exerceo

By Michael Clifford

What is the point of engineering anymore?  Can it serve more than our desire to consume?  Engineers need to consider the applications to which they can direct their practical creativity in a world where many people's basic needs aren't being met.

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Three friends decide to spend a day on the river. The weather is glorious, the picnic hamper filled with cold ham and beef, pickled gherkins, salad, French rolls, cress sandwiches, potted meat, ginger beer, lemonade and soda water. After several hours of just messing about, the boat drifts towards a waterfall. Toad, an arts student, is mesmerised by the rainbows that form in the plumes of spray as the sunlight is refracted into a glorious spectrum of colour: “Ooh, Ratty – look at all those colours. I feel a sonnet coming on!” Ratty, a Physics student is unimpressed with Toad’s poetic endeavours, but takes out a little notebook and begins to scribble down complex equations concerning the behaviour of light. After several unsuccessful attempts to solve the problem, he turns to Mole, an engineering student, who is also gazing at the waterfall. “Hey, Moley, what are you thinking, old chap? Are you writing a poem too?” Mole adjusts his glasses and turns to his friend. “No Ratty. I was thinking that if we built a dam across the river, then we could use the water to power a generator and light up Toad Hall.”

Engineering is an inherently practical subject. Indeed the word “engineer” used as a verb conjures up activity rather than reflection. It is easy to pick out engineers. They are the usually the ones in any group who find it hard to keep still. Like Mole, they find it hard to relax and instead are always on the lookout for opportunities for innovation. It may be a myth that James Watt dreamed of steam engines while watching his mother’s kettle boil and Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of parachutes, helicopters and scuba diving apparatus may just have been absent-minded doodling, but it is clear that an engineer’s mind is rarely inactive (Smiles, 1878).

Up to the mid 20th Century, engineering was usually a response to a physical need. For example, steam engines were developed by Savery, Newcomen, Watt, Trevithick and others, to pump water from mineshafts (Marsden 2002); Abraham Darby’s efforts to refine iron production were motivated by the need for cheaper cooking pots; and the chlorination of water by John Snow was in response to the 1854 Cholera epidemic.

In 1981, Radford noted that the progress made in material science, power generation, machine tools, transport, and communication have transformed human existence throughout most of the world, removing muscular effort and drudgery from the factory and the home (Radford, 1981). So, what is there left for an engineer to do in the 21st Century? Should we pack up our toolboxes and bask in the technology that surrounds us? This sentiment is not new. In his 1843 report to Congress, the then-commissioner of the Patent Office, Henry L. Ellsworth, stated that, "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end."
Scaling the pyramid

Maslow (1943) ranked human needs in a pyramid, with basic physiological needs such as the need to eat, to breathe, to sleep at the bottom of the pyramid. The next layer includes the need for safety and security. Next comes the need to belong, to love and be loved, which are topped by esteem and other higher “self-actualisation needs”. Having met most basic needs, engineering has attempted to scale the pyramid. Aided and abetted by marketing, innovations claim to meet higher and higher needs. Buy these trainers and you will be accepted. Use this deodorant and you will be attractive to the opposite sex. Subscribe to our mobile phone network and your talk will be unlimited. In 2007, consumerism, not necessity is the mother of invention. When engineers seek to meet higher needs with technology, like the builders of the tower of Babel who sought to reach God, the end will ultimately be failure.

Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself by creating a culture that seeks its purpose and finds its satisfaction in technology. The means to an end has become an end in itself.

The influence that technology can have on culture is discussed by Postman (1993), who classified cultures into three types: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. Until the seventeenth century, all cultures fitted into the first type. Tools were invented to do two things – firstly to solve urgent basic physical problems such as grinding corn, ploughing land, transporting water and so on, and secondly to serve the symbolic world of art and religion. The integrity and dignity of the culture was not threatened by the use of such tools. However, in a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. The very instruments created to meet the needs of society threaten to transform and indeed overthrow it. In Huxley’s Brave New World, the revolution is complete – Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself by creating a culture that seeks its purpose and finds its satisfaction in technology. The means to an end has become an end in itself.

The Indian theologian Dr M. M. Thomas expressed these concerns in an address to the Christian Medical College at Vellore on 11th October 1993 (Thomas, 1996).

"There is no doubt that the scientific and technological revolution of the modem period has been a tremendous expression of human creativity, It has eliminated distances and created the global community materially. It has given us the knowledge necessary to produce goods and services in abundance. It has given us power for social, psychic and genetic engineering, to control disease and death as well as birth. But as we survey the world situation today, the general feeling is that along with many benefits, many of the promises of technology stand betrayed and there is evidence of a lot of technology having become instruments of exploitation of peoples, destruction of cultures and dehumanization of persons and pose threat of destruction not only to the whole humanity through nuclear war but also to the whole community of life on the earth through the destruction of its ecological basis.”

While we may be reluctant to identify our own culture with Huxley’s Brave New World, it is fitting to ask just how far along the road to Technopoly the (so-called) Developed World has come. In a culture defined by the Internet, the mobile phone and the car, have the tools become idols? Whilst mobile phone technology in Africa and Asia has opened a lot of opportunities for farmers to connect to markets and for basic communication purposes, those developing new phones concentrate on styling and incorporating additional features such as video rather than addressing robustness, reliability and longevity. Bacon wrote that knowledge should be sought, not “for superiority of others, or for profit, or fame, or power…but for the benefit and use of life”. In today’s consumer driven society, many engineering and scientific projects undertaken by industry and academia alike, fall far short of these high moral standards. Although research into space exploration has had beneficial spin-offs such as the development of semiconductors and satellites to monitor the climate, these were not the primary goals of the research. It is difficult to see George W Bush’s plan for a manned mission to Mars primarily for the benefit and use of life rather than as an attempt to grab newspaper headlines and political support.

Redefining Research Priorities

While a deeper understanding of how atoms are held together may provide clues as to the foundations of matter, and exploring deep space with costly telescopes and space probes may hint at the origins of life, considering the pressing needs of people in developing countries have lead some to question scientific research priorities. This is not to say that fundamental research should be avoided or that research into Physics is largely a waste of time and money, but while many people lack access to basic facilities such as safe drinking water, shelter and adequate food, where should our priorities lie? Raymond Brand (1987) was bold enough to state in 1987, that, “There are some extremely expensive areas of research that should not be pursued now.” Brand commented specifically on a plan at that time to spend three billion US dollars on a superconducting super collider. Unfortunately Brand’s advice seems to have been taken on board by the U.S. House of Representatives rather belatedly, as in 1993 they decided to call a premature halt to the project after 14 miles of tunnelling had been completed and two billion dollars spent.

It is of particular concern that while richer nations can perhaps afford such frivolities, in countries where poverty is more acute, engineering priorities are governed by the desire for superiority over neighbouring lands by developing nuclear weapons, launching space programmes, and so on, rather than tackling hunger, malnutrition and disease. In an address to the British Association, Professor Sardar stated that most Muslim countries (many of them in the developing world) are happy to imitate research priorities of industrialised countries rather than work at shaping their own science policy based on their own needs and resources. “So instead of focusing, for example, on diarrhoea and dysentery in Pakistan, flood control in Bangladesh and schistosomiasis in Egypt and the Sudan, these countries blindly follow the international agenda and devote their meagre research funds on equally meagre work on cancer and heart diseases.” All the while, urgent work is needed on developing materials for quick and clean temporary housing, efficient and cheap methods for supplying emergency water, and mechanisms for providing basic health care and preventing the spread of diseases. Although the incidence of cancer in Africa is increasing, cases are often a result of the reduction in immunity in patients suffering with HIV/AIDS.

But before we claim the moral high ground, we need to realise that we are engaged in technology races of our own, and that the Technopoly that we have become is the goal to which many nations aspire.