DG CONNECT classifies and symbolises technologists as the uncreative ones!

Following last week’s ICT 2015 event in Lisbon, and the publication of the European Commission’s new call for ICT research proposals, in the END, ICT-ART CONNECT, or STARTS as it would now like to be known, appears in the new Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2016-2017 in the area of Information and Communication Technologies with a very traditional and very European approach, which STARTS with Classification and Symbolisation.

There are, we are told, two classes: technologists symbolised as the uncreative ones, who are suffering from a creativity deficit, which must therefore be corrected through collaboration with artists and creative people, symbolised as the carriers of the much sought after creativity (the weighty mystery). Yet what evidence is there for this creativity deficit? I look forward to reading the report that documents this evidence. I have searched for it using Google, but strangely, it does not seem to exist. Why could that be? Perhaps it is a secret report, only accessible to those with special positions, and not to be shared with invisible people such myself?

We are also told that arts are gaining prominence as a catalyst for an efficient conversion of S&T knowledge into innovative products, services, and processes. Again I searched on Google for the evidence of this. Truly there is a vast amount of information available about artists using S&T knowledge to create art which is what artists do, but innovative products, services, and processes? I also looked for evidence of this in the ICT & ART CONNECT study report. Nothing! And what a truly empty piece of work this is. It is one of those reports where there is so little content of value, that material that would normally be relegated to appendices has been included in the main body of the report.

So I am mystified by this talk of efficient conversion of S&T knowledge into innovative products, services, and processes, and even more so when I read, for example, the Digital Humanities manifesto, which clearly states that "in the vast majority of cases, scholarship and art practice are not-for-profit endeavours whose actual costs far exceed real or potential returns." This corresponds with my own perspective and that of most of the artists I have encountered.

So it seems that artists are to be recruited to become the handmaiden's of the economy and of technologists, to create unconventional and compelling new products. Interesting opportunities here perhaps for some subversive activities to comment on the attitude of mind in government agencies, that, on the one hand does not prioritise or value artists, but which, on the other, seeks to appropriate them to the demands of an economic system that is failing and which has no place in a sustainable future.

"But there is 6 million euros available", is your response. To which I would ask by way of reply, "just how much of this will find its way into the pockets of artists?"

What is most likely to be the outcome of this exercise is that the bulk of the money will end up in the hands of the usual organisations that live well off European funding, but which have tenuous connections with domains such as the arts. What artists will most likely end up with, are the crumbs that fall from the table at which these organisations are dining at public expense. Be aware too, that the 50,000 euro experiments referred to in the text of the Call for proposals, is an upper value (the words used are "typically below the range of 50,000 euro), and the amount is for the experiment, not for the artists. In other words, it will be shared among those participating in the experiments – artists and technologist, and perhaps others too.

You will not find in this new addition to the ICT Work Programme, any reference to the creation of art, which is what artists want to do. Nor is there any reference to the use of artistic criteria as part of the assessment of the entries for the STARTS prize, which seems, I must add, to be more about the European Commission in the form of DG CONNECT, seeking to acquire kudos from the arts. There is also no mention of artistic criteria in the selection of the experiments. And perhaps most noteworthy, no mention of using art to do all the important things that, at this moment in time, at this point in humanity’s short story, are most necessary if we as a species are to have a future worth having.

Words one associates with art that are missing: aesthetics, artistic processes, art as a way of knowing the world, art practice as research, artistic freedom, imagination …

So what becomes of artistic freedom, when vainglorious technocrats in state institutions decree how art should be used and what subjects are legitimate? No need to answer the question for the answer lies in history, with communism providing a modern example. And what to say about the notion of developing common work practices and identifying concrete Research and Development and Innovation problems that artistic practices could help address? Much in fact, but this will do:

What is the point of the first, when the value lies in that fact that the approaches are very different, and for the second, well this is something that you should already know, if you really understood and had taken the trouble to document the state-of-the-art and understand what art is about and how artists work. Which brings me to the sum of things: it was evident at the START that the European Commission did not understand; it was evident during the course of the development of ICT-ART CONNECT that the European Commission did not understand and did not want to; and it is evident at the END that they do not understand. STARTS, END, they are both the same, and an opportunity is once again lost. Never mind perhaps in 25 year's time the European Commission will take a fresh look, as they are doing with Social Sciences, to discover that which they have already been told, but have chosen to ignore. Only in 25 year’s time it will be too late.

The realisation of ICT-ART CONNECT in the new ICT work programme – a staggering lack of vision, imagination and creativity. Perhaps there is a creativity deficit after all, for here surely is the evidence. They should perhaps have practiced what they are preaching, and worked with artists to create an unconventional and compelling work programme!

ICT & ART CONNECT DISCONNECT – the decision to disconnect and to hack ICT ART CONNECT is one of the most fruitful things that I have ever done. And the reasons for this will become clear over the coming months and years. ICT-ART CONNECT, or STARTS, is about cognitive biases and deficit thinking, both being reinforced by artist willing to compromise their integrity for the sake of money. This is not the way forward for the arts.

So in the END you got what you wanted – money. Thus STARTS the rest of your life, without credibility and integrity. Enjoy the material rewards, for you have truly eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

And the END result will be an extremely noisy, highly schizophrenic circus, where all will be claimed to be a major success, but which will, in reality, be largely empty of substance, and once again the European Commission in the form of DG CONNECT will have demonstrated that it is truly a failing institution continuing to cause a huge amount of damage to the European economy.

The VW emissions scandal, engineering ethics, and collective denial

Insects fluttering around the light that is the ICT research programme will be addressed in my next blog, for this week I make an unexpected detour into the murky world of the professional and ethical behaviour of scientists, engineers and technologists. This diversion is made necessary as a result of an editorial to the October (2015) issue of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) periodical that goes by the name Professional Engineer, which in the light of VW, is a somewhat questionable title for an occupation where people are willing to engage in using technology to cheat.

That engineers in VW were willing to participate in an act of fraud came as no surprise to me, for it is just one more example of the low standards of behaviour that I have come to expect from this occupation. And I speak from over 30 years of experience in which I have encountered more scientist, engineers and technologists than I am able to count and certainly far more than most other people.

While there are individuals among these occupations who do have high standards comparable with those found in law and medicine, the norm is set far below these professions. And the problem is a human one, where there is a tendency to follow the easy path, in situations where engineers are employees and are in effect, handmaidens, and have to obey orders. And all around them are people and organisations that serve as role models for low standards, and that includes academics, who are probably the worst when it comes poor ethics and professionalism, and also institutions such as the IMechE and the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, who are just vested interest groups seeking power and willing to engage in unprofessional and unethical activities to achieve this.

And then comes collective denial and delusion, where all this is just ignored, and people start claiming, without any evidence, that the vast majority of engineers who are members of the IMechE, for example, comply with the guiding principles of that institution concerning such matters as professional conduct, ethics …, which is what the editor of Professional Engineer claimed; the equivalent to saying that the emperor is wearing a fine suit of clothes. And when a little boy speaks truth about the nonsense of this, it is not in the nature of humans to listen, but to classify and symbolise him as suffering from a deficit, and then to ignore him and to continue as though nothing were amiss.

I have come across many examples of poor professional conduct and unethical behaviour involving scientist, engineers and technologist over my career, and had to walk away from many activities because of it. The reality is that, there is such a thing as irresponsible research and innovation, and much bad conduct driven by the pursuit of personal gain and the Will to Power. One recent example is this thing called ICT-ART CONNECT, which has been shaped by the all too familiar, morally corrupt relationship that exists between the European Commission and its so-called experts and the organisations that engage with the Commission in pursuit of their own agendas, which usually have something to do with getting hold of public money. It is all about money, power and kudos, and this I will be exploring in some detail over the remaining weeks of 2015.

Insects are drawn to the light …

Continuing with the time theme and also following-up on the notion of Horizon 2020 as innovation nonsense …

Many insects (not just moths) are drawn to the light. Researchers are like that too. Turn on a light (that is to say provide funding for a topic) and the insects will flutter around it. Turn it off and then switch on another light, and these very same insects will flutter over to the new light. Very rarely will any of the insects question the light or challenge whether it is appropriate. That’s because they are caught in a loop, constantly reinventing themselves in exactly the same form that they were the day before, only calling themselves by a different name. Deep down they are just the same people caught-up in western (European) ideology, and certainly not interested in exploring the taken for granted assumptions, values, etc. which all those so called ‘value-free’ researchers are not prepared to have exposed to the public gaze.

So what happens when a light is turned on, but the light lies outside the spectral range of all those insects?

The above is a brief glimpse, into how to unleash the forces of creative destruction against the economies of the western world. People in China and India should take note of my past and future blogs about the nature of time, about Europe being cursed by Nemesis and condemned by Zeus, and about the Tao. Few of those with European/Western minds will understand what I am talking about. They still think that the whole world is going to play by their stupid Enlightenment rules! The new competitive advantage of the nation lies in culture and the empty materialist and soulless culture of the Western world has no future. It is time to change.

And all you binary thinkers note that this does not mean that I agree with the way that China deals with those who show dissent. But in this, they do what all with power do, the only difference between them and the West, is the trigger point at which they react and the means they use to enforce conformance. In the end all governments are evil – the point of difference is the degree of evil. And all will, given the right circumstances, hand to the dissenters, that phial of hemlock that Socrates preferred to drink rather than to surrender to the will of the small minded empty people who, in seeking power, find it in the institutions of the Nation State and now also supra level state institutions such as those found in the EU, and in particular, in the European Commission and its research programmes, and once more we are back to those insects and, next week, the ICT Research Programme, where there are many insects fluttering around lights.

The sum of things

And now for what was, my final input to the FET proactive consultation:

Most people are familiar with the image of a kettle being heated over an open fire. The kettle in this image is a proven classic design whose origin is lost in time. The form of this kettle design is, the way it is, because of the requirement to be able to suspend the kettle over a fire, which, in the distant past, was how people cooked. The handle enables the metal body of the kettle to be suspended from a hook over the fire, and the spout of course provides the route by which the boiled water can be poured into another receptacle. Surprisingly though, this design survived the transition from the open fire to the cooking stove with its hot plates, and then, in the early 20^th century, the transition to the electric kettle. By this stage though, the design was no longer relevant, because the source of the heat had been built into the kettle. Yet externally nothing changed. It was only in the 1980s that someone understood that this iconic design was no longer necessary, and then had the courage to propose a new design – thus the modern tower kettle was born.

A similar thing happened in the early days of the film industry. Early movies were just, in effect, filmed versions of stage plays that followed a linear chronological sequence of events, which represented the norm at the time. Yet in this case, very quickly people released that the camera liberated the script from the constraints of time and place, and that no longer was it necessary to follow a linear flow of events, and that also the camera enabled illusions that were not otherwise possible. And so it goes with literature too. For centuries people wrote novels as a linear chronological order of events, until someone, just after the Great War, wrote a novel that jumped about in a time sense, moving backward and forward, from present time to past time, and thus modernism arrived in literature.

The message of the above is clear – we are indeed creatures of habit. And what goes for kettles, films and novels, is also a summary of a large number of the inputs to the consultation on Global Systems Science – many just accept the kettle as it is and propose adjustments and refinements. A few people however have proposed radically new designs. These new designs consider: the use of art as part of the methodology; inclusion of what is called citizen science; adding behavioural (social science) aspects to the recipe; introducing time as a central element of GSS; generalising GSS towards a new way of undertaking scientific research; integrating Responsible Research and Innovation as an integrated aspect of method; moving beyond interdisciplinary thinking to encompass transdisciplinary operation in the sense of transcending the traditional organisation of knowledge; and shifting the focus away from policy towards the design of new systems.

So what is FET about? Will we stick with the kettle design as it is, or reinvent it completely? Which best captures the spirit of FET? Which is higher risk? Which is more visionary? Which is more likely to lead to transformational impacts and the much talked about disruptive effects? At this challenging point in Europe’s long history, what does Europe most need – an old design that is no longer necessary or a new one that can contribute to the making of a different future?

By way of a footnote, I add to what I originally wrote, by saying that the tale of the kettle is a metaphor for Horizon 2020 and explains why this is just innovation nonsense, and why all accounts of it being anything else are just the equivalent to saying that the emperor is wearing a fine suit of clothes. Normally such words are uttered by sycophantic people who have a vested interest in saying such stupid things.

This sets the scene for that which appears in the coming weeks …

Anne Glover's urgings to show a little trust dealt a death blow by VW

The pronouncements of Anne Glover, former chief scientific advisor to the President of the European Commission, have this week been shown to be what they are – just plain and utter nonsense uttered by a person who at best can be described as naïve. The confession by VW that it had installed technology in its diesel cars to produce misleading emissions test results leaves Glover looking very foolish indeed. The VW case well illustrates why we should not, as Glover urged in her FT article of July 2014 (Finding an Element of Trust) show a little trust. Ironically her article states (presumably based on the best evidence available at the time!):

“We trust industry where it suits us: in the toothpaste we use, the pizza we buy or the car we drive. But people seem to have a problem in trusting industry when it comes to influencing policy making."

So in the light of VW, and in the tradition of Epimetheus, Glover’s text must be re-written based on the best evidence now available:

“We trust industry where it suits us: in the toothpaste we use, the pizza we buy or the car we drive, except if it is a VW Diesel vehicle. But people seem to have a problem in trusting industry when it comes to influencing policy making, and VW well illustrates why this is so, and why my words are just nonsense, being the product of a reductive and fragmented mind caught-up in the delusion of rationality and objectivity.”

And this nicely illustrates why we should not be listening to people who talk about best evidence, but should instead be thinking about the consequences, unexpected or otherwise, both for ourselves and future generations, which is how we give meaning to the phrase sustainable development, which at the moment is just empty rhetoric, uttered many times by many people, including no doubt Glover herself. Giving meaning to this also sometimes means saying no to scientific developments, and embracing other forms of equally valid techniques – walking a different path, reconceptualising the notion of progress, accepting that with science and technology, there are different options and no such thing as the one best way, the sole truth. And this is why art is important, and why we should not be listening to those who, in pursuit of economic agendas, appropriate art for the purpose of communication (propaganda?) and to solve the (imaginary) creativity deficit.

VW provide the answer to why we should not trust industry and why also we should not trust scientists who naively believe that dialogue with such industries is the way to deal with unethical behaviour. History shows that the way to deal with VW and others is through legislation that results in fines and imprisonment. How many more examples do we need before we begin to understand this fundamental truth?

What the Glover episode reinforces is a message that society has yet to learn – scientists with their reductive minds and their simple solutions based on simple understandings of complex problems, should not be allowed into positions of power and influence.  Yet they conspire among themselves to do just that – the lure of technocracy as Habermas calls it.

We should of course already have learned this lesson from history – the pronouncements of scientists like CP Snow is a good example, for he foolishly waxed lyrical in his Two Cultures lecture and book, about how science would save humanity and rid the world of poverty. As more intellectually sound observers noted however, Snow was a technocrat with grossly simplified understanding of global development problems, and in this he is not alone, for this is the way that many scientist think.

By all means we should receive advice from scientists, but please no more nonsense about having seats in government, and certainly let us also have more advice from other researchers, like behavioural scientists, who can also explain why scientist say ridiculous things. Science is not the sole source of the truth and certainly, what science has to say should not be prioritised and valued above what other research paradigms have to offer. To do as Glover advocates, and to prioritise science, is to tacitly admit that science has become a handmaiden of the economy, and you should know what handmaidens are expected to do!

And if we could achieve a state of affairs of not valuing one way of understanding the world above others, and in doing so also recognise that all understanding of the world are but self-constructed realities which are then projected onto the world (even if those who create them do not understand this), this would certainly be worth calling progress, for times change, but not it seems do human minds, who cling to their beliefs, whatever they may be, scientific or otherwise, with a stubbornness that shows the nonsense of trusting entirely in this mythical thing called reason. We have, literally, stone-age minds, yet behave as though that were not the case, and in so doing, place at risk not only our own existence on this planet, but that of other life forms who have just as much right to exist as we do. This too is a fundamental truth that is yet to be understood. We live because they do. They are not a resource – they are life whose existence should be respected and celebrated.

All about time

On the matter of time, and my participation in the consultation on the European Commission’s FET Proactive Programme, here I present my input on the topic Time for Time, but dealing also with Art Practice as Research and also the so-called Global System Science. And what follows is that input about time:

Put aside now your notions of the arrow of time, of time the independent variable, of time the dependent variable. Look beyond irreversible processes that point to the uni-directional nature of this arrow of time, or to its illusory nature when it comes to deterministic equations which work equally well when time runs forward or backwards. Forget matters of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years and so on, which are but human notions for the counting of time. Think not about the linear view of time, with its chronological ordering of events, both natural and human. All these things are but the product of the rational mind, of objective thought, of which there is already far too much!

I invite you instead to enter a different world, one of artistic making, where the subjective is important, and where time can be bent by creative will, and in doing so becomes not any of the above, but something profoundly different – a product of the imagination, from which flows a simple question, and on this turns the beginnings of ideas for technologies and processes far beyond the limiting horizons of the obvious and distracting pretty pebbles of time, lying, so to speak, on the seashore, while a greater ocean of truth remains unseen.

Time you see, in this world that I created – in a work of fiction called Moments in Time, being a novel about time, and that which is timeless and that which is not – can be seen in a different way. In this strange book you will find, if one cares to look closely and explore the messages hidden there, that time is always, a single moment in time, in which all other moments in time, past and future, co-exist in this one time that is known as the present for the person who is experiencing that moment. And from this comes the simple question to which I referred: how would our view of the world change, if we could create a technology and processes that would make such a subjective understanding of time, a human understanding of time, where past, present and future co-exist, a reality to share with others?

Before I answer this question, which in effect will also explain why we should do this and its importance, I want to mention the process by which I came to this subjective understanding of time.

I spent over ten years writing Moments in Time, and did very little research about time, for this was not to be a book of facts and knowledge, but a work of the imagination. In creating my imaginary world, which is in no way connected to science fiction, I did something that few, if any one, has done before – I lived for an extended period, in my imagination, in two times separated by over 250 years, for this is the storyline. And the tale is not one enabled by a time machine, the act of human creation so much seen in time related fiction, but by the universe itself behaving counter to what modern science believes – yes your eyes do not deceive you, I am saying believes.

This imaginative process, this act of creation, is a key point that I want to address. Elsewhere in this consultation (under ideas for new topics) there is a proposal presented of art being used in ICT research. There was a FET Open project (a CSA), known as FET-ART, that addressed this issue, and spoke of co-creation, where artists and technologists work together, and artists participate in research projects. What I have briefly presented above is an example of artistic expression being used in ICT research, with this note being one result – a proposal for a new research topic. But this is not the outcome of co-creation, but of creation that results when two (possibly more!) areas of quite contrasting knowledge and skills co-exist in one mind.

So it was not the process of background research (which I have already told you was quite small) that I undertook for the book that led me to this subjective understanding of time, but the act of artistic creation itself. This resulted in new insights and new knowledge about time, as it is experienced subjectively by humans. This process has a name: it is called art practice as research, or art as research, or creative arts enquiry. It uses the artistic process, whether that be painting, dance, music composition, creative writing (like writing a weird novel about time), etc., as a means of producing new knowledge. And I cannot stress here enough, the importance of the subjective nature of the knowledge, for this also relates to the common misunderstanding that science is entirely based on the rational and objective, which it most definitely is not!

Here I just quote from the work of another writer, one of the most outstanding thinkers and artists of the 20th century, Arthur Koestler (who was also a physicist by education), who studied the matter of scientific (and artistic) creativity in depth, and said in his book The Act of Creation: “Here, then, is the apparent paradox. A branch of knowledge which operates predominantly with abstract symbols, whose entire rationale and credo are objectivity, verifiability, logicality, turns out to be dependent upon mental processes which are subjective, irrational, and verifiable only after the event.” This will of course sit uncomfortably with those whose self-image is one of being rational, objective, and evidence-based. More about this follows shortly.

The power of art practice as research is that it links to subjectivity and makes it explicit, and this leads to strange notions and questions which are essential to the creative process (be it scientific, technological, artistic, etc.), which in turn links to the more objective work that follows as a result. Art practice as research however is not primarily a matter of co-creation, nor even a question of interdisciplinary research, but mainly one of transdisciplinary working, which has profound implications for Global Systems Science, about which I will say more, later. I suspect that Leonardo da Vinci and his contemporaries would have known what I am talking about, but many modern (fragmented) minds, often only knowing a lot about very little, and having been subjected to the legacy of the Age of Enlightenment, do not. Instead they usually believe in dualities and the need for co-creation, and hence do not understand that there is a unity of opposites (in this case of art and science) – or put another way, a oneness in that which many people now see as being separate and different.

Now back to the matter of this question I posed, which I here remind you was: how would our view of the world change, if we could create a technology and processes that would make such a subjective understanding of time, a human understanding of time, where past, present and future co-exist, a reality to share with others? I can tell you that, as a result of the experience of constructing in my imagination and living in a rather strange world where all time co-exists at a single moment in time, has brought about a radical transformation in the way that I see the world, for I now look and see time at work, and, as a result, also see many things that others are blind to.

Here I introduce to you the topic of Behavioural Agriculture, which very likely you will not have heard of, for the book that I am writing on this has not yet been published. The topic is the product of transcending disciplines, of unifying many opposites, and bringing knowledge, both subjective and objective, and from quite dissimilar domains, together, to form a very different perspective on agriculture – one based on behaviour set in the context of time, past, present and future, all co-existing in a single moment in time.

One of these dissimilar domains is cognitive psychology, the same research in fact that Behavioural Economics is founded on, hence the name Behavioural Agriculture, only in this case there is more than just cognitive psychology and macro economics in play, but also philosophy of science; agronomy; biology; history; genetics; ecology and much more … This however is another story.

What is important are the findings from research in cognitive psychology, that people, all people (scientists included), make decisions based on cognitive biases. These biases are acquired over time and they lead people to make many mistakes, but people often do not recognise these mistakes or the reasons for them, and they actually engage in the delusion that what they are doing is rational, objective, … But worse still, is the finding that this is in our genes, and for very good evolutionary reasons, but which no longer apply. Thus what was once an asset for survival has now become a potential liability, for it leads humans to make serious mistakes, and this has profound implications for all sorts of processes – Global Systems Science, the way science is conducted, the development of policy, the design of future agricultural systems, the development of sustainable economies, the redesign of financial systems... The list is quite long! See also how time makes its appearance here.

In the case of agriculture, the cognitive biases at work today took hold about 10,000 years ago. These were significantly reinforced in the 1950s and 1960s, resulting in rigid mental frameworks that lead people today – scientists, technologists, engineers, policymakers and others – to do that which is no longer fit for purpose, but which they regard as been objective, rational, evidence-based, etc. But they cannot see this, for they do not know or understand that which is timeless and that which is not. This has serious and dangerous implications in the longer term (future time) for humanity, but if we could bring time past and future to bear in the present, to make the cognitive biases visible, along with subjective matters such as values and beliefs, we could instead make a different future. This is also part of the storyline in Moments in Time.

And just as one can refer to Behavioural Agriculture, one can also speak about Behavioural Global Systems Science. To what extent is Global Systems Science just the past presenting itself as the future, because it brings with it, that which is no longer relevant, and that which does not recognise cognitive bias and human delusions? How much of Global Systems Science is founded on the misunderstanding that science is only about the rational, the objective and the logical, because it is based on self-image and misunderstandings rather than what science really is?

Here perhaps one can see the importance of time past, and of creating a technology that brings time past into the present, for it can be said that time reveals the patterns in life, the trail that is often unknowingly followed, and provides the vantage point from which understanding begins to emerge, which casts past events in a different light, pointing towards a path that could be followed in the future. And time is important to the future as well, because, for example, one of most fundamental principles (if one can call it such) of sustainability, is that we should not do today, that which leaves an unwanted legacy for future generations. We are in our own time dealing with unwanted legacies created by previous generations – but we are doing exactly the same ourselves, and leaving unwanted legacies for our children, with the added danger that what we create today will overwhelm them. Is it not time to change?

This is one of the core messages to be found in Moments in Time. And it could be that Global Systems Science will provide the means of changing behaviour and exposing the delusions that lie behind our current self-inflicted woes. You will also find these woes depicted in the novel, in the form of the unintended and unforeseen consequences of the actions of the central character who, being an icon of the modern world, an industrial age engineer, strangely finds that he fits into 1750 with great ease! See here the creative act at work, where through the means of the imagination and the subjective, that which is timeless and that which is not is explored.

However, for Global Systems Science to become a means of changing behaviour, the potential that lies within Global Systems Science has to be recognised, and this involves moving beyond thinking of this as a means of supporting policymaking, and to re-conceiving it as a more advanced way of doing science, which of course also involves policymaking, but which also involves undertaking scientific research, and, potentially designing completely different systems than those that exist today.

So instead of carrying on with a science based on a reductionist and mechanistic world-view, which creates many problems, we could re-invent science. Instead of working with the agricultural system that exists today, and adding new bits here and there to supposedly make it more sustainable, we could reinvent it completely. Instead of working with global financial markets as they exist today, trying to make them more stable and less damaging, by changing policies, we could reinvent these systems completely. And this, if you have not already realised, is exactly what we need to do. But you will not so easily recognise this if you do not know that which is timeless and that which is not! And to reinvent one needs creativity, thus once again we are back to matter of subjectivity which is an essential aspect of creation.

What I am proposing is a radical rethink of Global Systems Science, which involves bringing time and behaviour to the fore, and also laying to rest this obsession with the rational and the objective and embracing also the subjective, the irrational, the qualitative, with an accompanying reconsideration of what constitutes so-called evidence. It is also necessary to move beyond the now standard call for an interdisciplinary approach, and to embrace transciplinarity – transcending largely artificial disciplinary boundaries, reassembling knowledge in a different way, and moving beyond dualities.

Arthur Koestler, in his book The Act of Creation, says, after examining the self-reflections of many leading scientists across history: “Their virtually unanimous emphasis on spontaneous intuitions, unconscious guidance, and sudden leaps of imagination which they are all at a loss to explain, suggests that the role of strictly rational thought-processes in scientific discovery has been vastly over-estimated since the Age of Enlightenment; and that contrary to the Cartesian bias in our beliefs ‘full consciousness’, in the words of Einstein, ‘is a limit case’.”

Koestler is right, and this is another reason why we need to bring artists into research, into FET, into Global Systems Science. And note too, this is the second time I have questioned the legacy of this thing called the Age of Enlightenment. The importance of understanding that which is timeless and that which is not cannot be stressed enough. It comes back to time once again! And if you think that questioning the Age of Enlightenment is out of bounds, think again, for slowly people are beginning to realise that its legacy has become a liability. We need to re-thinking the whole basis upon which our culture is based (see DG CONNECT’s Onlife Initiative https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/onlife-manifesto), and this is another reason to work with artists, for this is something many of them do as a matter of course. This is why they are so central to the President Barroso’s New Narrative for Europe initiative. And their conclusion is that Europe needs a new renaissance. We do indeed! Time for Time within the context of FET Proactive is a very necessary part of this, for it could bring to this new renaissance, the disruptive ideas and technologies that will allow more people to understand just how tyrannical the past is in determining our thinking about the future.

And on this note I also mention Charles Handy, a leading business thinker from the 1980s and 1990s. Handy wrote in his book Beyond Certainty, that when discontinuities occur as a consequence of structural changes in the business environment, the past becomes no guide to the future. These discontinuities can render assumptions and practices invalid and inappropriate. This then makes extrapolating into the future based on the past, an exercise of little value. When discontinuities are present, the success stories of yesterday can have little relevance to the problems of tomorrow. In fact, according to Handy “these success stories might even be damaging since the world, at every level, has to be reinvented to some extent.”  In another book, The Age of Unreason, Handy strongly argued that in times of structural change, one should not be taking note of what is reasonable, but should be listening to those who seem to be saying unreasonable things.

We are living through times of massive structural change – in society, in business, in technology, in peoples’ behaviour, in the nature of being human, in human civilisation. So it is time to say what seem to be unreasonable things. We need to bring time into our discussions and begin to recognise that which is timeless and that which is not.

As for the creation of a technology that brings time, past and future, into the present, this is something that I have reflected upon as part of the continuing process of using the novel Moments in Time as act of research and knowledge creation. Elsewhere in the consultation (under ideas for new topics), a number of people mention the importance of art and artists, and also observe that technological development work is being undertaken by artists (see no duality!), and they are right – some artists are technology developers and they are also researchers. These types of artists should be integrated into the ICT programme, and FET Proactive is one of the most obvious places for them to be, because of the transformational potential that they create, and their interest in questioning that which others just accept (like the notion of so called big data) and offering different perspectives that may in turn lead to new ideas.

One of the inputs provided on the topic of ICT and Art, suggests a number of research topics, which include: technologies for uncertainty and technologies for a non-human perspective. These are the kinds of ideas that need to be explored and developed further in this context of Time for Time. I could myself add another one: big data considered not as something to be mastered and controlled, but something to be addressed in a time context: past, present and future.

In my novel I provide a metaphor for the technologies that bring the golden threads of time past and future, into the present, and for experiencing the resulting complex tapestry that this merging creates. I called it the Time House, an architectural construction being “… a house built by two different builders; one working on the physical features, shaping it within the bounds of what is physically possible to meet the needs of those who will live there and make it their home, and the other, unseen, forming it into that which I will, in due course reveal.” Thus, one can conceive of an architectural construct, a physical space, where people (by which I mean scientists, policymakers, members of the public, and many others) come to understand … that which is timeless and that which is not, and also what the future might become because of thoughtless decisions in the present that are masquerading as being based on the rational and objective, and so on and so forth. The potential needs to be further explored.

There is a field of artistic practice called Technoetic Art, which is quite fundamental for creating a realisation of the Time House. Technoetic Art is an area concerned with the technology of consciousness, being a convergent field of practice that seeks to explore consciousness and connectivity through many different means. And Technoetic artists, along with other artists, will bring into this work an important insight, which is that another legacy of the Age of Enlightenment needs to be left outside the Time House. What I am referring to is this notion that humans can be compared to machines! They can of course if that is what you want to do, and this one can observe, is the story of technology development over the past several hundred years, but the point is that humans should not be thus compared. We should be looking at a different type of technology that is not one based on this now familiar refrain: humans are better at …, computers are better at …

And the new enlightenment goes like this: people have characteristics and behaviours determined by genes and social conditioning (acquisition of paradigms!), and we need a technology that brings this to our attention, so that we can make better decisions, with one of these decisions being, that it is we who will take decisions and not computers. Moreover, to replace the human-computer comparability paradigm mentioned above, this new enlightenment should be developing a different model – one based on human-computer complementarity, which is a topic much in need of development. And as for causality, this too should be reconsidered, for people should not be regarded as machines, subject to cause and effect. Instead we need to be looking at meaning and purpose, and other aspects which define humans and which differentiate them from machines. There is evidently much to reformulate!

However, we live in challenging economic times, where budgets are tight, and there is little money to explore new topics. So in response to this constraint I ask: why not explore new topics through existing ones; specifically Global Systems Science? By expanding the scope of this existing FET Proactive topic it would be possible also to begin to develop several new areas: Time for Time, Art in ICT and FET Research, and Behavioural Agriculture, while at the same time developing the field of Global Systems Science, making it in effect, wider in scope, which is also an answer to the question posed in this consultation about whether the scope of Global Systems Science is too wide or too narrow – it is most definitely too narrow.

So, to conclude, it is without doubt Time for Time. But is also a time for a different approach to science through an expanded understanding of the scope of Global Systems Science. And it is time to move beyond the legacy of the Age of Enlightenment. It is time for a new renaissance, a new enlightenment, and this means that it is time for art, and it is time for behaviour, and much more.

It’s all about time!

And as a footnote, I here add, with the benefit of the passage of time, that the above shows just how much DG CONNECT, with their notions of creativity deficits, to be corrected through the non-creative ones (the technologists) collaborating with the creative ones (the artists), are, out-of-time.

It is time for art

And another of the inputs that I made to the consultation on the European Commission’s FET Proactive Programme:

For reasons that we should, in time, take some time to better understand, science and art, which were once, in a kind of way, together, but not in the way that you probably think, having just read the above. In very brief outline: a long time ago there were not the sharp disciplinary distinctions of the type that now abound in the modern world. With time came the development along different paths. This was understandable, given the increasing knowledge base that was, as we would now say, scientific in nature, but this was also a development that has led to many serious problems that most of those caught up in science are unable to even contemplate. We are not talking here about the notion of Two Cultures – you should not be misled by this.

Do we need to rediscover the notion of the polymath, if there ever was such a thing? Or do we need people who can operate in the spaces between disciplines? While there will always be scope for the specialist, the person who, one can say, knows a lot about very little, such minds can be very dangerous. If we are truly to pursue the notion of sustainability we need minds that are able to embrace more than just atoms, or cells, or whatever pretty pebble that has caught the attention of a particular mind.

Artists are already exploring and researching the world from a transdisciplinary perspective, in which they bring art, science, and technology together in ways quite different to that of scientists or technologists, who most often limit themselves to quite narrow specialisations. And with this transdisciplinary approach, artists are demonstrating their capabilities to produce new insights and knowledge as well as new technologies. Only most people, especially those caught up in specialisations, and those who think in terms of dualities, do not understand. It seems that many scientists and technologists who do encounter art in the context of science and technology, think that it is about illustrating their work and communicating this to the public. This is the nature of the gulf that now exists, and which is inhibiting the development of entirely new approaches to science and technology research.

There is tremendous transformational potential in art used for research, and this is fully in line with what FET aims at achieving, and to understand more about this I have provided an example of the creative arts used for research in the Time for Time consultation, which appears as next week's blog.

And in closing I also note some additional points (which were not part of the original input): there are those who think that deploying art in research is about appropriating the artist’s creativity in research activities leading to enhanced creativity and innovation. This is a manifestation of the Ideology of Creativity. What fools these people are! Such fools can be found in the European Commission’s DG CONNECT – people who meddle in matters that they do not understand. These are the deficit thinkers, who, is their simple mindedness, reduce all of Europe’s problems to a lack of … Fill in the space yourself, according to your favourite deficit. This tells us something very important about the nature of being human, of being European, regardless of whether one is living in a digital or non-digital era. Some aspects of being human, of being European never change, but it is about time that they were changed, before the madness that Europe has created in the modern world, consumes everyone, regardless of where they live.

“Exploitation of artist is evil” was once said about Google’s appropriation of art in their so called DevArt. It is certainly time for art, but not through the appropriation of art by government agencies caught-up in technocracy, positivism, and technological determinism, and who are pursuing familiar techno-centric trajectories in support of neo-liberal agendas. Artists tempted to participate in such activities such reflect on the fact that these agencies stand in the company of past appropriators of art – dictators, tyrants and popes.

In due course I will comment upon the DG CONNECT deficit thinkers and what they have foolishly written into the new ICT work programme 2016-17, but now (next week) it is Time for Time …