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Dear Dr. Ramo:

	I found your report printed in 1985 January @i[Bulletin
of the American Academy] disturbing, because I think two of its
major recommendations, the creation of an FCCC, with broad
regulatory powers and the creation of a unified agency to
regulate harmful aspects of technology to be probably harmful.

	It is a truism that a new technology can have harmful
side effects unintended by those who propose it and introduce
it.  Many examples have been cited, but a very large fraction
of the accompanying statements of what society might better
have done, had it known the harmful consequences of this or
that technology, strike me as recipes for far worse harm.
The examples I have in mind concern proposals to regulate
the automobile.

	New laws and new agencies also have side effects unintended
by their sponsors.  I would claim that these side effects have
been less predictable and more harmful than the effects of
technology on the average.  Examples include the National Environmental
Policy Act and the Equal Opportunity laws.  That the NEPA would be
a vehicle for legal guerrilla warfare and a vast enhancement of the
power of the judiciary was never anticipated in its debates.  That
quotas would be the result was not discussed by the proposers of
the equal opportunity laws.

	To use an engineering analogy, long term planning in human
affairs can introduce instabilities.  It has worked better to control
disbenefits of technology as they arise, rather than to anticipate them.
The anticipations are usually wrong and usually are strongly
affected by hidden agendas of various kinds.

	Here are some potential harmful side effects of your proposals.

	1. In the guise of preventing monopoly, they will create
monopolies and powerful vested interests in preserving them.  This
is what happened to the ICC and the CAB, and it is what happens
in every city that controls the issue of taxi medallions.
Once these monopolies are created, it will take 50 years to get
rid of them again.

	2. I know the people who write papers about the potential
harmful consequences of computer technology.  They are dilettante
ideologs, and they will impose bureaucratic delays on the trial
of any technology the get the power to regulate.  Their ideas of
what regulations to make will be arbitrary.

	3. There is already a powerful anti-technological political
constituency and industry.  Its present governmental base is the Office 
of Technology Assessment.  The studies they prepare are often highly
biased to the ideological interests of this constituency, whether
the topic be energy or computers.

	4.  Research planning and the resulting creation of
monopolies for committee determined approaches doesn't seem
to follow directly from your proposals.  However, I fear that
it would happen especially if my acquaintances in the social
consequences business gain power.

	My own research is in computer science, and my
research has enjoyed government support during my entire
career.  Nevertheless, I don't think that the future benefits of computers to
society depend very strongly on the intensity of Government
support in this or any other well developed country provided it
remains at something like the present level.  This is
because the major social benefits that I can see depend more on businesses
taking advantage of the enormous varieties of opportunities to
make useful products and services than on Government plans.  To
take only one recent prominent example, the domestic use of
microcomputers was in no way the beneficiary of a government
program aimed at that goal.  Another example is that the 1960
government supported approaches to integrated circuits were all
failures.

	In my own field, I believe that the five year committee
controlled speech research program by DARPA accomplished far
less than would have been accomplished by half the money used
to support unsolicited proposals.  It was the very best committee
that could be assembled, but its premise was that concentrating all
the money on the proposals the committee thought best would give
better results than a more diverse approach.  This premise was
wrong and the result was a narrowing and sterilization of speech
recognition research.

	I hope you will be more inclined in the future to explicitly
consider possible disbenefits of your proposals for government
activity.

	I'm sorry I don't have time to write this reaction more
carefully and document some of my points.  Its either a quick
job or none at all.

Sincerely,

DON'T INCLUDE THESE NOTES IN THE LETTER

ramo[w85,jmc]		Ramo's recipe for disaster

1. provides a focus for the efforts of monopolists of all kinds,
commercial, ideological, political

2. There is simply no examination of the side effects.  Yet laws
have had a far larger number of unanticipated harmful side effects
than has any kind of technology.

4. The examples you cite of necessary government roles in allocating
scarce resources.

5. I know the people who are making it their profession to predict the
future social effects of information technology and devise ways of
regulating it.  They will be the leaders of your FCCC if it is ever
created.  They are ideologs and will do great harm if they achieve
they power you and they are trying to get for them.