Engineers Don't Solve Problems (2018)

>It's OK to just solve the tractable problems in front of us and to get a good couple of decades out of a system.

Is it? Is it really? The point the article is making is that by designing a system which solves the problems in front of them to get a good many decades out of a system, those engineers have actually made other problems worse. I think you're being overly simplistic when you suggest that the problem the article is proposing is that the system requires some rework.

The problem the article is proposing is that fundamental, irreperable damage has been done. We can't un-do that damage. Short term thinking like what you're proposing is, by the vast majority of evidence and evidenced theories, destroying our world and risking the survival of our species. It is not okay to just solve the problems in front of us now if the cost is that all our children die in chaos and poverty--and it looks like the cost is just that.

The engineering is fine.

You simply need to remove 15 million people to somewhere else.

So what is your solution to that?

(The lesson from Katrina is simply that there IS no solution--you have to let things build until a catastrophic event finally forces people out of the area.)

City gets built on a lake bed. Engineers are called in to fix the obvious problems that result. Engineers are then blamed for not solving the problems.

I can sort of see a genie analogy here.

"I wish we didn't have so much water!"

"Your wish is my command: all the water now drains out of the city."

"Wait, I meant..."

Pragmatically, I believe engineers indeed "solve" problems. However, the author is getting philosophical here, and argues the solutions themselves would create its unique, unforeseeable problem in the future. Thus engineers don't "solve" problems but "transform" problems.

It makes perfect sense to me, but is it correct to blame engineering?

Philosophically speaking, my pet theory is that the entire history of human civilization is an eternal process of solving existing problem by creating new forms of societies, thus creating their own problems, ad infinitum. It began since the use of fire, the invention of language and systematic agriculture, and moving towards more complex forms, simply because it has to be. I think some radical philosophers have not only argued that the industrial revolution was a mistake, but that the civilization itself can be seen as a type of technology, and it was a mistake.

Although some thinkers believe we should somehow degrowth and freeze the civilization for the best interests of human happiness, I don't think it's really coming. The human civilization on Earth is a very centralized system today. It may be possible in a future space age where human civilization spreads across the galaxy when centralization would be no longer possible and enable some regions to choose a primitive approach to civilization, or in a future digital age when computational resource is practically post-scarcity that enables minds and civilizations to exist independently in cyberspaces (even then, engineers have to work tirelessly to increase the computational power of the system before it collapses, although the laws of physics have set an extremely high upper limit for reversible computation, unlike many types of physical resources, so I don't think it would be a problem in many centuries if improvements is continued).

But before that, the ride will go on. If we are lucky enough not to accidentally destroy ourselves from a massive environmental incident or a world war, and we can keep engineering new solutions before the current system collapses, the ride towards, at least solar system domination, seems certain.

So I don't really think creating new problems to solve is an engineering problem and one should blame engineering for not solving problems.