NONOSENSE

Dick Pountain/Sat 14 February 2004/1:41 pm/Idealog 115

I've been making heroic efforts to avoid commenting on the Hutton Report in this column, but I'm now forced to cave in: you see, I want to put the boot into a BBC programme, but can't in conscience do that without some qualification given the present political climate. Broadly-speaking I admire and approve of the BBC, and I'm dismayed by the government's reckless attacks on it, which merely assist the global-tabloid-trashmongers in their long-term plan to dismember or neuter the corporation. (The fact that the killer blow was precipitated by a single spin-doctor's enormous ego reduces my estimation of the government to an all-time low).

However having said all that, I'm equally worried by a dumbing-down of Beeb programmes that may have been encouraged by precisely those New Labour appointees who've now fallen on their swords. Two of the most brainless and irresponsible TV programmes I've ever seen were shown in the last couple of months on BBC 2. The first was a documentary about the rise of gun crime in Britain, whose creators thought it would go down better with the nation's yoof if they employed a currently fashionable porno aesthetic. The documentary was called '9mm', thus colluding from the very start in fetishising this particular calibre, and it could have been an extended advert for the hand-gun industry rather than a warning. Its breathless presenter skipped through the whole arsenal in breezy Top Gear style, emphasising how cool, elegant and efficient each piece was and promoting precisely the mindset that lies behind the gun craze.

The second programme was a Horizon about Nanotechnology shown at the beginning of February which was so full of technical rubbish that I had to pinch myself after it finished to make sure I'd really seen it. The programme presented a stunning series of fallacies and non sequiturs, linked together with a hallucinatory rapidity that's hard to summarise on paper. First a Japanese-looking gentleman told us that the whole world's economy depends on microchips doubling our productivity every couple of years, but that Moore's Law is about to fail and plunge the world's economy into a huge depression (CUE TUMBLEWEEDS BLOWING THROUGH DERELICT FACTORIES).

Fact: Moore's Law isn't a law of physics, merely a handy rule of thumb. Fact: many reputable economists doubt how significant the contribution of computers to real productivity growth has been in recent years. Fact: computer companies have indeed made enormous profits (some might say through sharp practices like forced obsolescence) but that isn't the whole world economy by any means. Fact: all high-tech industries go through a period of exponential growth which eventually levels off in the classic S curve. The aircraft industry is a perfect example, where speed increases from the Wright Brothers at Kittyhawk to Chuck Yeager's breaking the sound-barrier might look rather like the progress from Intel's 4004 to Pentium 4 (though no-one to my knowledge made a law out of them). When the sound-barrier proved to be commercial as well as acoustic, airliners stopped getting faster and got fatter instead to hold more people at the same speed (hence the demise of Concorde). The computer industry just has to figure out what its own equivalent of fatter is going to be.  

The next proposition in Horizon's Mad Hatter logic was that organic transistors will rescure Moore's Law and hence save the world. Fact: Moore's 'Law' depends on a fortunate thermodyamic property of the CMOS transistor, not shared by bipolar, ECL and other previous silicon technologies. No-one has yet demonstrated that organic semiconductors share this benign behaviour when fabricated at the appropriate densities - they're at such an embryonic stage we just can't know. Then the programme announced that Bell Lab's Jan Hendrik Schoen had discovered an organic semiconductor system so promising that not only would it resurrect Moore's Law but also make possible the wildest dreams of the nanotechnology moonies (CUE RAY KURZWEIL LOOKING MONK-LIKE AND TALKING SMALL-AND-DIRTY). Soon we will be able to make these little computers, like the size of a grain of dust man, and they'll be everywhere! They'll be inside us monitoring our bodily functions, eating all the viruses and reducing our piles from the inside out, and allowing us to store MP3s, like, directly into our brains man... But what's happening, it's all going wrong! They've turned into the Grey Goo and are eating all organic matter on the planet (CUE THRILLING, EXPENSIVE 3D GRAPHICS OF SWARMS OF TINY CYBER-MIDGES EATING UP ALL OF LIFE). The logic of earliest infancy: invent a fantastic object, believe it's real and then start crying because you're scared of it...

The final cruncher was the admission that Jan Hendrik Schoen made up his results and Bell Labs has fired him. So it's not real, it was all a bad dream, and tough luck on any viewers who turned off before the end. They could of course have said that right at the beginning, but that would have violated tabloid rule number one (Murdoch's Law) that a gripping yarn is more important than the truth. The programme did however demonstrate how computer science is following the same absurdly accelerated lifecycle as the hardware itself: after a promising start with Turing and von Neuman in the '30s and '40s, through the glory years of Tony Hoare and Niklaus Wirth in the '70s, it has already arrived at senility - the equivalent of a medieval scholasticism where people argue about how many nano-chips can dance on a pinhead (possibly the scripwriter's).