Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
ENGINEERING AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS 62 The outlook for job creation in engineering is possibly better than for production workers. There is now a noticeable call for more manufacturing engineers, a discipline traditionally associated with the "smokestack industries." Contemporary manufacturing engineers will have an important role to play in the application of computers and advanced technology to the manufacturing process. Many engineers will enter the service sector to join consulting firms offering turnkey systems and system start-up and/or operating services. Perceptions of jobs gained and lost, and of the quality of engineering work in the automated environment, will affect the choices of young people regarding engineering study. Environmental issues influenced students' choice of disciplines as well as the nature and directions of the practice of that discipline. If technological unemployment is to be the next "environmental-type" issue for engineering, similar impacts on choices and directions may occur. Roles and Responsibility for Intervention Just as in the case of environmental problems in the 1970s, the government may have to intervene (directly or indirectly) in labor displacement if the application of technology is to proceed smoothly. This seems essential from a pragmatic as well as human-welfare point of view: Society will have to make provisions for severe technological unemployment to avoid a modern recurrence of the Luddite phenomenon. Industry is not and cannot be responsible for the social consequences of decisions taken to ensure survival in the marketplaceâalthough many companies do attempt to take such consequences into account in their business behavior. The formula that is frequently expressed (initially by James Baker, vice-president of General Electric) is "automate, liquidate, or emigrate," with companies threatening to take production offshore if workers and unions will not accept automation. Workers have already tried to prevent both by lawsuits, strikes, and other means; efforts to resist may intensify in the future. Industry and government ought to attempt to find alternatives and solutions in the meantime. There are surely more choices than to automate, liquidate, or emigrate. Carefully thought- out social and technological interventions are needed. What is the responsibility of the engineering profession in coping with this problem? It should recognize that technological unemployment is a major challenge for the present and the immediate future but also insist that it is not the responsibility of engineers to meet that challenge alone. In fact, it is largely a social problem, one with strong
