\\M0BASL30;\M1BASI30;\M2NGR40;\.
\F2\CSTANFORD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY
\CDEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
\CSTANFORD UNIVERSITY
\CSTANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305
\F0
							September 20, 1974

Editor, Magazine Section
\F1The New York Times\F0
229 West 43rd Street
New York, New York 10036

To the Editor:

\J	Fletcher Knebel's "The Greening of Fletcher Knebel" (Sept. 15) leaves this
technologist with the feeling that I am being set up for a lynching by
a rabble rousing politician.  Maybe it's just that technologists are
inarticulate (we have that reputation) or that, as a political journalist,
Knebel has learned how to do a hatchet job from the politicians, but
I sat for a long time trying to complete the sentence, "Our vaunted technology
has \F1not\F0 become a blasphemy against nature, because ..." in 200 words
or less.  I have not the slightest idea what would have to be proved to
exonerate us technologists, anymore than some poor Russian
in the \F1Gulag Archipelago\F0 could figure
out how to prove he was not an "enemy of the people".

	Let me mention a few specific points that make me unhappy:

	1. His recollection of "EXPANSION FOREVER" does not match my recollection
of what even the politicians said in the 1950s, let alone the
what technologists said.  When my high school English teacher taught us how to
recognize propaganda, she said something about setting up straw men that
seems to apply here.  I am sure, however, that no-one who has ever argued
for the automobile, work, or competition would regard Knebel's summary of
his views as fair.  Maybe fairness is another value that has been greened away.

	2. "25 tons of irreplacable ores must be extracted from the ground
each year to keep each American going in the style to which he's accustomed."
Knebel seems to think that's a lot, but provides no basis for believing that or
calculating how long we can go on this way.  If we divide the mass of the
earth by the world's population we get about one trillion tons per person,
so at Knebel's rate we could go on for 40 billion years, and we know the
sun won't last that long, and that's without any recycling.  Actually, this
calculation isn't conclusive either, and no-one really has full picture of
how low grade ores we can use.
There is not space to cite my reasons for not believing the Club of Rome and other
arguments that we face impending disaster, but then Knebel doesn't give
arguments for his doomsaying.  He just relies on the idea that if the
charges are repeated often enough some people will believe them.

	3. That Knebel rejects \F1rationality\F0 just because the people who
conducted the Vietnam war thought they were doing the rational thing, seems
unbelievable, and I guess I don't believe it.  Rather it resembles the
Stalinist campaign against \F1bourgeois objectivity\F0 in the 1930s.  There
it served the role of substituting authority for reason, and here it seems
to serve the purpose of substituting an appeal to prejudice for reason.

	4. The prejudice Knebel appeals to is that against machinery and
people who like machinery.  It gives me pleasure when after much tinkering,
I have gotten a complicated computer program to work, and I also admire
and get pleasure from other people's accomplishments like the Boeing 747 or
the Polaroid SX-70 camera or the Hewlett-Packard calculators or the Mazda
version of the rotary engine or the Apollo lunar module.  It surprises me
that Knebel is repelled by these things and can only think of how they can
lead to harm.  He has a right to his personal tastes, but why
must he incite hatred by calling technology a "blasphemy against nature"?\.




							John McCarthy
							Computer Science Dept.
							Stanford, California