Sociological Aspects 
happening with the saturation of our civilization by science. 
We are witnessing the formation of a new élite of scientists. 
Having started with numbers of the order of one person per 
thousand being members of an élite in the early civilizations, 
we now, by virtue of urbanization, have a situation where the 
cities are so enormous and the élite is so huge that we can get 
an “‘élite of the élite”. This produces a whole new machinery 
for communication between them—by virtue of which we are 
all now here. 
We have new problems of computing machines and their 
information flow, a terrible problem in so far as it is possible for 
this new élite to put the non-élite out of a job. We may 
presume that about 1 in 5 of the population may be capable 
of scientific work by virtue of their peculiar psychological 
endowment and intellect, and the other four-fifths are going to 
have their jobs stolen from them by the familiar processes of 
automation. ‘The technology of calculation and control is 
rapidly changing the life of the scientist. These developments 
are going to have a severe effect, a traumatic effect, on the 
future of man within the next generation. 
I want to stress the consequences of this scientific revolution 
which started, after all, with the sociological invention of the 
Royal Society. What dominated the rise of modern science so 
much more than the invention of any experimental technique 
was the invention of the method of cumulating science. Science 
has been doubling every ten years for the past 300 years since 
that invention of cumulation was made. Now there are some 
very interesting consequences of this. MacKay has pointed at 
the machines: we have previously only considered the possi- 
bility of using machines as an extension of man’s brain—to do 
various things for which man programmes it. It happens that 
machines can talk to each other, they have languages much 
more compatible than ours and they can talk to each other very 
much more efficiently than we can communicate. Our com- 
munication system is a most cumbersome thing; our ears and 
our voice organs are probably extremely slow, compared with 
our brain. 
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