# Transcript

Peter:

Oh, sorry, just reading the chat log as well. John, have we covered their naïvety sufficiently because if you enter into a world where you know that you’re dealing with military technology, you must have thought through the consequences. Weaponising a drone from a military point of view is a very good idea; from a humanitarian point of view, probably not.

Frank:

Yes, you do get the idea that Ned is incredibly naïve about a lot of the arguments that he puts forward, and it seems amazing that anyone’s gone into his line of work without actually considering the real aspects. It seems like he’s just a technologist, just like a little kid, really intrigued about the cool funky stuff he can build, but not even thinking about the way that they’re going to be used until it’s far too late and he has to sign this horrible contract.

Janet:

Yes, I’d agree with that but I’m also thinking that most of us will often hide things that we don’t want to know about from ourselves. I mean this may be perhaps a bit of an extreme example but people will go into a job because there are reasons why they know that they’re going to enjoy it and perhaps that causes them to hide from the realities they don’t like.

John:

Yes, actually the playwright, I’ve heard the playwright talk about this play and he said perhaps he made Ned a bit too naïve but he’s written the play and it’s been performed and perhaps if he were writing it again he wouldn’t do it quite in the same way. And the actors too said they found that particularly difficult to get over. I think they did a really good job when they performed it on the stage but I think the point about Ned’s naïvety is well made.

Peter:

And it wasn’t only naïvety. Ned was looking for a paradigm shift and he wanted to retain control.

Tim:

Yes, I wondered whether the naïvety in the play had been exaggerated in order to make the point that a naïve scientist can get himself involved in some quite dangerous stuff. This is a warning really but I also think that there are some incredibly naïve people around in all walks of life and I don’t suppose scientists are any more immune from being naïve than anybody else.

Janet:

Yes, just going back to what Peter was saying about the paradigm shift and the control. I think I got the impression, at any rate, that Ned felt that he would be able to exercise control through the contractual side of things so the naïvety was in not realising how hard he’d be pushed contractually.

Judith:

Perhaps Ned was simply so enamoured by the technology that he didn’t see beyond it.

Janet:

That’s also very probably true.

Peter:

Can you be enamoured by a weaponised drone?

Tim:

He wouldn’t be the first person to get enamoured by a piece of technology in my experience, that’s for sure, and yes, I think people can get enamoured by the weaponisation, if that’s what you want to call it. I think if you look at the history of weapons development, people have got quite excited about the technology and I think some of the stuff around the Hiroshima and Nagasaki I think shows that.

Janet:

Yes, I think also if you think about how people talk about their own work, the idea that something is my brain child, I think probably people do get enamoured in very much in the way that they love their children. They want it to be the best in the world, they’re proud of themselves for having produced it or whatever. But in Ned’s case, surely he was well and truly enamoured of it before it was weaponised and while he still thought that it was a relatively neutral piece of technology.

Judith:

Sorry, I didn’t mean to butt in there, I pressed the wrong button. Yes, I think I can see what you’re saying about it was like a child to him and like a bad child you’re trying to give it all the time, a child turned bad.

Frank:

He also makes the point though that when he was coming up with this technology, we weren’t in Iraq and Israel hadn’t invaded Gaza yet so the world was a far better place. So either he’s being naïve about the possibilities of things going wrong in the world or he genuinely didn’t see the bad applications and thought it would be only used for peace.

John:

Of course, it could be that the playwright actually exaggerated because he wanted to make a point and perhaps the playwright got it in for these kind of technologists.

Janet:

Yes, just thinking about not being in Iraq and those sort of things. Yes, the other point that came to me was when he’s talking to Ros later on about it and he’s describing it in very aesthetic ways and again, this seems to show that he sees his invention, his brain child as something quite different from what’s actually going to be produced out in the real world.