Anyone who has lived in the United States of America for the past few years has noticed the polarity that has grown between the people in the country. Or maybe, it could just be me, but I think that this polarity exists nation wide, even if many local groups do join together. Is this a side effect of growing technology, or an intrinsic part of human nature? Either way, that is not the point of this post. I believe that I have found the root of the confusion of one, just one of the issues. The issue of global warming, environmental danger, and sustainability. Most people talking about this are going to say that either an evil oil company conspiracy is ruining us, a few may also say that the government is to blame. Others will say that it is all a myth, and doesn’t matter at all. Many more, will live their entire lives without even knowing that the problem, or at least the perceived problem exists. I am not going to touch on any of that. But rather, I believe that the whole cause for the debate is that no one sees the ‘big picture’, and those that do, are completely infective in telling anyone about it. Or worse, is like a specific person who ran for president at one point in time, but never really dealt with the problem, only a bunch of useless rhetoric. The problem exists, however, the vast majority of the world does not see the problem, which is good, because the people that are supposed to take care of the problem, scientists and engineers, are doing a good job taking care of it. Such a good job in fact, that everyone who is not directly related to solving a particular problem, ends up thinking that it is a useless hoax, a ploy for money or power.
This idea came to me while in my engineering ethics class, which I was required to take for my degree in computer engineering at the University of Utah. I must confess, I did not want to be in class that day. There were two people from two different engineering fields, mechanical and biomedical, that were trying to enlighten people about their department. I was staring at my calculus book, wishing I could do math homework instead, when I realized something amazing between the difference between how engineers see the world, and the general population sees the world. If you were to ask an engineer if he was trying to save the world’s energy problems, solve global warming, end pollution, or just save the planet in general, there is a good chance he will say no. Some may say yes, but the answer will have a good split. However, if you were to ask an engineer if he or she was trying to make the best solution for whatever engineering problem he was working on at the moment, be it making an efficient aircraft, or simply a faster algorithm for Google, he will likely say yes. At least, I certainly hope so, as a computer engineer wannabe, I certainly do.
Thus, if we were to sum up all of the efforts of engineers around the world, trying to build better solutions, and scientists, trying to make better tools for them, and other parties using these tools, creating a demand for them, we can see the solution to global crises. It is solved at the level of, as Jeff Jarvis from Buzz machine http://www.buzzmachine.com, ‘a mass of niches’. In other words, the problem is solved by each individual firm, person, organization, doing what they do best. One chemistry lab may work on the ozone layer, but under the facade of being a refrigeration manufacturing company. Only a reliantly small amount of people that work on saving the planet, actually work in the name of, saving the planet.
One of the problems that plagues me as I design computer systems is heat. Following Moore’s law, the number of transistors on silicon doubles every 18 months to two years, and thus computing power doubles. For a long time, the problem was figuring out how to fit that many transistors onto a card. However, that is rapidly changing. The new problem is heat. The heat of your computers is growing at an exponential rate, and if the pattern is not changed, the heat that the sum of the computing power that we have on earth, will be equal to the heat of the sun, in about a decade. As such, we are rapidly working out a way to make more efficient computers, that can deal with the heat properly, and hopefully generate less of it, or at least put it to good work. Currently, the solution is to make multi-core processors, as they will generate less heat than a single processor with the same power as the summation of the two. However, this comes with it’s own set of problems, and is not sustainable.
Now, does the general public notice this? No. They are perfectly content to push the magic button with a picture of a circle with half a line through it, watch some lights blink, and be on their way to surfing the net. If I were to tell them that the very existence of the way they use computers hangs in the balance, they will scoff, for as they see it, the computer is just a magical box that does what they want. People have told them that there were major problems with it in the past, however, none of them ever affected him, as they were solved by the engineers before it even got to that level. And if a problem did ever get to that level, all research in that vein of technology will have been halted for several decades, do to a large amount of fear from the general public.
Even if engineers do manage to solve the heat problems in computers, there are many more hanging the balance. Computers are beginning to get small enough that Quantum Physics ruins the Newtonian Physics that computers are currently based upon. A problem? Yes. Will it be solved by engineers and scientists creating a faster, more advanced, more efficient society? Quite Probably. Will the general public take any note of it? Some will, the future engineers, and the well educated that care about that sort of thing, but in general no.
Now, you may be thinking that this is all well and good, but if this was the case, than why haven’t the engineers and scientists done anything about it, or have made coalitions to stop it? First of all, several people have. However, the majority of these people don’t know any particular niche thoroughly enough, to describe it, at least not in a way that doesn’t come across to the general public as political propaganda. Even worse is those that do use this fear for the soul purpose of trying to gain such power. However, a large part of scientists, and especially engineers don’t really care about such global scales. Like most people, they happily plug along with their task, try to build their efficient system, and try to do it better than everyone else, and happily ignore everything that doesn’t matter. For example, even though I am aware about the problems with current fossil fuel consumption, I am not very worried about it. It is not my problem. Yes, I have a broad enough understanding of the world to see that it is a problem, but not anything big enough that I need to alter the way I run my life. I will let the scientists and engineers that deal with that sort of thing guide my life, at least in that aspect. When they have found a way to make it cheaper for me to change the way I get energy, I will change, probably faster than the majority of the world. If they manage to find the magical way to remain using fossil fuels, or better yet, manage to change the world without the world even knowing, as happens constantly, than I am all the better for it.
This, is what went through my head as I was in lecture. Unfortunately, I still had to wait about an hour before I was able to do my calculus homework.
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