Dan McCracken's December President's letter quotes me to the
effect that Henry Ford could not have been expected to anticipate
the consequences of the automobile.  He missed my point that Ford
was right not to even try.  Ford and his contemporaries, unlike
McCracken and most of us, had a reasoned confidence that Americans,
individually and collectively, were better judges of their individual
interests in deciding what to buy, and their collective interests
in deciding what laws to past than a profession of technology
assessors.  I think that technology assessors in general, and
the ACM SIGCAS (Computers and Society) have already done considerable
harm and no identifiable good by delaying various services, especially
electronic funds transfer, while they endlessly and inconclusively
construct scenarios about people doing themselves in by preferring
bad new services to the one's they are accustomed to.  Of course,
some new services and products may be no good, but McCracken and
friends have no confidence in people's ability to learn from their
own and others' experience and want to figure it all out in advance.
My conviction that the only identifiable results are harmful are
based on reading the entire file of SIGCAS Newsletters.

	Computing has been one of the single most exciting technology
to develop since World War II.  Besides its contribution to our
prosperity by saving labor, it has revolutionized psychology and
promises to revolutionize philosophy of mind.  It is on the verge
of providing humans new ways of getting and interacting with
information in their daily lives that will comparable in benefit
to that provided by the automobile and telephone.  And yet the
leading technological society in computing repeatedly elects men
to office whose main talent is hand wringing and whose main ethic
is the bureaucratic ethic of "let's keep new toys out of their
hands until we're sure they won't hurt themselves".

	McCracken and SIGCAS have no thought, at least I found
none in my reading, that the ACM might play a positive role in promoting
new uses of computer technology to benefit society.  For example,
computer technology makes possible much more effective Freedom
of Information statutes.  Why don't they explore the possibility
that all information that a government or private organization
is required to make public, be required to be available from
computer terminals anywhere in the country?  Why don't they
explore the possibility of fighting bureaucracy by making it
illegal for any government or private organization to require
that information be supplied that the organization already has
in its posession?  Why can't the government or universities do
their own sorting?

	The fact that such blindness to the possibilities of
their own profession affects the leadership of ACM shows that
C.P. Snow was mistaken when he referred to "the two cultures" -
the literary and scientific.  Alas, there are but one and a
quarter when the leaders of technology take their social thought
from ignoramuses.