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Engineer A Better World - Bath, 8 March 2016: Comments

James Shaw
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”!

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    Abel,

    Thank you for adding to the discussion. I agree with you that Naomi did a great job and no doubt enthused many in the audience.

    Here is a sterotype for you - I'm a sceptical Scot, born to question and challenge! I must stress that is most certainly not negativity. Unless we identify our goals AND the pitfalls we WILL fail. Forewarned is forearmed as the saying goes.

    I have had some further thoughts on the talk and I think my concerns come down to these three topics:


    1. Engineering or 'manageering' the future

    2. Smart or high risk future

    3. Democratic future


    The first two we can perhaps control; the last I'm not so sure about.What I do believe though is that engineers are the good guys! Go to it!

    Engineering

    Engineering responds to the demand “Let’s do this!” with questions such as ‘why?’, ‘is it possible?’ and ‘how?’. ‘Manageering’ responds with “You’ve got it!”

     

    A classic example of ‘manageering’ arose in the US space shuttle programme. Safety was politically important. Management wanted better than a 1 in 105 failure rate. Engineering struggled with its conscience to offer 1 in 103. Management insisted it ‘was’ 1 in 105 (one for a flight per day for 300 years!) and the programme went ahead. By the end of the programme the failure rate was 1.2 failures per 100, an order of magnitude out by engineering and three orders by ‘manageers’.

     

    Stereotypes are ‘wrong’ say the ‘manageers’. Stereotypes are really the consolidation of common experience. If they are to be challenged one really needs to drill down to their foundations and determine if the basis is circumstantial or real and fundamental. If it is the later, live with it!

    Smart Cities – Internet of Things

    This comes under the guise of improving efficiency, a ‘good’ thing. Or is it? There are no right or wrong answers here, (typical of most engineering!).

    By removing redundancy and independence of design, following the path of integration, efficiencies can be made. But the price is a lack of resilience.

    Consider a street of ten houses, each with a refrigerator that runs a tenth of the time. In order to achieve a 95% certainty of supplying that street sufficient power for three refrigerators must be made available. Now suppose that the system is ‘smart’, the refrigerators are allocated their own time slot. The total power needed is now just enough to supply one refrigerator, a huge saving on plant and a great improvement for supply efficiency. That is until the ‘smart’ fails and demand soars three-fold and the system collapses abruptly and catastrophically.

    By contrast integration is out of fashion in software, design independence and ‘modules’ are the norm. That is efficient though because the modules can be reused over and over again. Which of course is perfect for ‘common mode’ failures, and the abrupt and catastrophic failure of the system.

    Democracy

    I take this to be shorthand for a culture of freethinking and free speech. Unfortunately this is a culture not a universal characteristic of the species. I don’t believe that the internet would support a ‘World Wide Web’ if it had been invented in, say, India. It comes from a legal requirement to make publicly funded research in the USA public and that fed into the open culture of the West and the USA in particular.

    Sadly we aren’t prepared to defend that culture. All cultures are equal now. Students in the US and the UK demand ‘safe spaces’ free of contrary ideas. What kind of future does that presage? 

Reply
  • 0
    Abel,

    Thank you for adding to the discussion. I agree with you that Naomi did a great job and no doubt enthused many in the audience.

    Here is a sterotype for you - I'm a sceptical Scot, born to question and challenge! I must stress that is most certainly not negativity. Unless we identify our goals AND the pitfalls we WILL fail. Forewarned is forearmed as the saying goes.

    I have had some further thoughts on the talk and I think my concerns come down to these three topics:


    1. Engineering or 'manageering' the future

    2. Smart or high risk future

    3. Democratic future


    The first two we can perhaps control; the last I'm not so sure about.What I do believe though is that engineers are the good guys! Go to it!

    Engineering

    Engineering responds to the demand “Let’s do this!” with questions such as ‘why?’, ‘is it possible?’ and ‘how?’. ‘Manageering’ responds with “You’ve got it!”

     

    A classic example of ‘manageering’ arose in the US space shuttle programme. Safety was politically important. Management wanted better than a 1 in 105 failure rate. Engineering struggled with its conscience to offer 1 in 103. Management insisted it ‘was’ 1 in 105 (one for a flight per day for 300 years!) and the programme went ahead. By the end of the programme the failure rate was 1.2 failures per 100, an order of magnitude out by engineering and three orders by ‘manageers’.

     

    Stereotypes are ‘wrong’ say the ‘manageers’. Stereotypes are really the consolidation of common experience. If they are to be challenged one really needs to drill down to their foundations and determine if the basis is circumstantial or real and fundamental. If it is the later, live with it!

    Smart Cities – Internet of Things

    This comes under the guise of improving efficiency, a ‘good’ thing. Or is it? There are no right or wrong answers here, (typical of most engineering!).

    By removing redundancy and independence of design, following the path of integration, efficiencies can be made. But the price is a lack of resilience.

    Consider a street of ten houses, each with a refrigerator that runs a tenth of the time. In order to achieve a 95% certainty of supplying that street sufficient power for three refrigerators must be made available. Now suppose that the system is ‘smart’, the refrigerators are allocated their own time slot. The total power needed is now just enough to supply one refrigerator, a huge saving on plant and a great improvement for supply efficiency. That is until the ‘smart’ fails and demand soars three-fold and the system collapses abruptly and catastrophically.

    By contrast integration is out of fashion in software, design independence and ‘modules’ are the norm. That is efficient though because the modules can be reused over and over again. Which of course is perfect for ‘common mode’ failures, and the abrupt and catastrophic failure of the system.

    Democracy

    I take this to be shorthand for a culture of freethinking and free speech. Unfortunately this is a culture not a universal characteristic of the species. I don’t believe that the internet would support a ‘World Wide Web’ if it had been invented in, say, India. It comes from a legal requirement to make publicly funded research in the USA public and that fed into the open culture of the West and the USA in particular.

    Sadly we aren’t prepared to defend that culture. All cultures are equal now. Students in the US and the UK demand ‘safe spaces’ free of contrary ideas. What kind of future does that presage? 

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