One more "future of engineering" article but this time from IEEE Spectrum
(Sep 2002)

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 na=EFve expectations, I ask myself: did it turn out bett=
er
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 =9650 =B0C? This has no meani=
ng to
me, because the outside world is merely a diorama ainted 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=97an
unreality wrapped in another unreality. I feel that I have lost touch with
Edison's world of electricity=97a 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=97the 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.
-- =

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