Before
this year's Superbowl, there were television ads featuring the famous Green Bay
quarterback, Bret Favre. Carelessly
spinning the football with a look of supreme confidence, he says to the camera,
"I can be anything I want." Then
after a momentary pause a shadow seems to cross his face, and he adds as a
confessional afterthought, "Except an engineer."
A slight touch of a smile indicates that perhaps he thinks that this
isn't such a bad failing to confess.
Ah
well, I wouldn't do so well as a professional athlete either.
But throughout my career I've always been proud of being an electrical
engineer. Of course, there were
those momentary lapses at parties when I would say that I was a scientist or
mumble something unintelligible. For
the most part, however, electrical engineering has been an honorable and
rewarding career for me. But now,
for the first time, I am worried about the future of our profession.
I
see a trend in the downward enrollment in electrical engineering and in the
changing focus of the workplace around me.
The problem is that maybe electricity doesn't matter so much any more.
The attention in technology has moved increasingly to the applications
level, irrespective of the mechanisms of the physical platform that supports
this level. Maybe, I think, there is an ice age coming for classical
electrical engineering.
Remember
when computers were called "electronic computers?"
That was a long time ago. Now
no one seems to care that they run on electricity.
They could have gears and pulleys in there as far as most people think.
No pays any attention to what's inside today's computers, because for
most of the world it's irrelevant.
I
blame this all on Heathkit. By
going out of business they took the fun out of electrical stuff.
For a while after their demise it was possible to play with the hardware
in home computers, but that soon ended. I
thought something else would come along, but it didn't.
A lot of the fun things disappeared into the Lilliputian mists of
faceless black chips. As keepers of
those chips, though, electrical engineers were arguably among the most important
people of this century.
Now,
however, the huge boom is in what is called information technology.
People in the most non-technical of occupations talk knowingly about
their problems with the registry in Windows95.
I can't get on an airplane without hearing conversations all around me
about modem connect speeds and Office97 interoperability.
The world is filled with users.
By contrast, far fewer designers are needed. Even
most of us engineers, trained in design, go out into the world as users.
It's
not that electrical design isn't important.
It is terribly important. The
whole world rests on the shoulders of electrical design.
Someone has to know what is inside those chips.
Progress depends on someone making them better along the planned
progression of Moore's Law. Unless
you are that someone, however, in one of the few privileged design positions, the
world will take that ordained progress for granted.
The
sacred legacy of Ohm's law is sinking into the bottom of an abyss of complexity.
Even circuit designers seldom can be concerned with the details of
electronics per se. Most will work
at simulators, and even then at higher and higher levels of aggregation and
abstraction. Only at these
higher levels will designers be sufficiently empowered.
When there are a billion transistors on a chip, how many people will care
about a single circuit? Moreover,
the higher levels of abstraction will become progressively isolated from the
principles of classical electrical engineering.
There
is, of course, a middle ground here. Electrical
engineers are also trained in algorithm design.
This is a fertile ground, precisely because of the burgeoning power of
the electronics underneath. Complex
algorithms that were unthinkably costly only a few years ago have become nearly
free to implement. So we inhabit
the middle and lower layers. But I
look jealously on all those applications above.
That territory is being occupied by a steadily growing number of computer
science graduates, and is not considered the natural province of electrical
engineers.
I
see the world as an inverted pyramid. It
balances precariously on the narrow point at the bottom, which is occupied by
the physical layers of the real world and peopled with engineers and scientists
who build devices. This point is
being impressed into the ground by the heavy weight at the wide top of the
inverted pyramid where all the applications reside.
Like Atlas, those relatively few physical designers at the bottom have
the weight of the world on their shoulders.
The teeming hoards above have little appreciation for their travails.
So
there is a dilemma. Classical
electrical engineers are trained in design.
A small number of designers will be critical. These designers will be highly sought, and handsomely paid.
Educators will pride themselves on the demand for the shrinking number of
graduates that they produce, while other disciplines will produce growing
numbers of informed users who will work at the application levels.
Electrical engineering will be in danger of shrinking into a neutron star
of infinite weight and importance, but invisible to the known universe.
I
tell myself that the downsizing of any profession is a natural thing.
Perfectly good occupations come and go.
In the middle ages it was undoubtedly prestigious to be a troubadour.
Troubadours probably had learned publications where they told themselves
how important they were to the world. Then
the world changed, and the universities were producing more troubadours than
were needed. Incoming students
began to select other fields of study, like jousting.
The old troubadours went on singing their songs, but no one was listening
anymore.
Projecting
the current trends, future computers will consist of a single chip.
No one will have the foggiest idea what is on that chip.
Somewhere in the basement of Intel or its successor will be a huge
computer file with the listing of that chip.
The last electrical engineer will sit beside the file, handcuffed to the
disk drive like a scene out of "Ben Hur."
That engineer will be extremely well paid, and his or her every demand
will be immediately satisfied. That
engineer will be the last keeper of the secret of the universe: E = IR.
Robert W. Lucky