Purposeful Engineering

Having software engineering experience without a true purpose behind it is like owning the smartest car, but without a destination.

You keep going and going until you run out of energy, but still end up getting nowhere.

Software engineering today impacts the lives of billions of people around the world – it’s tremendous powers can change an entire country into one direction or another; it can protect the planet from eminent dangers and save the lives of millions, as well as being a tool for crime and wrongdoings.

Software engineering is a vehicle for transmitting, processing, distributing, and manipulating data and turning it into information that can heavily influence and oftentimes drive decisions.

Decisions is what we do on daily basis, from the smallest child making a decision about which toy they want to play with, to the highest rank in a government system, making the decision about the future of a country and all the people living in it.

Given the overall history of civilization – technology and therefore software engineering is relatively new to the world, there’s only a small percentage of people today that can understand the true power that lies behind being a software engineer – someone who can develop a website or an app today is someone who has the power to make whatever they want visible and available for billions of people around the world at a click of a button.

With that kind of power a lot of the leaders in the software industry have called for responsible engineering, some even proposed having software engineers swear an oath to be responsible about what they make and why they make it with or without pay.

This situation becomes even more complicated at the new age of A.I and Machine learning – soon, every industry in the world shall become automated no matter how complex it is, and the only industry that is going to be left for humans to drive will be software engineering – until we hit the point of singularity.

A responsible software engineering is more broad than purposeful engineering – responsible engineering is simply about being a good cog in a machine, to simply not to do anything harmful and to be more careful not to program defective software that may cost irreparable damages.

Purposeful engineering is more focused on harnessing the power of software engineering and it’s reach to ensure the survival of the human kind and it’s evolution.

We as human kind today face so many different challenges that threaten our survival – a simple meteor could wipe out the entire planet at a glimpse, and other than the ongoing attempts by visionaries like Musk and others to turn humans into an interplanetary species we don’t really have any solution for that very possible danger.

A simple outbreak of a virus like COVID-19 has successfully killed around two million people and infected over fifty-five million others in very few months.

Our labs today and the software that supports the research and experimentation is not intelligent enough to detect examine and produce a cure for a killer virus like COVID-19 in short enough period of time before millions of people have already lost their lives or walking around spreading it further and further.

The prioritization of the overall engineering industry is for the most part going in the wrong direction, there are more engineers today in the finance and stock exchange industries than the research and medical industries.

There are more engineers working on trivial secondary products than the experimentation for inhabiting other planets and having a “Plan B” to avoid an eminent danger to our planet.

Purposeful engineering is a focused form of engineering where all the engineering efforts are targeting the survival of the humankind and its evolution.

Our evolution depends on our adaptability to the forever changing universe around us, not by how much military artilleries we have, neither by how much money we earn. because none of that would matter if a planet-wide disaster occurred.

Our earnings, and our fancy homes, cars or jewelry are not much of use if they were to be completely wiped out from the face of the earth.

Its only 100 seconds till midnight – we are at a very urgent state to focus our powers and our efforts to push towards what matters the most to our survival – our powers, energies and efforts should be mainly focused towards the fields and the industries that turns the clock back and brings us back to a stable state where we can focus on our evolution and growth as one kind.

These fields of focus are the fields that feed these following realms:

Education

Any species that lack intelligence to power up their adaptability to a forever changing environment and threats will eventually cease to exist.

Educational institutions are the factory that produces intelligent individuals that can carry the torch forward and innovate newer ways to ensure our survival and evolution.

This can range from schools and universities to libraries and tools that makes information accessible to the widest range of people in all languages to  ensure humanity has the information it needs to create enough experts to expedite the process of resolving the most challenging issues we have today.

I started with education because education is the fuel to all the fields that follow, all the departments and categories of science and research are powered by educated individuals who invested the time and effort to educate themselves and earn the proper degrees to become where they are, where the fate of humanity lies in their hands and what they do in their day to day jobs.

Health

While education is one of the highest priorities, the medical department in our world still suffers from so many challenges – as I mentioned earlier, the tools and equipment and the speed of research and innovation in the medical field is behind the times.

Additionally the time it takes a person to do something worth it’s while in the medical field is over a decade, it puts the degree seekers in an economical stress with all the heavy costs of getting a medical degree and the time that is spent on traditional century-old ways of teaching the human anatomy, incremental training and adding responsibility takes longer time, additionally a medical student is required to see as many permutations of a medical problem as possible so they have a chance to work it safely on their own when the time comes.

A lot of these issues can be resolved with machine learning and artificial intelligence, it should take one universal system less than few years to digest and understand all the permutations of a human condition to drive a better decisions to a successful surgery.

It’s the responsibility for software engineers to prioritize the medical research to expedite the process of adaptability to newer challenges and more dangerous viruses threatening the survival of our humankind and our planet.

But more importantly automate surgeries that have, is and will be performed in very similar ways to give a chance to those who do not have access to doctors to live, especially in the most remote areas where it’s harder to get the help needed in time.

But the health department covers all things that impacts our health, psychological, physical, and mental.

For instance, protecting our environment and ensuring the well-being of our planet falls right under this umbrella – along with all the efforts some engineers spend into making their software more accessible, more reliable and easier to use for those who suffer from disabilities.

Space

We are at a place in the history of humanity where thinking about transforming into inter-planetary species is not just a dream or a fantasy anymore.

Due to the continuous state of the world from an environmental standpoint, it is really important for all of the engineers to make it their purpose to support the cause of finding a new home for all of us – that’s our plan to have the option to survive in case a catastrophic event occurs.

Today, we all live on one planet, one home and under the same conditions and circumstances that impacts all of us at once, like a ravaging virus or an environmental disaster like hurricanes and tsunamis.

If we are thinking together as one nation and do our best to inhabit other planets and give ourselves, children and many, many generations to come to start over and spread across the universe to hopefully increase our chances of survival and growth.

Working towards becoming inter-planetary species shouldn’t impact our interest into saving our planet, and investing in producing a better healthcare system for the world – simply because if we can’t develop a better system to protect ourselves from killing diseases or maintain the planet we already live in, there’s no guarantee that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes for any other planet we colonize.

Throughout my life, I have always worked towards connecting with others, sympathize with their issues and make their happiness my ultimate goal.

I have then found that filling people’s bellies with food, minds with intelligence and hearts with hope and inspiration is the key to their happiness – it’s the key to create an entire generation of people working towards each other’s happiness and finding joy in spreading that around the world.

Focusing on Education, Health and Space does just that – on a humankind level, filling peoples minds with intelligences through education, and bellies with food through healthier and safer environment and their hearts with a better tomorrow by looking at the stars through space does wonders.

There are so many different occupations and departments that just falls under these three departments, like farming for creating healthier food, and creating a better environment through environmental studies and all that follows and falls under that ultimate goal – an intelligent, healthy happy species ready for survival and growth for millions of years to come.

Software engineering today is in the heart of every profession and every aspect of our lives, and we, as software engineers need to identify our purposes to create a true impact in our world and engineer our lives, careers and efforts towards these higher purposes.

If you want to measure your worth and impact in this world, think of it in terms of apples.

Some people consume an apple and produce and apple, they come and go, and they don’t change anything or anyone’s life – these are the ones I call zero-position folks, the go no where and they cause no change.

Some others consume an apple and produce nothing, these are more of a burden than anything else – keep clear from those who are able to be productive, but choose to lay on their backs and watch others work for them, produce for them while they do nothing.

But then comes those who consume and apple an create a farm full of hundreds of thousands of apples, feeding hundreds of thousands of people, filling their hearts with happiness, their bellies with food and their minds with intelligence.

Which one would you like to be? The choice is yours!