Mohandes Magazine Fall-Winter Edition 2018

two decades ago.
Diversity of engineering disciplines has vastly
changed the structure of engineering faculties.
For example, I invite you to take a look at the
University of Tehran in Iran. The former faculty
of engineering which in my days (1970s) used
to have six disciplines now has metamorphosed
into the “college of engineering” which is a conglomerate
of several engineering schools: civil,
electrical & computer, mechanical, chemical,
mining, metallurgy & materials, and industrial
engineering.
Every engineering school has a number of specialized
disciplines. For example, the school of
civil engineering has nine specialized fields like
structural, earthquake, environmental, and water
engineering just to name a few. The number
of engineering schools and their disciplines are
still growing.
Extrapolating current tendencies in engineering
education and practice, we might develop a
general idea and speculate about the future, but
how far can our imagination extend?
Future of Engineering
Even my wildest dreams can’t predict the status
of engineering one hundred years into the future.
I prefer to tighten the leash on my imagination
stallion and settle to speculate only the next
few decades.
Let us define modern engineering as “a tool to
provide needs” or “a problem solver”. Assuming
human population to reach a maximum of
10 billion before stabilization and beginning to
reduce in size, and considering “sustainability”
as the golden rule to govern human societies,
we might be able to define trends in engineering
and consequently predict the future to some
extent.
One important tendency in engineering that
has already begun and will probably continue
its reign in the future is to rely more on Fuzzy
Logic as opposed to the traditional deterministic
cause and effect logic. Another definitive trend
that will survive for a long time is the usage of
cloud storage facilities as a tool to drastically improve
our data storage capabilities. Vast usage
of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will also play an
important role in the future of engineering.
When it comes to the issue of sustainability, sociological
and humanitarian trends also begin
to impose their influence. Whenever the needs
and concerns of society as the main client of engineering
services changes, engineers have no
other choice but to adapt.
Nowadays, the Gross National Happiness
(GNH) is pushing to replace Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) and the Social Development Index
(SDI) that deals with fundamental human
values like racial equality and gender equality is
gaining momentum.
Education of engineering
Right now, average half-life of scientific knowledge
is about five years. In other words, everything
learned during years of university education,
will most likely become only 25 percent
accurate after ten years.
James Plummer, former dean of College of Engineering
at Stanford University, says: “It doesn’t
matter what we teach to our students because
by the time they graduate those teachings will
become obsolete”. As a matter of fact we have
to (and certainly will) change the teaching paradigm
in engineering schools from teaching
“how to do things” to teach them how to continue
learning to work with new concepts and
new inventions and innovations.
Continuation of education will no longer be optional
and every engineer shall always allocate a
certain percentage of her/his time to learning. In
this new paradigm, books will become less relevant
and research papers will deliver most of
the new scientific/professional discoveries. Students
of engineering will be encouraged to do
small scale derivative research projects instead
of conventional homework.
To be continued
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