CIAO DATE: 12/03

What Shall We Build?

Abstract

This report is intended to stimulate discussion on the title theme, preparatory to an ongoing series of conferences and activities. The theme is intentionally normative. The central ideas can be summarized in the following set of propositions:

• the Industrial Revolution will run to completion, irreversibly and worldwide, in the coming 50 years;
• there is a vacuum in global governance which will persist through this period
• professions can have major impact on social organization and human progress
• the engineering profession, itself defined by the Industrial Revolution, owns the moment" and must take responsibility for the outcomes of globalization (a fundamentally technological process); and
• human rights and worldwide justice are the authentic metrics of success.

New developments are needed within the profession if it is to serve the moment. A cooperative dialogue involving all parts of the profession - education, research, practice, professional societies, corporations, and agencies - is called for, beginning in 2003. An action agenda, comprising commitments to specific cooperative institutional developments, needs to be implemented in short order.

Many assertions are made herein which are not presented in a scholarly way, but in the sense of "we hold these truths to be self-evident." This approach is intended to stimulate discussion on the web of underlying issues. The value of that discussion will turn on the effectiveness of the resulting actions.

We are at a critical point in history. What shall we build?

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