ON OCTOBER 13, 1972, the American federal government established in Washington an Office of Technology Assessment to advise Congress on legislative problems related to new technology and its probable impact. This act reflects an ambivalence toward engineering innovation that has been rare during the last thousand years in the Occidental culture of which we are part. Both pagan and Christian antiquity, of course, had been dubious about technology. St. Augustine, the most penetrating mind of a groping age, expressed amazement at the ingenuity and variety of the arts, yet feared that the good coming from them may be counterbalanced by the evil of so many poisons, weapons and military machines in addition to stiperfluities and vanities.' The Latin Middle Ages, by contrast, developed an almost entirely affirmative view of techinological improvement. This new attitude is clearly detectable in the early ninth century, and by 1450 engineering advance had become explicitly connected with the virtues: it was integral to the ethos of the West.2 People are organized into cultures by the basic presuppositions-often unverbalized-that they share: their axioms. They ptit their intelligence, energy, and money into what they corporately consider good. The results are as varied as the majestic pyramids of pharaonic Egypt, the sadistic games of the arenas of the Roman West, and the family-centering, but globally focused, television sets of the contemporary industrialized world. Medieval Europe came to believe that technological progress was part of God's will for man. The result was an increasing thrust of invention that has been extrapolated, without interruption or down-curve, into our present society.