My first choice was one about technology, it totally blew my mind. It was about how technology has not only changed the way we interact with the world around us, but how the human relationships have changed and how our children are being affected in their learning process.
During the show a number of different aspects of our society were mentioned, things like how technology pushed people away from each other, at some point it says “at first we watched movies all together in the movie theatre, then we started to watch in our homes with the family only, then by ourselves in our computers and now even more lonely in our mobile phones”.
As well as the social aspect another couple of very interesting aspects arose; one is the IBM experience of changing its way of operating from a physical “real world” environment into the virtual world of Second Life. IBM employees from all over the World have Second Life avatars, so they meet in the virtual world and perform their normal tasks from anywhere, without the need to be in the same physical location.
Another side of today’s technology is its use in the war, at the present moment non-tripulated US strikers are and were being deployed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. While these jets are very close to the battle field bringing down enemy forces and eventually civilians as well, its pilots are sitting in a very safe military facility in US soil.
I have to confess that the last two things described were totally new for me until now, but as I watched I started to analyse how technology has changed the way engineering is done. Absolutely no doubt today’s engineering is a lot different than it was 20 years ago, 3D models, worksharing and collaboration by the use of web-based systems have improved a lot efficiency and quality in our business, however these things are evolutions of the last century and I truly have the feeling that after 11 years into the 21st century the way engineering is done hasn’t changed much.
With that in mind a number of questions start to pop-up: Why aren’t we taking advantage of not needing to travel as much as before? If war can be done remotely, why spending millions of dollars to have a full team in a construction site? With the chaotic traffic in our big cities and the urgent need of taking cars out of the streets why not having people working from home instead?
After all these questions I can already hear the most traditional managers and directors saying “It’s not cost effective!” or “We are not IBM or the US military!”, but I believe IBM and US military are just up-to-date with technology and are making good use of it. Change in technology isn’t something necessarily new for the human being, at the moment we might be talking about present technology, but similar shifts happened when the press was invented, the gunpowder and the telephone, moving into these new ways of interaction is unavoidable and the sooner we embrace it the sooner we’ll be able to explore and decide if that needs to be discarded and replaced by something better or if it needs further improvement.
I would say that the engineering business needs not only to be bold, but we as professionals we need to have a pragmatic attitude towards technology and give it a fair go. Looking at our role in the society the new technologies might be our contribution to a more sustainable relationship between employers and employees, where a better balance between professional and personal life can be achieved. Also, it can have a significant impact on how people related to the business interact with their cities and neighbourhoods.
Thinking locally now this new way of doing business can be a big challenge for the Brazilian out-of-date labour regulation, the current regulation was written about 70 years ago and very little has changed in the direction of upgrading it to the new status of labour relations. In the early 1940’s, when it was created, the economy was a lot more based on goods, industrialization was the engine of the economy, today this effort is shared with a more complex economy which propelled by a combination of industrialization and services, with the last one having a big share of the pie. Unfortunately our regulations didn’t follow the same pace as the world changed.
Having said that, it’s important to remember that the industry can’t do much with a government that is not in sync with the new state of things in world, unfortunately Brazil is miles away from having a labour regulation that can address these and other important aspects.
As a final thought, I think that being ahead of the game is not being the guinea pig, but being ahead of competitors!
Anderson Assunção.
Location:Flying - Sydney: Buenos Aires
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