{"text":[[{"start":7.63,"text":"The writer is a Conservative MP, shadow leader of the House of Commons and author of ‘The Winding Stair’, a historical novel about Francis Bacon and Edward Coke"}],[{"start":19.02,"text":"Four centuries after his death on April 9 1626, Francis Bacon — philosopher, man of science and statesman — still stands at the intellectual centre of the modern world."}],[{"start":32.92,"text":"This is surprising. Bacon discovered no new scientific laws. He was not a mathematician, and he largely missed the extraordinary 17th-century drive of Galileo and Descartes, and later Newton, to quantify nature."}],[{"start":48.800000000000004,"text":"But Bacon did something no less powerful: he articulated a new attitude to nature. As he famously wrote: “Knowledge itself is power.” Nature was not to be revered but interrogated, understood and ultimately controlled. His focus was what he called the “relief of man’s estate”: the systematic enlargement of human knowledge and human prosperity."}],[{"start":74.69,"text":"That foundational ambition to “master nature” is arguably one of the most consequential ideas in history, for good and ill. It underlies the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It also sits behind modern demographic and ecological crises — and the technological revolution of our own age."}],[{"start":96.42,"text":"Yet mastery, in Bacon’s sense, always invoked ambiguity. To understand nature is to gain power over it — but also to become newly dependent on the systems we create. Modern societies are not only masters of nature; they are also entangled in vast technological networks they can neither fully predict nor easily control."}],[{"start":121.31,"text":"Bacon’s further insight was that the production of knowledge itself could be organised. In The Advancement of Learning, he advocated the creation of specialist colleges of research to gather intellectual and practical knowledge."}],[{"start":136.64000000000001,"text":"In New Atlantis, written a few years before his death, he imagined a research institution devoted to collective scientific discovery, anticipating a world in which knowledge is systematically mobilised for practical ends. That world is now our own."}],[{"start":157.17000000000002,"text":"The application of organised knowledge to matter and energy has delivered extraordinary gains: greater comfort, abundant goods, longer lives and billions lifted out of poverty. In this respect, Bacon’s promise has been fulfilled. But so too has its inner tension. If nature can be understood as a system of manipulable processes, it can also be overexploited, destabilised and degraded."}],[{"start":186.06,"text":"The same mindset that treats forests as timber reserves and the atmosphere as a sink for emissions is an extension, albeit a crude one, of his project. Climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion are, in part, the products of success."}],[{"start":204.79,"text":"Bacon himself was not blind to the danger. As he warned in Novum Organum, knowledge and human power were inseparable, but “the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding”."}],[{"start":219.57999999999998,"text":"He also warned against the systematic errors of human judgment that distort inquiry and lead to misuse of knowledge. But what he could hardly have foreseen was the scale and speed with which his project has been realised, or its effect in magnifying human impacts."}],[{"start":237.52999999999997,"text":"Today, that scale is planetary and increasingly digital. AI, in particular, is the industrialisation of Baconian induction: the extraction of patterns from vast bodies of data in order to generate prediction and control. It is, in a sense, the logical culmination of his method."}],[{"start":259.80999999999995,"text":"Yet precisely for that reason, it sharpens the ambiguity in his idea of mastery. AI extends our capacity to act without necessarily deepening our understanding. It risks separating power from judgment in ways Bacon himself would have recognised as dangerous. The question is not whether humanity can master aspects of nature, but whether it can manage the consequences of that mastery."}],[{"start":287.93999999999994,"text":"Bacon’s project demands continued scientific and technological ambition. But it also insists on discipline, humility and vigilance against error as correctives to human hubris."}],[{"start":302.43999999999994,"text":"In New Atlantis, Bacon imagines a new kind of advanced research institution that he names Salomon’s House. Its members decide which discoveries to publish or withhold, believing that knowledge itself must be governed, not simply unleashed. It is a strikingly prescient image. Today’s AI laboratories face precisely this dilemma: how to manage the release of systems whose power is advancing faster than our ability to understand or control them."}],[{"start":333.91999999999996,"text":"We are all the inheritors of Bacon’s central insight, that knowledge confers power. Let’s not forget his other lesson: that such power must be exercised within the human norms and institutions it seeks to support."}],[{"start":357.13999999999993,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1775702647_9817.mp3"}