I don’t think anyone could deny that humankind is staring right at the face of incredible challenges in our near to mid-term future.
Rising population, changing climate, increasing disparity between rich and poor, growing energy and food demand, longer life expectancy and ultimately, rising standards of living. The convergence of these sometimes opposing forces will demand the best of our ingenuity and optimism if our species is going to survive and keep thriving (without destroying everything else in the process).
The engineering profession will keep playing a very important role in the exploration, development and implementation of viable and sustainable solutions to all of these challenges.
If I had to define the main mission of an engineer, I would say it is:
The creative application of scientific principles in the pursuit of practical technological developments that improve the human condition.
It is not a coincidence that the word “engineer” shares a common root with words like “engine” or “ingenious”. An engineer is an investigator, a trouble-shooter, an inventor, a discoverer, a maker and even sometimes a “disassembler” (mom, you know what I’m talking about).
Armed with the fundamental knowledge of how nature works the engineer has been devising practical applications of these concepts that have been improving the life of people for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
However, at present, our capacity to develop solutions is not being put to the test by the laws of physics but by our very own minds.
Incremental solutions will only take us so far. The major challenges will require engineers to think in a completely new and holistic way.
Similar to what has been happening in other fields of human activity, engineering has increasingly become a collection of highly specialized knowledge-silos which sometimes do not communicate amongst each other.
I believe in part this has been driven by the necessity of packing ever increasing amounts of knowledge into any given person’s brain. Each engineering discipline requires the practitioner to learn and master a significant volume of data.
My question is: is this the best use of a human brain? I don’t think so.
In my lifetime, the engineering field has benefited enormously from the availability of computers and I think it will and should continue to do so. The cognitive support that we are bound to get from these machines will only expand in the coming decades.
I see this as very liberating for the study and practice of engineering. Instead of stuffing engineering students’ brains with formulas and figures, we could rather stimulate their reasoning, understanding, pattern-detection and creativity skills. We could show them beautiful visualizations of the scientific principles that they need to understand and at the same time instil in them the capacity to look at a problem in an all-inclusive manner.
Rather than spending his or her days tied to a desk working with spreadsheets; I could visualize an engineering future where computers take care of all the “grunt” work and the engineer’s time is spent in the field observing, thinking and creating technologies that benefit this blue marble that we all call home.
What do you think?