TomcasterWorld - SILICON VALLEY'S imagination has become our world's reality, as tech companies continue to re-engineer the human experience in remarkable ways. But the light speed at which we're traveling has created a blur, as neither lawmakers and regulators can keep up.
When it comes to big data, automation, robots and machine learning, for instance, change happens almost daily, and the learning curve is steep. Millions of people across this country are sitting in the dark on some of the most critical issues of our day because the "magic" behind these technologies – that magic being engineering – is a foreign language. That needs to change, lest we all become pawns of Silicon Valley and witnesses, rather than participants, to our governance.
Just as economics became the language of the masses in the wake of the 1980s economic boom and Wall Street craze, it's time more Americans acquired a base knowledge of this new world. More of us must learn to speak engineering – and we need to start learning this language now.
For decades, the world of engineering felt like an unreachable plane, an area of study limited to highly trained people who solved problems the rest of us couldn't begin to comprehend. That has fed an unhealthy complacency in which citizens are oblivious to the details of how things like geolocation and big data actually work, blindly trusting that it's all on the up and up.
Then something like Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal happens, and the next time we order from Amazon we're nervous about how our personal data is stored in the cloud, who controls that data and who else can access it. Or a self-driving car kills a pedestrian, and we begin to doubt the possibility of autonomous transportation – and feel intimidated by how to vote on legislation that addresses safety regulations for these vehicles. Slowly but surely, people start to fear the engineered world around them and the power of what it might do and become.
A recent Pew Research Center poll found 72 percent of Americans trust tech companies "to do the right thing" only some of the time or hardly ever. Even so, we're allowing these seemingly untrustworthy players who are recoding and mapping our children's future to do so without our understanding or buy-in. When we're expected to simply trust, and not equipped with some basic knowledge of engineering principles needed to verify the information, our society will suffer for it.
It doesn't have to be this way if American colleges and universities begin to teach the core ideas of engineering principles to the masses. As our world is re-engineered, more people need to learn how engineers analyze, design and operate. Engineering concepts such as "modular design" and "feedback control" can become part of citizens' vernacular, just like "inflation" and "trade deficit" from economics. Sure, it's interesting. But it's also integral to daily life.
As the dean of one of America's preeminent engineering schools, I'm not advocating a complete makeover of college curricula. But I do believe a base understanding of certain big ideas would begin to give people the oars to navigate technology's rapids. A glimpse of how encryption for privacy works, or an effort to demystify the cloud, or a whiff of context around machine-learning algorithms could make technology more accessible and something to embrace rather than fear.
Thanks to advanced capabilities and lower prices, the worlds of technology and engineering permeate our everyday lives today more than they did 10 or even five years ago. This leads to faster adoption – but also more confusion over gadgets and related policies that affect our privacy, safety and health. Our federal, state and local representatives are regularly asked to comprehend this world and the decisions that impact it. As citizens, we should have the ability to participate in the debate that will impact our lives and our children's lives. The tug-of-wars over net neutrality and 5G deployment are recent examples that made the headlines, provoking curiosity but probably not comprehension for many.
The model that in a single generation changed the cultural understanding of economics needs to be adopted for engineering. Doing your part to bone up on today's technology is about the present, but it's more about our collective future. We can no longer bury our heads in our smart phones and trust that everything will work out just fine.
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