Three cheers for the Harvard Program on Technology and Society. And three cheers for its director, Emmanuel G. Mesthene. It is news that a large number of scholars-economists, for instance, or sociologists-are taking a close look at technology, its dynamics and its impacts. It is news, for instance, that an economist finally tries to relate technological development to economic theory, as Anne P. Carter is doing in one of the studies under the program. Or that another economist (Raymond Vernon) is trying to relate technological development to international trade and investment. It is news that a prominent philosopher (Morton White) tries to relate technology to the main currents of American philosophical thought. And it is, above all, news that technology is being seen by nontechnologists as part and parcel of human activity and society, instead of, as has been so common in our universities, as something outside and nonhuman. But above all there is reason for thanks for the courage which Mesthene himself displays and for his willingness to give us, in this fourth report on the program, his first conclusions. Mesthene dares to define technology. And while his definition, knowledge applied to practical purposes, is clearly too broad (does a fox who has learned not to cross the Trans-Canada Highway during daytime hours, as most of them have, apply technology?), it is at least a break out of the straitjacket of the traditional definition of technology as machines. Mesthene has the courage to see technology as a human activity rather than as a force. And he has the courage to speculate and to generalize. The fundamental insight that underlies Mesthene's essay is invaluable. He is the first writer, to my knowledge, to realize the pointlessness of arguing whether technology is good or bad. The problem of technology is that it may become too much of a thing. The problem, in other words, is one of trade-offs between countervailing impacts: the balance between the need for more crops in a hungry world and the protection of life and health against the toxic effects of insecticides, the