We stand on the cusp of a rare transformative period in the interaction between technology and society. We live in a highly connected world where technology has been democratized, disrupted and is being distributed in unprecedented ways. The opportunities for individuals and society are huge, as are the risks. Engineers are the people who balance technological opportunity with risk. We need engineers now more than ever.
We spend our lives inside the machine that we call society and we need to care about how it’s being designed and operated. Right now, this new machine is being created between lawyers, insurers, business-owners, and politicians, based on a passing understanding of tech and a ‘suck it and see’ approach. To contribute to these conversations, we need to recruit and equip the next generation of engineers, we need to create the next engineering discipline.
This new discipline will be about how interconnected we are to each other and to the things that make up our world. It will bring together design, anthropology, business, and technology.
The engineers who make up this new discipline must be willing and able to engage with the complexity that comes from the interactions between people, technical systems, and science in such a highly connected and decentralized world.
To succeed we need to dramatically broaden the pool of engineers. Engineering isn’t the first choice for enough of our brightest kids, especially young girls. The participation rate of young people in the combination of subjects that qualify you for entry to engineering is less than 10% and fewer than 20% of engineering students are women.
New engineers will only be inspired through the engineers they see today. We need to better explain what an engineer in the 21st century is and can be. You don’t have to choose between changing the world and being an engineer or between being a creative and a tech. If anything, being an engineer equips you to express your creativity and impact the world at a scale that has rarely been possible.
This is what we are trying to achieve at the Australian National University right now. In collaboration with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world, we’re trying to define this next engineering discipline. This is our contribution to the evolving relationship between technology and society.
Opinion piece submitted by Professor Elanor Huntington FIEAust, Dean of Engineering and Computer Science, Australian National University. If you would like to hear more from Elanor on this topic, please RSVP to attend her keynote address at our Canberra Individual Awards evening.
Image: courtesy of Elanor Huntington.