Where the future meets the past: "Connections with James Burke"

The star of the awesome new series shares his thoughts on if history matters, what's just ahead, and how AI will create a societal identity crisis

Characterized by the Washington Post as “one of the most intriguing minds in the Western world,” science historian, futurist, and TV presenter James Burke is something of a time traveler. His stellar new series Connections with James Burke on Curiosity Stream (and Amazon Prime) straddles what’s just ahead and what’s far behind as it zips across centuries spotlighting key ideas, inventions, and people that together propelled us to the threshold of a future that we may not recognize.

Based on the premise that we’re about to see “the biggest changes to the way we live in human history,” each episode of the show, which is also written by Burke, opens with a future “destination” that lies within reach of our current reality — such as genetically engineered superhumans, quantum computers with vast predictive capabilities, AI avatars so realistic they can’t be distinguished from people, and nano-factories that produce everything from food to gold, for free.

Before exploring what’s ahead, however, the program asks how we got here — and then jumps backward, starting a few centuries earlier and threading ten key events, people, and ideas from the past into our contemporary world in unexpected, peculiar, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny ways.

Who, besides James Burke, the creator and host of the highest-rated documentary series in BBC history, would connect, via ten steps, the raging syphilis of King Louis XIV’s court — that popularized the practice of donning wigs (a means of hiding balding syphilitic heads) — to the rise of the nano-fabricator? Or connect the creation of quantum computing with something as obscure as Napoleon’s toothpick on St. Helena?

“I think the human brain likes nothing more than being surprised, of being shown that 1 plus 1 can equal 3,” Burke told me via Zoom from his home in the south of France. “And these shows are full of surprises.”

James Burke explaining how syphilis in the court of French King Louis XIV brought wigs into fashion — to cover the bald heads wrought by the disease. And the richer a person, the more wigs they had and the bigger they were — hence the term “bigwig” to connote a wealthy, powerful person.

Whether it’s the role 17th-century coffee houses and mechanical ducks played in the ability to genetically engineer humans or how dog pee and Polaroid sunglasses are linked to AI avatars, this captivating time journey zigs and zags, careening through centuries, connecting dots and ideas that initially seem to share no commonality, but suddenly do in the rich historical tapestry Burke weaves.

“Change doesn’t happen in a linear way,” explained Burke, underscoring one of the show’s key concepts — that innovation occurs when in the course of addressing one problem, unexpected events and unpredicted outcomes knock people and their ideas onto new trajectories.

He speaks from experience. Graduated from Oxford with a master’s degree in medieval English, he was teaching at Italian universities in the 1960s when he randomly fell into television after spotting a newspaper ad while on a bus in Rome — hopping off at the next stop to apply: without a bit of TV experience, he was hired to report on why the Leaning Tower of Pisa didn’t fall down.

After seeing that segment, BBC, the premiere broadcaster in the UK, flew him to London, hiring him as a writer-reporter-producer for Tomorrow’s World, a show about science, a subject that he’d barely studied in college. In 1969, he was called into his editor’s office and asked how much he knew about outer space, rockets, and the moon. “A bit,” he answered. “Well,” said the editor, “you’re in deep doo-doo, because I just told the bosses you know all about it.”

So Burke wrote to NASA and the space agency sent him boxes of books, which he plowed through. And that led to James Burke soaring to fame — as BBC’s lead commentator covering the Apollo 11 moon landing with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. “All of the sudden, I became the BBC’s expert on space,” he recalled.

And from there, Burke landed show after show, book after book. The series he created in the late 1970s — Connections, with a similar concept as the new series — became the most lauded documentary program in BBC history, leading to more spinoff shows and sequels that continued for decades.

Twenty years ago, he founded The James Burke Institute for Innovation in Education, an online global knowledge web, and later moved to France, believing he had retired from broadcasting. But he was recently called back to London by Bigger Bang TV, the Emmy Award-winning production company behind the series Stephen Hawkings’ Favorite Places and the PBS series Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World.

Bigger Bang wanted to re-launch his most popular series, this time calling it Connections with James Burke and this time streaming it on Curiosity Stream, the subscription platform launched by the founder of the Discovery Channel.

But this time back in the studio, everything was different: To Burke, it felt more like a radio broadcast than TV. “There was no location shooting, not a bit,” he said. Instead, historical photos and illustrations as well as computer-generated graphics provided the backdrops — frequently to spectacular effect.

What’s more, the edgiest scientific and technological innovations had traveled light-years in two decades. Forget topics like moon landings, plastic and credit cards, the massive computer ENIAC, and the defense facility NORAD, built into Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Now artificial intelligence — not long before only a theory — was the new cutting edge of science and technology along with genetic engineering, robotics, nanotechnology, and the beginnings of quantum computing, together pushing humanity to a point where our whole zeitgeist may well go flying out the window.

“Artificial Intelligence will do away with every way that the Industrial Revolution has organized our lives, driven our lives, shaped our lives, and given us a purpose,” he told me. “I think that artificial intelligence will do away with every job that has ever been created. And the big question is: what then? What are we supposed to be doing?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The whole idea of the Industrial Revolution has ruined us in a sense that it's given everybody the requirements that they be something. We don't say to people, “Who are you?” We say, “What are you?” And the other person doesn't say, “I'm a happy bunny,” they say, “I'm a doctor” or “I'm a journalist” or whatever. If you take away that identification of a person, what's the person got left except themselves? And what the hell is themselves? So I think we've got some surprising things coming up very soon because I think artificial intelligence will totally hit us in the next 10 years.”

I hadn’t expected to delve into the societal implications of AI when I’d called Burke. I’d wanted to know if he was concerned that contemporary society appears to be kissing off history, as evidenced by plummeting test scores in schools. I’d wanted to mention the college professor who’d told me about referencing the American Civil War to a student, who’d thought it was fiction, and tell him about the bright 30-something lawyer who’d mentioned that Christopher Columbus was an Englishman, as well as the comments following an article in the Washington Post about the movie Napoleon, with people scoffing that he’d been important or was still relevant.

“If Napoleon was such a big deal,” wrote one, “why have I never seen a Napoleon costume at a Halloween party?” I wanted to know if he found that alarming.

But I never got around to those points. Burke, who is as much a futurist as a historian, is focused on the march of time going only one way — forward — and his answers, like everything else about James Burke, were colorful and unpredictable.

Below are but a few of the topics discussed over several Zoom calls:

Rossi Reports: First off, how do you write your show? For instance, in the first episode, you start with how we're on the edge of employing the quantum computer, asking, “So how did we get here?” And then you jump back two centuries to Napoleon's toothpick. Do you start from the near future — i.e. with the quantum computer — and go back? Or do you start with Napoleon's toothpick and go forward?

James Burke: Well, if you started with Napoleon's toothpick and came forward, I haven't the faintest idea where you'd end up, because every time there's a step, there's 45 or 50 possible ways to go from there. So you could spend a lifetime wandering through this maze and get to 27,000 places that you probably didn't want to go to. The only logical way is to home in on the present, looking at something that is likely in the near future, like the quantum computer, and then go back to where it seems to have come from. And then I go back to see where that link seems to have come from. And each time, since it's a television show, I’m looking for the least expected links and ways to surprise the audience and keep them from falling asleep.

Rossi Reports: Oh, it’s certainly not sleep-inducing. It makes my brain blow up — in a good way. I love how you string together wonderful historical vignettes and long-forgotten breakthroughs, like how the shipworm, which burrowed through wood ships, brought the innovation of iron vessels, and how the introduction of wallpaper was a huge deal in French Revolutionary society. So I assume you think history is important?

James Burke: Well, it is certainly important when it's happening. But I'm not sure that the study of history gives you something that you need in order to live your life to the fullest or to understand what's going on. I would argue that history is another country. And you get to visit it and see what an exotic, exciting, and interesting thing it is. But it's really no more than going on a trip. We can't possibly understand history. It's not now, it's not us. It's not what's around us. It's not what we call reality. What it is is a zillion things that make up a world that we can't possibly understand because we're not in it.

Rossi Reports: Hmmm. I’ve always believed that we can’t understand where we are — or are going to — unless we have a clue of where we came from. Besides, I’m curious — like when I see Paris, most of it built in the mid-1800s, I want to know why did they build it that way, the architecture, the boulevards, the huge parks — what prompted their creation? Paris is an example of living history that continues into present life…

James Burke: The boulevards of Paris — in fact, every physical thing outside the window — is the past, it's not leading to the present. It's just a leftover. The world in which anything happened, more than an hour ago, is a different world than the one we’re in now. I mean, in so many thousands of ways, because there are so many millions of us doing different things, blazing new trails, bringing things together to coalesce and start something new, those things are happening all the time, every second. So, in a sense, history can only ever be part of a storyline, I think, but it’s not relevant to me, not now.

Rossi Reports: We seem to be progressing to a point where history seems less relevant than ever. I think there’s an attitude, particularly among younger people, that history just doesn't really matter. So it sounds like you’re saying the kids have the right idea, when they don’t care about it.

James Burke: There's only one purpose in knowledge, and that's preparing for the future. What's coming tomorrow? What is my life going to become? So if anybody says, “What's the point of learning history?” it's so that you can know something about how to prepare for what comes next.

Rossi Reports: I was just reading about the idea of “progress” really taking hold in the 19th century with all those inventions — the railroads, photography, the telegraph, steamships — and that the idea of “humanity is on a forward march” was first captured by the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, when they displayed new technology and new architecture and things from all over the world, with the message of “Look at my how far we've come and where we're going!” And during the Second French Empire, they were also doing huge international exhibitions, showcasing things like the hydraulic elevator and the first lawn mower, and spotlighting people like Louis Pasteur and new organizations like the International Red Cross. Here's my question. Do you believe there is such a thing as progress? Is humanity evolving and going forward?

James Burke: First of all, I pick holes in the word “progress.” We're not progressing. We're moving, maybe we're not even moving. But the world is changing, not necessarily in the sense of the word progress.

I suppose one way to look at progress is from the point of view of biology is to look at the way in which organisms grow and change and become adults and then die, that could be called progress, there's motion in one direction, it never goes the other way. Not that I know of anyway. So progress is really an idea that comes from the way life works, it seems to me, and then it’s easy enough to apply that to the way society works, because society is a bunch of lives altogether working.

I think all the noise about progress happened in the 19th century because a lot was going on and changing. And science itself was discovering new stuff, like genetics. And British society was also imperial, going out taking over the world, changing the world, to become more British, so that we could get cheaper goods and make a lot more money from those poor souls out there who made this stuff. And so, in that sense, it was a good idea to foster the idea of progress. It was a selfish, good idea for a particular bunch of people in a particular society. So in that sense, I suppose it was progress. Because life, by definition, isn't here in order to die, it's here to stay alive and get more food and whatever it needs to live. But the idea of progress being onwards and upwards and better and more exciting, this is looking back at it and giving an original way of describing it in some way. Because when you describe something, you control it.

Rossi Reports: As you illustrate so well on your show, innovation occurs when we come up with solutions, but that usually has an unexpected effect, creating another problem. And then we come up with a solution to that problem. And that goes a different way than anticipated. So changes happen because of these things knocking into each other. Ultimately, it's not necessarily a linear progression from A to B to C, right?

James Burke: Never. I think if it's a linear progression A to B to C, it probably dies fairly quickly. And novelty is life. Novelty is change, novelty is what you called progress. Novelty is having a better time than you had yesterday. And so novelty is a good thing for us, because we enjoy it. And most humans do things because they want to make whatever it is better than it was.

Rossi Reports: One of the themes that comes through in Connections with James Burke is that humans and machines are merging, with machines becoming more and more and more dominant in our society and they are probably going to ultimately control it. So do you believe that is definitely our direction — that machines will run our world and that humans will merge with machines? Was it pre-destined that this would be the human future — melding with machines? What were the key moments in that?

James Burke: I'm not sure that machines will be running the world. But the human-machine interface, goes way, way back — to the first time somebody noticed some little birds were using twigs to root out ants so they could eat them, and said, “Hey, that's a good idea. Let me try it!” And suddenly he had a tool of some kind. So, tools are very useful because with a tool, a man or woman can do the same thing that maybe two people can do, or even four people can do. So you multiply your own capabilities with the use of a tool. And there's no reason not to do that, because it helps you change the world into something you'd prefer to the one that it was yesterday. I think, as a result of several dozens of thousands of years of using them, we're close to a point where tools are going to do almost everything we can do. And this is often referred to as artificial intelligence.

I think that's to be expected, because the more you use tools, the more you see how they can be improved to make it easier to use them to be more capable of doing more things. And artificial intelligence is I suppose the apotheosis of that, because the great thing about artificial intelligence is almost by definition, it's not the end of anything. Because artificial intelligence is changing all the time. The question is, how far can it go? How will it interact with human beings? And that's a really, really complicated story. Because we're only at the beginning of that stage.

Rossi Reports: Let’s go back a second. Beyond twigs, was there some defining moment that set us on this course? Like “Humans, you will merge with machines!”?

James Burke: I don't think there are moments that shaped the rest of time. There are moments that shaped the rest of time for a minute or two, and then something bumped into them coming from some other direction. And that changes the future again.

Rossi Reports: But this idea of the rise of machines, what were some of the key events in bringing this era that we're in now? What else spurred it on?

James Burke: Two or three very obvious things. Reading and writing. Non-human power — steam power, horse power, the extension of ourselves through other entities like that. [And] the scientific revolution, when people started to look at what reality was, what the world was, and why it was like that. Why did water never fall upwards? What was gravity and what gravity meant to what we could do? Those are the kinds of things that kicked the can along the road.

Rossi Reports: What about inventions?

James Burke: I suppose it began with clockwork. A clock could be described as an intelligent machine in the 15th century, because it went tick tock, and it told you, before you knew, that a minute had passed.

The clock, as far as we know, doesn't think on its own, it doesn't seem to have a mind. But it does one thing we can't do: tell the time with absolute accuracy. It helped us organize the entire planet and our lives from start to finish. Without the clock, we couldn't organize the world as it's organized. I suppose the clock is one of the beginnings of intelligent machines, but it's one of thousands. And I can't give you them all now, because you’d get bored, and I can't remember anyway.

Rossi Reports: In the show, you talk about people melding with the Internet through chips embedded in eyes, ears, and brains, how nanotechnology will provide everything we need, how human-like AI avatars will become indistinguishable from people. Are you feeling hopeful or worried about this future, particularly with regards to AI?

James Burke: More worried, because there's a lot of bullshit being talked about. The invasion of privacy, the fact that AI will take over everybody's job and leave them with nothing. And in a sense, AI will be the great devastator.

But AI could also be the great trigger. Because we’ll have to find out what we're all going to do and what we’ll do together as a society. The Industrial Revolution made that very simple: you're either a banker or a teacher or a dog walker or something. Because you have to earn money. And these jobs are available. [The Industrial Revolution hammered home] the magic word “job.”

There was really no word for “job” before the Middle Ages. And I think soon we'll be back to the stage where there's no word for job. And then the issue won’t be what you are but who are you? And I don't know whether people can answer that — we haven't answered it for four or five hundred years. So I think we've got some very exciting times coming up.

Rossi Reports: But are you hopeful that AI will ultimately help humanity?

James Burke: Half of me feels positive. If it's used properly, AI will be able to solve most of the problems we think are insoluble, like climate change, like running the economy so that there is enough of whatever it is that we want to have a running society in such a way that it represents the kind of structure within we'd like to live. That's one side of it.

The other side of it is that while AI will take away problems, which are problems from the Industrial Revolution, they are not the same problems of the post-AI world. What those problems are include finding out who the hell we are and what the hell we do.

A human life is a long period of time in which to do nothing. Instead of being a successful banker or teacher, what are you doing if there's nothing to do? If AI produces, which it's highly likely to do, a structure that provides all the food and riches and whatever else we want in order to have a comfortable life, then what do we do? Do we just have to sit back on the couch, eat, drink, and watch the movies? I think it's one of the biggest questions we face in history. And nobody seems to be doing much about it.

Connections with James Burke can be viewed on Curiosity Stream and Amazon Prime.