I Back in the days when I did useful work, I thought of myself as a control systems engineer. While I never scaled the heights of those who have played leading roles in IFAC -- so fascinatingly described in the historical account written by Steve Kahne -- I did participate in sessions of the Joint Automatic Control Conference meetings of the 1960's, published a few papers, and was a card- carrying member of the IEEE Control Systems Society. But like former New York Yankee Yogi Berra once advised, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." I came to such a junction in the mid-70's and have traveled, since then, as a scientific and higher-education administrator, ... a bureaucrat.

However, I have not lost total contact with what is occurring in "your" field nor have I lost interest in what is being pursued and accomplished in the research and development centers throughout the world. I continue to be proud of my own humble origins as a control systems engineer.

Thirty-one years ago this summer, I had the privilege of heading a small team of engineers, computer scientists and technicians who conducted one of the earliest demonstrations of the use of a stored-program, general-purpose digital computer as a controller in a closed-loop digital control system, if not the first. The computer, a U.S. Navy AN/USQ-20 machine with 32,768 words of memory and a 1 microsecond memory access time, which we programmed in machine language, was used to control a large, shipboard-mounted, electro-hydraulic, tactical-missile launcher. We employed the theory and techniques of John R. Ragazzini, Gene Franklin, E. I. Jury, Julius Tou, and others, who were writing texts and papers about sampled-data control systems theory but who did not, at that time, have access to the computers to carry out tests of their research. You can imagine the thrill I felt when that massive launcher responded smoothly to computer control with commands provided at a 10 samples/second rate. The results of the work demonstrated, to me at least, that digital closed-loop control could be made practical.

Today, computers with many orders of magnitude more speed and power and many orders of magnitude less weight and volume are ubiquitous and are performing tasks unenvisioned in 1965. Computer hardware and software developments dazzle us with their professed capabilities but to date it remains difficult to see whether computer technology has fulfilled the promises of the increased productivity that we seek. We have learned how to develop applications that replace human activity but the large multiplier effect on human productivity has yet to be realized. This reality, in my opinion, is what makes the community of control systems engineers so important to the future. Just as education is too important to be left solely in the hands of educators, computer applications are too important to be left solely to computer designers. The issues facing our global society are monumental ones. The problems we encounter in sustainable development, environmental protection, food production, transportation, health care, communications, energy and power, and many others that require the use of state-of-the-art computer equipment and systems demand the best thinking and work of our world's control system researchers. and designers. Applications that draw upon the enormous potential imbedded in the hardware and software being delivered by computer manufacturers throughout the world are best developed by those who understand the fundamental truths of control theory and practice. We need fewer applications whose worth is measured by the number of persons they replace and more applications that can be measured by the improvement they make to the quality of our lives. Simply automating human operations is not enough; providing value through the intelligent and ethical use of systems that enhance the synergies between humans and machines must be our higher goal. In short, our performance indices must be changed.

Our world is becoming increasingly populated by concepts and technologies with names like "client/server," distributed networks, graphical user interfaces, "relational databases, "interprocess communications," and the like. It remains unclear whether or not these ideas and developments will truly be used to improve the health, education, security and comfort of all people or whether they will-only deepen the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. The answer lies in the utility we fashion from them, the task that confronts each of us.

As an educator am increasingly concerned about the tensions, fears and uncertainties that afflict too much of the world's populace -- especially young persons. Starvation, ignorance, pollution , crime, ethnic and racial conflict are too omnipresent for us to feel that our grand accomplishments in research and technology are being used for the best purposes.

When the late African-American chemist Percy Lavon Julian, received an honor scroll from the American Institute of Chemists, he chose to quote, in his acceptance speech, from a poem of Henry Wadsworth Lon gfellow which begins: Where should the scholar live? In solitude or in society?

As both chemist and humanist, Dr. Julian's answer was: in society. "My prime concern," he said, is that the scientist . . . recognizes the magnitude of responsibility resting upon his shoulders, when the nation entrusts so much of its wealth in his hands."

Today, we are confronted on a regular basis with tremendous advances in science and technology that continue to reshape our society. From the space shuttle to the personal computer, technological advances are constantly before us. Discoveries made in our research laboratories are reaching the public more quickly than ever before. There used to be an average of two decades between the making of a scientific discovery and its application in the marketplace. But recently, especially in fields such as microelectronics and biochemistry, that span has been telescoped into as little as two years.

I find it sobering to realize that in the slightly more than forty years since Watson and Crick unlocked the secrets of DNA and in the nearly fifty years since Brattain, Bardeen and Shockley discovered the transistor, our lives have been irreversibly transformed. Today we have the ability to synthesize insulin, produce interferon, grow disease-resistant plants and grow hogs that have less fat using animal growth hormones such as porcine

sonatocropin. We have supermarkets full of CB's, CD's, PC's, TV's, and VCR's as a result of the explosion in microelectronics. All of these applications, and many more, are the products of the feverish activity that has occurred globally in research and technology.

While we cherish the pleasure, comfort and improved health that we receive from these innovation-, which are rapidly becoming necessities we must stop and reflect on their total impact on our standard of living n ow and in the future. We must recognize that there are potential conflicts between science and society and that there is a need for an appreciation of social consciousness in science and technology. Unfortunately, but understandably, solutions to these conflicts will not be found in courses in science and technology. Answers to them require an exposure to, an appreciation for, and an immersion in the study of moral thought an. human values. Without this understanding, the scientist or engineer is but an amoral machine that dispassionately and mechanically crunches numbers and grinds out answers. But an effective scientist or engineer, a socially responsible scientist or engineer, is a person who has this appreciation.

In order for the enormous advances in science that we will see in this decade to be used for the betterment of humankind, we must hale experts who understand the social and ethical consequences of their research. Many scientists and engineers find their source for this in religion. They obtain guidance from Martin Luther King, Jr., who said that "Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values." And they receive even more solace from the words of Albert Einstein, the quintessential scientist, who remarked that "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind. Whether it comes from religion or some other source of ethical or moral values, the scientist who cannot make value Judgments, who cannot see beyond the facts, is of limited use and may even be a threat to society. We must not let the emerging scientific developments and technologies in our laboratories and testing facilities hypnotize us to the point where we fail to consider the moral and social consequences of our advances.

In 1869, the great American educator, Charles William Eliot, noted in his inaugural address as president of Harvard University that the university "recognizes no real antagonism between literature and science and consents to no such narrow alternatives as mathematics or classics, science or metaphysics. We would have them all," he said,"and at their best.

I like tha t view and, in my own opinion, we in education have our work cut out for us. As an engineer and now head of a liberal arts college, I believe that we must insure that our students are well versed in the fundamentals of literacy and numeracy. We find that often we need to assist them in the development of manners as well as mathematics, compassion as well as composition, civility as well as the history of civilization, accountability as well as accounting and tolerance as well as topology. We need to help them make the connections between the arts, the humanities and the sciences. They need to study both Milton and molecules, both Carlyle and calculus, both Bach and botany, both Picasso and picofarads, both Giovanni and geometry, both Michelangelo and microcomputers, both Isaiah and isotopes. They need to understand the insight of Percy Lavon Julian, about whom I spoke earlier, who said of the sciences and the humanities, "The goal of both is to enrich and ennoble the good life of man."

James Botkin, co-author of the book Global Stakes: The Future of High Technologv in America, said in a U.S. News and World Report interview that "There needs to be a rethinking of the social sciences and humanities in the general education of college students to insure that they have both technological training and grounding in values and ethics. If they do not have both, he said, "we could wind up with either technological illiteracy or a technocracy.

We are agreed that the questions that need answers -- the ones that influence policy makers and opinion makers -- must be based upon solid science and not just on human concern. But scientists and engineers are becoming well aware that they alone can't give the answers to the question, "What are we going to do with the knowle dge we gain?

Clearly, science, technology, ethics and public policy meet in the environmental sciences, in energy and natural resources issues, in defense R&D and a host more areas -- sometimes where it is least expected. In all of these areas control systems theorists and designers have major roles to play.

It is time and it is imperative, I believe, for the scientists and the engineers of the world to join the battle with the enthusiasm and the imagination for which they are noted. It is time for the creativity and the energy of our superlative scientific and technological communities to be brought to bear on the problems and dilemmas that face our society. It is time to transform the reality that scientific knowledge doubles every thirteen thirteen years and computer power doubles every eighteen months into the creation of a safer, saner, cleaner world for our children to inhabit. We need to insure that every individual has an opportunity to be a productive participant in a global society in which virtual reality and inter-active imaging will have the capacity to shape our perception of the world in which we live. Now is the time for the scientific and technological community to stop receding into our laboratories to clone genes, invert matrices and synthesize compounds while pretending that the rest of the world does not exist.

Science, Percy Lavon Julian noted, is more than methodologies, symbolisms, and technological devices. It is vastly more than the creation of mere things; computer and mechanical robots are only incidental by-products of its spirit of inquiry. He went on to state that, in his opinion, the mission of scientists and engineers is to give their energies toward creative imagination in the world of ideas concerning mankind and hum an destiny. It is this kind of thinking we need today. It is time for us all to get involved.