Museums and Galleries

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, we should indeed be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for his long-standing commitment to this area. It is a privilege to participate in this debate. I declare an interest as a former trustee of the British Museum and a current member of the Science Museum’s fundraising trust. I am based at Cambridge University, which is fortunate to have several outstanding museums; these are not only key adjuncts to research and teaching, but important cultural assets for the city and the region and, of course, tourist attractions too.

Museums and galleries are a diverse and complex ecology. I will focus my comments on science museums but I reiterate the concern we all share about the vulnerability of all local museums and libraries in an era when local government funding is under extreme pressure. There is a risk that temporary squeezes could lead to irreversible losses to our culture and communities. All museums aspire to be inspirational, cultural, and educational for young and old and they have a duty to conserve the artefacts emblematic of our heritage. However, I think it is accepted that science museums have, in addition, a more explicit educational role than the others. In this sense, they overlap in their mission with so-called science centres. Some of the latter were established with capital from the Millennium lottery fund, and have struggled to sustain an income.

The Science Museum itself has long seen young people as a key part of its clientele. There were 650,000 booked school visitors at the museum last year. Its acclaimed Wonderlab interactive gallery started in London and another was opened in Bradford at the newly revamped National Science and Media Museum, boosting visitor numbers there by one-third. The Government’s industrial strategy depends on a lifeblood of young people fired up by science and technology, and museums have a key role to play here. All too often, the natural enthusiasm that primary school children have—for dinosaurs, space or tadpoles—erodes at later stages. Those who have carried on in scientific careers often attribute their continuing motivation to media and museums, more than to their formal schooling.

As has been remarked, a generic feature of our great collections is that they are London-centric. The Science Museum is unusual here; it is actually a federation. Its flagship institution is indeed in South Kensington, but it has four other museums: the National Railway Museum in York, where there is an exciting redevelopment being planned; its adjunct in Shildon; the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford; and the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. This is at least some cheer for the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, as he explained earlier. More than that, the Science Museum has organised special exhibitions which travel internationally. Science is the most truly global culture. There is currently an “Illuminating India” season at the Science Museum, which has been a tonic for UK-India relations. A special success—achieved through seriously difficult diplomacy by the director—was the Cosmonauts exhibition, which displayed artefacts from the 1960s which had never been seen publicly before, even in Russia. They went to Moscow only after they had been shown here. It was a worthy celebration of the heroism of the early cosmonauts and of Soviet achievements in science.

As a follow-up, incidentally, the museum is acquiring the capsule in which Tim Peake the UK astronaut travelled from the International Space Station; he came down in a Russian capsule. This will go on tour in the UK, along with Stephenson’s “Rocket”—a nice juxtaposition. Incidentally, touring exhibitions obviously engender concern about the safety of fragile artefacts, but the Science Museum director noted that this was the last of his concerns in the case of the space capsule as it had survived, glowing white-hot, during its re-entry into the atmosphere at 5 kilometres per second—so travel to the north of England occasioned zero concern. It will surely attract a lot of interest.

This leads to another important point: the allure of seeing the “real thing”. The web is, of course, a huge plus in spreading knowledge virtually and an important element in all museums. However, it is absolutely not the case that the web erodes the motivation to see actual iconic objects, just as in other fields there is now growing demand for book festivals and live concerts. I have witnessed an extreme example of this in science centres, when a spoonful of moon dust—utterly nondescript-seeming grey soil—always attracts a crowd of wondering young people.

Of course, some artefacts have aesthetic as well as technical or historic appeal—old clocks and astrolabes, for instance. That seems less true, sadly, of their modern counterparts, although an engineering friend assures me that the intricate structures on a silicon chip have a certain austere beauty if you look at them under a microscope. Be that as it may, in an era where short-termism is ever more prevalent, we should treasure our museums and acclaim their successes and initiatives. We need to celebrate and understand our past and be mindful of the heritage we owe to past generations as this should inspire us to reach for a brighter longer-term future.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, would he like to mention engineering? It is very important and has hardly been mentioned.

Digital Understanding

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I join other speakers in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, on this debate. Our lives have been hugely enriched by consumer electronics and by web-based services that are free or very cheap. Indeed, during a decade where many people’s real wages have fallen, the main reason why they may enjoy greater subjective well-being is the consumer surplus offered by the ever more pervasive digital world. However, it is not an unalloyed piece of good news that young people spend so much time online, and there are other concerns. What about, for instance, the burgeoning information about us on the net—about health records, google searches, where we have travelled and what we buy?

When we are at home, Amazon’s home robot is recording what we say. Even the humble robotic vacuum cleaner can record the floorplans of our rooms. All this information has commercial value to the companies that dominate the sector. Criminal hackers can steal our identity. As the internet of things becomes more pervasive, they will be able to sabotage our house and our car as well. When on the phone or online, it is increasingly hard to tell whether you are dealing with a real person or with a computer. Bots can engage in increasingly sophisticated dialogue—but it is important that we should be able to recognise them for what they are. Would we be happy if a stranger who sat near us on a train could access facial recognition software, identify us and then search our online presence?

AI will enable machines to control traffic flows, the electric grid and such like. They will do such jobs better than humans and that is an unambiguous benefit, but when machines decide the fate of individuals, one is ambivalent. If individuals are denied a request, they should be entitled to be told the reason. One genuine dilemma is that machine learning leads to algorithms that seem reliable, but no human understands how they come to their decisions.

When so much business, including our interaction with Government, is done via websites, we should worry about, for instance, an elderly or disabled person living alone who is expected to access the benefits system online. Think of the anxiety and frustration when something goes wrong. Such people will have peace of mind only if there are enough adequately trained human beings in the system to ensure that they can get help and are not disadvantaged.

This leads to a more general point. The digital revolution generates huge wealth for an elite, but preserving a healthy society will require massive redistribution of wealth and, of course, redeployment of labour to ensure that everyone still has worthwhile employment. To do this we should surely hugely expand the numbers of public service jobs where the human element is crucial and where demand is huge, and now hugely unsatisfied, especially carers for young and old, and in particular, enough computer-savvy carers to help the old and the bewildered.