The Outdated Industrial Era Perspectives of Engineers

Understanding what is wrong with modern engineering is the first step towards reinventing it and making it fit for purpose in the 21^st century. The same can also be said for science and technology. The bottom line here is that it is all about people and what goes on inside their heads and the outdated nature of acquired processes, along with all the associated baggage (collective delusions).

Two items illustrating what I call the outdated industrial era thinking of UK engineers dropped through my letterbox in October (2013). One came from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and the other from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).

The IET’s piece of nonsense came in the form of a small pamphlet with the title Annual Political Engagement Review. In this, the IET highlights its determination to take advantage of the attention that the UK government has recently paid to manufacturing and engineering. This interest of course, follows on from the financial crisis, and is based on a policy of rebalancing the UK economy.

What the pamphlet actually deals with is providing an overview of the IET’s lobbying work; a rose is a rose by any other name.

Lobbying takes place all the time, not just by the IET, but by many people, companies and organisations, all with vested interests, trying to influence government policy and decision making in a certain direction, which in the IET’s case is focused on its particular bias towards promoting engineers and engineering. And there are many ways that one can lobby, varying from meetings with government officials and ministers, through to presenting specific cases and pieces of information, often under the guise of an authoritative report produced by experts.

We all know that most people who lobby or who are experts engaged in producing these so called authoritative reports have a particular bias or interest that they wish to promote, and that is why lobbying takes place, and we all know that most involved in this process of political engagement are most definitely not independent and unbiased, and that they only present so called evidence and facts that supports their position, leaving the rest of the picture, unaddressed. You will be pleased to learn, that the IET have acquired the collective delusion that when they undertake lobbying, they are unbiased. How they arrived at this conclusion is of course a mystery, but such is the nature of modern day engineering institutions; much style, little substance, and a lot of delusion.

The IET also state in this pamphlet, rather patronisingly, that few Members of Parliament have a good understanding of science and engineering, but do not present any evidence to support such a claim: this you must understand is the nature of the evidence-based approach that engineers are so keen to promote, this being only to use evidence when it suits. I wonder too if our elected representative realise that the IET has such a condescending attitude towards them?

As I mentioned, the pamphlet refers to the government’s interest in engineering and manufacturing, which I here note are mostly resource intensive activities; so I wonder if the IET, this thought leading organisation, has told them that, turning to these sectors of the economy for economic growth, at a time when for the sake of future generations, we should be investing significantly in developing a different type of economy that is not reliant upon resource intensive industrial type activities, is most definitely not something that they should be doing. Somehow I doubt that that they did, for they, like all in they modern world, will have advised in their own interests, which of course, lies in these industries of the past.

Now I turn to the IMechE’s nonsense which came in the form of its monthly members’ magazine. And the silliness in question was an editorial about a stupid proposal from an engineer who has been involved in high profile projects with political dimensions.

At the time of writing this entry, in the UK, there is much debate about a new high speed rail link, which is called HS2 for short. It is controversial for many reasons, some of which I will discuss in a future blog. Needless to say there are vested interests, including engineers and engineering industry bodies, lobbying for HS2, and many ordinary people campaigning against a proposal, the costs of which are already rocketing far beyond the initial target cost of 17 billion pounds for Phase I, which was, even at the outset, an enormous price tag for what is quite short rail link.

And the suggestion that has been made by this engineer is that politicians should be removed from the process of long term infrastructure planning, so that warring politicians do not, in effect, interfere. An independent commission, it has been stated, should be established that would act outside political influence and all its work would be based on evidence, etc. etc. Did I not say that many engineers are fundamentally at heart, undemocratic? If I did not, then I should have, for they are.

I think we have had enough of people working behind closed doors, being subject to subtle influences, engaging in delusions of being independent and claiming to act in our interests.

One of the reasons why we elect people to parliament is to engage in debate about such matters as HS2 and other infrastructure projects – this is part of the purpose of politics! Moreover, the idea that we, the people, should allow a bunch of engineering type technocratic experts to be in a driving position on such matters demonstrates how out of touch engineers are with the real world. The age of the expert knows best, the professional in charge paradigm, is over. It passed into history long ago, and the future lies with citizen’s taking charge of their world and shaping it in ways that fit with what people want, not what experts and vested interests desire. This is the age of participatory democracy, although few experts have realised this.

What both examples that I have mentioned above illustrate is the world of Prometheus and it is a very dangerous one that condemns us all to a bleak future, for the future should not be the past, with slightly more advanced science and technology, but an entirely different civilisation; one where more steel, concrete and silicon are not seen as the answers to all problems, but are understood to be part of the problem.

Do you have the courage to begin to explore what this civilisation might look like, and to begin the long journey towards its realisation? If so, keep reading!

A Voice of Reason in a Time of Great Madness

“A voice of reason in a time of great madness.” You may have come across this before, for it is a quote from a movie called Field of Dreams. It is taken from the scene when the central female character in the film (Annie Kinsella) stands up to defend the writer whose books the right-minded (that is to say, the mob) want to ban. “Terrance Mann” she says, “was a voice of reason in a time of great madness. He coined the phrase make love not war.” The time of great madness she is referring to is the 1960s.

We live once again in a time of great madness, yet few are prepared to admit this. And this blog and my other writings are about being a voice of reason in a time of great madness. This is why I write, to show people that we are truly living in an age of great madness that will lead eventually to an avoidable human tragedy on an epic scale. And my message is clear – we need to begin a transition to a different way of living on our small and wonderful planet. It is time to walk a different path and ordinary people should now take control through peaceful means, to ensure that we do begin to walk a different path. This is already beginning to happen, and people with vested interests in maintaining the world as it is, are becoming concerned. My great worry is that they will take steps to stop this change. Recall what the British did in India, in response to Ghandi. The British though, are, at heart, a moderate and tolerant people, and they eventually understood that opposing Ghandi was contrary to the ideals that they themselves hold dear.

Politicians in Europe I hope will understand this, and embrace and encourage transition towards a different path. What this path should be of course is a matter for discussion, but the first step is to begin this dialog and to understand why we need to change. This is a matter that you will find explored in my books, in particular, Encounter with a Wise Man and A Tale of Two Deserts. As regards to what should be central to these discussions, the answer is that which is central to our modern civilisation: free market capitalism; religion; and science, engineering and technology, and how all these should be transformed to enable the development of a sustainable civilisation, and to ensure that extremists of all kinds (atheist, religious, scientific, capitalist, political etc.) find no space to prosper in society, in the world. And by engaging is this dialogue we might begin to understand how the madness that inevitably flows from ideology and dogma, can be avoided.

Through the power of words the climate of thought can be changed. This is the journey …

The Importance of Social Innovation in the 21st Century

This is the journey …

Now and then I remind readers of this blog what my writing is all about: a journey of discovery and adventure, providing the opportunity for everyone to begin to open their minds, and to avoid the trap of a mind that has closed in on fixed opinions, from which great madness often flows. And with this reminder firmly planted in your mind, please read on …

Occasionally words of wisdom and great insight find their way into the pages of Institution of Engineering and Technology’s monthly magazine, E&T. This happened twice back in the November 2011 issue – a rare thing indeed! The wise comments I am referring to are the statement by Robin Hanbury-Tenison (in the column For and Against) that “the greed of development leads to the extinction of a culture”, and the comment offered by Heinz Wolf, that “innovation in the 21^st Century is not going to be in science and technology, but in the way that society organises itself.” The two remarks are connected, for if we do not engage in social innovation, and move beyond technology driven thinking, then the extinction of our culture is a real possibility. This is not to say that we do not need technology, but to recognise that human civilisation has, for many reasons, reached a transition point which requires a reinvention of the many taken for granted aspects of the modern world, including science, engineering and technology.

There is here, the opportunity for the engineering community to demonstrate some thought leadership, and perhaps also to address the perennial problem of concerns about the poor status of UK engineers in society. But are these people ready to take the lead? Regrettably the answer would seem to be no. Too often one sees engineers and technologists offering technological fixes to challenges that can only be properly addressed through social, human and organisational innovation, with technology following-on in a supporting role, but also not forgetting that sometimes technology can be used as an enabler for these kinds of soft innovations.

However, talking to engineers about social innovation is a depressing and unrewarding way of passing one’s time, even when such innovation makes clear and unquestionable business sense. I have quite a lot of experience of this. One example that I will mention is the inability of most production engineers in the western world, during the 1980s and early 1990, to grasp the importance of what is now called Lean Production. Engineers and technologist working in manufacturing during that period were obsessed with technology, particularly Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and many visits were undertaken by European engineers and technologists to Japan to view their robots, flexible manufacturing systems, and computer numerical control systems. Yet these visitors were on the whole, completely blind to the organisational and methodological innovations behind this technology, and it was these soft innovations that were the key to Japanese success.

Engineering has not internalised the learning from this period. In an earlier blog I wrote about the either/or mind-sets of engineers, referring to a lecture that I attended which was entitled Is the World Running out of Energy? At the end of the talk I mentioned to the speaker that this was the wrong question to ask. I told the lecturer that a more important question was “do we need all this energy?” There was agreement that we did not, but the speaker added that there is a very real requirement to improve energy efficiency. In reply I said that I did not disagree with this observation, but I pointed out that if we were to change the way society operates, undertake a reorganisation, start doing things more intelligently, etc. (i.e. social innovation to eliminate energy needs), then perhaps we might not need new nuclear power stations and other capital and resource intensive constructions. The response, as I noted previously, was very predictable, but well illustrates the problem, “We cannot put back the clock.”

Social innovation is not about putting the clock back, reverting, so to speak, to an earlier less sophisticated existence, but is concerned with putting the clock forward. This involves leaving behind all these outdated and irrelevant perspectives which are no more that an effort to preserve the past by creating a future that is just the past presented as something new!

I am starting to think that we are living in a lunatic asylum and that all common sense has been abandoned as the world pursues the Holy Grail of economic growth, but which is now looking increasingly like plain corporate greed at our expense, as well as that of the natural world upon which our continued existence depends.  Everywhere one goes people are talking about sustainable economic development, yet just about everyone is proposing to continue doing the things that are so self-evidently responsible for the unsustainability of contemporary civilisation. Few people seem ready to think about how we may need to fundamentally redesign our societies to eliminate consumption that can be avoided, and to engage in de-growth of certain industries that are resource intensive, while at the same time fostering the growth of new less resource intensive sectors. This is indeed bad news for future generations.

What we have here is truly Promethean and most worrying is that the majority are blind to what is happening. We are busy creating an avoidable disaster of epic proportions and yet the message from just about everywhere one looks is – business as usual. And thus the seeds of the next human global catastrophe are sown. We need to take peaceful action now to make sure that this never happens; time to walk a different path!

Digital Science, Responsible Research, Bees and Neonicotinoids

Often in my writings I have referred to the need to reinvent science, engineering and technology. Digital Science is a small step towards achieving this and is part of a European Commission initiative towards Responsible Research and Innovation.

The term Digital Science was proposed by the European Commission’s Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) research programme. Digital Science is one of the research topics that will be addressed in the new Framework Programme for research (Horizon 2020) that begins in 2014.

The European Commission’s concept paper defining the issues of relevance to Digital Science notes that the focus is on using ICT for two key reasons: (i) to improve the efficiency of scientific research; (ii) to transform science. The latter point is crucial and in many respects far more important than the first.

Already ICT is much used in research, be it scientific, technological or engineering research, but while ICT provides modern researchers with many powerful tools, it has not fundamentally changed to nature of science – and science does need to change for it is trapped in the past and needs to move forward. The same can also be said for technology development and engineering as well.

People working in various scientific fields usually publish their results in scientific journals, but the content of these journals are only accessible to those who pay subscriptions to the publisher, yet much of that which is published results from research that is wholly or partly funded from the public purse. So, you, most probably a taxpayer, having indirectly paid for this research, have to pay again if you want gain access to the results. One of the thrusts underlying Digital Science is to change the scientific publication process to open access, so that all can gain access to the results of research, without having to pay!

But there is more, for science also makes use of much data, which is collected through experiments, observations, and so forth. Yet much of this data is not openly available to others. If anyone wants to use the data they have to ask, and the answer could be: “no you can’t have it.” Why? Actually, usually for no good reasons at all, other than someone has decided to restrict access. Many scientists you should understand, are very elitist and also not interested in openness and sharing, except perhaps when there is something to be achieved in return that will advance their own research careers (they are human!). Digital science is therefore also about providing open access to data.

Open access however is not the sum total of what Digital Science is about. There is also the matter of what is called public engagement in science. Here you perhaps think that I am referring to scientists telling the public in simple terms what they have discovered. Better think again!

It is important of course that the results of research are communicated to the public, but scientists are usually not very good at doing this, and also there is a danger that such communication becoming propaganda, hubris, and an exercise in experts explaining to the poor non-expert why they should just accept the science (science after all is self-evidently always good – I think not!).

What public engagement should be about is a process for accountability, modernising the ethical basis of science, ensuring responsibility in research, and democratising research policy development. And this should involve informed members of the public in decisions about what research to fund and what not to fund with public money – an issue of growing importance given the potentially damaging impacts of some types of scientific research, the questionable underlying ethics of modern science, and the hubris associated with science.

So what of bees and neonicotinoids? Here is a case study that demonstrates the importance of what I have just described above, of allowing open access to research results and data, and of enabling public involvement, not just through their elected representatives, but also through a process of participatory democracy. But there is more, for the case of bees and neonicotinoids also demonstrates the need to make public the links that scientists and their employing institutions have with vested interests such as, in this case, agri-chemical companies.

It used to be the case that one could talk about industry scientists in the sense that these were the ones working in industry, but this is no longer the case, for the bulk of scientists in the public sector are also deeply involved with industry, through their employing institutions – and this does very much influence what they say and believe (it creates conflicts of interest which are rarely declared). This I have seen for myself, many times, and it is an aspect to modern science that the public need to be aware of, as do politicians and those who assist them, such as parliamentary research officers. And the nature of science itself also needs to be better understood by the public, for the image of the rational person, free of bias and values, engaging only with facts, evidence and that which can be proven by experiment, is just an idealised self-image that is far from the reality of what science actually is. About this I will say more in future blogs.

For those who have to deal with policy issues surrounding bees and neonicotinoids, and the associated issues such as banning their use, Digital Science would have been a very helpful tool to have available. This is one reason why we need to support the development of Digital Science, ensure that it is not developed by experts for experts, and to develop the concept further so that it truly becomes a transformational tool.

And this latter point is one of the key reasons why we need Digital Science – to change science itself, not just to be rid of its elitist mind-set, but to develop a wider understanding that science is not neutral, and that the bad side does not just come from abuse, but that science and scientists, by their very nature, are potentially very dangerous. And the profound point I wish to make here is that, what we have experienced in the past with science cannot continue, and we need to move science forward by developing a new scientific process – this is a key aspect of building a sustainable civilisation. But this will not be easy, for those unbreakable chains that bind people to the rock of the past will have to be broken (this is that Prometheus Syndrome once again) to allow people to invent a different kind of science.

So it may also be the case that Digital Science might prove to be quite challenging for DG CONNECT, the Directorate General responsible for the ICT research programme, for the bulk of the experts that it relies upon for external expertise are part of the problem – they too are caught up in this outdated scientific paradigm, and what we know about people’s behaviour is that when paradigms are challenged, the first reaction is always to fight to defend that which exists and to preserve the existing order, sometimes quite vocally, but most often in a more insidious way, because their values and beliefs shape the concepts and the technology, and in the end the future just becomes a more technologically sophisticated version of the past – Prometheus chained to the rock of the past.

In my book A Tale of Two Deserts, I mention that modern science is like a bag of bones dressed up with a little good meat (another reference to Prometheus).  Science, you should understand, on the one hand helps us, while at the same time, destroys us; we have not yet acquired the knowledge, the sophistication, the wisdom to achieve the former without the latter. The time we have left to do so grows short!

And so it goes with technology and engineering too!