The Future of Engineering

IEEE Spectrum Online ^ | Sep 26 2002 | Robert W. Lucky

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The Future of Engineering By Robert W. Lucky What will engineering be like in the future? Every now and then I think about how much it has changed over the course of my own career. If changes of a similar magnitude happen in the coming decades, what will the profession be like for today's college students? When I studied engineering in college, I had little idea of what I was getting into. I suppose in retrospect that I was too busy taking courses and enjoying college life to think about what real engineers did. Maybe in the back of my mind I was Thomas Edison sitting at his desk in a big musty laboratory, surrounded by elaborate equipment as he wrote in his notebook of progress toward the great inventions that would change the way people lived. It's hard to remember now, but maybe that's what I signed up for when I selected engineering as a career. How differently engineering is practiced now from any vision that could be extrapolated from that dream of Edison! I wonder what dreams today's engineering students have and how those dreams will be transformed by the reality of the future. I worry, too, about how those inevitable changes will affect the attractiveness of engineering as a profession. Looking back on my naïve expectations, I ask myself: did it turn out better than I had envisioned? The answer is clearly yes. The information and computer power at my fingertips in my office and home are light years beyond that dream of Edison. Today we soar on the wings of computers and networking to heights where the minutiae of engineering lie indistinguishable on the ground far below. Sometimes I think of Archimedes' lever: "Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth." We've been given the lever and the place to stand upon, and I feel that the earth is ours to move. That feeling of empowerment is exhilarating. My worry is the price that we have paid for soaring so far above the landscape. In our profession there is a growing distancing from reality. It is like the profound feeling of disconnection I have when I stare out the window of an airplane. Those aren't real houses down there, I think, and I'm not really sitting in an aluminum tube high in the sky with no visible means of support. Why does the pilot tell me that the outside temperature is ­50 °C? This has no meaning to me, because the outside world is merely a diorama painted on my window. But as soon as these troubling thoughts intrude, the flight attendant's voice supervenes, telling me to lower my window shade so that I can better see the movie, substituting one form of unreality for another. Engineering today feels like that window seat on the airplane. Those can't be real transistors and wires down there, can they? Watching the simulations on my computer monitor is like watching the movie on the airplane—an unreality wrapped in another unreality. I feel that I have lost touch with Edison's world of electricity—a world of black Bakelite meters, whirring motors, acrid chemical smells, and heated conductors. I miss Heathkits and the smell of molten solder and burning insulation—the sensual aspects of engineering that have been replaced for many of us by the antiseptic, ubiquitous, and impersonal CRTs. I have a deeper worry that math itself is slipping away into the wispy clouds of software that surround us. I walk down the aisles of laboratories, and I see engineers staring vacantly into monitors, their desks piled high with anachronistic paper detritus. Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder? Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations? Perhaps math in the future will be the exclusive province of a cult of priests that embeds its capability in shrink-wrapped, encrypted software. I can't believe that 20 years from now engineers will still stare into displays, run CAD tools, and archive their results in PowerPoint. But what will they do? My deepest fear is that the reality gap becomes so great that the best-selling software will be called Engineer-in-a-Box. ILLUSTRATION: HAL MAYFORTH

[E. Pluribus Unum]

I have a deeper worry that math itself is slipping away into the wispy clouds of software that surround us. I walk down the aisles of laboratories, and I see engineers staring vacantly into monitors, their desks piled high with anachronistic paper detritus. Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder? Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations? Perhaps math in the future will be the exclusive province of a cult of priests that embeds its capability in shrink-wrapped, encrypted software.

[Mark Felton]

He stands on the shoulders of giants.

Or perhaps he is lamenting that engineers now are mostly corporate slave technicians, managed by non-engineers without intellect, vision, dreams or passion.

[joesnuffy]

Dont fear the reaper... Kansas :)

[Sloth]

The houses aren't real? Sounds like he's been smoking wacky weed.

Anyhow, yes, that Edison thing IS what I signed up for when I went to engineering school, and NO, it hasn't actually turned out better than that. I was sold a bill of goods... should have declined the scholarships and become a plumber instead.

[austinite]

Concur, over.

[aruanan]

Or perhaps he is lamenting that engineers now are mostly corporate slave technicians, managed by non-engineers without intellect, vision, dreams or passion.

Sort of like why the Japanese steel industry was able to do so well back in the 70's. They used state of the art engineering. The US steel industry at the time was managed by accountants who wanted to squeeze out every last percent of plant capacity. Problem was that the plants were pretty much living museums. Or so I have heard.

[laker_dad]

Used to be I couldn't even spell engineer, now I are one...

[Consort]

Future engineers will be "designer/breeder" engineers as designed or breeded by genetic engineers.

[saminfl]

...managed by non-engineers without intellect, vision, dreams or passion.

That is a big part of the problem. I saw the greatest electronics company in the world go down the tubes and then disappear in a buyout when the non-engineers took over.

[esopman]

Thanks for posting this. The writer is giving his age away: 'I miss Heathkits...' 'Bakelite meters...' He is of my generation. E-school in the 1960's.

Engineering is a challenging curriculum - I have a nephew at Carnegie Mellon and he is doing math in his second year that I did in my fourth. I ain't worried about the engineers - I'm worried about the LIBERAL arts and the indoctrination that passes for education.

I retrained in corporate finance many years ago and have met many engineers who did likewise. Gotta tell you that they are primarily problem-solvers and have done very well indeed.

The writer shouldn't be wringing his hands about the technology. It's great. The use of it by a morally decadent, ethically corrupt, Godless political class (e.g. Bubba Rex and Hillary Regina) is another matter. The next couple of decades are gonna get real interesting.

Blessings on Freepers Everywhere.

[Barry Goldwater]

I find engineering to be a highly rewarding and satisfying occupation. The key to this is to take on the hardest, most challenging work and never let an employer get in your way - take the initiative, start your own business and think outside the box (no cook books!). I have little sympathy for an employee who complains about the work, then takes a paycheck and doesn't move on. The career stinks only because you made it that way and you only get what you negotiate for. The computer simulations allow me to solve bigger, more complex problems. I can design things no one would dare attempt 30 years ago. Any tool is simply an extension of the man using it. If you don't like engineering, seeks another carrer. Life is short so why waste it on something that makes you unhappy.

[boris]

"ILLUSTRATION: HAL MAYFORTH"

Beautiful, too...I guess.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Perhaps math in the future will be the exclusive province of a cult of priests

A concept taken to extremes in the novel "Dune".

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

"Where there is no vision the people perish."

[Dead Dog]

My sentiments exactly. It is our own faults if we become pawns in a corporate ponzy(sic) scheme. We are the kernel of these enterprises, without us there would be no product, so take our talents elsewhere. We can sit on our duffs in a prefab cube and let the Nation turn into a third world nation, or we can do what God had given us talent to do: Create and Innovate!

I found myself looking forward to the end of the day so I could go home and cut the floor out of my dry rotted bathrooms. That is just wrong. Life is to short for this.

[70times7]

A man in a hot air balloon was lost so he reduced altitude when he saw someone below. When he was close enough he shouted, “Excuse me, I need your help! I promised a friend I would meet him over an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.” The man below replied, “You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet off of the ground.”

“You must be an engineer”, replied the balloonist. “I am,” replied the man, “how did you know?” “Well,” answered the balloonist, “although everything you have said is technically correct, I have no idea what to make of the information. I am still lost, and now I am even further behind schedule. Frankly, you have been of no help at all.”

“You must be a manager”, said the engineer. “I am,” replied the balloonist, “how did you know?” “Well,” answered the engineer, “You have risen to where you are chiefly due to a large quantity of hot air. You have made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. I have provided to you the information you requested and you don’t know what to do with it because of your own ignorance. The fact is you are in exactly the same situation you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”

Cry me a river. There will always be a need for the those that have cultivated the proper problem solving and creative skills that computers will never replace. This is not about the future of engineering, it's a semi-nostalgic daydream by someone who needed to write an article about the future of engineering...and didn't, but I bet his/her manager was pleased.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Why is a discussion of the future of engineering germane to conservatism? Because conservatism is about the future. Conservatism is the result of attempting to look far enough into the future to avoid running the our nation into an iceberg like the Titanic. We are conservative because we believe the iceberg is possible, yet that we are not presently committed beyond recall toward one.

Thus we seek to see farther into the future than "the children" and their own immediate education. We see that they are necessary but not sufficient; we are concerned with what their children and grandchildren will learn and how they will think and act.

That perspective makes us look to the immediate and even the distant past, to discern what has been most important over serious historical periods of time. We judge that what has been important in the past, and which still matters today, will probably still be important in the distant future.

In short we reject the radical perspective that "In the long run we're all dead." We are conservative because we belive in the future--as Ronald Reagan did. Reagan modeled a future for Russia, and the vision of what it could be--and the knowledge that the USSR could never match that, imploded the Soviet Union from within.

[boris]

"A concept taken to extremes in the novel 'Dune'."

Did you know that large bits of Dune were plagiarized from Cordwainer Smith?...

Dune-----------------------------Smith
Arrakis (Desert Planet)------ Sand Planet
Telepathy used-------------- Telepathy used
Longevity drug (spice)------- Longevity Drug (Stroon)
Spice made by giant worms- Stroon made by giant sheep
"Traveling without moving"-- "Planoforming"
Superhuman hero (Maud'dib)-Superhuman hero (Casher McGee)

Etc.

--Boris

[BRK]

Or perhaps he is lamenting that engineers now are mostly corporate slave technicians, managed by non-engineers without intellect, vision, dreams or passion.

You forgot to mention the lack of integrity.

There is a Dilbert cartoon out there where that pointy haired lady demands that Dilbert teach her how to be an engineer "even if it takes all day". Dilbert explains to her that it takes years to learn how to be an engineer, BUT if she wants to be an engineers boss, then no training at all is required. This is so true that it is saddening.

[dfwgator]

Dont fear the reaper... Kansas :)

Dude, you need to brush up on your 70s classic rock, that was Blue Oyster Cult.