Ethical Considerations 
we are going to do with science, but what they will do. Very 
rapidly, within the next generation, the present ‘western 
scientific world”’ is going to become a minority, since the under- 
developed countries grow so very quickly. Add this to the 
nervousness of an over-developed country with a saturated rate 
of scientific advance, and the consequence to be expected is, 
not a moratorium on the growth of science in which we can 
pay some attention to other aspects of life, but a deep reaction 
in quite the opposite direction, towards competition and the 
maintenance of technological supremacy. I regard this as a 
very dangerous situation. 
MacKay: In this context a serious limit may be set by the 
problem of information retrieval. As Norbert Wiener pointed 
out some years ago, the more information you produce, the 
more competent a man must be before he can sort out what is 
worth reading, and the more of his time he has to consume when 
he might have been doing productive work. No matter how 
hard we mechanize, this is liable to lead to some kind of levelling- 
off of progress to which no answer seems to be in sight. 
Crick: The total rate of cumulation of scientific knowledge is 
liable to be maintained, regardless of whether the process is 
efficient or not. 
Price: But science is not at all happy with a constant rate; 
science is an exponential animal and it gets terribly unhappy if 
you deny it the right amount of exponential growth. 
Comfort: It isn’t science, but the scientists who are unhappy, 
and I think that if we were like the Samoans we should be less 
violently motivated to maintain this frantic “‘progress”’. 
Price: I am not sure that it is a social property of the 
scientist; it may well be a property of the interconnectivity of 
the network of knowledge. 
Huxley: Surely science may evolve and curve over towards 
fewer but better-integrated networks of study. This will change 
the whole problem of publication; there will be fewer little 
separate bits of science that need to be added up; scientists will 
be working on large co-operative projects, which will be co- 
ordinated. 
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