this post is partly inspired by a writing prompt at Indie Web Club in Bangalore
Engineering
Engineering, a word for the thing that engineers do, but what is it that engineers do, who are engineers? and what is engineering? In some ways, I believe, engineering is a very intersectional field. To me engineering is where science meets the real world. The elements laid out in the neat grid of the periodic table, form into vast stores of energy which heat up great masses of water to drive them through blades of fans, so that we sitting in our houses, can be treated to the motion of particles 60 times a second, and derive energy from that motion. Engineering is a discipline that allows a constellation of metal, plastic and electronics be lifted into space, several kilometres aove this planet, be subjected to such vast forces and distortions that time itself would become relative, yet bring you to your loved ones' homes, no matter where you are across the world, in time.
Engineering very fundamentally is about building things, making things that last in the real world. The word engineer, itself deriving from Latin ingenium for innate quality or cleverness, related to concepts of ingenuity, and design, and clever usefulness. In the roman world, an engineer was not just an engineer, but often as well as being an engineer he (or in unlikely cases, she) would also have been an architect. Making possible the building of impressive public works which would come to define the classical time period.
Across on the other end of Eurasia, China has a millenia old tradition of impressive public engineering. Long centralised into massive states, and with a near perpetual surplus of labour, the Chinese state undertook projects on an unforeseen scale. Long continous walls from coasts to the wastes of Central Asia, great waterworks to bring water to the hinterlands of China.
The modern economic behemoth of the United States, owes large part of it's prosperity and infrastructure to the decades of effort in building the country railroad by railroad, road by road, and dam by dam, all under the watchful eye of several engineers. people would crisscross a continent in iron and steel. Engineers imagining something as simple as
Well more precisely, one would say
Being at the heart of the idea that man could one day walk on the moon.
The Heart of Engineering
I believe the heart of engineering lies in building things, be they contraptions of whimsy, flights of fantasy, or things of terrifying power no man has dreamt before. Engineering is about making an idea into reality. An Engineer is a person equipped with a wide variety of tools, not merely the knowledge of his or her discipline, but a grasp of sciences and the scientific method of inquiry, methods of mathematical analysis, a solid grasp of finance and accounting, and a great mind for solving problems, and learning.
It is this heart that lies in every engineer, and in every inspiration, that breathes life into every bridge over every stream and every river, every contraption that made someone smile, in every single piece of equipment in countless hospitals across the world which saves millions of lives every single day.
For my own person, my passion for engineering derives from an unlikely source. One of the many cartoons, I had the good fortune of watching when I was growing up, was Disney's Phineas and Ferb. While the plot is charming in it's own right, and engaging, and entertaining. The voice acting supreme, and the art eye catching, what strikes show after show is the characteristic act of building something. To me, nothing captures the imagination of being an engineer more perfectly than this cartoon. Of building new things, of having fun when building things and of sharing it with friends, seeing them have fun as well.
Perhaps of anything I have watched in the past decade, or more, nothing has stood out larger than this cartoon, only because of it's sheer embrace of the joy and happiness of Engineering.
Engineering to me, will always mean the joy of building things for the sake of having fun. The joy in making something just for the sake of making. The joy of discovering and failing in the process of making, and the joy of trying again and succeeding.
Addendum: Software Engineering and LLMs
Since the emergence of the computer, productivity across the world has skyrocketed, by making a machine that represented calculations faster than biological tissue, humans have an unprecedented power. For the first time, humans are no longer limited by the speed of their brains. In some ways, an electronic computer is an ultimate machine, it represents capability of surpassing human minds in thought, though a very narrow specific kind of thought, but thought nonetheless.
Computers have brought upon unprecedented capability, what required the thoughts of men, would now be relegated to machines, and men would be free to think of better things and greater things. To a large extent this has transpired, we no longer think for instance of phone numbers or anniversaries, let alone mundane things as post mail (unless one is doing bureaucratic paperwork that is). However the offloading of thinking is a slippery slope.
Technologies like Large Language Models, (LLMs) represent an unprecedented degree of offloading of thought, and most depressingly, ridding ourselves of the smaller delights of engineering. LLMs are a great tool, but the incessant noise they have generated, along with the ceaseless accompanying pursuit of results over process, make these tools a net negative for my broader engineering experience.
The LLM as a tool is fabulous, a miracle of engineering in itself, a model of human language which mimics speech like people, yet much like any tool, we seem to be in a process of experiment and discovery on their usage, with the current trend being deeply pessimistic.
Resources used
- wikimedia commons for the images.