The Role of the Engineer in the Information Age
By Arun Mehta INTRODUCTION When looking at technology, we barely see machinery, let alone the people who made it. We seem to take technology and its development for a given, neglecting the process of its creation. We live off the fruits of the tree, without examining its roots. Technology is “the application of scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life or, as it is sometimes phrased, to the change and manipulation of the human environment.” As such, it has played a crucial role in human survival, allowing a physically weak species to marshal natural laws and resources in its defense. Since the harnessing of plant growth in agriculture, the taming of fire and the invention of writing, the fruits of technology have surrounded and transformed us. The cumulative effect of technological development has brought us to a point where technology is intertwined with every aspect of our lives. Yet, we aren’t entirely comfortable with it. We only seem to notice technology when it breaks down. There is passivity in modern society towards technology. While new products are continually brought to our attention through advertising, the degree of control most of us exercise is only in buying this product or that, and, at most, in telling our friends. This is perhaps comparable with the degree of control a couch potato exercises, through his remote, over the content that networks beam at him. However, there is a segment of society that actually makes technology, which trolls the journals of science for new ideas, and looks at the reaction of consumers to old products, in designing new ones. These people also have the responsibility of keeping the old technology running and are the ones you call when products don't work as they should. These are, of course, the engineers, who belong to a “profession in which a knowledge of the mathematical and natural sciences, gained by study, experience, and practice, is applied with judgment to develop ways to utilize, economically, the materials and forces of nature for the benefit of mankind.”[ ] Going by this definition, the term engineer must equally apply to practitioners of “old” technologies, the farmers, carpenters, architects and plumbers, as it does to geneticists and computer programmers. For a while, each technology must surely have been new and exciting, and during this time, technologists must have been looked at with interest at cocktail parties, as Internet engineers were during the Dot-Com boom, and geneticists are today. But the fate of the plumber is theirs in the long term, recalled only when things go wrong. However, societies that grew affluent based on technology as most of Europe did, ignore technology at their peril. If much of the best student talent does not head towards engineering, if European universities are not leaders in technological innovation, their engineers no longer the world’s best at invention and the management of production, it must come as no surprise if jobs migrate to countries where societies treat the engineer with greater respect. A spectacular example of the importance with which other societies treated engineers in recent times is available from the Soviet Union. Almost the entire generation of Soviet leaders that followed Stalin were engineers, including Kruschev, Kosygin, Brezhnev and Yeltsin. The probable reason for this was that while Stalin had little hesitation in wiping out everyone else, he must have appreciated that there was no way he could have beaten the Nazis, nor competed with the West, without engineers. When he died, these were the only people left, in any sort of leadership positions. A Martian looking at Earth might imagine that engineers are the stars of a civilization that is totally dependent on technology. Yet, nothing would be further from the truth. Like the craftsmen who created medieval architectural and other masterpieces, most engineers remain anonymous, even the brilliantly successful ones. How many people could identify the inventors of the digital computer (John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert), a device whose importance in modern life is second to none? Alfred Nobel was himself an engineer par excellence. His invention, dynamite, is still widely in use in mining and construction.(1) That even he did not see fit to institute a Nobel Prize for engineering, is typical of the modesty of the profession. Perhaps the best example of societal inattention to engineers, though, is the case of Claude Shannon, whom few outside the profession have even heard of. This genius discovered that Boolean algebra, an area of mathematics thought to have no practical use, was perfectly suited to the design of digital circuits. H. H. Goldstine, in his book The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann, called this work ``a landmark in that it helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science.'' In 1981 Professor Irving Reed, speaking at the International Symposium on Information Theory in Brighton, England, said, ``It was thirty-four years ago, in 1948, that Professor Claude E. Shannon first published his uniquely original paper, `A Mathematical Theory of Communication,' in the Bell System Technical Journal. Few other works of this century have had greater impact on science and engineering. By this landmark paper and his several subsequent papers on information theory he has altered most profoundly all aspects of communication theory and practice.'' This paper has justifiably been called “the Magna Carta of the information age.” Shannon’s work on information theory has also had significant impact on fields outside of communications, including linguistics, psychology, economics, biology, even the arts. Robert W. Lucky, executive director of research at AT&T Bell Laboratories, called his work the greatest “in the annals of technological thought”, while IBM Fellow Rolf W. Landauer equated his “pioneering insight” with Einstein's. Claude Shannon died as recently as February 24, 2001, but the Internet, which is inconceivable in the absence of his insights, barely noticed.( ) If people pay no regard to the people who make technology, nor make any effort to understand them, they will find it hard to appreciate the logic of the direction it takes – for the inventor and the invention resemble each other. If the products of technology often seem lackluster and unimaginative, maybe this is a reflection of a similar lacuna in most engineers. We can also take the analysis one level upstream. To understand why engineers turn out the way they do, one must look closer at how they, in turn, are made, at life in an engineering college. THE DEFICIENT EDUCATION OF ENGINEERS The manner in which engineering is taught is incredibly authoritarian and dull. The reason for this is not hard to find. As pointed out by Peter Senge and others, our modern education system was born during the industrial revolution, which faced a severe shortage of trained personnel. At the time, industrialists made a fortune by taking manufacturing out of the community and locating it in a new kind of space called a factory. Faced with a shortage of people skilled in manning these factories, the owners applied their tried and tested formula once again: they took education out of the community, and made it the responsibility of a new kind of factory called a school. Indeed, our schools are organized along the same principles as assembly lines, where the students are as parts moving in lockstep from one class to the next, while the teachers are like machines that impart education, within a highly authoritarian system. If a student cannot successfully pass the requisite tests, he is thrown out, not unlike a part that has failed quality control. According to Senge, “While the assembly-line school system dramatically increased educational output, it also created many of the most intractable problems with which students, teachers, and parents struggle to this day. It operationally defined smart kids and dumb kids. Those who did not learn at the speed of the assembly line either fell off or were forced to struggle continually to keep pace; they were labelled "slow" or, in today's more fashionable jargon, "learning disabled." It established uniformity of product and process as norms, thereby naively assuming that all children learn in the same way. It made educators into controllers and inspectors, thereby transforming the traditional mentor-mentee relationship and establishing teacher-centered rather than learner-centered learning. http://www.next5minutes.org/n5m/journalarticle.jsp?section=essays&articleid= 3500 c/ ********************************** se arrivi ad un bivio...prendilo!! ********************************** http://materialiresistenti.clarence.com ___________________________________________ http://rekombinant.org http://rekombinant.org/media-activism