Quo vadis?
It seems to me that idealism�the desire to make the world a fundamentally better place�has been largely lost in engineering today. A lot of engineers now see the profession essentially as a means of generating personal wealth.
What profit it a man if he gain market share and lose his professional soul?
As I write this, many of those engineers are still recovering from the effects of the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas in early January. For them, the days leading up to the show were incredibly hectic�prototypes of new consumer devices and their specs had to be checked and double-checked, technical presentations underwent numerous reviews and rewrites, and arrangements were made to lodge a small army in Las Vegas, where things got really intense.
All this activity was for one purpose: to ensure their company's success by enticing consumers to part with hard-earned cash. And it looks like they're succeeding�according to the Consumer Electronics Association, factory sales will grow by 8% to $135.6 billion in 2006. If one estimates retail figures as about double wholesale, then consumer sales roughly equal the GDP of Norway, the 25th largest economy in the world.
Having grown up at a time when the only consumer electronics in a typical middle-class home were a television and a radio, that growth seems pretty amazing to me. When I entered the electronic engineering profession, the major projects we EEs aspired to involved defense/aerospace systems, utilities, and computing.
For the most part, these projects were aimed at somehow improving the lot of mankind�maintaining world peace (albeit on a nerve-racking Cold War basis), exploring Space, bringing power more economically to more areas, and solving scientific problems more accurately and rapidly with mainframe computers.
It would not be so terrible if an engineer focused on developing his or her personal wealth if he or she followed the example of two of Time magazine's 2005 persons of the year�Bill and Melissa Gates. They are using some of the wealth they've accumulated from consumer electronics to try to eradicate disease and illiteracy. Still, I'll always be uncomfortable in a world where most engineers aren't involved in working daily for a better world.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the creature comforts consumer electronics provide, it's just that everyone in the world should have the opportunity to enjoy them. And until that's the case, I'll feel a twinge every time I pick up a video cell phone.
Richard Comerford
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