OSPE - The Voice - Winter 2021 - 21

NEWS & EVENTS
The Future of Engineering
WE NEED TO LEARN!
WE NEED TO CHANGE!
This article was written by Doug Reeve, Ph.D., P.Eng., OSPE member,
Director Emeritus of the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in
Engineering at the University of Toronto, and recent keynote speaker at
OSPE's 2021 Engineering Conference.
M
y father was an engineer; I admired how he
thought about the physical world.
I became an engineer and I love thinking
like an engineer. My mother was not an
engineer; she was a people-person and I am
also a people-person. After many years as a consulting engineer
and small business owner, I became a teacher of engineering,
working with the next generation, the future leaders, of
engineering. As a teacher and researcher, I am frequently
thinking about the future of engineering.
One more thing. I am a reader. I love reading: fiction, nonfiction;
bring it on. Through reading I continue to learn about
people and about how the world works - to deepen my own
consciousness.
I tell you all this, because I think you should know where I
am coming from, what I bring to my consideration of the future
of engineering.
What is the future?
The American baseball player, Yogi Bera, famously said: The
future ain't what it used to be! - this is both clever and absurd. I
dug deep into the internet to find an earlier reference - A journal
article in 1937 asserted that the perception of the future had
changed: ...the future is not what it used to be, ... The future, ...
contains nothing but scientific development. It is an involuntary
spending and manipulation of physical forces, empty of
consciousness...
We engineers manipulate physical forces but are we empty of
consciousness? If the future ain't what it used to be, what did it
used to be?
Let's consider engineering, say in the 1870s. There is a
building on the UofT campus named for Sandford Fleming. In
1871 Sandford Fleming was 44 years old and was named chief
engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway. There was pressure
to match American expansion to the west, to carry settlers to
December 2021 THE VOICE
21

OSPE - The Voice - Winter 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of OSPE - The Voice - Winter 2021

Table of Contents
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OSPE - The Voice - Winter 2021 - Cover3
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