Communications

Rosalind Williams's thought-provoking essay on her experiences as a scholar-administrator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("'All That Is Solid Melts into Air': Historians of Technology in the Information Revolution," October 2000) has provoked so many thoughts of my own that I am compelled to write some of them down. Hers is indeed a key perspective, coming from within the ranks of what is probably the most cutting-edge institution of technology in the United States, if not the world. If the technology she describes may be likened to a tsunami that overwhelms everything in its path, Dr. Williams has spent half a decade surfboarding on the leading edge of the wave. In the process, she has concluded that whatever engineering used to be, "engineering" is no longer the right word for it today. The old vision of progress in the service of mankind has given way to a technological determinism that makes the direst prophecies of Jacques Ellul sound mild. As an engineer and a professor of engineering, I both agree and disagree with her

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