Searchlights from the past

“Modern man”, wrote the historian, E.H. Carr, “peers eagerly back into the twilight from which he has come, in the hope that its faint beams will illuminate the obscurity into which he is going …”. Carr is wrong. For those who are willing to look, searchlights, not faint beams, shine out from the past and show us the pits into which we will fall if we do not look where we are going. Some of these searchlights illuminate specific technical risks while others remind us of general principles. In an age of rapid change people are particularly prone to ignore the past, but while technology changes, people do not.