Some 15 years ago, a friend recommended I check out a vintage BBC science documentary series called Connections: “I just think it will resonate with how your mind works.” He was right. I was immediately hooked and devoured every available episode, following host James Burke down countless fascinating historical rabbit holes before arriving at an unexpected final destination—although in retrospect, the haphazard journey somehow made perfect sense. Connections was the science documentary series for compulsively curious people who weren’t necessarily drawn to more traditional science and nature documentaries. And now Burke is back and better than ever with six new episodes of a rebooted Connections, thanks to the folks at Curiosity Stream.
The series had been around for decades before I made my belated discovery. The BBC first aired Connections to the UK back in 1978, expanding to the US the following year. Produced and directed by Mick Jackson, each episode would start with some past innovation or event—the invention of the cannon and subsequent changes to castle fortifications to eliminate blind spots, for example. Then Burke would spend the remainder of the episode tracking a path through a series of seemingly unrelated events—maps, limelight, incandescent bulbs, substituting guncotton for ivory in billiard balls, the zoopraxiscope, the telegraph—to demonstrate how they all connected to produce a modern-day breakthrough: the movie projector.
Much of the delight came from all those surprising and unexpected connections. But Burke also had an overarching philosophy about the nature of change and innovation, arguing that rather than progress occurring in a conventional linear fashion, it occurred nonlinearly via an intricate web of interconnected events. In short, one simply could not understand a new modern scientific breakthrough or technology in isolation. That’s why the series was subtitled “An Alternative View of Change.”
This alternative view has some significant implications. First, since history is driven by people who act only on what they know at the time, one can merely speculate about how science and technology will progress into the future. As surprising as Burke’s connections might be, future audiences will be equally surprised by where today’s actions and events will have led. The downside is that, over time, there will be an increasing number of possible connections. So the process of innovation can accelerate too rapidly, to the point where human beings simply can’t adapt quickly enough. Eventually, only an elite few will have requisite knowledge and expertise to navigate an incredibly complicated technological world built on all those interconnected innovations; the average person will simply be out of our depth.
It’s a conceptual framework that has remained relevant over the ensuing decades. The Learning Channel (TLC) revived Connections for two subsequent seasons in 1994 and 1995. And now Curiosity Stream has taken up the mantle, keeping everything we loved about the original series—including its legendary host. This time around, Burke explores such links as the death of Rene Descartes in 1649 and virtual reality, for instance, or Napoleon’s toothpick and Nielsen TV ratings. And he’s still an active participant, jumping into a sensory tank with dolphins for an episode connecting outbreaks of syphilis in the French aristocracy to nano fabrication and its implications for the value of things.
“Increasingly today, change happens too fast for most of us to handle,” Burke said. “Connections shows how this happens: because when things come together in new ways, 1+1= 3. The connective approach offers a way to second-guess that process—and predict the future.” Ars spoke with Burke to learn more.
Ars Technica: What prompted you to want to do another round of Connections after all these years?
James Burke: It’s been 20-something years since the last one, and the first 20 years of this century have been extraordinary in terms of the speed with which technology has developed and affected everybody. Above all, the interconnected nature of society now is tremendously more dense than it was 20 years ago. So it struck me that it was an audience that might well fit well with another connective approach, since I think that the connective approach allows people to practice prediction for themselves. If ever we need to be able to predict, it’s now.
Ars Technica: I want to delve a bit into the central philosophy behind your series: this idea of the nonlinearity of how change happens, which was quite novel at the time. How did you develop that particular insight?
James Burke: When I was at school and at university, change was a linear matter. It went from A to B to C to D, and that was that. As for how I came to it, I have no idea. I think it’s partly because of the way my life went. I finished at Oxford, and in those days, everybody used to go work for Unilever, a very big corporation in Britain. I thought, no, I think I’d rather slit my throat. So I ran away to Italy, where I got a job accidentally running a language school. I met somebody at the university who said, “We need somebody to teach medieval English.” I could do that, so I did. Then I got a chance to do the same thing at Rome University.
All of a sudden I bumped into English TV people who said, “Could you direct a film?” And I said, “No. I couldn’t.” And they said, “Well, can you come and help research, because you speak Italian?” I said, “Sure.” At a certain point, the director said, “We absolutely have to have a presenter.” I said, looking around, “Where?” And they said, “You.” So I stood in front of the camera and did it. That was the beginning of a television career that hasn’t stopped since. So my life is nonlinear and always has been.
Ars Technica: Has your understanding about the connectivity of change evolved over the ensuing decades?
James Burke: No. I suppose I started with the view that the world was a mishmash, and it moved along and whatever happened, happened because of the mishmash. I still think that’s more true than ever. For me, the main thing over the last 20 years or so is the way in which the interconnectivity of society and what we do has become tremendously more complex than it was—primarily of course because of the computer. That means it’s very much more difficult to predict what’s going to happen and therefore prepare for it. And even if you prepare, it’s going to be way ahead of you by the time you get there. It’s a question of learning to ride the crazy animal.
I think probably right now, half the people are worried about that and can’t handle it. But I think that will go away quite rapidly. It has to go away rapidly, because science and technology will move away from us too fast if it doesn’t. Change is happening in science and technology at an ever-increasing rate. Either we keep up or I don’t know what we do. The best we can do is to try and find tools to allow us to keep up. I’m not sure we will. I mean, artificial intelligence presents colossal problems.
Ars Technica: You’ve always said that that’s one of the downsides. Many people really didn’t foresee the negative impact of social media and AI with regard to the rapid spread of misinformation, for instance.
James Burke: When we thought of them in the first place, they looked good. How could things be bad if you’ve got a machine that tells you what’s coming tomorrow? We didn’t realize that it’s going to tell you how many tens of thousands of things are coming tomorrow, and then the next 10,000 days after that. Television and public media used to help in the way that they backed up and benefited from the educational tools that we have in society to prepare people for this kind of experience. I think they’re no longer doing that, because things are moving too fast. The question is, is there an alternate form of communication, of organization of what we know, other than television and modern education, that can keep up? If not, how do we do so? If we can’t, what’s going to be the result? Those are the main questions we need to answer within the next five to 10 years.
Ars Technica: So are we doomed? Is society just going to implode in on itself because we no longer adapt to such rapid change?
James Burke: Well, it can’t, because we won’t allow it. If the worst comes to worst, you dynamite the place. But I think there will be modes of thinking about this stuff that will allow us to work in a different way to the machine. If you read books and they become too dense, too complex for you, you invent a library. You invent a way to organize them in such a way as to make getting at them in the first place easier. Instead of having a book that is too difficult to understand, you say, “This book has the following things in it,” and put up about five or six ideas that the book expresses.
Ars Technica: What sort of connections have surprised and delighted (or terrified) you the most?
James Burke: All three boil into one, really: delighted, terrified, and surprised. I’d probably say two inventions boiled down to all three: surprised, delighted, and terrified. One was ENIAC, the first proper computer developed during the Second World War. The other was earlier, an invention that happened in the German National Museum in the 1900s, and it was what we now call a dome. Buckminster Fuller gave it his name, wrongly, because he didn’t invent it. It was originally invented for planetaria so that you could lie inside and see the stars. Then the dome became really important for keeping the wind off things called radar heads as part of the defense of the United States across the Canadian border during the Cold War. Between them, those two things made possible the modern computer and the Internet, both things that have changed society the most.
Ars Technica: There was a time when C.P. Snow’s notion of two cultures—science and the humanities—dominated the discourse in certain academic circles, I think to the detriment of society. Do you think that’s shifting, the boundaries blurring, as everything becomes more interdisciplinary?
James Burke: I think you’re right about C.P. Snow’s early years and his effects, but I think it’s mostly gone, mainly because of computers—because it’s easy to interpret what science talks about, turn it into plain language and understand it that way. When I was little, scientists spoke a foreign language. There was no way that you understood a physicist unless you were a physicist. Now there are ways of getting in behind it, if you like, with plain language. Thanks to AI, I think we will go on being better and better at doing that.
This, of course, asks the question, “If we can understand science, shall we start putting our fingers in, or will they be cut off?” Well, I’m afraid they’ll be cut off because it’s not as easy as it looks. I think over the next few years we will develop a set of rules about how far you can go in and in what way into science. Because science is going to become immensely more complex and immensely more powerful and immensely more effective in the next 20 years. There’s no way a non-scientist will be able to keep up as much as physicists in physics or bacteriologists in bacteriology.
So there has to be a way of tending the grass around it as a way of getting close to the bush. You can’t touch the bush because the bush is physics, right? Maybe you look after the grass. It’s halfway there, but it’s better than nothing. That’s going to be as good as we can get, because the alternative is dumb rabbits sitting there, having stuff done to them by ever-increasingly complex science, about which they understand almost nothing.
Ars Technica: It’s especially an issue because we live in a society that’s increasingly more science and technology-driven, yet our leaders and much of the general populace increasingly just don’t have the relevant knowledge or expertise to navigate it.
James Burke: Yes. Science is turning out new kinds of things nearly every day. And there’s this quite old-fashioned thing called government, which is increasingly incapable of keeping up with the changes required to run society in the way it needs to be run, given the speed with which science and technology are changing. I think fairly soon we will have to think of an entirely new way of running government. It’s all very well to ask everybody, “What do you think?” and then do what they want, but that will be uninformed, too slow, and just wrong. We have to think of a new kind of governing. I think it’s in there somewhere with AI, but I’m not sure how.
You’re either optimistic, or you jump off the bridge, and I don’t intend to jump off the bridge. The best thing is to stick around and do something. A lot of AI is the problem, but part of it, by definition, is a solution. There is no reason why we could not think of a way of shaping the use of AI to better suit our problems in the time available, before new problems appear and make things even worse. We have no choice. We have to do this. One way is to blow it up. That’s gone. Too late. Can’t do that. I think we have a decade of very difficult work ahead of us. I think it’s going to be our single major problem of this century.
Ars Technica: How was your experience making this latest incarnation of Connections different than past incarnations? The technology has changed significantly and so have science documentaries.
James Burke: Television is entirely different. I remember walking around the world with a film crew, sometimes 15 people, and pointing at a bush and saying, “What am I doing here?” That’s very time-consuming and expensive, and we no longer need that kind of thing. This time, there’s no money. There’s a lot of technology like virtual reality and archival material by the ton that you can access without leaving your living room. You can put it together with ease in any way you like. There are things I like about it. Nobody went anywhere, so we didn’t get up and catch planes all the time. And nothing got in the way of the story except me. All I did was stand and talk. Because of the structure, the nature of the production style, the story can move more densely and more quickly than ever before. I’m not saying I’ve invented a new style, it’s just the way it’s done now.
I think we’re seeing the end of documentary filming on centralized channels. I think it’s almost dead. Documentary films are not made anymore for television. My feeling is we’re going to have a renaissance, but it’s not really a renaissance because it hasn’t been “naissanced.” There’s going to be a major new development equivalent to the Internet, which could be called, if you like, “do it yourself.” There are hundreds of potentially genius filmmakers out there waiting for a medium that doesn’t require tools they can’t afford, that allows them to be as creative as they wish. They won’t care whether a channel wants to take them on or not, they’ll put it online. YouTube and TikTok are early examples of what’s coming.
I have great hopes that while it may not be art, it certainly will be knowledge. If it’s done well, it will do all the things that the old documentaries used to do, but much better, much more quickly, much more densely. Documentaries have a use, they fill in the gaps, whatever it is we didn’t get from education, experience, or work. Especially I think there will be a large new school of documentaries called “How Do You Keep Up With What’s Going On Out There?” We’ll be teaching people about what the science is running ahead of them to do.
Connections is now streaming on Curiosity Stream.