^{From left to right: MTU ASME Student Section representatives Daniel Vanderhoff, Daniel Michalski and Nick Dumler; Todd Allen, CFL&D Board member and workshop facilitator.} 

Imagine a moment in the future when you are highly satisfied with the “state of engineering”, e.g., education, professional careers, colleagues, etc.  Then, take a snap shot! What do you see? What is working well? What successes are occurring? What is making a measurable impact? 

Participants in the diversity workshop at the recent Congress in Chicago had the opportunity to do just that. “Strategic Diversity: Envisioning the Future of Engineering,” sponsored by the Center for Leadership & Diversity, (CFL&D) engaged participants of different backgrounds, experiences, ages, genders and ethnicities in an exercise of forward outlook into a successful future state of the engineering profession. Led by Todd Allen, ASME member and Johnson & Johnson executive, workshop participants produced a collective wisdom, voice-of-the-customer insight into engineering’s future, including:

• Engineering is in harmony with nature
  • Sustainability technology is the norm
  • Engineering profession is diverse
  • Fostering engineering education to young people
  • Engineering introduced in pre-school
  • All people have understanding/training in mathematics/applied math, applied knowledge
• Engineering creativity is unleashed
  • Reinvestment in technology adaptation
  • Engineers don’t do “the same old thing with the same old technology”
• All team members can voice their opinions and be heard
  • No fear of applying knowledge
  • Communicating the passion for engineering to others
  • Others look at engineering as a desired career
• Engineers could communicate with other engineers worldwide in all forms --- open communication
  • Technology is shared across the world enabling us to have no poor countries
  • Engineers can share knowledge/network easily; resources can be identified easily
  • Engineers will continue to learn through what they do
  • Engineers partner with health care to end diseases
  • Everyone will be our customers
    • Build new things to make life easier (workers/automation)
    • Drug screening to identify new drugs
• Engineering will provide the solutions to three global problems: food, poverty and social problems.
  • Conserving natural resources
  • Focusing on the needs of humankind
  • Diagnose and fix (painlessly) human (illnesses, etc.)
  • Instantaneous transport
  • Knowledge downloadable into brain directly
  • NO WAR
• Engineering seen as the “premier” profession
• More diversity; having everyone at the table
• Education
  • Scientific and technical literacy
  • Continuing technology education
  • Breadth of education: multidisciplinary
  • Interdisciplinary education – no departments
  • Introduce engineering in the first grade curriculum
  • Second language required
  • Hands-on courses
• Virtual work environments
• Use technology for efficiency
• “Friends” with co-workers
• Global approach, sensitivity to differences
• Within the corporate environment, no silos; a multidisciplinary approach
• “Renaissance Engineer”
  • Curiosity – Problem – Solution 
• Passion for the profession, not for the money

In conjunction with the 2006 diversity workshop, the CFL&D sponsored a first-of-a-kind original competition for ASME Student Sections in the Chicago area.  They were encouraged to visualize and describe their vision of “Engineering in the Future” via short essay supplemented with a poster display, photographs, video, PowerPoint, etc.  Discussion and inclusion of different views within the student section and with other engineering organizations on campus and/or throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, and/or with industry and community groups, were strongly encouraged.

Johnson & Johnson’s Office of Diversity generously provided $1,000 in awards: $750 to the winning student section and $250 to the runner up. In addition, the top two ranked student sections were invited to participate in the 2006 CFL&D workshop and to present their winning entries to workshop attendees.

Michigan Technological University’s ASME student section was the first-place entry in the competition. Nick Dumler, section president and fourth year ME student; Daniel Vanderhoof, section vice president and a third year MD student; and Daniel Michalski, a second year ME student, presented their chapter’s award winning entry of “Envisioning the Future of Engineering” Dr. Bill Predebon, ME-EM Department Chair and Dr. Donna Michalek from the MTU faculty also attended. The full text of the essay appears below.

Envisioning the Future of Engineering
Daniel Vanderhoff & Michigan Technological University ASME

At what point are we satisfied with the state of engineering? Assuming that we can even reach that point, to us it is when anything physical that the individual desires can be created without any human effort.

Just imagine, vast cities of self-automated robotic production plants. These plants can produce anything the human brain can imagine or desire. All the individual has to do is go to an interface panel in their home and describe what it is they want. This request can then be processed, and a finished production date can be displayed to the individual. The request is electronically sent to the closest production plant. At the plant, nanotechnology along with self-automated systems create the desired product to the very last detail. No human error or mistakes, a finished result with no imperfections.

But an object can’t just be created out of nothing – it needs raw materials. Well, at this point every elemental atom has been mapped. Solar energy has become 100 percent efficient, and energy from the sun can be sued to create the elemental atoms needed for a product. Once the correct amount of materials is generated, they can be transmitted through the air to different parts of the city where they can be transformed into parts and put together.

There is no waste on transportation. Almost instantaneously, objects can be transmitted through different parts of the production city to their destination. This goes for people as well. Cars and planes are obsolete due to the fact that if someone wants to go someplace, all they have to do is go to their house transporter, say a location, and enjoy the ride. Once the individual’s product is finished, it can be directly transported to their home to enjoy.

Due to the fact that everything someone could want can be created for free, there is no need for human labor. Life is based on self-enjoyment. Every individual is content and almost anything they want they can have. Thus, there is no war or greed or anything to that degree.

Of course, there would be restrictions built into this futuristic production. Individuals would not be able to create things such as weapons without the proper permits and licenses. Also, the amount of product from one individual would be limited depending on size and location. There would be central databases in these production cities that would keep track of this sort of issue. These cities would be maintenance free and totally capable of self-development and innovation within the limits of reason.

With any vision, there are always drawbacks and concerns. At first this vision of the future sounds pleasant, but what about the development of the human race? With machines to do all the work, would humans become too lazy and non-intelligent? Would the earth fill up full of produced “junk”? What happens when humans no longer have any control of the production robots? There are an endless amount of hypothetical problems as well as solutions that could be argued.

Others argue that the vision of the future is not in developing the human surroundings, but in developing the human itself. Unlocking the hidden parts of the human genome and maximizing human potential. Making humans “super” humans and perhaps even incorporating technology into the body.

One problem with this vision is that is sounds like humans will be come something totally different than they are now, and perhaps be uncontrollable. To what end would people stop modifying themselves? If you could improve any part of yourself, would you ever stop? Technology could become like a drug for the human body and in the end, nobody would be human anymore.

Yet another idea of the future would be if engineering evolved to the point where time travel was possible. At this point, current technology could be implemented to the past, thus improving the current technology. This would create a hypothetical loop of never-ending self-improvement; a future of engineering that continually updated itself. But how long could this go on for, and to what end? The downside of this vision is that whenever you start messing with time, you never know what will happen. With each engineering time advance, the Earth could possibly be getting closer and closer to its end for whatever time meddling reason.

The point is this: trying to predict what the future of engineering will be like is virtually impossible. Everyone has their own belief of what the future should be like, what technology it should involve, and how to get there. There is not one right vision and one wrong one. We just believe that our vision of “production cities of the future” is perhaps more likely than others.