The crossroad of social economics and engineering science
The rate of change due to technology and its affect on social structures has left us in constant uncertainty of what will happen next. We are seeing a myriad of new technologies: genome editing, point-of-care diagnostics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, etc. Our universities excel at teaching us improved statistical, computational, and visualization methods. However, the problem we forget is that new math alone will not give us more useful application.
The reason is simple: students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) typically are not the ones who know the problems of the world. STEM students are bombarded with courses and learning techniques to find cheaper data analytics and faster computational models. However, their schedules often leave very little room for them to examine the realities outside the algorithms. It is a shame that for this reason, the main application of data analysis has thus far been to maximize the profits of large corporations, from Target to Amazon to Alibaba. It is implemented where the fastest and highest turn around of money occurs; at present it is mostly serving the richest 10% of the world. Even for the companies that we suppose should create real societal value, such as biotechnoloy and pharmaceuticals, solutions are aimed at the same 10% and their health problems. We are not looking at the problems of the other 90% who need it, and definitely not where our future generations will need it. Solving the problems of the “poor” does not need to be a compromise.
In fact, much of our current investments reside in activities that has no positive productivity, and to borrow so much from the future in these investments is bound to result in an economic crash. Our greed in this zero-sum game is in fact toppling us into economic recession — or the steep curve of de-leveraging in the economic cycles that have repeated since the invention of the modern monetary system. On the other hand, investing in what looks like a money sink now might be our way to unlocking infinite potential in both market and intelligence, and thus productivity. It is a counterintuitive idea, just like the idea that we can solve the problem of overpopulation by ensuring better life expectancy in developing countries.
The globe is interconnected, and to solve our own problems of the future we need to solve the problems of the world, which means we must know where the issues are elsewhere in our world. Another motivation to design for the poor is that design criteria prioritize cheap, effective, reusable, and easy to use solutions. By directly designing for the other 90%, we are not only addressing the problem of social unsustainability due to huge wealth discrepancies (as we can see with the anti globalization movement in many parts of the world), but also the unsustainability of our own overconsumption. There are no shortage exponential technologies: biotechnology and bioinformatics, computational systems, networks and sensors, artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing, medicine, and nanotechnology. But to fully utilize the potential of these technologies to solve grand challenges, we are required to know realties outside of technicalities.
Luckily, it doesn’t take too much looking to see the institutions and organizations actively working on it. For example, Engineers Without Borders and sustainability groups are diffused around campuses in Canada. They hold many conferences and activities each year to focus on solving these problems. There are also many other government and privately funded challenges to empower students to build critical problem-solving projects instead of waiting for researchers to find out the answer. We are where we are due to the efficiencies brought on by division of labor, and institutions generating ultra-specialized research have helped us achieve exactly that. However, overspecialization has also resulted in academic institutions that are ill equipped to address the world’s grand challenges. We need our institutions to produce more integrative and macroscopic thinkers to talk about the biggest and boldest ideas, to reinvent the industries of energy, health care and education to realize human freedom.
