Engineer guru seeks a tech-savvy society

William A. Wulf is taken aback by a society in which 60 percent of homes contain personal computers, but a large number of people are proud that they don’t know how to use them.

By Brice Wallace
Deseret Morning News

Wulf, the president of the National Academy of Engineering, finds the situation puzzling and troublesome.

"It scares the bejeebers out of me that we have a society which is so dependent on technology, and yet it’s not only technologically illiterate but, in many cases, proud of the fact that they don’t know how technology works, that it’s somehow socially OK to be technologically illiterate. I don’t know how we got to that state," Wulf said Tuesday at the University of Utah during the 12th annual Gould Distinguished Lecture on Technology and the Quality of Life.

Among those willingly expressing their reluctance to embrace technology are learned people, including English professors, he said.

"Why is it OK to be technologically illiterate when so much of our society is focused on technology, but not OK to be illiterate with respect to reading and writing?" he asked.

Wulf described the tech illiterate as "not dumb" but instead "uninformed."

"When I talk about technological literacy, I’m not talking about being able to use a computer. I’m talking about some understanding about how all of the technology works . . . and how it’s created," he said.

In the same vein, Wulf said the country needs to get a better understanding about engineering, but "it’s not so much about the facts of engineering, but the process of engineering." Most people, he said, will never understand the elements of a nuclear power plant but can understand the process of engineering of a nuclear power plant "so that they feel good about its safety."

Wulf called for engineering schools to "think about the industries and jobs that will be, not the ones that are," noting that Wayne Gretzky attained hockey fame by skating to where the puck would be instead of where it was.

The idea that the exportation of U.S. manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries necessarily takes jobs from U.S. workers has been discounted in economic circles, he said.

"Apparently now we’re outsourcing engineering, computer programming and other skilled jobs, including research jobs. There is a lot of investment in research that is going offshore, too. Well, that worries me," he said.

"But it also strikes me as having the assumption that engineering jobs will stay pretty much the same; therefore, that an engineer trained in India is equivalent to an engineer trained in the United States. I think the challenge to U.S. engineering education is to make that not true. It is to make it true that what we educate engineers for is for the engineering jobs that will be, not the engineering jobs that are."

Without that education reform, "we’re going to lose, and it will be the case that the engineers in China and India are a replacement for those in the United States," he said.

Wulf acknowledged that pain comes with such change.

"I don’t want to suggest that those manufacturing workers who lose their jobs to a plant that is moving to Mexico aren’t hurt. They are hurt. I have enormous sympathy for them, but I don’t think that preserving their jobs for another few years until the automation comes along and eliminates the job altogether is really addressing their problem," he said.

"The real trouble that the country ought to be facing is how do we develop a public lifelong learning system and train them for the jobs that will be, not just the jobs that were."

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