn of the century, IT has finally matured into adjectives such as 'cheap' and 'easy to use', with the tsunami of applications and knock-on implications it has for our lives."
Broken-backed, lifeless, badly expres-sed and difficult to read, this is a more or less standard example. There are also trivial inaccuracies that emerge simply because she thinks they sound right - the Thunderbirds puppets did not wear "tinfoil outfits". This is silly self-indulgence, though it is not as bad as the opening paragraph of the preface, which explains how she wanted to write a novel.
"Indeed," she muses, "such unfettered literary abandonment was just the type of activity I was looking forward to on a quiet beach holiday in the Caribbean during the Christmas break, a few years ago."
Unfettered? Literary!? Abandonment!!? Get on with it! And try not to end sentences with a series of limp afterthoughts. But, to be fair, long sections of this book are more or less tolerable in a rhythmless, rambling kind of way. The problem is that some horror is always waiting around the corner to jolt you out of your torpor.
. . . and certainly you will probably be more different in character from your clone . . .
Yet imagine a world in which the mobile phone is miniaturised into visual invisibility . . .
Does anybody read this stuff before it goes to the printers? Does Greenfield?
OK, OK, I'll calm down. This book argues that developments in science and technology may have negative effects on human life, either reducing us to passive consumers or providing us with the means of destroying ourselves. I agree with this. Indeed, I wrote it - much better than Greenfield and with some historical depth - in Understanding the Present in 1992. Then, scientists queued up to abuse me, personally and professionally; now they seem to be queueing up to agree with me. So it goes.
Greenfield's case is presented confusingly not just because of the prose, but also because she sometimes adopts the posture of looking back from the future and sometimes of looking forward to the future. Furthermore, she invents categories of personality - cynic, technophiles and technophobes - to explain arguments. She then mixes them up in ways I can- not follow before capriciously dropping them altogether.
But broadly speaking, a virtual world of sensation and sensuality awaits us. In this world our private lives will have gone - quantum computing will log every move we make - but we will not care, because we shall have no secrets. We will talk to dead people, though they will be invented by the computer, and we will be able to have virtual affairs. Our partner may well play hard to get but he or she will succumb in the end. Time will become, as the hippies dreamt it might, meaningless and our self - considered as a striving towards wisdom and recognition - will be an irrelevance.
Our bodies will be elaborately cyborged to make, for example, psychokinesis possible. And negative thoughts will simply be swept away on a tide of dope. Expert systems will take over much professional and management work and there will be a culling of white-collar jobs, comparable to the culling of blue-collar ones that has already taken place. Sex will be finally and fully severed from reproduction. Terrorism will threaten all this, and human nature will be transformed into a bipolar nightmare of fanaticism and virtualised passivity.
Greenfield doesn't quite say this because she hedges all her bets. And she doesn't ask any important questions about these developments. What is it about science and technology that should make us do such terrible things? What are the historic roots of these trends? Does the acquisition of self-consciousness lead inevitably to its own destruction? The problem is that in her own field, the brain, Greenfield is on firm ground. But, in areas such as politics, sociology and history, she is pure dinner party.
This is all a pity, because this could have been an important book. The possibility that there may be no beneficial human consequences to further technological progress is obvious but generally denied. When pressed on this matter, technocrats first offer all sorts of computerised wonders to the wealthy and then murmur stuff about feeding the world. But as Greenfield acknowledges, the technology provided for the wealthy is quite likely to discourage them from having any interest whatsoever in the starving billions.
The wealthy will not only be selfish, they will also be stupid. Greenfield writes unconvincingly about education, but she does see the problem. In a world where facts are instantly available, children will only be expected to invent systems and ideas. Indeed, many educationalists are celebrating this development. But in reality, facts will be rendered valueless by this process because they will be seen as not only cost-free but also arbitrary. This is already happening. As a result, there will be no basis on which children can be required to learn anything. They will simply recline in their virtual salons until killed by a terrorist bomb.
This book could have been important because it could have been a warning from a prominent scientific mandarin - Greenfield is director of the Royal Institution - about the concealed destructive trends in current science and technology. Its literary and intellectual failure is, therefore, serious. Penguin, you have one last chance. Get her a ghost. Now.
— Bryan Appleyard
New Statesman
2003-09-
http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSReview_Bshop&newDisplayURN=300000075053
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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