In the background of reports on the status of the information-technology industry is a germane but not infrequently overlooked fact: that the enormous technical strides in the field are on a course that overlaps and converges with human behavior and institutions. Why that is relevant to this research may be discerned in a remark made as long ago as 1983, when momentum in the high-tech industry was just beginning to build: that as a practical matter, a definition of technology was becoming increasingly difficult to settle on. because of the all-too-human values into the service of which technology was being pressed even then, "correct usage of the word in its original sense seems almost beyond recovery" (Pacey, 1983, p. 3). Accordingly, wrote Pacey, the concept of technology were best approached "as a human activity and as a part of life . . . not only as comprising machines, techniques and crisply precise knowledge, but also as involving characteristic patterns of organization and imprecise values" (p. 4).

That analysis yields two contradictory inferences at the same time. One is that high technology proceeds well in advance of human capacity to cope with it instrumentally and practically

The spread of information technology throughout the economy has been a major factor in the acceleration of productivity through capital deepening . . .

Meanwhile, however, the fact of IT internationalization must be considered as a feature of the tendency of U.S. companies to outsource manufacturing and services abroad as a cost-cutting, profit-protecting measure. The cost benefits of outsourcing design and/or manufacture must be weighed against security risks and the proximity issue. Another issue is the impact of globalizing production on the American labor force. For some years, owing to the relative dearth of the American high-tech skills base, U.S. companies have recruited high-tech experts from Asia or from the pool of Asian students who receive American university degrees in computer science and related fields. A number of Asians who have worked in American high tech reportedly are returning to their native countries as IT professionals owing to an array of government-sponsored incentives to do so. No or few similar incentives are part of American public policy. There is no special incentive to study computer science, for example, and that helps explain why the relative number of American-born college students majoring in computer science and related engineering fields has declined, not increased, in the past decade.

Turing, A.M. (1995). Computing machinery and intelligence. In E.A. Feigenbaum & J. Feldman, Computers & thought (pp. 11-35). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Council of Economic Advisers. (2005). Economic report of the president, transmit