IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 3

president's message

Greg Adamson

Do We Just
"Build Stuff"?

ver y day as engineers and technologists we go to work
teaching, developing,
building, implementing, maintaining technology. Do we
care about its impact on the people
around us? Or is that their problem?
My first career was in publishing
in the 1970s, as a typographer. The
company's phototypesetting system
was 1960s technology, still functioning effectively for the book, magazine, and newspaper production
the company did. Then in the early
1980s desktop publishing struck.
In a surprisingly brief time its quality went from internal newsletters
to high-end advertising. While some
typographers were still required for
the high-end work, the vast majority
of roles disappeared, as the need to
rekey copy disappeared. I was fortunate, being young enough to retrain
first as a phototypesetting equipment technician, and then as a data
communications engineer, a change
I have never regretted.
This sort of rapid technology disruption occurs repeatedly. In coming
years the pace of disruption can be
expected to increase, and this raises
the question: Do technologists have
a responsibility to the communities
that our technologies disrupt?

E

As an individual, we are all part
of a bigger picture. We can comfort
ourselves that technology disruption has always occurred, and that
society has always managed to survive. This approach works best if we
ignore the historical and sociological
evidence of the damage experienced
individually and by communities as
the disruption occurs. Or we can
take refuge in Joseph Schumpeter's
1930s term "creative destruction,"
interpreting the disruption as some
sort of natural force. (Schumpeter
himself was never blasé about its
impact, and expressed deep concern about society's ability to survive
the destruction.)
Some years later I discovered
to my surprise that one technologist had warned of the impending
disappearance of typographers.
Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, had approached a leader
of the U.S. typographers' union

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2554443
Date of publication: 2 June 2016

june 2016

∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

with the warning that the profession would be automated in a generation. He received the response
that this threat to jobs was too far
in the future to worry about. This
example is indicative of the difficulty of explaining future changes.
Nevertheless, technologists have a
unique perspective on what a new
technology can achieve. If we don't
let the community know, who will?
This subject will be discussed at
a keynote panel, "Technologists and
the Future of Work: Do we have a
responsibility to the community?",
at the IEEE Conference on Norbert
Wiener in the 21st Century, Melbourne, Australia, July 13-15, 2016.

Author Information
Greg Adamson, 2015-2016 IEEESSIT President, is with the Melbourne School of Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Email: g.adamson@ieee.org.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016
