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ENGINEERING AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS 61 greater today, individuals can more often avoid economic harm. In the United States, people displaced from mining and manufacturing from the 1950s on have tended to enter the burgeoning services sector. It is important, however, not to let such generalizations about trends mask the fact that the negative impact of technological change in many individual lives can still be profound. The essential point is that, if change is managed well by society, improvement (rather than deterioration) of the quality of life is quite possible. A case in point is the gradual reduction in hours worked per week since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The spread of ''flex-time" in recent years is perhaps a sign that even the 8-hour workday is beginning to give way to what could become a less-than-40-hour workweek. Labor savings are, after all, one of the major reasons behind the development of automation technologies. There is no reason to believe that their introduction will necessarily have catastrophic effects on society. Potential Impacts on Engineering Employment In the context of engineering employment, technological change has impacts not only through automation of manual tasks, but also in the form of new technology and discontinuous change in technology. (The production of a controlled atomic fission reaction might represent the first, while the invention of the transistor is an example of the second.) We have examined a few cases of the emergence of new disciplines in response to demand for a new technology, as well as the response of engineers to the rapid obsolescence of an established technology. In both cases, as long as the change was not too sudden, engineers and the educational system adapted successfully. The effects of automation on engineering employment are somewhat different, and should be examined separately. There will be considerable displacement of engineers brought about by the implementation, in the manufacturing sector, of computer-aided design and manufacturing systems (Office of Technology Assessment, 1984). It may be that fewer engineers will be required to prepare designs, or to program and monitor robots or flexible manufacturing systems. Much drafting and analysis will be computerized, as will a great deal of documentation. The overall number of engineers employed in this sector may therefore decline. Nevertheless, with reductions of the work force in general, engineers will (in the opinion of the panel) represent a higher percentage of the manufacturing work force than they now do. Manufacturing will become more engineering-intensive.
