615 



VARIETY OR SCOPE 



The variety of technological innovations to which the individual 

 citizen is today exposed seems to have increased by orders of magni- 

 tude in the past quarter-century. This increase seems to be attributable, 

 again, to the heavy and rising public investment in basic and applied 

 physical science, to hea^^ developmental outlays in the high technology 

 of military and space programs, to the initiative of entrepreneurs in 

 effecting lateral transfers of new hardware to consumer markets, and 

 to the receptivity of a teclmically literate and affluent consumer mar- 

 ket. The imiovative trend is indicated by the automation and pro- 

 ductivity of agriculture and industry; the great variety of consumer 

 goods m the home ; the elaboration of hardware for recreational pur- 

 poses ; the introduction of computers into banks, brokerage houses, 

 ticket officers, the management of credit cards, and other services ; the 

 elaborate expansion of hardware and technological systems into group 

 medical practice and hospitals, school systems, and law enforcement 

 administrations ; and the great range of different vehicles in service in 

 the air, on the highways, and in shops, airports, heavy constmction 

 projects, and urban areas. 



While the scope of diplomacy has not excluded attention to all these 

 topics, there is a tendency for teclmology to make them more salient. 

 Assigning priorities among a growing array of salient developments 

 becomes increasingly difficult as a problem of formulating and imple- 

 menting foreign policy. 



RANGE AND PERVASIVENESS OF IMPACTS 



The effects of an onrushing technology on the United States and in 

 its relations with other countries are virtually without limit. His- 

 torical concepts of war, and of the military base for diplomacy, have 

 been unseated by atomic weapons and their long-range delivery 

 systems. 



Industrial productivity, supported by technological innovations, has 

 risen so impressively in relation to hours of work that a "post-indus- 

 trial" condition can be foreseen in which standards of livmg will no 

 longer be limited by the length of the work week. 



Consumption of industrial materials continues to rise, to support 

 present high levels of industrial output, so that the future adequacy 

 of minerals and fuels is increasingly in question. 



Consumption of electrical energy to run all the appliances and 

 durable goods in the household, and for all manner of industrial appli- 

 cations, has been doubling every decade in the United States, and 

 seems destined to continue to double at this rate, at least through 1990. 

 Impacts of power generation on environmental quality are a source of 

 growing pul3lic and professional anxiety. 



Imperfections in technology are coming increasingly under attack : 

 in terms of pollution of the air and surface waters ; in terms of noise, 

 radiation, and thermal effects ; and in terms of massive quantities of 

 waste products to be disposed of, and minute additions of toxic mate- 

 rials that progressively accumulate in the environment. Agricultural 

 technology has enabled the highest rate of per- worker productivity in 

 all histoi-y, but at a cost of heavy uses of chemicals, some of which re- 



