Matt Ridley notes that we close the black box pretty quickly:
When did you last read an account of how microchips actually work? You know, replete with all that stuff about electrons and holes and “p-doping” and “n-doping” and the delights of gallium arsenide. The golden age of such articles, when you could read about them in the mainstream press, was the early 1980s. Today nobody writes about semiconductors, at least not about how they work.
My point? That when a technology is new, everybody wants to understand how it works. When it is mature, nobody is interested in such details. The fascination with how things work fades, and the technology becomes a black box.
It is the same with any technology. A few years ago people modified their computers in all sorts of clever ways, adding on hard drives or patching in programs. Now they tend to take them as they are: a sign of a maturing technology.
Once upon a time people built toy steam engines, or assembled home-made radios with crystals and cat’s whiskers (whatever those were), or tinkered with their own cars and talked about fuel injection and conical piston heads, or tried to teach children computer programming languages; or drew diagrams of different types of jet engines. Now you treat a radio or a car as a fully functioning off-the-shelf device with internal workings that you dare not touch; and nobody is terribly interested in the precise processes of internal combustion or amplitude modulation.
I am especially conscious of this, because when I first became a science reporter, part of my job was to write breathless dispatches on semiconductor breakthroughs, with carefully nuanced explanations of mechanisms. But as the semiconductor became ubiquitous, the details dropped out of sight. Take gallium arsenide. There was a lively debate about whether this semiconducting compound was going to replace silicon, because of its superior features. There probably still is, but it’s no longer considered newsworthy.
Likewise, there was once a good living to be made by people like me explaining genetics at the molecular level: all about hydrogen bonds, four-letter alphabets, three-letter code-words and A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s. Now you mostly take that for granted and cut straight to the medical chase.
“Now you mostly take that for granted and cut straight to the medical chase.”
Which, considering that the Human Genome Project (the most expensive scientific project in history, by far) has had approximately zero positive impact on medicine, actually means cutting straight to the BS, spin, hype and outright lies.
I was shocked to learn that the Human Genome Project was declared finished when it had not in fact sequenced the entire human genome. And I was baffled by the prevalent expectation that knowing the code without understanding the machine running it would yield massive, immediate breakthroughs in medicine.
Indeed. So dishonesty was built into the project.
Many of us knew from its inception that the Human Genome Project was either ignorant (because the scientists knew virtually nothing about medicine) or dishonest (because the scientists did know about medicine, but wanted the money anyway) and would not yield what was promised.
The Human Genome Project was ‘sold’ on the basis of generating rapid and significant progress in the treatment of human disease, and that was a false and often fraudulent claim.
I think the Human Genome Project had — and still has — plenty of potential; it’s just going to take a lot of time and effort to extract useful knowledge from the raw data — and I don’t necessarily think it’s the current medical experts who are going to lead the way. The task is one for information-coding experts, informed by “old school” medical experts.
Also, is there any way around dishonesty in funding, when those with the funds — and those they’re beholden to — can’t understand what they’re funding?