James V. Burke – BYU Forum Address

Venue: BYU Devotionals and Forums, Marriott Center

Date: 24 January 2006

Dr. Burke has worked his whole life for various communications technology and broadcasting companies. He thinks along the lines of Nibley and Einstein. He spoke on innovation and change. Innovation is surprising and unforseeable. Change results from things coming together in ways they have not come together before. Institutions have only purpose, to perpetuate themselves and the things they create. They are slow to accept change and adopt innovation so they they try to make us confident by what they have done in the past, not the future. On modern higher education, Descartes suggested we apply methodical doubt, but we have progressed to learn more and more about less and less. The current academia attitude is to specialize so much that you’re the only one who knows what you specialized in. Explain yourself in gobledigoop so nobody else can make their way up to you. Then you are at the top of the world, in your little area.

Technology is developing faster and faster and institutions are not keeping up so they attempt to censor and limit technology. Modern global communciations have changed that and there is nothing institutions can do anymore to stop the progression.

Einstein once said, “public education destroys our brains.” The fundamental process of the brain is to make new connections. Burke offered the example of jokes. When we make the connection, we laugh and we like it because we are making connections. Information should trigger reactions, unfortunately we aren’t learning much information in school these days.

We are growing out of our democracy and intermediaries. Our Democracy is based on the idea that we need representatives. We don’t anymore. We can communicate for ourselves now. The top down systems are no longer applying. The culture of scarcity is coming to an end. We are not prepared for what lies ahead. Intelligence will not longer be a rarity. There are 4.9 billion people who will soon be added to the global community and some of them will be smarter, faster, and better than us. We’re going to need to learn how to deal with that. Technology and globalization of technology is bringing the previously nobodies the opportunity to equalize themselves with the somebodies of the western world. We should attempt to think out of the box Descartes put us in.