A case for the modern engineer (Part I/II: RESPONSIBILITY)

Modern technology is gaining increasingly more power over our lives. I mean this in both an empowering as well as in a threatening way. We can use technology as a tool to enhance human capabilities to connect, travel, learn, manufacture and build. On the other side it can also be used as a weapon to destroy and deceive people. In both senses and as a first consequence of digitalisation, its impact has now grown up to a global scale. Technology itself is value-free, instead its value for society is generated by the people who design it as well as the people who put it into use.

In the past, this whole debate has seemed to only circle around the latter group, the people who may have intentionally or just for the lack of education mis-used such a technology. But let us focus on the creation side of things here.

I am now in my final year at university and all those lectures have tried hard to break my original belief in what an engineer should be like. Personally, I think about engineering in a rather romantic sense. Engineers are the inventers of our modern time, they have the knowledge on fundamental physics, they are creative, they can think up new technologies to solve problems and create solutions to elevate humanity onto the next level. 

Sadly, I also get the sobering insight of an existing educational and university system (in Germany) that does not really encourage young engineers to think multidisciplinary, but rather promotes specialisation. Now, I do not intent to say, that we would not need experts on all sorts of topics. But I sometimes get the impression that specialisation can come with narrow-mindedness.

As I described above, technology is becoming more powerful and with that the responsibility for the creators increases, too! I am writing this because I am not sure whether every engineering student is aware of that yet. As we automate routine work and production processes, the task of an engineer will shift. We will spend less time with manual constructions or iterative optimisation. Instead we need to start thinking about the bigger picture and in which direction development efforts should lead us.

Therefore, I would personally love to see more engineers not only thinking about the economical, but also the social impact of the technology they are working on. The next sentence is not intended to offend anyone, but rather sums up a thought process I have gone through over the past years. So, in addition - and this can be hard, as we are all playful kids inside- we as engineers need to seriously ask ourselves, whether our work is currently having a meaningful impact (on humanity) or not. With all the crises ahead of us, I tend to think that we cannot afford to “waste” the brain power of our smartest people.