Naomi Climer delivered her presidential address to a packed audience in a joint event with the Women’s Engineering Society (WES). It was gratifying to see such a large number of students there.
As this event will be available later on IET.TV I will briefly summarise the event as being made up of a review of the speaker’s career, a description of the changes in TV news-gathering and presentation and communication advances on the horizon. This was followed by a forecast of the engineering needs of the world in the future and a plea to encourage children, parents and teachers to consider engineering as a satisfying career choice. As it was International Women’s Day there was a special emphasis on the need to enthuse girls.
Not surprisingly the talk was very upbeat, particularly as regards the future. Forecasting the future of technology is hard, quite small advances can lead to an unpredictable avalanche of changes. For instance the simple semi-conductor diode lead to the transistor, which lead to the integrated circuit and then a chain-reaction as the technology enabled the production of every more powerful VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) microprocessors.
Forecasting the future of society is equally hard. Our speaker was, perhaps, influenced by her ‘Californian Experience’ when she envisioned a world of co-operating democracies. Others might suggest that the future will be an Authoritarian one, the winner between Global Corporatism, Cultural Marxism or Islam. The recent failure of ‘The Arab Spring’ to bring democracy to the Middle East is not encouraging.
We were given an example of the ‘past’, Peter Woods reading the news from a sheet of paper, and the ‘present’, with ‘ticker tape’ and panoramic background. No longer do we get just the ‘facts’ but whatever emotive imagery an agenda-driven broadcaster wants to push – a picture paints a thousand words, none of which is necessarily true.
Anyone who installs Windows 10 on a new computer will find that Microsoft would like to ‘share’ the computer, data, location and user’s life. This is part of the move towards ‘the internet of things’, everything and everyone becomes part of the whole. Fans of Star Trek will recognise this as The Borg! Will it make us more productive? I doubt it, for every one person for whom this technology is a tool there will be a thousand for which it is a mind-numbing drug!
Just supposing that we do enter a utopia of worldwide democracies will we actually need lots of engineers? When I was a young engineer I designed things that I couldn’t afford to build, now I go ‘on the net’ and buy working items for less than the retail price of the parts. I used to write assembly language code and ‘interpret’ it by hand, now I download a module or, more likely, a completely functioning program. In a ‘connected world’ surely we get nearer and nearer to ‘design once, use many’?
Am I being too ‘downbeat? I do hope so. I have always enjoyed my engineering and I take delight in seeing what my fellow engineers have achieved and continue to achieve. If I had my time again I would still want to be an engineer.
Perhaps the future will be golden if, as The Beach Boys sang, “I wish they all could be California (engineer) girls”!
