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\'3;↓Q\CSTANFORD UNIVERSITY
\F3\CSTANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY\←L\-R\/'7;\+R\→.\→S   Telephone:
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT\←S\→.415-497-4430
\F0\C1 November 1974



Editor
\F1Communications of the ACM
\F0ACM Headquarters Office
1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10036

Dear Sir:

\J	In her October President's letter, Jean Sammet favors the certification
and/or licensing of computer programmers and operators by government
agencies and regards it as inevitable.  As aids to this, she proposes
various measures including urging people to take the examination for
the certificate of data processing.
	In fact licensing will harm the field by increasing bureaucracy,
by protecting people already in it from competition, by the cost
of the bureaucracy, and by diverting effort into squabbling about
who should take what exams.  It will do nothing to prevent the use
of computers for frauds, bugs in programs that make up utility bills,
or the misuse of files stored in computers for wrongly discriminating
among applicants for jobs, credit or paroles.  It seems to be motivated
by the desire to create another petty monopoly so as to increase status
and pay and is thus on the moral level of the oil cartel.
	Moreover, the greatest faults in the use of computers so far is
the creation of inflated bureaucracies to run them and their use to
inflate the bureaucratic activities of organizations posessing them.
Licensing programmers, managers and operators won't help fix this
and the spirit that motivates licensing the same spirit that motivates
bureaucratic inflation.
	I hope that in the next ACM election, I will have the opportunity
to vote for a candidate who will oppose licensing and other extensions
of monopoly and bureaucracy, and I hope that the nominating committee
or whatever will keep this in mind.  I also urge individuals neither to
take nor require unnecessary examinations of dubious relevance to job
requirements.  I would be happy to correspond with other ACM members
interested in turning the ACM away from promoting bureaucracy and monopoly.\.
\←L\→S\←R\-L\/'2;\+L\→L
Sincerely yours,



John McCarthy
Director, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Computer Science Department
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JMC:pw
ACM.LE2[LET,JMC]:SU-AI