October 6, 1967
Page 28095
SOCIETAL IMPLICATIONS OF ACCELERATING TECHNOLOGY – ADDRESS BY SENATOR BAKER
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in a recent address before the Association for Computing Machinery, the Senator from Tennessee [Mr. BAKER] spoke of "the upcoming socio-technological revolution."
Already the changes which science and man's inventiveness are making in our living environment and in our institutions pose a threat to some of the most basic values of our society.
At the same time, we know that technology, if made to serve the long-term best interests of mankind, can enhance the quality of life and the prospects of achievement for each and all of us.
I happen to know that the Senator from Tennessee has informed himself thoroughly on the societal implications of accelerating technology. I hope that other Senators will give thoughtful attention to what he had to say to the Association of Computing Machinery, for his remarks have a special meaning to us as legislators. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of Senator BAKER's address be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
TEXT OF ADDRESS BY SENATOR HOWARD H. BAKER, JR., TENNESSEE, BEFORE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY, AUGUST 30, 1967, WASHINGTON, D.C.
I thank you for the opportunity to appear and discuss a matter of mutual interest, the upcoming socio-technological revolution. I bring you the genuine regrets of my colleague, Senator Muskie, that he could not be with you today. I think it would have been especially appropriate and significant had he been your luncheon guest and had the opportunity to discuss the creation of a Select Committee of the United States Senate for Technology and Human Environment, S. Res. 68, of which he is the author. However, as you know, he is part of a special mission designated by the President to observe the conduct of the elections in South Vietnam.
I am pleased to have had the opportunity to enthusiastically support Senator Muskie in this important effort, and before I discuss the aspects of the proposal itself, I would like to speak in broader terms and paint with a broader brush for just a moment.
Your field of interest is as broad as the entire scope of the activities and the environment of mankind. The computing sciences provide the tools and techniques which permit us to bring coherence and organization to the exploding body of knowledge which will directly affect every life and all our governmental institutions both now and for the future. Without the computing industry the new burgeoning science of cybernetics would be only an abstract concept and "the art of steersmanship," as the American College Dictionary defines cybernetics, would be impossible of obtainment.
In the social sciences as distinguished from the purely scientific, your industry and talents and imagination will permit us to, for the first time, engage in scientific and systematic inquiries into the nature of existence and the form and substance of theory in a logical, useable and useful form.
For the first time theoretical science, applied science, engineering, economics and government are discernibly interacting, and thus the reason and the necessity for the creation of a Select Committee such as proposed by Senator Muskie in order to assure that the governing process, which in the democratic form is itself a computing machine of sorts, keeps pace with and maintains an awareness of the forces and vectors of change and opportunity.
Let me speak of one aspect of the socio-technological revolution that is basic to all our considerations.
We are about to enter an age of vast, unbelievably cheap power. We will see the unlimited availability of nuclear power in the next few years at almost zero fuel cost. This production of power at zero fuel cost will transform our society in nearly every aspect.
As Dr. Alvin Weinberg, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has said: "the advent of very cheap, ubiquitous and inexhaustible nuclear energy, through the development of the breeder reactor, will make a qualitative change in man's relation to his environment."
Energy is the ultimate raw material. If we make energy available at almost no cost, then we will be faced with a revaluation of everything that is produced.
Even now we are working hard for implementation of a proposal by former President Eisenhower and Admiral Lewis Strauss to provide fresh water for the strife-torn Middle East with nuclear power plants. This is already practical and if adopted, will revolutionize the Middle East, hopefully bringing peace and prosperity to that troubled land.
With Breeder Reactors producing this near costless energy, the promise is even greater. But revolution is a concept that is fraught with peril. For, as we have seen in the revolutions perpetrated by man across the course of history, they can be for good, or they can be for bad.
Every Fourth of July, we celebrate with pride and patriotism the American Revolution in which our forefathers revolted against the mother country and declared themselves forever free of tyrannical oppression.
But we also know of the revolution of the Fidel Castro variety where one despot is replaced with an even more ruthless tyrant.
So, revolution, if not carefully controlled, can enslave rather than free.
It is, therefore, imperative that we begin now to plan for the great technological revolution which is almost upon us.
We must make the necessary adjustments and preparations to assure that this revolution works for our benefit, that it makes us freer, and that it does not destroy the basic values upon which our nation was founded.
You are well aware of the fears expressed of the "big brotherism" aspects of the computerized society. And you've heard the humorously told accounts of people fighting frustrating battles against an immutable computer which insists on sending a bill which for some reason or other is erroneous.
These stories and jokes are funny today. But tomorrow when our society becomes completely dependent on computerization, they could become nightmares, unless we plan for the new age computers are bringing us.
The anguish of the economic dislocation in the coal mining areas of West Virginia and Tennessee is an illustration in miniature of the problems that may beset this nation on a much broader scale as a result of new automative techniques, on the basis of new labor saving approaches.
The plight of the coal miner is essentially a problem where our economy has failed to anticipate the disruptive impact of high mechanization in one industry but the new frontiers of science and technology threatens these very same economic disruptive forces throughout the fabric of the entire economy and the problem we are confronted with in the hills and valleys of Tennessee and West Virginia will be multiplied many times over in many other industries unless we have the foresight to anticipate and provide against these contingencies in the immediate years to come.
This exciting prospect of unlimited nuclear energy, and all that one can see flowing from
it has been described by Dr. Weinberg as constituting a "technological fix" – a means of circumventing, through technology a profoundly disturbing social problem.
He used the case of the classical Malthusian dilemma. One hopes through this technology, he said, to buy the time the world needs to work the social changes which will ultimately be needed if we are to control the world's population.
These "technological fixes" help but they alone are not enough.
To attack these problems we need a coherent and coordinated approach of the socio- technological and political implications.
To those of us who are not scientists or technicians, but politicians rooted in the experience of people, their idiosyncrasies, their prejudices and vagaries, the future of automated machines, manipulated genetic structures, self-contained new cities which recycle their own wastes and giant airplanes, the nuclear devices that produce costless energy, give us substantial cause of concern on Capitol Hill.
And, of course, in order that no one here may be offended by being excluded from the list of these frightening projections, there is the cybernetic revolution, which Glenn Seaborg terms "the quantum jump in the existence of man," which will have all manner of far-reaching effects on the individual and his environment.
What we lack in the Senate, in Congress, in the Executive Branch, and among our State and local governments is a mechanism for inquiring into the broad impact of science and technology on man's thinking, his health, work, living habits and individual security over the next fifty years.
There is a tremendous information gap between the politician and the scientist. We really don't know where we are heading – where the benefits of technology can be best applied, and what the hazards and problems that may flow from such technological application.
In an attempt to meet this information gap, Senator Muskie has proposed legislation which would establish in the Senate the Select Committee on Technology and the Human Environment, composed of members from each of the standing committees most involved with legislation affecting human needs. This committee would provide an excellent forum where scientists and legislators could face each other across the table and discuss the critical environmental problems ahead and what science and technology can do to solve them.
It would provide a central source of information and analysis – not now available in the Senate – comprehensive information cutting across the technological spectrum, which the standing committees and members of the Senate would use in developing their legislative policies.
This Select Committee would have no jurisdiction over legislation or powers of legislative oversight, but its reports and recommendations covering essential environmental problems could well become a foundation for development of national goals and planning involving science and technology as key ingredients in building a modern America.
We are well along with our scientific and technological planning and programming, our system management, our cybernetic progress in the military and defense sectors, and in our efforts to put a man on the moon. There have been problems in these sectors, but extraordinary minds and machines have worked to solve them.
But what does the next fifty years of science and technology hold for man on earth? Is he to be consigned to the ghettos, stalled in traffic, choked by poisoned atmosphere, and subjected to the continuing noise, strain, speed tension and social instability of our increasingly crowded urban and suburban environments? Can he be released, at least in part, from these intolerable conditions, from the kind of scientific effort that is going forward so energetically in the space and defense fields? And if we bring in the scientists and the technologists, and their 21st Century equipment and ideas, do we have the type of governmental structure and administrative process to implement effectively the rebuilding process? How much of our concepts of free enterprise, of individual freedom and initiative and of democratic decision-making will have to be forfeited in order to plan and to build a new American society along scientific lines?
These are hard questions requiring some very hard decisions. But the internal conditions of many areas urban and rural in this country are getting so serious that we are going to have to make these decisions sooner than we think. Hopefully, a Select Committee on Technology and the Human Environment can help us along the way.
All the witnesses that appeared before our Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations to comment on the resolution were optimistic that we have – or are rapidly building – the scientific capability to solve environmental problems.
Again, the question – to what extent will the "technological fix" impair the democratic decision-making process, and reduce individual freedom? Could it be that we as legislators representing a hundred and ninety million people are hooked into a technological system over which in the long run we are powerless to control?
Many witnesses see this high energy civilization coming on us before we may be ready to cope with it. They see the impact of trillions of kilowatt hours of low cost electricity spread across our Nation by massive interconnecting grids as revolutionizing nearly every facet of our American life.
They picture cities built in the nature of a closed system, powered by huge atomic reactors which will breed their own fuel run by automation. These cities could produce their own materials, recycle their water, sewage, and industrial waste, have modern efficient heating, housing and transportation facilities, and concentrate heavily on education, research and development, along with service industries as contrasted to productive industry.
Other than atomic power, computerization would be at the heart of the operations of such a city. The computer complex would be the city's largest decision-making body.
What kind of a government would such a city have? What kind of political decisions would be needed? What kind of competition would there be? How much private ownership? How much individual freedom would a person have? There are many interesting questions here, which no doubt a Select Committee would consider.
Never before in our Nation's history has it been quite so critical that we shorten the 10- to 20-year gap between basic research discoveries and their practical applications. Never has it been quite so critical that Congress legislate intelligently so that taxpayers, impatient to achieve effective solutions to a myriad of social problems, get their money's worth from each dollar spent.
The Select Committee will be a major first step in preparing for this technological revolution I have discussed with you today. But an important next step should be given immediate consideration, perhaps as the first major inquiry of the Select Committee.
This would be the question of establishing coherent National Socio-Technological Institutes that could mobilize around the great social problems that mar the quality of our life. Such institutes would be concerned with the city, with race relations, with crime, with civil defense and with the environment. The institutes would have both social scientists and technologists working in dally give-and-take, exchanging views and keeping each other honest. Some of the institutes might represent a redeployment of existing government laboratories but others would spring up anew. Some might be university-connected; others would have no such connection. But, above all, the institutes would have a coherence in their attacks on these profoundly different questions.
The thought that I really want to leave with you in summing up is that all of us – you in the computer manufacturing industry – we in the Congress – have got to do a great deal more thinking about where science and technology is leading us, and what kind of mechanism we can devise for coordinating the information as to what is happening, and what benefits and hazards are developing as a result of all this activity.
Second, the time is long overdue for the development of national goals and planning with respect to relationship between our scientific and technological achievement and the improvement of our human environment. We can no longer rely on Federal grants in aid and State and local administrators to solve the problems of our cities. Science and industry have got to be brought into the picture.
Third, we have to think seriously about the kind of creative Federal system of government that will best serve our needs in the 21st Century, preserving to the greatest extent possible individual freedom, and the democratic process of decision-making.
And finally, we must develop a national purpose, to which everyone is dedicated – to rebuild, refurbish, rejuvenate this Nation at every level of human activity, to reduce the widening gap between affluence and despair that is threatening the strength of this Nation as we approach the 21st Century.