A Comment on the Comments

A COMMENT ON THE COMMENTS EMMANUEL G. MESTHENE I am grateful to all three commentators for the time and attention they have devoted to my essay, and to Mr. Drucker in particular for his perceptive appreciation of the spirit and focus of the Harvard Program on Technology and Society. The purpose of this comment, thus, is not to deny the compliment of serious criticism but to clarify a few points of fact and interpretation and to respond to some of the questions im­ plicit in the three commentaries. Mr. Drucker finds a fatal weakness in what he takes to be my “im­ plicit belief that the impacts of technology are foreseeable and indeed foreseen.” Mr. Ramo, by contrast, apparently does not find such a belief implicit in my essay, for he urges upon our Program “an effort ... to see technological change ahead and, with this advance notice, to adjust society.” My actual position in this matter is intermediate between these two readings. I do not believe that specific technologies or specific con­ sequences of specific technologies can be predicted accurately or reli­ ably, because a significant residue of uncertainty is implied by the very concept of technological innovation. To that extent, I am dubious about the promise of “technological forecasting.” On the other hand, I do not deny the usefulness of systematic at­ tempts to forecast a “surprise-free” future as a methodological device for dealing more effectively with the inevitable surprises when they do come. Moreover, I think it is possible to identify some respects in which technology entails change (“entails” is the operative word) and to sug­ gest the broad kinds or general directions of the social changes it can be expected to lead or contribute to. I nowhere suggest that improved sensing mechanisms will make our social problems disappear. But I be­ lieve enhanced understanding of the origin and nature of those problems, and of the cause-effect mechanisms by which technological change af­ fects their shape, can help society to deal with them more effectively. Both Mr. Drucker and Mr. Dupree charge me (and our Program) with not taking history seriously enough. To the extent that we seek after origins, natures, and mechanisms, however, I do not believe it can be fairly said that formulation of our research questions is devoid of a historical sense. It is true that we have not so far engaged in projects in the history of technology. That is largely because the “modern ap535 536 Emmanuel G. Mesthene proach to the history of technology” that Mr. Dupree urges upon us has not yet, so far as I know, gained significant ground against the patentfocused history of individual inventions that he rightly identifies and criticizes as “the framework of the history of technology as now prac­ ticed,” which would “be unable to help Mesthene very much in un­ raveling the relation of technology to society in the late 20th century.” I think I would be the first to welcome the Arnold Hauser who would attempt a genuinely social history of technology, or Mr. Dupree’s “hy­ pothetical qualified modern historian of technology (. . . armed with anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics as well as systems analysis, ecology, and all the conventional scholarly appurtenances),” who would search the past in terms of the hypotheses we are exploring about the relationship of technology and society in the present. I cannot imagine on what Mr. Drucker bases his conclusions that I believe that business is the dominant institution of our society, and that “Mesthene proposes rule by the priest-expert of academia.” So far as I can discover on rereading my essay above, I made no such statement about business. I did say, in our Program’s third annual report, that “business has been the dominant institution in American society during the last hundred years [emphasis added]” and I have elsewhere ex­ pressed my view that the university appears to be replacing business in that role. But that is exactly what Mr. Drucker is saying, too. As for the charge of intellectual elitism, it runs counter to my major emphasis in the essay, namely, that the political imperatives of tech­ nological change call for institutional innovation in the

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