High Tech Is Oversold; Research What’s Useful : Clinton agenda: His ‘critical technologies’ won’t help the critical problems that need more simple technology.

If I knew their phone numbers, I would call Bill Clinton and Al Gore with a warning about their plans to boost economic growth by spending $30 billion on high-technology research during the next four years. Watch the high tech, Bill. Be careful, Al. High tech is not going to do what you think it will.

Super technology--the kind of high-budget technology that depends on elaborate, sophisticated instruments, squads of ultraspecialized scientists and a lot of administrative coordination--has a long history of creating super problems. The best example may be nuclear power, a high-tech “success” that has generated a nightmarish string of disasters starting with the mining of uranium fuel and never-ending with the disposal of the radioactive waste. High tech offers more unfulfilled promises and is less accountable for its consequences than any other area of our society.

High technology is expensive to buy because corporations need to recover their Nuclear power (here the cooling tower of the Trojan Nuclear Plant near Portland, Ore.): a high-tech “success” has generated a nightmarish string of disasters.

enormous investment in equipment, facilities and research, and expensive to maintain because planned obsolescence forces constant replacement and upgrading. Costly replacement parts and services cannot be homemade or jury-rigged.

In addition, high tech frequently does not deliver the promised results. It may not work. One of the most dramatic examples of over-selling is artificial intelligence, which has been around for decades and has merely achieved big budgets.

High technology does not necessarily produce what people need. This is because the starting point for most high-tech research is a technical discovery, not a social problem that wants solving.

The push for high-definition television is a good example. If we spend a fortune to achieve a leadership position in HDTV technology, we will discover that our magnificent new receivers are still showing the same mind- and society-rotting trash.

A second example: agricultural biotechnology, which is absorbing most of the available funds for agricultural research and producing a meager harvest of pricey and dangerous products such as herbicide-resistant seeds, which do not work nearly as well as low-cost, ecological methods that a few poorly supported researchers are developing.

Because of its cash flow and complexity, high technology requires much administration and regulation to coordinate research and production and to control the use, side effects and ownership of products. One instance of the abuse is the socially irresponsible flood of applications for gene patents that has resulted from research in genetic engineering.

High technology is ruining higher education by siphoning off university resources to cover its fantastic expenses. These siphoned resources include student tuition dollars, faculty positions, maintenance and repair budgets, even parking fees. Meanwhile, academia sinks under a double burden of massive over-administration and corporate control. About half of the courses in the most affected universities are taught by poorly paid, temporary staff with teaching-supply budgets of only a few pennies per student.

With all these problems, what should the Clinton Administration do about funding technological research?

* Be more selective. Of the “critical technologies” listed in the Clinton plan--including computer programs, robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology--some are far more worthy of support than others. Waste management and pollution reduction (especially research on recycling) might make it onto my list for more money.

* Spend less. By all means take $30 billion out of the military research budget, but don’t spend more than half on technology. The best science is often inexpensive. Too much money is as bad for research as too little.

* Control the amount of high technology going into health care. This is a key part of the medical price spiral, and it isn’t making people feel better. The human side of health care is lost when medicine becomes a high-tech industry, when the needs of machines are more important than the needs of patients.

* Support what economist E. F. Schumacher called “intermediate technology,” which provides sophisticated but socially useful and durable products that average wage-earners can afford and can repair using readily available materials. It is sustained by human energy, not by public debt--technology suited to moderate-sized workshops, even garages and basements. Our housing industry desperately needs this, as do agriculture and the new industry of energy conservation.

* Put more money into “small science”--research done by one or a few scientists with budgets of thousands, not millions of dollars. Small science is more creative and responsible. Some areas of small science that could use more research dollars are conservation biology and restoration ecology, which save species and habitats and are teaching us how to rebuild damaged landscapes.

The Human Genome Project, big science par excellence, should be scaled way back to its useful gene-mapping component. And it may not be too late, Bill and Al, to cancel the Supercollider, a super waste of money. You didn’t win Texas anyway.

Above all, remember that America became rich because it has an industrious, diverse population and the best agricultural climates and soils in the world. We cannot afford to put more of our dwindling resources into any technology unless we are pretty sure of getting real value in return.