To Engineer

I'm in a philosophical mood. Maybe it's my recent brush with my own mortality. Or maybe it's that I'm reaching the end of a project at work. Sometimes it's good to just take a step back and ask questions that have no answers...

We, in this society, are always looking for the new and improved. The march of progress. Some take it for granted that the march is inevitable, propelled by human ingenuity, and always leading in the same direction.

Somewhere, long ago, a Neolithic schmatte macher first put needle to thread. It was not inevitable. It was a clever solution to a problem -- a new way of doing things that was deemed superior to the way things had been done before. Because of it, today I wear pants.

We engineers are trained to create or use technology to solve problems. Each of us works in our own problem domain, improving upon that tiny, narrow piece of our world. Where are we going? The accelerating march of progress, proceeding blindly into the future, is not without risk.

What if that progress carries with it externalities, where others must bear a cost for what we design to be optimal for ourselves? What if the negative externalities are cumulative and persistent, but the benefits are ephemeral? How do we know that the sum total of all our efforts will not lead us -- all of us -- to our ruin?