World Brain

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

--H G Wells

En annen kjent Science Fiction-forfatter er engelskmannen Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), som også var sosiolog og historiker. Han var en meget samfunnsbevisst person, og medlem av Fabian Society i London; en forsamling av sosialist-orienterte tenkere.

I essaysamlingen ”World Brain” fra 1938 tar han opp problemet med organiseringen av utdanning og håndtering av kunnskapen i verden, og skriver blant annet:

"We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.

The three or four years course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages.

Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.”

Mens Wells innså nødvendigheten av “livslang læring” allerede i 1938, kom noen norske politikere etter i 60 år senere...(og den såkalte ”kvalitetsreformen” i høyere utdanning sitter paradoksalt nok fortsatt fast i 1800-tallstenkning).

Wells så for seg et verdensomfattende informasjonsnett (”World Brain”), som konseptuelt sett var ganske likt World Wide Web, men som skulle baseres på mikrofilm og telegrafi som var datidens teknologier. Han beskriver den blant annet slik:

„As the core of such an institution would be a world synthesis of bibliography and documentation with the indexed archives of the world. A great number of workers would be engaged perpetually in perfecting this index of human knowledge and keeping it up to date. “

„By means of the microfilm, the rarest and most intricate documents and articles can be studied now at first hand, simultaneously in a score of projection rooms. There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, [...] A microfilm, coloured where necessary, occupying an inch or so of space and weighing little more than a letter, can be duplicated from the records and sent anywhere[...] so that the student may study it in every detail“

„The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual. And [...] in this uncertain world where destruction becomes continually more frequent and unpredictable, is this, that photography affords now every facility for multiplying duplicates [...]. It need not be concentrated in any one single place. [...] It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, ... “

Imponerende klarsyn i 1938. Lær av framtida - les Science Fiction!